Distracting and Inaccessible Website Design
A significant portion of the discussion revolves around the website's interactive "asteroid game" that fires projectiles at the user's cursor. Many users found this feature to be highly distracting and even created accessibility issues.
- "Is it just me, or is there some kind of asteroid game shooting bullets at my cursor while I try to read this [1]? I hate to sound mean, but it's a bit distracting." - the_plus_one
- "No, it's the website's fault for doing stupid cutesy stuff that makes the page harder to read. Don't victim-blame yourself here." - bigstrat2003
- "It's extremely distracting. I'm not normally one to have issues that require reduced motion, but the asteroids are almost distracting enough on their own, and the fact that it causes my cursor to vanish is a real accessibility issue." - lilyball
- "I actually can't read things on that site at all. I move my mouse around while reading, not necessarily near the words I'm currently reading, so when my mouse disappears it's haltingly distracting. In addition to that, the way the 'game' visually interferes with the text that I'm trying to read makes it incredibly hard to focus on reading. These two things combine to make this site literally unreadable for me." - joemi
- "I don't get why people keep posting and upvoting articles from this user-hostile site." - joemi
- "Yea, well, I had to modify your website to make it readable. Why do people do this?" - themafia
The Debate Over "Fun" vs. "Seriousness" Online
A counterpoint emerged, questioning the negative reaction to the interactive element, framing it as a desire for online environments to be overly serious.
- "god forbid people have fun on the internet" - q3k
- "I really don't understand this 'everything must be 100% serious all the time'. Why is it stupid?" - stavros
Guidance on HN Commenting and Discussion Scope
Moderator actions and user comments highlighted the importance of staying on topic and avoiding common tangential arguments that can derail discussions on Hacker News.
- "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." - tptacek
- "Because way more people have opinions about e.g. asteroid game scripts on web pages than have opinions on RCUs, these subthreads spread like kudzu." - tptacek
- "The described behavior sounds like significantly worse than tangential annoyance, and isn’t really a common occurrence even on modern user-hostile websites." - ummonk
- "Still worth avoiding having the HN thread be about whether OpenBSD is in general faster than Linux. This is a thing I've seen a bunch of times recently, where someone gives an attention-grabbing headline to a post that's actually about a narrower and more interesting technical topic, but then in the comments everyone ignores the content and argues about the headline." - ameliaquining
Technical Explanation of RCU and File Descriptor Allocation in Linux vs. OpenBSD
The core technical discussion, sparked by the original article, focused on a performance difference observed between Linux and OpenBSD related to file descriptor allocation and the impact of RCU (Read-Copy Update) in the Linux kernel.
- "In Linux, the file descriptor table (fdtable) of a process starts with a minimum of 256 slots. Two threads creating 256 sockets each, which uses 512 fds on top of the three already present (for stdin, stdout and stderr), requires that the fdtable be expanded about halfway through when the capacity is doubled from 256 to 512, and again near the end when resizing from 512 to 1024." - bobby_big_balls
- "This is done by expand_fdtable() in the kernel. It contains the following code:
if (atomic_read(&files->count) > 1) synchronize_rcu();" - bobby_big_balls - "The field files->count is a reference counter. As there are two threads, which share a set of open files between them, the value of this is 2, meaning that synchronize_rcu() is called here during fdtable expansion. This waits until a full RCU grace period has elapsed, causing a delay in acquiring a new fd for the socket currently being created." - bobby_big_balls
- "By contrast, the OpenBSD kernel doesn't have anything like RCU and just uses a rwlock when the file descriptor table of the process is being modified, avoiding the long delay during expansion that may be observed in Linux." - bobby_big_balls
- "So ... essentially testing file descriptor allocation overhead" - agambrahma
- "A better title: a pathological test program meant for Linux does not trigger pathological behavior on OpenBSD" - sweetjuly
- "RCUs are super interesting; here's (I think I've got the right link) a good talk on how they work and why they work that way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rNVyyPjoC4" - tptacek
Micro-benchmarking Techniques and Considerations
The discussion touched upon best practices and potential pitfalls when conducting micro-benchmarks, specifically regarding timing mechanisms.
- "Not sure if that’s relevant, but when I do micro-benchmarks like that measuring time intervals way smaller than 1 second, I use __rdtsc() compiler intrinsic instead of standard library functions." - Const-me
- "On all modern processors, that instruction measures wallclock time with a counter which increments at the base frequency of the CPU unaffected by dynamic frequency scaling." - Const-me
- "Isn't gettimeofday implemented with vDSO to avoid kernel context switching (and therefore, most of the overhead)?" - sa46
- "My understanding is that using tsc directly is tricky. The rate might not be constant, and the rate differs across cores. [1]" - sa46
Perceptions of OpenBSD Performance
A divergence of opinions arose regarding the general performance characteristics of OpenBSD, with some characterizing it as light, minimalist, and compact, but not necessarily fast, especially in comparison to Linux for server-like workloads.
- "OpenBSD is many things, but 'fast' is not a word that comes to mind." - sugarpimpdorsey
- "Lightweight? Yes. Minimalist? Definitely. Compact? Sure. But fast? No." - sugarpimpdorsey
- "Would I host a database or fileserver on OpenBSD? Hell no." - sugarpimpdorsey
- "Boot times seem to take as long as they did 20 years ago. They are also advocates for every schizo security mitigation they can dream up that sacrifices speed and that's ok too. But let's not pretend it's something it's not." - sugarpimpdorsey