The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

Thread meta and sense of time

• Commenters note this PDF has recurred on HN for over 15 years; the 2008 thread is now closer to the book’s 1994 publication than to today.
• Several people reflect on aging via comparisons like “birthdate to WWII vs birthdate to now”, finding it unsettling.
• Europeans describe vivid personal/family memories of WWII, the Iron Curtain, and lingering physical scars (bullet holes, bunkers, ruined city centers), contrasting that “history-book distance” with how close it actually is.

Ritchie anti-foreword and changing language

• The anti-foreword is praised for its brutal but witty metaphor, interpreted as an extremely polite way of telling the authors off.
• A dated phrase quoted from the book sparks a side discussion about likely racist origins and the difficulty of judging historical language by present norms.
• Some argue “the past is a foreign country” and note that future generations will likely judge today’s norms just as harshly.

Systemd, PulseAudio, and modern Unix complexity

• One commenter proposes a “systemd-haters handbook” listing inconsistencies: separate tools for logs (journalctl vs systemctl), obscure top-level options, and uneven feature coverage across unit types (e.g., retries for services but not mounts).
• Others defend systemd: it unifies many previously scattered tools, its docs are deep as reference material, and features like cgroups, service readiness, and event-based activation improved reliability.
• Critics call it overgrown, ergonomically hostile, and driven by niche enterprise needs; they liken its evolution to accreting hacks it originally set out to replace.
• PulseAudio vs PipeWire is used as analogy: PA was initially painful but enabled new abstractions; PipeWire later cleaned things up. Some expect or hope for a “systemd successor” of similar nature.
• One person notes many early PA problems were actually broken audio drivers; defenders of systemd similarly emphasize underlying complexity.
• There’s disagreement over what “reliability” in an init system should mean: merely starting/stopping services vs keeping them alive and supervised.

“Everything is a file” and alternative designs

• New Linux users say AI help makes Unix’s text/file orientation more approachable than Windows.
• Others point out “everything is a file” was never fully true on Unix (notably for networking), and that Plan 9 and Inferno extend the model more consistently (e.g., /net with file-like connections).
• Long subthread compares Unix file descriptors vs Windows kernel handles, and what it would mean if network interfaces were actual character devices (raw frames, broadcast, restrictions).
• Plan 9’s 9P and “connections as files” are praised as a cleaner, more object-like evolution of the Unix idea; some connect this to OO and Smalltalk-style late binding.

Unix strengths, weaknesses, and historical context

• Several note that the book’s attacks were aimed at commercial Unix circa 1993; many specific targets (csh, sendmail, some reliability issues) are either gone or much improved.
• Others stress that the fundamental pain points—C’s design, the shell’s quirks, rough edges in tooling—remain, even as replacements proliferate without universal adoption.
• One long defense of Unix emphasizes its process model, cheap composable processes, stdin/stdout, pipes, backgrounding, and inetd as uniquely empowering compared to systems like VMS.
• This “Lego of processes” is contrasted with more closed or static environments; despite arcane syntax, Unix is described as unusually pliable in the hands of non-admin users.

Lisp machines and alternative OS ideas

• The book’s Lisp-machine nostalgia is seen as historically fascinating but mostly irrelevant to mainstream practice; still, commenters link to modern FPGA and software Lisp-machine projects.
• Others argue many Lisp-machine hardware advantages have been absorbed into modern CPUs (caches, multicore), leaving less reason for dedicated hardware, though the environments remain intellectually influential.

Cutler, NT, and Unix lore

• A side discussion revisits the story that a well-known NT architect “hated Unix.” Commenters argue this is mostly myth built on a few anecdotes and jokes.
• Some of NT’s non-Unix design choices (HAL, object manager, async I/O, user-mode “personalities”) are portrayed as legitimate architectural alternatives rather than pure anti-Unix sentiment.

The book as artifact and cultural touchstone

• Several people own the physical edition with the “barf bag” and recall it as simultaneously unfair, hilarious, and educational.
• It’s described as a mix of still-relevant criticism, outdated gripes, and great one-liners; for many, it was an early, accessible gateway to understanding Unix’s culture and flaws.