[TUHS] Signal/noise

[Larry McVoy]

On Mon, Feb 04, 2019 at 12:23:32PM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
> > So I don't know what counts as 'signal' on this list versus 'noise',
> > but I'd much rather read a million posts about OSI, CLNP and other
> > networks ??? a history lesson and information that's been getting scarce
> > in general ??? than kill/mute yet another thread full of generic "boo M$
> > Windoze" drivel that I can already find on Reddit.
> 
> Warren's protocol for off-topic material: let it slide for a day or two,
> then politely ask people to move it to the COFF list when it doesn't
> veer back to the Unix direction :-)

And I must say you have done a great job of handling stuff going off 
course.  I don't mind a little wander, this list reminds me a lot of
Usenet around 1985 or so.  Not a ton of people but most are pretty
darn interesting.  So your policy of letting it wander a bit seems
just right to me, yeah the Jimmy Page guitar thing was way off track
but it wound down fairly quickly.

I agree completely with Mantas' comment about "drivel that I can
already find on Reddit."  The technical content level for programmers
on reddit seems pretty lame.  Though the one that really puzzles me is

https://news.ycombinator.com/

That place is called "Hacker news" and the level of decent hacker
content is amazingly low.  Once in a while there would stuff like
the Netflix writeup of how they got to 200Gbit/sec on a one core
server (with the data coming up to user space to be encrypted,
and doing it with 1Mb/s per socket, that's 200,000 sockets running
in parallel).  That was an amazingly impressive accomplishment 
and the sort of thing I'd like to see on Hacker news but I rarely
do.  As in once every 10 years or so.  I stopped reading it.

So go you, Warren.  You have the right touch for the list and while
I hope you continue to do so for decades, maybe think about picking
out someone who seems like a younger you as a backup.  I like this
list a lot.

Cheers all,

--lm