It took decades to get UNIX's reliable enough to trust for day to day operation with labor estimates in hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. Three or so people got that done in a few years with MINIX 3 using micro-kernel architecture and self-healing services. QNX and INTEGRITY RTOS's have been doing that stuff for years in the field with less resources. And QNX-based Playbook was more reliable, responsive, and fast than iPad in its first incarnation. Before that, KeyKOS outperformed IBM's monolithic stuff on their mainframes with better security and full persistence of system state.

So, they worked better and keep working better. People just use monolithic kernels for some reason. Just like they took forever to get off of C for reliable, business applications. "Worse is better."

Downvoted? I thought atheism was A Good Thing with the HN hive mind.

I imagine you got downvoted because this thread is neither about Chesterton nor about atheism. HN culture is generally not very tolerant of threads that deviate into things that aren't at least tangentially related to the main topic-at-hand.

I'm not totally sure what you mean.

I would not expect an atheist to consider themselves "God forsaken", and I would not be surprised if one was kind of offended by being called that.

(I myself am not an atheist, ftr)

Given that,I am not sure why you would be surprised that people reacted negatively?

Because so many on HN are so proud of their atheism. I'm not a conventional believer either. But my description happened to be factual, not an insult.

It can only be factual if you consider god real.