anelson

We use localstack for as much of our integration tests as we can, and have multiple paid licenses. When we started using it I was skeptical that it could reliably mimic all the AWS services we use, and I was right. Don’t get me wrong it’s a valiant effort and it lets us run tests much faster (and obviously cheaper) than the real thing, but those same tests need to pass on live AWS too before we have any confidence in our code.

If any of the localstack authors are reading this, thank you for your tireless efforts!

Another NewsBlur user here, ever since Google killed off Google Reader. All of my news and regular content consumption, including HN, is via RSS. If a site doesn’t have a well behaved RSS feed then I won’t be able to follow it.

I’ve used a number of blog engines over the years and don’t recall ever having a problem with RSS. It seems like a solved problem on the publishing side.

I do find it annoying when the RSS feed publishes only partial content without making it clear that it’s doing so.

I had this problem myself when using tmux (how to switch sessions quickly and easily).

I ended up writing a shell script [1] to use fzf to display a list not only of sessions, but the windows within each session.

Which I invoke from tmux like this:

bind C-a run-shell -b "$HOME/.local/bin/ftwind"

This has become so ingrained in my tmux workflow that I would be utterly helpless without it.

[1]: https://github.com/anelson/dotfiles/blob/master/home/.local/...

EDIT: for formatting

We use bors as well. Our repo isn’t particularly active, a few dozen committers at any one time, but it lets us have pretty aggressive checks on master without having to run them separately for each PR before it lands.

Definitely recommended. We run ours on a Heroku instance it’s cheap and almost entirely maintenance free.

He doesn’t need to carpet bomb the whole country. He just needs to lay waste to Kyiv and Kharkiv with rocket artillery, maybe thermobaric weapons if he’s willing to commit even more unspeakable horrors. There was a TOS-1A sighted approaching Kyiv so the option is at least on the table.

Compared to what the Russian army is capable of doing to civilian population centers, they’re actually restraining themselves so far. I’m terrified that the gloves might come off…

I’m American, but lived in Kyiv for years and was lucky to get out just before the war started.

I was hesitant at first about donating to this fund as well, but the reality is that this is an existential struggle for the Ukrainians. I’m not willing to join their international brigade and pull triggers myself, but I’m down for anything short of that to help kill and demoralize as many of their enemy (which is my enemy also) as possible in the shortest amount of time.

For as long as I’ve been alive there has been either no moral justification for wars America fought or at best a dubious justification. So the idea that one should be anti-war and pro-peace is deeply ingrained. But when an aggressor invades with the express goal of eliminating your sovereign nation and subjugating your people, ferocious violence against the enemy is a moral course of action, as is funding such violence. At least in my personal moral code.

In addition my company is doing all we can to support our team in Ukraine. I hope the combination is enough to help preserve a free Ukraine. If it’s not I don’t want to spend the rest of my life asking myself if I could have done more…

I feel the same. What do you say in Slack to the guy who just told you he’s handed over his tasks to a colleague because he’s joining the territorial defenses and has to go and fight? “Good luck”? “Give ‘em hell”? “Слава Украины" is what I settled on but there’s just nothing you can say that conveys the weighty emotions of that kind of goodbye.

The very least that can be done is to not cut them loose because Russian bombardment has decreased productivity.

I’ve left behind a life and all of my possessions in Ukraine but more than that I feel like I’ve let them down since I’m living comfortably in Georgia while they suffer and could possibly die.

I’ll just do what I can to help keep the project going so we can keep supporting them. The cold reality is that a startup isn’t a charity so at some point some hard decisions need to be made, but that point isn’t five days into a war.

I am American, moved to Kyiv almost four years ago. My startup engineering team is 100% in Ukraine. As the warning signs mounted I urged my people to consider leaving but no one, myself included, thought it would come to this. Of course no one left.

I finally agreed to take a couple of weeks out of Kyiv to calm my cofounder’s nerves, sure that I’d be back and we’d have a laugh at how it all came to nothing. So I am in Tbilisi and my team are all stuck in Ukraine.

We’re doing all we can to help We can’t get the men out because the Ukrainian borders guards won’t let any men leave, and most of the women won’t leave their husbands behind. A few have joined the territorial defense forces and are defending Kyiv now. Many others are taking shelter in basements while the Russians shell their cities.

Today, 66% of my 45 person team were online and working. It’s astonishing the grit and commitment the Ukrainians are showing. We’re resolved not to abandon them and to do all we can for them but the shitty reality is that’s just not a whole lot right now.

If anyone can fight their way to victory in this war it’s them. I wish the west had done more when there was still time to make a difference, but now it’s up to Ukrainians to save themselves and make the Russian invaders pay for every meter they take.

My situation exactly. I’m American but I live in Kyiv, I was lucky to get out a few days before the invasion but my life, my team, and my property are still there. I try to focus on helping the guys still there find safety and arrange lodgings, but the draw of doomscrolling is ever present.

Fortunately I’ve noticed that I can’t focus on the horrible reality of this war and also on coding or reviewing PRs or debugging some code. If I can focus on a concrete task my mood improves for as long as I can hold the focus.

Also as usual, physical activity helps. I landed in Tbilisi with just a suitcase and didn’t have time to find a gym or set up a routine, but even just walking up the steep hills in the city improves my mood. Don’t underestimate the positive effect this has on the mental state.

This war is not going away soon and my people aren’t going to be out of danger any time soon, so it’s critical to find a way to focus on what needs to be done and not waste time and energy fretting. Easy to say, not so easy to do.

Invoking the image of nazis is also a dog whistle directed at primarily older Russians. During WWII some Ukrainian forces initially joined the invading Nazi forces against the Soviet Union, which given how the Soviets treated Ukraine maybe made sense at the time.

Ever since then the memory of this “betrayal” has been kept alive in Russian culture. There’s no greater enemy than nazis, so the image of a Nazi Ukrainian oppressing Russians is a powerful one. Utter and complete bullshit propaganda of course, but it’s not an accident that Putin uses this particular image.

The fact that Zelenskiy is a Russian speaking Jew is, I guess, either not widely known in Russia or not considered sufficient proof of his innocence…

Not exactly what you're talking about, but I wanted an InstantPot badly here in Kyiv and the models available in Europe on 220V did not include the model I wanted, and cost alot more. So I imported into Ukraine a US InstantPot, and a transformer to convert to 120V (although it doesn't convert the frequency from 50 to 60Hz). Works fine; I've been using it daily for at least a year. I thought the timer might run slow if it's using the mains power frequency as a clock, but that doesn't seem to be the case so it must have an internal oscillator.

And part 2:

As to what I've gained, which I think on balance is more than I've given up:

- I met the girl who is now my fiance here. When living in the US I was quite certain I would never marry. I'm 41 so I've been around a bit and seen and done a lot, but my perspective changed a lot when I came here. That's pretty specific to me and not something everyone will experience, but I definitely count it as a gain for me.

- If you compare the legal frameworks of Ukraine and the US, US is far superior in terms of freedom. Not only rights reserved to the people, but also limits place on the government. Even in these troubled times, that legal framework restrains a lot of authoritarian ambitions that would otherwise impose on the freedom of US citizens. In Ukraine almost none of those protections exist. To give one example, the government closed some Russian-language television channels because they were furthering Russian interests in Ukraine, and this was within the power of the government to do.

  That said, the reality feels very different.  Because the rule of law is weaker here (but not so weak that it's a might-makes-right anarchy), I feel a lot more free.  You might or might not like that, depending on how much of a rule-follower and law-and-order type you are.  I am fiercely independent and deeply resent stupid rules, so for me it's great.  To give one example which might scandalize some of you, in the depths of the COVID lockdowns when everything was mandated shutdown by law and masks were required everywhere, I was drinking cocktails with my girlfriend in a packed cocktail bar where you couldn't find a mask for love or money.  Make no mistake this was illegal, and if police found out they could shut down the bar, fine the patrons and seriously fine the owner, but this doesn't happen because the owner of the bar is connected and bribes have been paid and the Ukrainian people are ungovernable in the best of times anyway.

- Living here has immersed me in Russian (which is widely spoken in the part of Ukraine where I live although it is emphatically NOT the official language) to the point where my Russian proficiency is shocking to me. Sometimes I catch myself talking politics or sports or whatever with my trainer or my girlfriend and I think, "holy shit! I'm speaking Russian!". It never gets old, and is a really satisfying experience.

- I listed the healthcare system as a sacrifice, and it is, but it's not all bad. It's vastly cheaper than the US, and way more accessible if you're willing to pay just a bit more. I mentioned my heart problem; I had a cardiac MRI with contrast in Kyiv to confirm the diagnosis; it was scheduled the day after my doctor ordered it, and it cost a bit under USD 200. I then had another one done in Miami just to make sure they didn't miss anything; I had US health insurance but it has a high daily co-pay so the MRI cost me something like $900, and was booked a month in advance. The conclusions were the same from both MRIs.

  For better or worse, you can buy almost any drugs other than narcotics without a prescription.  The process is, a doctor tells you "you should take $DRUG, here I'll write it down for you", you go to a pharmacy, and ask if they have $DRUG.  If they do, you give them money and they give you $DRUG.  It's great.  I can stock up on the meds I take for blood pressure, for example, without asking a doctor's permission.  Obviously that's risky, but they never developed the equivalent of our Sullivan Act giving doctors a monopoly on pharmaceuticals.  Another fun anecdote, my cardiologist prescribed (again, "prescribed" just means "told me to go buy") phenobarbital, which you can just buy in the pharmacy over the counter.

- My cost of living is hilariously low here. I could live here for years on savings alone. Human labor is very cheap here, which makes all kinds of things possible. I have a private Russian tutor, a personal trainer who was a former European champion powerlifter, and a cleaning lady, not because I'm rich and powerful but because it's just so cheap it doesn't make sense to do without them. My mobile Internet is plenty fast, unlimited, and costs $7/mo. An Uber ride to someplace far away and inconvenient to get to is maybe $5, $10 at the most.

- I appreciate what I have, and the little things in life, a lot more. Ukraine is a very poor country, although the city center where I live is populated only by the rich and foreigners. Nonetheless, this results in a completely different mentality. I've become much more resilient, able to tolerate disruptions (eg, the elevator isn't working again and I live on the 6th floor; fuck it I'll just hump my shit up the stairs like usual), and much more appreciative of the wealth and comfort I left behind, and may someday return to.

- We're at this moment almost surrounded by Russian combined arms BTGs, but my family and friends back home are freaking out much more than I am. Because this is Ukraine, bad shit happens, it's been happening for a thousand years, we'll make it or we won't. I really admire this mentality, and I've tried to cultivate it in myself. That's not to say there aren't a ton of problems here (there are), and a lot of shitty people (there are), but I'm happier here. When I go back to Miami or DC to visit, I feel like a foreigner. My friends have $1M houses bought on credit and live lives of incredible comfort and ease, and it's hard to believe that was ever me. My fiance is from Donetsk and already fled Russian invaders once, yet she doesn't want to live in the US. "Too many rules", she says. I totally get it now.

I wrote a long comment but it was too long, so I'm going to try to split it up into separate comments:

Part 1:

I moved from Miami to Kyiv, Ukraine three and a half years ago. I see a lot of interesting responses from Western Europe, but OP didn't specify where in Europe so I'll give my EE perspective.

I live in the city center in Kyiv, which is a great city, vastly underrated due to the legacy of the Soviet stereotype.

Big sacrifices, in no particular order:

- Others have mentioned that the houses are smaller in Europe; this is true here as well. But it's not just about the space; apartments here (and the houses I've been in as well) as just not a comfortable. The stairs are steeper, the layout is weird (especially in old apartments like mine which dates from the Stalin era), the corridors are dirty and dark, if there's a clothes washer at all it's in the bathroom and there is no separate dryer. I admit non of this really counts as a "big" sacrifice, but it's something I still notice every day, even after years of being here.

- As I mentioned, I came here to build a company, so I'm not earning a salary on the local economy. The US is by far the best place to earn money in tech, others have already reported that. Ukraine salaries are cheaper than Berlin, but for strong and in-demand talent, not a whole lot cheaper. The absolute top of the market at this time of crazy salary growth is probably USD 7K or 8K/mo; a more realistic salary would be USD 4K to USD 6K/mo. Compared to the US that's shit, but the Ukrainian tax code has a special carve-out for IT, so the income tax on that is only 5%, and the cost of living is pretty low. I think as a foreigner if you could find an IT company that would hire you for a reasonable salary you could set up quite a comfortable life for yourself, although as I said I haven't personally done this.

- I took for granted that in America, foreigners can immigrate and become Americans, not just by law as citizens but in the eyes of other Americans. That emphatically does not happen here. I could live here for 40 years, earn Ukrainian citizenship by serving in the Army, raise Ukrainian children, and when I die, I will die a foreigner. Most Ukrainians I meet are not hostile to foreigners, but they also don't treat me as one of them, and many assume all foreigners are rich and will try to cheat you. I've grown used to this, and it doesn't bother me, but make sure you're prepared for this reality.

- This sounds stupid, but Amazon (and the ability to impulse buy things and get them the next day, in general). The local market has a lot of Western products, but the markup is insane. Ukraine has very unreasonable import taxes on foreign goods, so everything here is much more expensive. Cars could easily end up being 2x the cost of the equivalent in the US. Residents are allowed to import packages worth up to EUR 100 without import duty; after that, it's 20% tax. Amazon does ship some things to Ukraine, but the shipping is unreasonable and almost everything they still will ship to US only, so I use a service (Meest) that provides me with an address in Delaware, and then will re-ship my packages by boat (takes over a month) or by air (takes at least a week and costs a lot more), where I can receive them at the Ukrainian equivalent of FedEx. Obviously this elaborate process and restriction on dollar amount means I rarely order things from abroad. This might be the most first world of problems ever complained about, but I really do miss this.

- Practically no one you will encounter in daily life, outside of tech workers, will speak any English. This was very hard for me because I'm very self-conscious about making mistakes speaking a foreign language. I speak Russian now at an intermediate level (I really should learn Ukrainian, but Russian learning materials are so much more abundant, and I can use Russian in other countries in the region), which has helped immensely. I can't emphasize enough the importance of speaking the local language with at least conversational fluency. It used to be I wouldn't order food delivery because I know they will call me to confirm the order (this is an annoying cultural difference BTW) and I'll struggle to understand them and it'll be a mess and it's better to just eat some crackers. Now I have no fear of communicating, not because my Russian is perfect, but because I've been here long enough and studied enough that I know I'll be able to communicate. If I had not invested multiple hours per day early on in language study, I doubt I'd still be here. It's just too hard, and too isolating.

- The healthcare system here is...not up to Western standards. In summer 2020 had a heart issue, and was really unsure if I needed to evac back to the US or not. I felt like I would die, although my cardiologist in Ukraine said that was very unlikely. Dealing with the healthcare system is really not pleasant for me, thankfully my girlfriend helped with some details. The process is utterly foreign, and bedside manner is not emphasized in Ukrainian medical schools. So if you come here, don't get sick, and if you do get sick...make sure a Ukrainian cares enough about you to help.

- I left all of my friends and family behind. There's no getting around it, that sucks and there's no solution. Ask yourself how badly you want to move. I don't regret my decision but I won't pretend it was easy. I doubted myself many times. It's not easy for me to make new friends even in my home country; it's no easier here. I am friends with the guys I have hired on my team, but I wouldn't say I have any close friends here.

FWIW, I've tried the Scaleway (Paris), MacStadium (Atlanta), and as of today also the Hetzner (Falkenstein, Germany) M1 offerings.

The Scaleway service had such awful latency on the VNC connection that I found it almost completely unusable. MacStadium and Hetzner are both better. That's particularly odd because I'm based in Kyiv, Ukraine, so I would have expected better latency to Paris than to Atlanta. It might have been a problem on my ISP's end, I didn't spend any time looking into it.

Besides that, the Hetzner offer is by far the cheapest, as is usually the case with Hetzner. If you don't mind having to do all configuration yourself, and you don't require a flashy whiz-bang UI for managing your provisioned resources, Hetzner is a great value.

The customer forum requires a login to access, and unfortunately is often in German.

The linked post says this:

"Danke für das Interesse an dem neuen Produkt!

Die Fragen zum Betriebssystem sollten sich durch die Veröffentlichung der Produktmatrix beantwortet haben. Es wird das aktuelle macOS Big Sur installiert.

Bei der Einrichtung und Zugangsmöglichkeiten haben wir uns nur für SSH entschieden. Nicht jeder Kunde möchte mit einem aktiven VNC-Zugang starten. Wie auch der eine oder andere beschrieben hat, ist die Einrichtung/Aktivierung nicht schwer. Gerne könnt ihr dazu auch einen Community-Artikel schreiben und weiteren Kunden helfen.

Welche Alternativen zu VNC würdet ihr Vorschlagen oder hättet ihr gerne, die wir uns mal anschauen sollten?"

I don't understand German, but I ordered one and received SSH login instructions, and was able to get VNC enabled and connected by tunneling port 5900 through the SSH connection.

We've been using Hetzner boxes to run our self-hosted GitHub Actions runners for a couple years now, except for Mac which we have run in MacStadium. This offering is much cheaper than MacStadium though; EUR 49 compare to USD 129.

I ordered one of these M1 Minis from Hetzner last night as soon as I saw the announcement. It was provisioned and ready this afternoon. Initial impression is good, it's a Big Sur M1 Mini. I paid extra (EUR 69/mo) to get two 1TB SSDs as well, since we often run up against the 256GB storage limitation.

Hetzner provide a dedicated IPv4 address and IPv6 /64, SSH access is via a password. Unlike MacStadium, VNC access didn't seem to be enabled initially, but some Googling around yielded the ASD command to turn that on. Our Hetzner firewall config blocks everything but port 22 anyway, so I tunneled VNC port 5900 through SSH and it worked fine.

The open question, which only time will answer, is network connectivity. MacStadium (or at least the Atlanta data center we use) seems to have pretty reliable connectivity, but our Hetzner runners sometimes fail with some transient network glitch while trying to download a random dependency now and then. Fortunately most of the tools we use will auto-retry, so even if we do have sporadic network connectivity glitches for the price it's well worth it.

There were definitely some Crimeans who preferred to be part of Russia. But I don't think the referendum was free or fair. And even if we could say that 51% of them genuinely wanted to secede from Ukraine and join Russia, it doesn't change the fact that Russia annexed Crimea first, and then, lo and behold, the Crimean people wanted Russian rule all along. I don't think there's any way to square what happened with international law.

There's another devious tactic Russia uses which is IMHO even worse than the bogus referendum: They've started issuing Russian passports to Ukrainian citizens in the part of Eastern Ukraine that is controlled by the "independent republics" which are de facto controlled by Russia. So now, Russia can say, truthfully, that there are many Russian citizens in Donbass, and justify military escalation there as a purely defensive act responding to Ukrainian abuses of Russian citizens. Meanwhile, life in Donbass gets worse and worse, Russian passport or not.

> Yet we have to be ready for "Russian speaking Ukrainians" from nearby Russian cities

Yes this is an important point. Russia's official position to this day is that they have not invaded Donbass, and that the conflict there is a civil war. That's transparently false propaganda, and extensive evidence exists of specific identifiable Russian military units operating in Ukraine, but it's nonetheless the Russian narrative. If they escalate further it would not surprise me if it were "Russian speaking Ukrainians" again; Russian operatives furthering Russian interests using Russian equipment and Russian resources, but officially deniable by Russia.

Another favored narrative is that they are protecting Russian-speaking peoples from oppression, and that these oppressed peoples want to be under Russian rule. That worked to some extent in 2014, and I knew many educated and prosperous Ukrainians who believed that propaganda. It will be a harder sell today, as it's very obvious that seven years of "freedom" in Donbass has destroyed the region and made life worse for the Ukrainians who still live there. But, again, I don't think Putin cares if the rest of the world believe that propaganda; the target audience is the Russian people.

Hey, American here, I live in Kyiv.

Things are as tense here as I've ever experienced since I moved here in 2018. Most Ukrainians I know don't think a full-scale invasion is likely, but I think that's just because contemplating the prospect of an escalation of the war with Russia is too unpleasant. I know that the Ukrainian armed forces are taking it seriously, although as far as I know they haven't yet mobilized any reserves.

That said, a lot has changed since 2014. Back then, Ukraine's military was hollowed out by years of neglect and corruption. Ukraine's armed forces have undergone a significant transformation since then, and while I don't think they could hold off the combined forces of Russia's armor, air, and naval assets, they don't have to: they just have to make Russia pay dearly enough for every meter they take that it's not worth it.

To that end, we (the US but also Canada and Great Britain) have done a lot in terms of training and support, and IIRC there are units of Ukrainian Special Forces which have certified as NATO SOF. If I were a Russian tank commander advancing into Ukrainian territory, I'd be very worried about the Javelin anti-tank missile systems Ukraine bought from the US. Ukraine is also operating a pretty advanced Turkish armed UAV platform which could ruin the day of would-be invaders.

I'm not yet at the point where I'm considering leaving Ukraine, but it is a pretty stressful time. However you have to understand that Ukraine has been at war with Russia since 2014; Ukrainian soldiers have continued to fight and die on the contact line in Eastern Ukraine ever since. So to some extent the population here are used to the looming threat of violence from Russia since it never went away. Nonetheless, this feels like an escalation and that worries me.

Granted this survey isn't robust enough to be taken as evidence of the superiority of unschooling or even homeschooling generally. It's anecdotal, and if I had to guess I'd say the target audience is parents who have already decided to unschool and want some social validation, or at least parents leaning that way.

That said, I think your huge concern is that unschooled kids are at a higher risk of insufficient or delayed social development, and a survey that recruits on social networks will biased against such socially underdeveloped children. And furthermore that those socially underdeveloped children are at a higher risk of suicide than their conventionally-educated peers such that a survey which doesn't count the dead ones is further biased.

If that's a correct assessment of your concern then I'd be really interested to know upon what facts or even anecdotal experience it's based. If it's just that the idea of unschooling seems suspect, or that you can't imagine how such a system could produce better outcomes than conventional education, then you're certainly not alone in that position but I would submit that you are misinformed.

In my experience the social (to say nothing of intellectual) development of the average American high school graduate was laughably primitive when I was that age 20 years ago, and nothing I've seen since makes me think it's gotten any better. As for suicide risk I find it hard to believe that an educational style that presumes a higher than average degree of parental involvement and an almost certain lack of bullying and abuse in school leads to a higher propensity to suicide. In fact I would confidently wager that, were such data available, it would show the exact opposite.

I can somewhat relate to this. During my years as a homeschooled and then unschooled kid, I was very interested in chemistry, and then electrical engineering, and finally computer programming. My parents didn't have the faintest idea of the fundamentals of any of those disciplines, nor did they know anyone who did.

The point of this approach to education isn't to say that teachers are unnecessary or that parents possess all of the knowledge that their children will need. It's that children have an innate curiosity that is woefully underutilized by conventional educational systems, which if encouraged can lead to the counter-intuitive result in which children teach themselves or seek out mentors on their own.

In my particular case, we were a weekly fixture at our local small town library, which fed my curiosity about chemistry and to some extent electrical engineering. Thankfully dial-up ISPs started to pop up around the time I was getting seriously into computers, so I was able to download an freeware C compiler and...well I'm posting on HN so it's obvious how that turned out.

Might I have had a similarly inspiring programming teacher at our local public school? I suppose it's possible. Might I have turned out just as intellectually curious and confident after years of public middle and high school? I doubt it but who knows. Was I in any way limited by the bounds of my parents' knowledge or ability to each? Not in the slightest.

^ This!

In all my travels I've only met a handful of people who were not at least skeptical or downright disparaging of home schooling, at least until they learned about my background and either politeness or exposure to contrary evidence required backtracking.

I often encounter a kind of reverence toward teachers in particular and our educational establishment in general which is woefully misplaced. The structure the American education system (and maybe in other countries although I only went to school in the US) is in direct opposition to the formation of qualities like curiosity, independence, auto-didactic inquiry, and skepticism that are as vital today as literacy was a century ago.

I was lucky to be raised by parents who had no respect for the establishment and chose to live in a state that did not force them to educate their children in accordance with government mandates. As a result they were free to bring us up in the way that they hoped was best for each of us. For me that ended up being unschooling.

Thanks for sharing your story. I can relate to some of your experiences, although you definitely had it tougher than me.

She called the owner of the local ISP and essentially traded me for internet access; I would go to their "office" (a repurposed shipping container) to answer tech support emails, and at home we could dial in for free.

This is where "unschooling" truly began. I had Microsoft Encarta that came with the PC, I had a book called Internet For Dummies, and I had virtually unlimited access to information.

This was a breakthrough moment for me also. The local ISP offered shell or SLIP accounts, but SLIP was more expensive so I had a shell account. Mosaic was still buggy back then and it required the Win32s extensions to run on 16-bit Windows so I didn't bother. Gopher and FTP were the centers of my world.

My book was Navigating the Internet by Richard Gibbs.

Do you ever wonder if you would've ended up in the same place if you'd had an easier or more privileged upbringing? I'm convinced that most of my hardships growing up were essential factors in how I ended up. If I came up today with high speed Internet and a comfortable middle class life with a new smartphone every two years and a computer that I don't have to share with four other siblings, I might not have found the things that I'm so passionate about that I'll do anything just to pursue them.

All things being equal, I'm sure a random sample of children from the top SES quintile will have better educational outcomes then the bottom quintile (as measured by test scores, graduation rate, lifetime earnings, pick your metric). However my anecdotal experience based on my own background and other unschoolers I know is that unschooling specifically is not biased toward the wealthy.

Rather it seems to correlate with parents who for whatever reason are willing to go far outside societal norms and the comforting embrace of social proof in the interest of doing what's best for their child. This isn't a value judgement one way or another; that statement could apply as much to an anti-vaxxer as an unschooler. The point I'm trying to make is that if a family enrolls their children in private school, hires tutors, arranges legacy admissions to $ivy_league_school, etc, no one will question the advantages they are conferring on their children. If instead they keep one parent at home and unschool their children, they will be doing so against a very strong current of social pressure, likely including their own extended family, and depending on where they live they may be acting against the will of the state itself.

If anything, homeschooling in general is a way for families who lack the wealth to buy into elite education to try to provide their children with better educational opportunities than those afforded them in the local public school. It requires considerable sacrifice, particularly if it means giving up a second income and moving to a cheap place in the country to make the numbers work. Whether or not it's actually better for the children in question is ultimately up to the parents.

I count my hybrid schooling/homeschooling/unschooling experience as a privilege in the sense that it's made me better than I would be otherwise. But it has nothing to do with wealth or income. I could arrange to be born 1000 times to 1000 wealthy families and not have the same advantage as I did with my poor family.

During my childhood I experienced the full spectrum of American education systems, including /laissez faire/ unschooling, homeschooling with a structured curriculum, a one-room country schoolhouse, urban public schools, and even a Catholic private school. I was fortunate that my parents, particularly my father, were willing to try multiple approaches to learning based on what was and wasn't working.

I hated almost every moment of my public school education, and private school was only slightly better. My urban public school was little better than a gladiator academy, and even in private school the curriculum was not challenging or engaging in any way. I was an awkward child and was frequently bullied (in fairness this did teach me the importance of being willing to meet violence with violence, a lesson which fortunately I've not needed to apply since my school days). I would find every opportunity to get out of school and work on my own self-edification projects; vaguely defined "sick days" were my stock in trade.

My last year of "normal" education was the 6th grade, in a public school in a small midwestern town (population: ~750). Having explored the gamut of educational styles it was clear that I learned best on my own.

I spent a lot of time exploring different subjects based on what caught my interest. By the time I was 13 I had already decided I wanted to go into EE. I saved my meager allowance and over time managed to procure the entire library of Forrest M. Mims' "Engineer's mini notebooks", and could reproduce the schematics in each one practically from memory. I was already looking at how I could get into the field without waiting until I was 18 and could go to college, but then I discovered digital circuits...

After extensive lobbying on my part my parents finally bought a computer in 1994 (a Gateway 2000 486 DX2 66Mhz). From then on I've been immersed in computing, at times to an obsessive degree. If you'd asked my father in 1995 if unschooling me had been a mistake, he might have shared his concerns that my humanity was slipping away as I spent every waking moment on that "damn machine". He couldn't have known at the time that I was laying the foundation for an incredibly satisfying career as a software engineer.

I always assumed I'd get around to a GED and then a college degree, because it was taken as an article of faith in my family that one must, if nothing else, graduate with at lease a bachelor's degree in something. But it never happened. I started community college like many unschoolers do as a way to get around age and testing requirements in four year schools, but by then I was already working as a software engineer and I didn't see the point in taking on debt and spending a few years in a CS curriculum, so I dropped out and never looked back.

I've seen some other comments here talk about the "socialization" question. My mother was very worried about this also. As others have mentioned, in the end I was better socialized than my age peers, because I had more meaningful interactions with people outside my age cohort. My coworkers, boss, in some cases even their children were all older than me, and that taught me how to act both professionally and in informal settings like happy hours and parties.

On the topic of privilege, I certainly count myself privileged to have been raised by two involved parents who had the insight to let me develop outside the accepted bounds of our society. However my family were very poor for the first ten years of my life, and barely middle class during my teens. One of my parents had a serious substance abuse problem which contributed to our poverty. Whatever aspect of my background and upbringing gave me an advantage in life, it was definitely not socio-economic.

Who knows if my experience reflects the superiority of one system over another, or if I would have turned out this way anyway, or some complex non-linear space in between. The key takeaway I think is that education is in no way a solved problem, and the system we have now (particularly in the US) is in no way the apotheosis of pedagogy. Just like we vigorously debate the merits of programming languages, tech stacks, type sytems, methodologies, business models, etc here on HN, how we educate ourselves and our children is at least as much of an unsolved problem.

Whether or not unschooling is a good fit for a particular child or their particular parents, the movement has nonetheless done us all a great service by proving convincingly that it's OK to question the education orthodoxy, that there are is no priestly caste of teachers who possess the wisdom of the pedagogical gods. In the early 80s this was by no means apparent, and my parents took a lot of shit from a lot of people for their approach. Now my sister is free to unschool her four kids with little to no hassle from the state.

Cool! Assuming it's a faithful port with source-level compatibility, it should work with the existing DTrace implementation I'm building. The differences between compiler toolchains are already abstracted away by the excellent `cc` crate.

In any case I already have a Windows CI build; when DTrace is ready I'll add DTrace on Windows there and see what happens.

This is now published on crates.io for those of you interested in playing with it:

https://crates.io/crates/tracers

Better docs and a quick start coming soon.

Yes absolutely. Better docs are a top priority right now.

Great question. `rust-libprobe` was the original inspiration for `tracers`, and made me start to explore what else was possible. Everything that follows shouldn't be taken as criticism of `rust-libprobe` in any way; without cuviper's work there would be no `tracers` at all.

The main limitation of `rust-libprobe` is that it uses the `asm` feature in nightly Rust. In my case I really wanted to be able to use stable Rust so that was a deal-breaker.

`rust-libprobe` also doesn't include any logic to help to expose Rust native types to the probes. It works with primitive types but I wanted a framework that would allow the use of arbitrary Rust types provided a trait implementation was available to adapt them to the C representation. An example of this is Rust `String` or `&str` types, which my code will lazily convert into a C-style string if the caller chooses to include such values in the probe.

Furthermore I wanted probes that are integrated into the type system. You define probes as methods on a trait, with regular Rust parameters. Those get translated into probes at compile time but they remain methods, so if you don't call them you get the usual unused method warnings, if you forget an argument to a probe it's a compile error, if you pass the wrong type you get a compile err, etc. It's much safer and more ergonomic, in my opinion.

Finally note that `tracers` has SystemTap and LLT-ng impls now, DTrace is about half way done, and Windows ETW is coming. `rust-libprobe` is clearly designed to support various tracing impls but it only supports SystemTap today, and the way it is designed it would be difficult to adapt it to something like DTrace which requires the use of a compile-time code gen step. `tracers` has a ton of code run at compile time specifically to support the code-gen case, so in theory any tracing system that requires compile-time code generation could be adapted to use it.

As well you should. Few things are more motivating than seeing one's not-quite-yet-finished project on HN ;)