Ask HN: What technologies are you thankful for? - stbullard
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ksaj
I'm most thankful for the fact that Open Source has given me a relatively
successful career for the past 30 years. I always see people disparage OSS
saying there is no way to make money from it. I'm not rich, but I can (and do)
pick and choose my gigs without sweating the gaps in between nowadays. And 90%
of the gigs I do today are by word of mouth alone. Thankfully, because I got
way too lazy about my website and I haven't updated my CV in a decade. There
is a lot of money to be made in Open Source, but only if you are willing to
find (and add to) the value in it. OSS allows me to live in my comfort zone.
And besides my career, damn near everything technical in my home is connected
in some way or other to OSS. I'm glad the commercial technology is catching up
so I don't have to work as hard to build everything from scratch. OSS has been
my life blood, and I think it has a whole lot more to show yet before there's
any actual threat of it fizzling out.

I would have had to stick to my original dream career (guitar god!) if Open
Source didn't happen. But then I'd have to redefine "comfort zone" to
something that isn't exactly comfortable.

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leipert
Latest command line tools I learned to love: ripgrep over grep and fd over
find

Latest hardware: Raspberry Pi Zero W for tinkering. To me it is crazy what
they have achieved with those little computers and how it can be used for
education.

~~~
ksaj
Indeed. I have a pile of Pi's, and they're always configured for the weirdest
things that interest me at any given time.

The Rpi 4 is pretty much a game changer. As is the Zero-W. The two together
are something really great.

What blows my mind is that the Rpi 4 boots a hell of a lot faster than my
workhorse Mac Pro. That Mac has 14G of RAM and 4Tb of hard drive, but I use my
Pi's for desktop stuff because they are so uncluttered and fast as a result.

PS: Get a clusterHAT. Trust me. You won't get much sleep as you get the hang
of super computing on these tiny-yet-brilliant things.

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zepearl
Linux & open source & commodity HW

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jolmg
All open source ones.

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catacombs
Emacs

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kleer001
high bandwidth infrastructure

