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Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

> Google with all of their cash in the bank and talented engineers can't even crack the problem.

Don't forget that Linux became only possible because 20 years of OS research was carefully studied, analyzed, discussed and thrown away.

Ingo Molnar

From a message to the Linux Kernel mailing list in 1999.

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Can you explain? Was there a competitor to Linux that never surfaced?

I wonder if it was a veiled reference to the debate between Linus and Andrew Tanenbaum, who wrote MINIX based on OS research that, according to him, showed that microkernels are better than monolithic kernels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...

In a funny twist of history MINIX is running at ring -3 on most modern Intel CPUs. So it's probably running on more desktops than MacOS or Linux.

what is the ratio between dynamic and static content amongst say the top100 web sites on the web? Can we say 0% static pages? [yes, i accept Dean Gaudet's point that webpages can be split up into dynamic and static parts, probably that will be the future.]

This is delightful

Here's the mailing list entry referenced: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9906.0/0746.html

My point was that as a newcomer in either operating systems (Linux late last century) or a new search engine (Marginalia, Kagi) you cannot always win by repeating the same stuff incumbents do.

Especially not when the incumbents are busy digging deeper holes.

Yeah I'm very much betting on the null hypothesis when it comes to fancy machine learning-based methods and implementing the most bog-standard keyword search you could imagine.

It's not perfect, but it's scary how well it works sometimes.

I assume they're talking about all the OS research done at places like XEROX and Bell Labs that never really came to fruition, but formed the basis for modern OS's.

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