[HN Gopher] RIP Usenix ATC
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RIP Usenix ATC
Author : joecobb
Score : 113 points
Date : 2025-05-12 16:29 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bcantrill.dtrace.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (bcantrill.dtrace.org)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Usenix ATC Announcement_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43933511
| khuey wrote:
| IMO the implication that the "in-person conference" nature of the
| forum is what led to its demise rather than its capture by
| academics/abandonment by industry practitioners is incorrect. I
| think a better summary of the cause is that most academic
| research is not that relevant to industry but academics _need_
| the prestige of forums like Usenix ATC in a way that industry
| does not which naturally leads to squeezing industry (and thus
| much of the relevance) out of the forum over time. I think the
| same would have happened to a virtual conference /printed
| journal/etc.
| bcantrill wrote:
| I definitely agree with you, and apologies if that didn't come
| through in the piece! (Perhaps the rare case where I undershot
| on the metaphors?)
|
| One thing I didn't mention but certainly believe: academics
| were attracted to USENIX ATC because of its attendance count
| (especially at the height of the Dot Com boom when it had
| nearly 2,000 attendees!) -- but no one really took apart who
| was attending or what they were looking for. So the conference
| became _more_ academic because of the attendee count -- but
| that it became more academic also drove the attendee count
| down. (I heard from a lot of practitioners who attended that
| they struggled to find sessions that were relevant to their
| work in even the broadest sense.) I know I link to it in the
| piece, but I think Rik Farrow 's piece[0] really got right to
| the heart of all of this.
|
| [0]
| https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_fal...
| khuey wrote:
| I didn't mean to imply that I disagreed with anything other
| than that specific point (which perhaps is more nostalgia for
| the halcyon days of in-person conferences than anything
| else).
|
| I do think that you correctly identified a major source of
| the problem back in 2004 as economic factors. I was at
| Mozilla when Rust was built (though not directly involved)
| and the sum of Mozilla's investment into Rust over the years
| easily broke into the 8 digits. Google's investment in Go I'm
| sure is an order of magnitude or two more than that. This is
| simply beyond the capacity of any academic institution or
| grant process. The only academic efforts that get to this
| level require Acts of Congress (e.g. LIGO, the Human Genome
| Project, the James Webb Space Telescope, etc).
|
| And anyone who can afford to drop $10M+ into development can
| find channels for distributing and publicizing their work
| that don't go through program committees. Open source is
| definitely a big part of that but I don't think that's the
| whole story. I'd certainly count CUDA as a major advance in
| systems software since 2004, for instance.
| abetusk wrote:
| I don't feel like I have a good understanding of all the
| context but I don't think that's the implication at all. The
| post does offhandedly mention that doing online only
| conferences get "more bang for the buck" but the rest of the
| post and linked articles and talks discuss other aspects and,
| in my opinion, mirror your last sentiment about it happening to
| all conferences and journals.
|
| For example, one of the linked talks from 2016 "A Wardrobe for
| the Emperor" [0] talks about adding a more social website
| features (stars, likes, comments, feedback, etc.) to arXiv to
| improve it. He also talks about the "Papers we love" meetups,
| which are in person.
|
| I think the Usenix ATC is a highlighting a deeper problem and
| that it is happening across other conferences, journals and
| disciplines. I don't have a good theory of why. I think
| Cantrill's observations are part of the puzzle but I don't have
| a good sense for why things changed so drastically (and I think
| they have, compared to 20-40 years ago).
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAEiXWO44bQ&t=3457s
| glitchc wrote:
| The big issue may be companies clamping down on divulging
| details regarding vulnerabilities and mitigations.
| Cybersecurity is significantly more weaponized now than it was
| in the 90s and companies might be facing immense pressure to
| limit the wrong kind of attention.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| I don't think academics view ATC as particularly highly
| prestigious. Just within systems there are many other
| conferences which are either more, or just as, prestigious as
| ATC: OSDI, SOSP, NSDI, SIGMOD, VLDB, SIGCOMM, EuroSys.
| Especially the first three are viewed to be much higher
| prestige than ATC, at least from my perspective.
| linguae wrote:
| I used to be a grad student in a file systems lab at UC Santa
| Cruz over a decade ago. It was considered a dream to publish
| in OSDI or SOSP; our lab's most successful paper was the OSDI
| 2006 paper on Ceph. We also thought very highly of VLDB,
| though most of our work was outside the interests of the
| database community. We regularly published in USENIX FAST and
| made occasional appearances at USENIX ATC.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| It was a fun conference. RIP.
|
| Anybody remember the January 21-23 '87 Winter Usenix in
| Washington, DC, that got snowed in by the giant "Blizzard of
| Discontent" with 14 inches of snow that closed down Metro? The
| beloved/infamous Mayor Marion "The Bitch Set Me Up" Barry was
| attending the Super Bowl in California at the time, a fine
| tradition that Ted Cruz honored in Cancun during the February
| 2021 winter storm in Texas.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSRW18ahWG0
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5KAw9MHeP0
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZSROdXWTTc
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTMif8cGlcE
|
| Or the one after it on June 8-12 '87 Summer Usenix in Phoenix,
| Arizona, where they took everybody to a dude ranch for steak? My
| friend ||ugh Daniel was a vegetarian, and didn't want steak, so
| they told him to "git" into that line over "yonder", which he
| did. When he got to the front of the line, they plopped a half of
| a chicken onto his plate, like that's what a vegetarian wants to
| see and eat for dinner.
| rootbear wrote:
| I definitely remember that one, one of the first ATCs I
| attended. I took an NFS course and the speaker told us that
| after the class was over for the day, all of the Californians
| were planning to go out and play in the snow! I had planned to
| show off my brand new "DEV CAR" license plates at that ATC, but
| the snow was so bad I took Metro. I still have those tags.
| tptacek wrote:
| The flip side of this, though, is that it has probably never been
| easier to effectively distribute exciting new systems research,
| both because of the proliferation of smaller, more focused
| conferences with public video, and because we've all just gotten
| better at promoting stuff on the Internet. Usenix at its worst
| was a gatekeeper rather than a facilitator.
| bcantrill wrote:
| I absolutely agree, and I got to as much in my USENIX ATC 2016
| keynote[0]: there are so many vectors now for sharing new
| ideas, it's almost hard to remember that in the heyday of
| USENIX ATC, technical conferences were really one of the only
| ways (along with USENET, really) for practitioners to broadcast
| a new idea. While there were perhaps upsides to having such
| limited vectors with respect to high signal, there were of
| course many more downsides; systems research has been well-
| served by information connectedness!
|
| [0] https://speakerdeck.com/bcantrill/a-wardrobe-for-the-
| emperor...
| CalChris wrote:
| Similarly, Stanford's EE380 has slipped from these mortal coils.
| Brian Cantrill spoke there as well. BITD, EE380 seemed like the
| Senate of Silicon Valley. Startups would announce at EE380. But
| then it went from relevance to thinly attended and taped for
| YouTube to archives.
|
| This wasn't academic capture. There's a simpler explanation. No
| one goes to talks anymore.
| bcantrill wrote:
| Oh no! I had honestly never heard of EE380 when they asked me
| to present[0], but I really appreciated the fact that it was
| (either implicitly or explicitly?) open to the public. I wish I
| had heard of it earlier, and sorry to see it go!
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvZA9n3e5pc
| gnat wrote:
| Computers and the Internet started with academics. Distributed
| systems were theoretical before they were practical. The first
| sites of the Internet were universities and the first non-
| academic site was a milestone. Harvard and Dartmouth and MIT all
| contributed to computer design and programming advances. UNIX is
| a product of a quasi-academic research lab.
|
| The Center of Gravity shifted in the late 90s/early 2000s, I
| reckon. Real world needed distributed systems, and neural
| networks, and crypto math, and hardware design, and ...
|
| There's still a place for academic research but it's a much
| different place in the Gilded CPU Age. It's the god of the non-
| commercial gaps: for a while there if it seemed like it'd make
| money, someone .com giant with gigabucks of free cash had someone
| on it. Why work for a university if gigabucks.com is hiring?
|
| Not saying USENIX didn't have factions. I just question the word
| "capture" about academics, who invented all this stuff before
| there was money in it. It feels like retiring the Annual
| Technical Conference is the final step in Usenix's capture by
| industry.
| mlyle wrote:
| I think what they're saying is this:
|
| USENIX ATC at its best was always focused on operations and
| real _use_ of Unix. It was the Unix _User_ 's Group.
|
| But academic CS has a shortage of real publishing
| opportunities, causing less immediately practical things to
| flood USENIX ATC and smother it.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Academic CS has no shortage of prestigious or even good
| publishing venues. Just within systems and networking, there
| is SOSP, OSDI, NSDI, EuroSys, PODC, DISC, FAST, SIGCOMM,
| CIDR. If you extend to databases there's also VLDB, SIGMOD,
| etc. These are all Tier-1/Tier-1.5 venues.
|
| Academic CS didn't take over ATC because of a shortage of
| venues.
| tedunangst wrote:
| BSDCan is happening in one month, and along with sister
| conferences, has always kept a good mix of industry and academic
| work imo. There's a few PhD or masters student projects, but many
| of the talks are practical industrial work, things that have
| shipped.
| nmgycombinator wrote:
| Damn. As someone who has dabbled in OS history research Usenix's
| archives were a God-send. I hope they continue to maintain them,
| and that other groups can take up the mantle of hosting cutting-
| edge computer science research (at least to the extent its still
| happening).
| tuckerman wrote:
| I agree that for a lot of purposes online conferences are a great
| experience (p99 conf has been really fun for example) but nobody
| has really cracked the hallway track. I've heard about smaller
| conferences like Monktoberfest but their smallness being a main
| appeal necessarily limits their scope. Meetups seem to lack a
| certain je ne sais quoi. I wonder if someone will either figure
| out the online hallway track experience or if there is room for a
| new sort of in-person event?
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(page generated 2025-05-12 23:00 UTC)