[earthscienceman]

This is such a great post, I'm surprised it doesn't have more traction but maybe people aren't into reading longform plain text.

"spamming Internet users at scale requires a lot of parallel activity, after all. If those processes can be segregated so that all siblings of any given core run processes from the same customer, we can be spared the gruesome prospect of one spammer stealing another's target list — or somebody else's private keys."

[mwcampbell]

Maybe I'm just being too humorless, but I found the quoted passage a bit too dismissive of all the good things that are being done in cloud environments. Some of us are developing products that actually make people's lives better, and we're selling those products as SaaS, but we're not yet big enough to operate dedicated hardware with the same level of reliability and security that, say, AWS can achieve, so we run in a shared cloud environment. Anyway, the constant cynicism in online communities like this one, and reflected in that part of the OP, gets to me.

[bayindirh]

We also do useful things in cloud/HPC which touches people's lives, but a little joke here and there doesn't hurt IMHO.

Maybe I'm too used to stab myself and laugh at it.

[secondaryacct]

Yes you're being too humourless :)

[Diederich]

Such dry humor is one of the best things about Jonathan Corbet's writing style.

[wayoutthere]

The Linux kernel community has always had a bit of a suspicious attitude towards commercial use. This attitude long predates the cloud / SaaS and reflects Linux’s origins (and Linus Torvalds’ world view) inside Scandinavian academia.

[sosadmin007]

I agree, especially since this huge change was a prime example of how open source is incredible ! This work was made possible because engineers working for competitors such as DigitalOcean, Google, Oracle and Microsoft worked together with the kernel community to find an acceptable software solution to a hardware problem that impacts a lot of people.

[jacquesm]

Technical writing with a sense of humor is great. Highly recommended: the user manual of the SkyRC MC3000 Li-Ion charger.

[Fnoord]

Link to PDFs [1] (scroll down, EN and DE it seems). Seems like an amazing device, too. Too bad it could only charge one at a time, so I guess you'd buy multiple of these on a tech dept.

[1] https://www.skyrc.com/MC3000_Charger

[bayindirh]

> Too bad it could only charge one at a time, so I guess you'd buy multiple of these on a tech dept.

The phone app screenshots show three charge one discharge cycle at the same time. It's a 4 channel charger which can work even with a single battery.

Currently I use IKEA's battery chargers*, but if I gonna need something more advanced, gonna look at this one.

*: IKEA's battery chargers are no slouches either. They're very intelligent with battery fault detection and very good charging characteristics.

[jacquesm]

Highly recommended, I have a whole slew of consumer and pro-sumer Li-Ion chargers and this one is by far the best, it's not the cheapest but it works very well.

[HanaShiratori]

What do you mean with one at a time? I've been using one of these chargers for a couple for years now and can charge multiple batteries at the same time. Even different types are not a problem. (nimh / liion)

[Fnoord]

What I mean is the very same type is going to work only once since you cannot convert it to twice the type you need. So in a work environment where you use these, you might end up with say two of these to load two of such rechargeable batteries at the same time. Whereas 'normal' chargers for things like AA and AAA have multiple spots for the same battery. Like the other comment, I also currently use IKEA's charger (my wife bought it), and it can charge a lot of batteries at the same time.

[jacquesm]

It charges up to 4 batteries at the same time (or discharges, or prepares them for long term storage etc).

[HanaShiratori]

I'm sorry I don't really get what you're saying. You can charge any (supported) battery type in any of those slots regardless of how many you want to charge at the same time. I can charge 4 eneloops simultaneously or 18650 or whatever...

[Fnoord]

Thanks, also jacquesm, I get/see it now. Its springs which adapt to the battery size. Neat!

[wazoox]

I still remember the fun I had 30 years ago reading the t.c. electronics 2290 digital delay user manual.

[HanaShiratori]

Haha yeah the good old MC3000. I love this charger, it makes a simple task a little more exciting and sometimes (a bit) unnecessarily complicated - but at the least you've got full control about charging those damn batteries!

[bayindirh]

That's a fine charger too. Good hardware, good features, humorous user manual. A splendid combination, indeed.

[sytelus]

A majority of long form writing is extremely low information density and, even worse, just designed to retain attention as long as possible. I now dislike majority of news articles which starts with pseudo-literary description of anecdot and a main detail is revealed 3/4 of the way in sentence or two. It’s purely filler and like sugar it has a purpose. I want all long form writing to have sub title to tell the core of story in one line, followed by abstract, or let Twitter guy summarize it for me.

[medstrom]

This puzzled me until I realized you're talking about mainstream news-type sites. I agree on that, but these barely qualify as writing in the first place, since none of the traditional goals apply. It's like if the only kind of video you've seen are ads and you then proceed to complain about the info density of video as a whole. Though most video on YouTube also sucks, some things are very well expressed in video, like the documentaries An Inconvenient Truth or Blue Planet II.

For me "long-form writing" brings to mind textbooks, LWN, some bug report emails, some HN comments. These are a different category of writing. I don't think you should sit around to wait for someone else to summarize these for you -- that attitude must be terrible for you in the long run.

[golergka]

A lot of books are just as bad, especially mainstream non-fiction. May be it's because they're typically written by journalists, but I often see the same awful New Yorker style of spending three pages on a personal story of some scientist in an article about quantum physics.

[gary_0]

That's Sturgeon's Law[0]. Most writing isn't very good, and most writers irritate readers with paragraphs of navel-gazing that tries and fails at being profound.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

[tluyben2]

Yes, and I have the same issue with videos: 30 min videos with something that fits in 1 written sentence. Ugh. People are so afraid of reading (or are just very slow readers?); many even here won't read beyond the first line of this comment and if they comment, they comment only on that line often).

But... this does not apply to this post. It is not that long, not low density and does not have fillers or sugar.

[azalemeth]

I have exactly this issue with video, moaned about it here a few weeks ago -- and another HN reader explained, very pithily why the trend has occurred: money. It's much easier to monetise a YouTube video than it is an easy, or a blog post. Video impressions get more currency/eyeball even outside of YouTube. Our lack of ability to skim read or rapidly search for information doesn't enter the calculus.

[AshamedCaptain]

These days I'm supposed to watch a 30 min video in order to check if a Wikipedia source really contains the quoted statement.

[hvis]

I guess that's what made Twitter rise in popularity as a source of news: difficult to stuff much filler in 140 characters.

[chrisseaton]

> longform plain text

Lol it's just a thousand words!

[yissp]

Anything over 280 characters is "longform" in 2021.

[_zoltan_]

OG 140 ;-)