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The Ongoing Struggle
Personal blog · strugglers.netsystemsprogramming
The Ongoing Struggle is a personal blog at strugglers.net about systems and programming. Since 2013, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times, most often “The Internet of Unprofitable Things (2018)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link these posts on hardcoded NTP servers in IoT devices being firewalled and on entropy depletion on Linux/Android. The commenters cite them as background for their own points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
I'll get there eventually
Most-linked posts?
- The Internet of Unprofitable Things (2018)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-01-20
- XFS, Reflinks and Deduplication2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-01-10
What Hacker News says?
The name of the company (Netthings) seemed familiar with me, turns out I had read an blog article regarding the hardcoded NTP servers that they used in their devices being firewalled off and therefore losing time sync. Article: https://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2018/12/24/the-internet-of... It also appears that they went into liquidation in 2018, so good luck getting any support with that device from them!
Comment linking /~andy/blog/2018/12/24/the-internet-of-unprofitable-things/
on “What's that touchscreen in my room?”Submitted The Internet of Unprofitable Things as a story · 408 points
HN discussionMy guess is that the AHA moment happened when he ran this: "watch -n x.xx cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail" Which itself appears to deplete entropy: http://strugglers.net/~andy/blog/2010/06/06/adventures-in-en... As others have said, there's good evidence that nothing in android touches /dev/random these days.
Comment linking /~andy/blog/2010/06/06/adventures-in-entropy-part-1/
on “Entropy generator to provide significant lag reduction in Android”Submitted I don't think the cheapest APC Back-UPS units can be monitored except in Windows as a story · 191 points
HN discussionSubmitted Debian-installer, mdadm configuration and the Bad Blocks Controversy as a story · 94 points
HN discussionSubmitted Database backups, dump files and restic as a story · 40 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Internet of Unprofitable Things (2018) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted XFS, Reflinks and Deduplication as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Starting services only when the network is ready on Debian/systemd as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted XFS, Reflinks and Deduplication as a story · 1 points
HN discussion