[MaximumYComb]

This article seems like 3 pages of my CS Operating Systems unit summarised into an article. Since I started reading Hacker News I've always assumed the userbase has a typical education equating to at least a CS education.

Am I wrong for assuming that this article seems fairly low level for the user base here? It just seems to me that if you can read this article and understand push, pop, thread priority, mutex, transitive, etc then it's more than likely that someone has already lectured at you about the issues that can arrive with using mutexes for locking.

[cesarb]

Setting aside that many here are self-taught (or haven't even reached university age yet, the first class when I went to university had an interesting bimodal distribution: half the class already knew how to program well, the other half had no idea), there are other reasons why an article like this is useful:

* Some might not have learned that particular piece of knowledge, either because their particular OS class didn't cover it, or because they skipped it;

* Others might have learned it, but later forgotten all about it, or at least some of the details;

* Even if they do remember it, this article can act as a reminder ("pay attention if you set thread priorities, because priority inversion").

[gdxhyrd]

I would say your assumption is wrong. A lot of people have a CS background, but there are many others that don't.

[blablabla123]

Also there are different approaches. I hardly do any low-level threading but I'm aware of the fact that locking and context switching can be expensive. I don't think that one always has to learn theory first, it can also go the other way.

[rsdsaf]

The guy who started ycomb has a philosophy degree.

I've been reading HN since 2011, and the only programming course I've taken is a (bad) into to programming that all engineers had to take.

Maybe most of everything I know about CS I've learned reading it on HN.