[HN Gopher] Linux is an interpreter
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Linux is an interpreter
Author : frizlab
Score : 145 points
Date : 2026-03-28 16:59 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (astrid.tech)
(TXT) w3m dump (astrid.tech)
| shevy-java wrote:
| Well - Linux is kind of like a somewhat generic interface to have
| actionable, programmable tasks. One could use Windows for this
| too, but IMO Linux is in general better suited for that task.
|
| The only area I think Windows may be better is the graphical user
| interface. Now, the windows interface annoys me to no ends, but
| GNOME annoys me and KDE annoys me too. I have been more using
| fluxbox or icewm, sometimes when I feel fancy xfce or mate-
| desktop, but by and large I think my "hardcore desktop days" are
| over. I want things to be fast and efficient and simple. Most of
| the work I do I handle via the commandline and a bit of web-
| browsing and writing code/text in an editor, for the most part
| (say, 95% of the activities).
| ux266478 wrote:
| > The only area I think Windows may be better is the graphical
| user interface.
|
| Nah. You're right about Gnome and KDE, but Windows is even
| worse because you can't exactly escape away from microsoft's
| insane labyrinth or awful wm. Frankly, not a fan of the Xerox
| bloodline of desktop interfaces in general. mpx/mux heritage is
| the one I like. 9wm, cwm or dwm. Closer to Engelbart and just
| generally all around better.
| chickensong wrote:
| > I want things to be fast and efficient and simple.
|
| Sway + foot with keybinds to provision each workspace to your
| liking is pretty nice. No desktop, but really flies for your
| use case (mine also). Bind window focus to your most
| comfortable keys.
| TZubiri wrote:
| From earlier in the series.
|
| "Okay, so the reason I initially did this was because I didn't
| want to pay Contabo an extra $1.50/mo to have object storage just
| to be able to spawn VPSes from premade disk images."
|
| I think there's a sweetspot between " I spent 50 hours to save
| 1.50$/mo" and "every engineer should be spending 250K$/mo in
| tokens".
|
| Host employees still need to eat, if we can't afford 1.50$/mo,
| then we aren't really professionals and are just coasting on real
| infrastructure subsidized by professionals that pay for the pay-
| as-you-go infrastructure.
|
| It's still possible to go even further to these extremes, there's
| thousands of developers that just coast by on github pages and
| vercel subdomains. So at least having a VPS puts you ahead of
| that mass competitively, but trying to save 1.50$/mo is a harsh
| place to be. At that point I don't think that the technical
| skills are the bottleneck, it's more likely that there's some
| social work that needs to be done, and that obsessing over
| running doom on curl is not a very productive use of one's time
| in a critical economic spot.
|
| I write this because I am in that spot, but perhaps I'm reading a
| bit much into it.
| astralbijection wrote:
| ... I think you're reading a bit much into it. It's less that I
| couldn't afford to pay that, and more that I didn't want to pay
| that, and iterating on the solution I used to dodge that led me
| down a giant rabbit hole of learning more about Linux while
| solving stupider and stupider problems posed for myself.
| jcul wrote:
| That four part blog was one of the most entertaining things
| I've read this year, thanks.
|
| Really in the spirit of "hacker" news IMO.
|
| I get the motivation, it's less avoiding the 1.50 per month
| and more like a challenge to work around it!
| jmalicki wrote:
| I like the term host employee, carrying the LLM parasite as it
| uses us to embody itself and reproduce into the singularity.
| GranPC wrote:
| I think they meant employees from the hosting company. But
| that's a funny interpretation!
| cardanome wrote:
| > it's more likely that there's some social work that needs to
| be done, and that obsessing over running doom on curl is not a
| very productive use of one's time in a critical economic spot.
|
| It can be a problem but it can be also just a human following
| their special interests that give them joy.
|
| For me as a ADHD person engaging with my special interests is a
| hard requirement to keep my mental health in check and
| therefore a very good use of my time.
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| That sounds like something I would've done... When I was a kid,
| the 5EUR/month for a VPS was a massive expense, to the point
| where I occasionally had to download my 10GB rootfs to my mom's
| windows laptop, terminate the instance and then rebuild it once
| I had enough money. Eventually I got an old Kindle that was
| able to run an app called Terminal IDE which had a Linux shell
| with some basic programs like busybox, gcc. Spartacus Rex, if
| you're out there, thank you for making my entire career
| possible.
| miki123211 wrote:
| And I think this point is heavily under-appreciated in the
| cloud Vs. on prem debate.
|
| The cost for 1 hour of cloud CPU time is the same (barring
| discounts), no matter who you are. THe cost for 1 hour of
| engineer time varies wildly. If you're a non-profit or a solo
| dev, you may even consider that cost to be "free."
|
| If your engineer costs are far lower than what AWS assumes
| they are, going with AWS is a stupid decision, you're far
| better off using VPSes / dedicated servers and self-hosting
| all the services you need to run on top.
| pwdisswordfishy wrote:
| > if we can't afford 1.50$/mo, then we aren't really
| professionals and are just coasting on real infrastructure
| subsidized by professionals
|
| This is a strange claim.
|
| Whether someone is getting paid or not to do something is what
| determines who is a professional, not whether or how much
| they're paying someone else. (And that's the _only_ thing that
| matters, unlike the way that "professional" is used as a
| euphemism in Americans' bizarre discursive repertoire.)
| TZubiri wrote:
| I think the sense of the word professional here is not as a
| boolean professional/amateur, but the sense of
| professionalism, the characteristic of taking business
| seriously, not letting personal matters intervene, and in
| this case, investing into tools.
|
| To put an example, suppose you hire a painter, and they show
| up with non-work attire, no ladder, no brush, they ask you to
| buy a can of paint for them and a brush. Compared to a
| contractor that bills you flat and brins their own ladder,
| has work clothing and shoes, an air pneumatic spray painter,
| a breathing mask. Who is more professional?
|
| It's part of a broader debate for sure, OP seems to have done
| it more for the experience than to actually save 1.50$.
| bigyabai wrote:
| It always depends on results. It _can_ be unprofessional to
| design a system that takes an external variable like S3 for
| granted, especially if it 's not needed. As long as the
| hack isn't worse than the official $1.50 happy-path, you
| might as well save the end-customer a monthly fee and
| reduce your attack surface.
|
| I think hacks like these have a positive effect on the
| industry. It pushes back on meaningless, encroaching
| monetization and encourages Conatbo to reevaluate their
| service offerings to ensure they justify the price.
| hrmtst93837 wrote:
| Calling cheap hacks unprofessional misses the point, some
| suprisingly portable tricks only show up when you stop paying
| for everything on autopilot.
| TZubiri wrote:
| I really get that, and I value these otherwise pointless hack
| articles as much as the next guy. But I think I was
| specifically getting at the fact that these might actually
| turn into an economically useful skill just by finding a
| sweetspot in the amount of money they can save.
|
| 1.5$/mo is still in the toy realm, (and games can be very
| good for practicing before the real stuff), but using tricks
| like this to save 50$/mo or 500$/mo or 5k$/mo or 50k$/mo and
| so on can definitely cross the threshold into actually
| (massively) useful.
|
| The biggest challenge in crossing that bridge is matching up
| clients with bad engineers but good budgets, with good
| engineers with no budget. There's probably thousands of
| engineers that are currently spinning 5$/mo into impressive
| architecture for their blog or their 2 user startup, and
| clients throwing buckets of cash into tokens and zapier/n8n.
| The world needs Cupids that match those together.
| bityard wrote:
| The author did write that, yes. But it's very obviously a joke.
| The real reasons are literally the very next paragraph:
|
| > I thought it was a neat trick, a funny shitpost that riffs on
| the eternal curl | sh debate. I could write a blog post about
| it, I tell you about how you can do it yourself, one thousand
| words, I learn something, you learn something, I get internet
| points, win win.
| vatsachak wrote:
| Isn't every OS an interpreter for machine code with kernel
| privileges?
| astralbijection wrote:
| This one is an interpreter for CPIO files.
| tosti wrote:
| This article was painful to read because of all the
| misconceptions. A cpio archive is not a filesystem. Author uses
| initramfs, which is based on tmpfs. Linux can extract cpio to
| tmpfs. An archive of files and directories is in itself not a
| program.
|
| Just because something looks similar doesn't mean it's
| equivalent. Binary programs are executed on the CPU, so if
| there's an interpreter involed it's hiding in the hardware
| environment. That's outside the scope of an OS kernel.
|
| If you have a shell script in your filesystem and run it, you
| need to also provide the shell that interprets the script. Author
| omits this detail and confuses the kernel with the shell program.
|
| Linux can easily be compiled without support for initramfs and
| ramdisk. It can still boot and run whatever userland sits in the
| filesystem.
|
| "Linux initrd interpreter" hurts my brain. That's not how it
| works.
|
| Edit: should've read further. Still a backwards way of explaining
| things imho.
| commandersaki wrote:
| At least it isn't AI slop!
| daveguy wrote:
| I dunno, sure seems like "AI research" at least.
| astralbijection wrote:
| > An archive of files and directories is in itself not a
| program.
|
| Okay, but you can make the same argument to say that ELF files
| aren't programs in and of themselves either. In fact, some ELF
| files are dynamic libraries without an entrypoint, and
| therefore not actually executable in any meaningful way unless
| connected to yet another program.
|
| If you can accept that some ELF files are executables and some
| aren't, then you can also accept that some CPIOs are
| executables and some aren't. What's the difference between
| ld.so unpacking an ELF file into RAM and running its
| entrypoint, and the Linux kernel unpacking an initramfs into
| RAM and running its entrypoint?
| lstodd wrote:
| man ld.so:
|
| ... (in which case no command-line options to the dynamic linker
| can be passed and, in the ELF case, the dynamic linker which is
| stored in the .interp section of the program is executed)
|
| note how the ELF section is named.
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