A note for LWN subscribers | Hacker News Reader

A note for LWN subscribers

lwn.net

219 pointsstevekemp51 comments

Jonathan has been quietly battling cancer for some time[1] and is a literal treasure. I'm happy to continue paying for his health insurance and treatment while also furthering a really good community service. LWN is the only Linux news service that has the technical depth and breadth while also staying solvent.

He's also really friendly in person and was willing to answer relatively stupid questions at a conference from random people that approach him to say hi (like me!)

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/594980/

I wish stories like this would inspire more techies to support universal health care in the US.

People should not have to beg for more money for their services or goods because they end up with a disease.

Everyone deserves health care, not just people who are visibly successful/popular.

I think universal healthcare might be more popular than most people think. I would consider myself a conservative voter, but I can recognize the good of universal healthcare. Healthcare shouldn't be tied to jobs, and people shouldn't have to bankrupt themselves due to health issues.

I think most discourse in the US is driven by vocal minorities that in no-way represent major sentiment in the rest of the population. It is quite unfortunate. I am not even sure what can change it.

I will be taking my voting very seriously next election because frankly I am tired of this.

This is a nice breath of fresh air to hear. Unfortunately, it appears that the vocal minority you mention are basically conservative congressmen or their boosters.

For now it may be conservative congresspeople but once a Universal Healthcare proposal starts gaining traction all the common support for the initiative will likely shatter. People will disagree on what the intended outcomes are (are they economic, empathy based, or both?), the implementation details, how to pay for it, etc...

Yeah, no. We had this fight when Obamacare was being hammered into shape. Universal didn't happen because conservatives in both parties refused to do anything other than say "the poor can go to emergency rooms for treatment".

Now, it's a bit more complicated than that, and single payer was never on the table because Obama decided to pre-capitulate in the futile hope of being able to tag the ACA as bipartisan, but it's only gotten worse. If a literal global pandemic doesn't bring people to their senses, I'm not sure what will. There's just too much money being funneled to incentivize our politicians to do the wrong thing (Sinema being an obvious example).

> Universal didn't happen because conservatives in both parties refused to do anything other than say "the poor can go to emergency rooms for treatment".

"Conservatives in both parties" is a bit reductive and I'll also call out as misinformation/misrepresentation: https://ballotpedia.org/Obamacare_overview

But, what is useful here, is you've provided a fantastic example of the rhetorical devices and reduction we can expect to see.

I say that as a supporter of Universal Healthcare that both replaces and learns lessons from VA Medical.

> "Conservatives in both parties" is a bit reductive and I'll also call out as misinformation/misrepresentation:

Are you under the impression that Manchin or the other Conservative Democrats support universal healthcare?

They do not.

There's really not that many of them. Secondary to that, which might be a bit pedantic, is I dislike "conservative" being used as a pejorative as I mentioned. It's not really an accurate reflection of what Manchin or others believe in or what the populations they're voting for are concerned with. As I also stated, I think it's a bit reductive.

Seventeen Centrist Democratic Senators voted with Trump to kill banking reform.

That does not sound like "not many" of them.

There are 48 Democratic senators and 2 independents. I'd have to look at why each of those 17 decided to vote against banking reform. It's not like it's as simple as "conservative" or "not conservative", which is exactly what I'm calling reductive.

Conservative Democrats have held the leadership roles in the party since the end of the Regan years.

>The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was a non-profit corporation founded in 1985 that, upon its formation, argued that the United States Democratic Party should shift away from the leftward turn it took in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. One of its main purposes was to win back white middle class voters with ideas that addressed their concerns. The DLC hailed President Bill Clinton as proof of the viability of Third Way politicians and as a DLC success story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council

And liberal congressfolk, too, mind. That the behavior of Congress doesn't reflect the broad desires of the public is an ongoing problem -- Gilens & Page's 2014 "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" is a rough read -- and isn't strictly correlated to whether your tie is blue or red. That said, I do admit that we _also_ have a serious issue with the political class at the national level being split between folks that tack right as hard as they can and centrists that follow them because you gotta land where the "center" is.

I live in a country that Americans would recognize as having 'universal health care', and while the US system is also bad, I would prefer it to the fragile and dysfunctional government monopoly that I'm used to. I would prefer a free market with mutual aid societies, but the corporatist system in the US at least lacks the single point of failure and complete unaccountability of a government monopoly.

> complete unaccountability of a government monopoly.

That is a problem with the quality of your democracy, not with government monopolies. A corporate oligopoly is virtually identical to a nondemocratic governmental monopoly.

The key thing you want is democratic control.

Democracy is not a mechanism for accountability. No democracy can produce accountability, that's not what it's for. A company with competition has a degree of accountability because their customers can go elsewhere if they are mistreated. A citizen without a lot of money to spend on political campaigns have very little recourse when they are mistreated by the government. Even when the government breaks its own laws, there is almost nothing you can do between qualified, absolute, and sovereign immunity.

The US and other governments have long histories of medical abuses. I would not want an organization that preforms unnecessary and intrusive surgical procedures without consent[0], falsely told people they have cancer in order to remove their reproductive organs[1], intentionally gave people syphilis, hepatitis, and other diseases[2], pretended to treat syphilis to see what happens when it's left untreated[3], etc. to be my only provider of health care. It frankly seems irrational to want an organization that can act with impunity and seem to abuse every function and responsibility it is given to be the sole provider of anything.

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/22/ice-gynecolo...

[1]: https://www.insider.com/inside-forced-sterilizations-califor...

[2]: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/ugly-past-u-s-hum...

> Democracy is not a mechanism for accountability.

It is. It is a particularity of the Anglosaxon language space that propaganda that it isn't took root.

The US system doesn't typically have choice either except to get another employer... who probably has the same insurance company anyway.

In addition to not being able to choose insurance company, we also have a limited selection of doctors who we can see, assuming you want your insurance company to cover it... and by "cover it" I don't mean the insurance company pays for the whole thing either, its still just a portion... and usually an inflated price because doctors tend to have 2 rates, one for people with insurance and one for individuals paying totally out of pocket without insurance where the out of pocket rate is typically slightly more than what you'd pay out of pocket with insurance but insurance gets a huge bill (which they are all too happy to send you a mailer on how much money they "saved" you).

Thanks for your nice words...

Being a somewhat private person I don't normally talk about health stuff. Also, being a cancer patient, I know better than to say I'm "cured". That said, things have been looking good for a while, to the point that my oncologist fired me a couple of years back. I get to deal with the consequences of the treatment, but the original problem is not really an issue in my life.

I do, however, make a point of ensuring that our health coverage never lapses!

Glad to hear it, also happy to see that LWN is still thriving.

> LWN is the only Linux news service that has the technical depth and breadth while also staying solvent.

Would you have any other publications to recommend?

I personally read El Reg, ArsTechnica, Phoronix, TechRepublic, and a few others (including CNET). The last two are arguably of less journalistic quality, however I do very much like the ability to leave comments and participate in discussions.

lwn has no peers. Before I found it, and when I was earlier in my career, I spent about an hour every evening trying to read most of the relevant to me threads on LKML directly (seriously). I've paid for it for the kernel section alone, but the rest of the news is really good.

phoronix is hit/miss. The methodology Michael uses for many of his clickbait benchmark stories is often absolute garbage. He does a relatively decent job covering the latest happenings in desktop linux tech, but overall the quality is all over the place and the clickbait + ads get really old. I once setup the phoronix test suite to build an automated performance regression test harness and was ummm underwhelmed. That was about 10 years or so ago mind you, so maybe it has improved since.

The others you mention are all quite good. I'm a huge fan of just about anything sjvn writes (he posts a lot of zdnet, pcmag, etc). I'm also a fan of following the planet blogs for some of the bigger projects I care about (e.g.: https://planet.gnome.org/) but that's more raw source than actual aggregated news. Just depends on what you're into.

I like LWN. It is great. They do a bang up job. One of the few online offerings that provides a value-noise-ratio akin to some of the great publications of the 80's (Byte, etc). I was a subscriber in the past. That employer made it easy. My current one, it would be a hassle not worth it. I could easily pay for it myself just on professional betterment grounds. But the minute I did that, there's a number of "a few dollars here, a few dollars there" great value-for-money services that I should participate in, and I'd bankrupt myself chasing them all.

I lament that micro payment pay as a go has never really caught on in the world of the internet. When I was a kid, you could get the paper delivered to your house daily. But you could also run down to a local box, put a quarter in, and get a one off that way. If you were going to do the newsbox run every day, the subscription paid off as a volume discount. On the flip side, it allowed you to participate in multiple papers at a casual rate easier. You could grab the (relatively expensive) WSJ when it looked really interesting.

LWN and Usenix are the two subscriptions I happily pay for, and would be happy to pay more for. The quality of the content, and flexibility around how to share it, is well worth supporting.

I also pay the ACM, and that one physically hurts me every year.

I rationalise the ACM membership cost as a cheaper way of accessing the O'Reilly library.

Totally fine with me. I won’t bat an eye paying the new price; I think the content is well worth it!

I used to advocate for bulk subscriptions at every employer, but with the growth of cloud services and abstractions like Kubernetes I feel like I can't justify it any longer.

We don't even run any Linux ourselves at my current employer. Pods and lambdas and databases-as-a-service.

I can't help but think this trend will damage shared knowledge in the long run.

When running on Kubernetes or Lambda, you are still directly interfacing with the Linux kernel, unless you’re under something like gVisor. I also don’t think the endgame of “cloud” is that literally nobody knows how to run servers; in fact, Kubernetes is one of those technologies that makes bare metal much more appealing. I think cloud has outsized appeal for now simply because things are moving so quickly that it’s difficult to keep up, and I feel like that is probably not forever.

Even just for Kubernetes administration, it’s probably good to keep tabs on Linux, especially technologies like cgroups, even if your nodes are managed.

> in fact, Kubernetes is one of those technologies that makes bare metal much more appealing

Bare metal on Kubernetes is a PITA though to set up. For extremely small scale stuff in private labs, okay, that takes half an hour, but as soon as you are on the Internet, maybe have a couple rented bare metal machines, it gets nasty. For ingresses, you'll usually need to set up MetalLB which requires acquisition of a range of IP addresses and it only is capable of running one server (the "speaker") as the one and only entrypoint for all traffic. Not to mention you cannot have roles such as "internet-exposed node" and "not internet-exposed node", since MetalLB wants to run on all nodes.

Also, a Kubernetes environment will need at least four separate network ranges - a network for the Pod IPs, a network for cluster IPs of services, one for the nodes themselves and if you want to expose stuff to the Internet you need a fifth one that holds the public-routed IPs. This is really funny if you are in a corporate environment that uses all three of the historic private ranges (10.0.0.0/8,172.16.0.0/12,192.168.0.0/16), good luck carving out ranges that do not result in routing conflicts.

Mesosphere DC/OS was more usable in that regard as it had pre-defined the roles of nodes, included the load balancer as part of the platform and had only two IP ranges (node-internal and whatever the public IPs of the public nodes were)... whereas it's clear that the only designed/supported way to run a major Kubernetes deployment is to use a fully-managed Kubernetes provider. Everything else is a world of undocumented, spurious-bug-filled stuff and incomplete documentation.

> Bare metal on Kubernetes is a PITA though to set up.

I think you are misunderstanding the previous comment. I read it as Kubernetes being so complicated (I enjoy it, but that's another discussion) to operate is making the regular bare metal operation more appealing. So people might choose the well understood bare metal over Kubernetes.

MetalLB is the best baremetal LB (for k8s) but far from perfect indeed. For the IP conflicts, there are other private IPv4 range that you can use, just pick something in the CGNAT range (100.64.0.0/10) or in 198.18.0.0/15 ("Used for benchmark testing of inter-network communications between two separate subnets")

The best thing about HN: You learn something new every day. Thanks!

Even with gVisor you're still depending on things like the host kernel's scheduler and memory management.

I am pretty certain that

> I can't help but think this trend will damage shared knowledge in the long run.

is an understatement. There will be a few people in the know on how to run "the cloud", and lots and lots of people consuming their services, at bewildering premiums.

The prevalence of this attitude is why we have things like Heartbleed and log4shell.

LWN also has coverage of language runtimes and other projects. Recent stories include one about python-dev discussion of adding a literal syntax for frozensets (https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/881599/ae07750ec86ed3cc/), a new OpenSSH feature on restricting agent keys (https://lwn.net/Articles/880458/), Lessons from log4j (https://lwn.net/Articles/878570/), etc.

I often skip the really in-depth kernel articles, since it makes no difference to anything I do if Linux gets a new slab allocator or whatever, but still find my subscription valuable for hearing about new project releases, as well as these deep project dives.

I've subscribed to LWN for as long as it had subscriptions. I think it was for a long time the only journalism site I subscribed to. (Actually, I think Jonathan may have thrown me a free sub because I was an underpaid urchin at EFF originally, but I switched to paying, because it was cheap enough and I felt that I should support it.). It has both consistently been the home of some of the best researched, most honest pieces about Linux and, by extension, the progress and troubles of the open source/free software community. I remember on numerous occasions wishing that there were equivalents in the politics and current affairs space. Subscriptions and Patreons are much more popular in those spaces nowadays, but I still don't think I've found its equal. At least not one that lets me read it all the week's updates in one giant HTML page.

My only problem with LWN is that it’s so good, I get upset there’s nothing even close to the quality of it for the other hobbies/interests in my life.

As the person who originally proposed what Jon ended up calling the Maniacal Supporter level, I've asked him to double the rate.

$1k a year (deductible) is a bargain when Linux and FOSS is literally your career.

(Disclosure: I let mine lapse after I retired from kernel maintenance, but I'm thinking of renewing since I still get value mainly be following links from HN)

LWN is one of the most important reporting sources for linux and the highest quality. I think it would be awesome if Linux or other projects directly sponsored it (maybe they do?). As a sort of 'inside' journalism it could really benefit from funding, and may give it better access to the inner workings.

Keep it up! love LWN!

10+ years subscriber here, will keep subscribing it no matter what, even though I read less kernel stuff these days.

I wanted to use this thread to bring attention to lwnfeed (not my project).

https://github.com/tulir/lwnfeed

It is a docker (or standalone) web server that caches your credentials and logs into your LWN, pulls articles, and serves them back to you over RSS. I have my NextCloud News app setup to pull data from it, so I get the full, paid LWN releases in my RSS reader.

Question, hopefully not too off topic: if I subscribe, can I get the weekly edition emailed to me like a newsletter? Or at least a notification when it’s posted? I want to subscribe but doubt I’ll actually remember to log in and read it every week.

You can sign up for a notification email when the weekly edition is posted, yes. We don't currently have an option to receive the whole thing in email, but that has been on the list for a while...

Ah, great. Thank you

I'm fine with this. LWN is a great value as it is and I don't mind paying a little bit more.

I don't see the point, other news sites are free.

Without getting into the value/lack thereof...

> will increase to $9/month, which is almost exactly in line with that mid-2021 inflation rate

I don't believe that the mid-2021 inflation rate was 28%. Sources† say it was actually around 7% (which is, admittedly, bloody insane).

† A DDG search and looking at the top 5-6 articles

7% is from 2020 to 2021. 28% is from 2010 to 2021.

The article quotes that 28% as being the amount of inflation "from 2010 until the middle of 2021". I haven't checked the figures, but that seems believable for a decade's worth of inflation.

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

Try typing in "2010" and hitting calculate.

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