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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

Allow me to clarify somewhat. This isn't the first time I've seen someone make a comment like yours; but I have never seen anyone say "wow, it's really cool that a FreeBSD developer is running FreeBSD on his server" (substitute "nginx", "Apache", "linux", "Xen", etc. for "FreeBSD" as required). It's more the opposite -- it seems that those of us who work on the lower layers only ever get attention if we don't eat our own dogfood.

To turn my question around: Ok, so the blog engine and all the underlying layers are all awesome; but why don't all the underlying layers get as much attention?

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I think it's cool that Linus Torvald's is using Linux to teach his daughters computing (with handy parental controls he wrote himself).

I think it's cool that Guido van Rossum uses Python in most of his daily programming.

I think it's cool that thet Lighttpd website runs on Lighttpd.

I think it's cool that I use my own project for my daily websearching needs (okay, bad example, since I'm in Search UI and most of my job consists of putting a pretty web interface on the stuff the backend engineers do. I think it's cool that I use lacker's stuff that I slapped a frontend onto for my daily websearching needs. ;-))

Where you use "cool" I'd use "expectable"...

That was cperciva's point, I guess. I still think it's cool though.

Okay, that makes more sense.

I think it's because a lot of that stuff doesn't get as much publicity. I'm fairly clueless about Unix: I know that Linus guy did something, but I am not well-versed in Unix's history.

That might actually be a fascinating thing: a publication or web site or blog devoted to exploring stuff like that, explaining why they're so huge and so important, and getting information like that out there. I feel bad* that I don't know more about my computer and about coding systems beyond that top layer, but at the same time I don't know where I'd start to learn about things like that. (The closest I got was with _why's explanation of why Ruby is neat, and even that was enough to inspire a real fascination with the language. I'm sure that sort of attitude could be more commonplace.)

*Specifically, something to do with Linux.

Its all about the percieved value. Its amazing how hackers (me included) don't get this.

Normal people rarely care about the technology, they do care about little things that improve their live

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