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Comment by puzzlingcaptcha | Hacker News Reader

"It's possible to just connect two computers together with Ethernet" - on the front page of hackernews. Incredible. Ethernet over USB4 interdomain protocol at least had some novelty, but this...

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Can you please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49512349 and, in the future, share some of what you know instead of putting down others (including the community)?

HN has very little understanding of networking in general.

Programmers have very little understanding of computers, in general.

They'll think hard about a beautiful unrealistic idealisation of the problem, and/or treat a software abstraction as if it's the underlying reality, e.g. (of the latter) thinking networking starts with HTTP and languages start with JavaScript.

Agreed, except IME this is "junior web developers" rather "(real) programmers" in general.

Mel wouldn't. But Mel isn't programmers.

Can you please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49512349 and, in the future, share some of what you know instead of putting down others?

Just read the contract from the other side! If focusing on idealistic software abstractions instead of the problem is bad, the implication is that focusing on the problem is good. If treating a software abstraction as the underlying reality is bad, the implication is that looking below it to the actual underlying reality is good.

It does seem to be a surprisingly common blindspot of programmers in general. I strongly recommend programmers learn it, it can save a lot of headaches in system architecture.

Any recommendations on a good path to learn this — curious if you have any personal, opinionated thoughts on this.

Buy some cheap computer, pop in a few NICs, setup a FreeBSD or OpenBSD gateway, including DNS and some other goodies.

And by cheap, any $10 relic will do.

You’ll find their manuals very informative.

I'll add looking up the ipv4 and ipv6 specs on www.rfc-editor.org .

HN has very little understanding of many things, especially if you are familiar with <specific thing>.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect

Especially since most machines will just WORK with auto-assigned magic weird IPs and you'll actually be able to share files directly via the OS if you do this, no need for Linux netcat tricks at all.

Now I still remember when target disk mode over ethernet was being talked about.

Can you please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49512349 and, in the future, share some of what you know instead of putting down others (including the community)?

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