Here's a summary of the key themes from the Hacker News discussion, with direct quotations and attributions:
Respect for cperciva's Work and Time Management
The thread begins with admiration for cperciva's work ethic and ability to juggle multiple projects like Tarsnap and FreeBSD contributions.
- "Lots of respect for cperciva. Don’t know how he manages all of this + Tarsnap." (tiffanyh)
cperciva responds by explaining how hiring professionals for tasks allows him to focus on more important things.
- "It turns out that at a certain point, money can buy time. Do I fix the leaky tap myself, or hire a plumber? After electricians rip up my basement drywall (perfectly reasonably -- I was getting solar panels installed and the electrical panel needed to be upgraded) do I fix it myself or do I hire a professional drywaller?" (cperciva)
DIY vs. Hiring Professionals for Home Improvement (Drywall Specifically)
The discussion branches into the merits of DIY versus hiring professionals, particularly regarding drywall work. The consensus leans heavily toward recommending professional drywallers.
- "When it comes to drywall, always hire a professional. Learn from other's mistakes... it's not as easy as you think and it won't turn out well." (Alupis)
While some claim it's possible to DIY drywall, the time investment is significant.
- "I know how to do drywall as well as a pro - it just takes me 6x as long. It is easy to do, but you can't do what the pros do without a lot of practice. By planning on 6x longer you can slow down, do thiner coats and such (pros do 3 coats of mud, I do 6 for the same thickness). Which falls into the do or hire." (bluGill)
Professionals are simply better at it.
- "Dry wallers are amazing. As a diyer, it’s one of the few things I can never seem to get right. I’m happy to put holes in it, but seeing professionals patch it is another level." (jonhohle)
Some offered tips for faking it. * "My wall has orange peel on it so I just spray it with orange peel after getting the spackle smooth and sanded. Never know I patched it." (firesteelrain)
The "Boots Theory" and the High Cost of Being Poor
The conversation extends conceptually to financial inequalities. Being poor often means paying more in the long run due to the inability to afford quality items or services initially.
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"The other day I had the opportunity to get a 10% discount on a fridge if I could pay the whole thing in one payment. If I didn't have the money I wouldn't get the discount, so in a way being poor means everything is more expensive." (AlienRobot)
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"Being more poor is always more expensive than being less poor. All poor people know this in their bones because they face this every day of their lives." (naikrovek)
This concept is encapsulated by the "Boots theory" popularized by Terry Pratchett.
- "... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness." (phonon quoting Terry Pratchett)
Corporate Sponsorship and Support for FreeBSD (and Open Source in General)
A significant portion of the discussion revolves around corporate sponsorship of FreeBSD, particularly from major tech companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. There is a feeling that certain companies should be doing more.
- "I was rather hoping Amazon would spend and contribute more. But it seems they basically only want to pay for the minimum FreeBSD support. Amazon isn't even on FreeBSD sponsors [1]. And Google only sponsored $9K last year. Apple isn't there. Edit: And Credit to Microsoft being at least on the list! And forgot to mention Meta / Facebook missing from it as well. I would have expect them to sponsor FreeBSD and OpenBSD annually by default given they use and continue to benefits the work out of both." (ksec)
However, some argue that looking only at donations to the FreeBSD Foundation doesn't tell the whole story.
- "I'd love to see Amazon contribute more, of course; but the fact they don't show up as donors to the FreeBSD Foundation doesn't mean they're not supporting FreeBSD. The money they paid me didn't flow through the Foundation, for example; I'd guess that Foundation-funded development is maybe 10% of all corporate-funded FreeBSD development." (cperciva)
Contributions can come in various forms, including direct funding of developers.
- "First, it presents the snapshot of donations within a given year to the Foundation. The history of donations is not represented by definition. Second, it does not present contributed development. Those are typically summarily available on the release notes of each release [1]." (vitorsr)
Microsoft's support for FreeBSD is also intriguing, despite the lack of obvious reasons.
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"I wonder for what reason Microsoft funds them. Their Hyper-V extensions are not as complete as Linux. There's no Microsoft-supported port of .NET. I can't think of any services that run on *BSD from Microsoft, cloud or otherwise." (p_ing)
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"I don't know, but Microsoft has some developers working on Hyper-V for FreeBSD. They've even come to FreeBSD developer summits." (cperciva)
The Mystery of Amazon EBS Performance and Disk Size
A curious issue is brought up regarding a sudden performance slowdown in FreeBSD's boot process linked to a seemingly arbitrary change in root disk size.
- "Starting in the first week of 2024, the FreeBSD boot process suddenly got about 3x slower. I started bisecting commits, and tracked it down to... a commit which increased the root disk size from 5 GB to 6 GB. Why? Well, I reached out to some of my friends at Amazon, and it turned out that the answer was somewhere between 'magic' and 'you really don't want to know'; but the important part for me was that increasing the root disk size to 8 GB restored performance to earlier levels." (msdrigg quoting cperciva)
The explanation involves caching and heuristics within Amazon's EBS (Elastic Block Storage) service.
- "My understanding is that EBS has some heuristics for deciding whether to keep data cached; an AMI which has a cached snapshot as its root disk will boot much faster than an AMI where all the data needs to be pulled from S3." (cperciva)
Speculation arises about potential optimizations based on common data chunk sizes used by large customers, though cperciva casts doubt on simplistic explanations.
Zig Language's Support for FreeBSD
A positive development is highlighted: the Zig programming language has added FreeBSD as a fully supported cross-compilation target.
- "Sweet! By the way we just added FreeBSD to the download page on ziglang.org (as of today), so FreeBSD users can grab master branch builds automatically built by the CI...It's also now a first-class supported cross-compilation target...And then of course if you have any C/C++ dependencies, you can fetch and build them with the zig build system, so it should be possible to easily cross-compile even quite complex projects for FreeBSD now. Hopefully that helps more projects decide to add FreeBSD support and respective testing to their CI!" (AndyKelley)