Rabbit-hole: From DNS To Hacker Wisdom

Waiting for a DNS change today, using <tt>dig</tt> to check the propagation, did a `man dig`, found mention of Chaosnet and Hesiod classes,

the latter having been developed within the Athena Project, which also gave us the X Window System:

In 1984, Bob Scheifler and Jim Gettys set out the early principles of X:[2]

  • Do not add new functionality unless an implementor cannot complete a real application without it.

  • It is as important to decide what a system is not as to decide what it is. Do not serve all the world’s needs; rather, make the system extensible so that additional needs can be met in an upwardly compatible fashion.

  • The only thing worse than generalizing from one example is generalizing from no examples at all.

  • If a problem is not completely understood, it is probably best to provide no solution at all.

  • If you can get 90 percent of the desired effect for 10 percent of the work, use the simpler solution. (See also Worse is better.)

  • Isolate complexity as much as possible.

 

Wisdom for the aging.

 

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