skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't know why the kernel continues to treat PID 1 so specially

By design all processes inherit from PID 1 (directly or indirectly), so you always have an unbroken tree from every process back to PID 1. PID1 aka init is supposed to do bookkeeping (e.g. zombie processing), and if PID1 crashes the bookkeeping records are lost.

Because of this, it is better to fail hard, instead of allowing for corrupted process trees or similar.

Also, ps, top and basically every program that works with processes expects one root process for the tree. Breaking this would basically break compatibility with every existing userland (which the kernel cares the most about!)
I use the deliver-to-shop method unless the item is huge. They deliver to a newsagent (grocery store) on the adjacent road and it's always before 7AM. Very nice, though I feel obliged to buy some milk to make up for using the shop as a dropship point.
Seems like you decided to quote the article, yet ignore the actual advice.

>Password length is 99% of password security. Password complexity is a distant second when it comes to modern password security.

He doesn't say to use a common 10 letter word with no complexity, which you infer with your comment. It's also comparing 72^8 with 72^22. The point of the article is that length trumps complexity. Not sure how you came to your conclusion.
Is the cost of living proportional to competitiveness?

Anyway, it seems like a mystery to me why tech firms like Google set up shop in small expensive Zurich instead of say cheaper, bigger Barcelona or Vienna, for example. I'd love to know what the incentives are for them.
systemd is by far the best linux init system. The options are sysvinit, OpenRC, Upstart, and systemd. Of those, the only reasonable choice is systemd.

Upstart was almost good, but its really frustrating to use.
OpenRC is decent, but confusing.

systemd solved problems, not only that it solved them well.

The scope creep of systemd is something that is a bit alarming, however even with the creep it's doing a good job. The tools that it is building work fairly well, and its a relatively new project.
Ran as a normal user on debian jessie, and now ssh logins are delayed by 30 seconds. I don't see any other problems yet, but this is a VM host and so leave it running for a while for fun. :)
I completely agree with you. That would be nice, if people were presented with facts and a choice. But they weren't, and aren't.
I don't know, we had a dead blackberry drawer at work - they kept dying on us. The phones were expensive, underpowered, and pretty plasticky.

But the hardware keyboards were great, as was the consistency of the interface that it allowed, something which Android and iOS need to learn about.

I also think that QNX/BB10 was a great platform. Probably the best mobile OS at the time of its release.
The First Draft of Anything Is Shit
First they came for PID 1, and we were silent.

Oh, wait, we weren't. But although I don't miss the rickety init scripts, I've grown more and more worried about stuff like this, enough to ponder replacements (in Go or Python, which seem to be generally acceptable for systems software these days).

Ignoring for the moment the usual biases against Python, how feasible/how much support would it be/have to build something to replace systemd (by having PID 1 do the minimum possible, in C, and having the rest done with Python)?
> I don't see how Amazon can do it cheaper (cost-wise)/better than UPS or Fedex, who have been optimizing for 50 years.

Amazon is looking at hitting the low hanging fruit first. Where they can ship large amounts of times from point A to point B then have USPS or their own carriers deliver. They're not trying to compete with UPS or FedEx today. Maybe some day in the future but that's years off at best.

If they can do their own shipping for certain items to certain locations (especially if they need to move an item to another state before having UPS / FedEx / USPS ship it) they can likely save some money.
Or make them pay extra taxes for abandoned properties. If they can't afford the taxes the government gets the land and building, and can then auction it off to someone who can put it towards a better use.
I still don't understand. Just because a bank will lend someone money to buy a home, why is it exploitative to offer someone else the chance of living in that home?

I wish we could sit down over coffee or whatevs and discuss this. I feel like we must have fundamentally different views of the world, and I would like to understand yours better. I rarely meet people whose views I don't understand, even if I disagree – especially people to the "left" of me.

I rented for as long as I've now been a homeowner. I never felt like I was being exploited as a renter. I was essentially paying the same in rent as a mortgage, but as a renter, I got a ton of advantages. For example, I didn't have to pay for maintenance of the home, I got access to nice amenities, and I got the flexibility to easily move somewhere else at the end of the year. For a fee, I got to offload a huge amount of stress onto someone else – the property owner.

I know someone who owns two homes and rents them out. Meanwhile, she lives in a small rented townhouse shared with 2 other housemates. She does this, because she's very handy and can do most of the maintenance herself. And she feels she understands the real estate market better than the stock/bond market. So, these homes are basically her retirement savings. She's not forcing anyone to live in them, and she can't afford to have them sit vacant very long. So, she must price them at a rate that will attract renters. I just don't see the exploitation in that scenario.
Cross Platform vs. Native
And posting random giberish more often than not if you're like me.
Why would Amazon care if they damaged their reputation with Fedex and UPS? They can just do what UPS and Fedex do when it is too expensive to deliver a package somewhere -- turn it over to the USPS. Amazon is already using USPS to deliver packages on Sundays, which is win-win-win. Amazon wins, USPS wins, and the consumers win. Amazon's home delivery seems to work well where it's been rolled out, and I don't see competitive barriers to rolling it out elsewhere.

I think the article fails to cover a lot of areas where Amazon will have a competitive advantage over UPS and Fedex. First of all, Amazon will be vertically integrated. They can control the packaging. They can control which warehouses are used to store items. This could lead to better packing efficiency in delivery vehicles, and could make automated loading of vehicles easier. If you have a particular route that is usually 110% full or 40% full, you could either move more items to that warehouse or take some away. Plus, Amazon can incentivize cheaper shipping options dynamically. Will the marginal cost of this order be incredibly high because you'll need a second truck for a particular route? Discount one day shipping, or offer two day shipping to their work instead.

On top of all that, Amazon doesn't have unionized employees. That's a huge advantage when you are trying to reduce costs. Not only are their employees wages probably less, but they also don't have contracts that reduce planning ability, like fixed routes, etc.

(The above is my comment on this post yesterday, though the post failed to get traction. I think it's probably still relevant 24 hours later)
this is a great article. Funnily enough, I just posted something from the same site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12600807.
> However, linux is missing basic functionality other os's offer

Could you please elaborate on what some of those are?

> systemd is showing up and trying to fill in those blanks

I haven't really kept on top of all systemd releases, but all I can see is them replacing things that already exist, just doing them in a different way.

I agree the init system replacement was necessary, but I'm struggling to understand why and how it extended to trying to extinguish and replace every core function of the operating system ecosystem.

That's rubbing a lot of people the wrong way, especially as mentioned in the article, those who adhere to the unix philosophy of do one thing and do it right.
> However, linux is missing basic functionality other os's offer, and systemd is showing up and trying to fill in those blanks.

I'm curious what functionality other OSes had that Linux did not before systemd came along. It seems to me that it has been subsuming functions of other systems on Linux that were already present, as opposed to offering anything new.

Socket activation? inetd/xinetd.
Timed start of programs? Cron and At
Logging? rsyslog/syslog-ng/etc.
DNS? -- dnsmasq, powerdns, bind, etc.

Honestly, I think if system had stopped at doing init, and focused solely on that and doing the best damned possible job of it, there'd be less hate. I think what's pissing off a lot of the systemd haters is the scope creep of the project has undergone. I was personally fine with the idea of systemd when all it was promising was init and service management. But then oh, were going to take over /dev, and cron and logging, and logins and DNS and (to be determined). Ahh, thanks, but no thanks.
Thanks so much for releasing this. I think it serves equally well as a useful service and as a proof of concept, that trying to tie identity to phone numbers is a folly.
Binary only logs was enough for me to hate it.
you might look into facebook integration. you can target facebook down to zip code.
Heh. Yeah. I just wrote a comment on your post of that about how I had posted http://skarnet.org/software/execline/. Which is a cool thing in its own right.
And the speech to text only works reliably if you speak with the right accent, for most of the planet it's appalling.
Top Free-To-Play Multiplayer (FPS) SHOOTER Games (2016)
It have to agree with the parent, it definitely looks like a display or a projection surface oscillating in the vertical direction.

I'm really curious if they opted for a display or a projector. A display is heavy but it might be possible if they use a vacuum. A projection surface on the other hand can be very light but you have to calibrate the optics and it _has_ to have a display and not a DLP chip, etc.. it's a really interesting problem to solve.
>>> Do you think that's it's that people would rather deal with operational complexity, or just that it's easier to not think about operational complexity early on

That's one way to scale development projects.

Have multiple teams of dev who work on separate stuff. They can develop in their corner however they want and that makes them happy. The final thing is a clusterfuck of services with little cohesion [YET they ALWAYS manage to put the shit together in production in a mostly working state].

The alternative implies to have a consistent and cohesive view of the components. For that, you'll need to have people with experience in architecturing scalable and sane production systems [so they understand what are the consequences and tradeoffs of ALL their decisions]. I know of very few people on the planet who can design systems. (We're talking past unicorn-rarity here). Plus, the developers must actually listen AND care about the long term maintenance AND the people involved (i.e. not want to do shit that will hit either them in 6 months or the team in the next office).

The amount of collaboration AND communication AND skills required to operate this strategy is beyond the realm of most people and organisation. There are very few individuals who can execute at this level.
Actually, the first draft is food, then it gets digested.
50 year old hall of famer? Its rare for a QB to make it to 40 years old in the NFL. Peyton Manning retired at 39 years old after he won the Super Bowl last year, and he was considered ancient and past his prime despite that achievement.

Furthermore, I just looked it up, and the oldest player to ever have played in the league was George Blanda, who retired at age 48. http://www.profootballhof.com/football-history/40-and-over-c...
I helped start a specialty practice at Matasano focused on trading firms and exchanges. That doesn't make me right or anything, but I'm pretty familiar with the attack surface we're discussing. I think the kind of attack you're contemplating is a lot harder to pull off than you think it is. (Not from a technical perspective.)

I have no trouble believing that you can make money from PII stolen from a bank breach. The issue is that the same PII exists in all sorts of other firms that are lower-hanging fruit, both from a technical perspective and from a "degree to which law enforcement will be invested in tracking you down" perspective.

In any case: banks staff decent-sized security groups, but they're generally nothing like the force Google can bring to bear on the same problems. There's a reason Chris Evans works at Google and not at some random bank.
Roll on the self-driving cars, no more pesky humans and workers rights!
Yes, a large part of which is the process behind systemd. You're adopting more than just software when you adopt software, and I think investigating what the systemd developers are like is a worthy exercise -- in particular how they approach bugs. I think most people would be surprised to learn what that is like.
Indeed. That's why I'm not entirely trusting of it yet.
We don't live in the open source world of the 1990s. People don't make this stuff in their basements. What was a community of devs that made things in their own time has turned into a huge industry supported system of semi-bullshit sharing. The OSS devs of the 90s wanted open source end products: a GIMP that could replace Photoshop. A blender that could replace 3D Studio. Today we mostly have OSS middleware.

As the other comments have stated, there have been several systemd drop in attempts, such as this one:

http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/

But maintaining them is terribly difficult when Redhat is pouring money into people to work on it full-time. There are lots of systemd-free forks, including ones for Debian and Arch. But you need a large user base to continue to use these forks so other people will be encouraged to support them. Money, donations and good ole kudos help too.

TL;DR we don't live in the open source world you think we do.
In Japanese anime, the vast majority of characters, male and female, are done by female voice actors.
For the EU what is a 'medical device' is pretty well described in 93/42/EEC which is the law describing the medical CE process (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CONSLE...)

There are quite a bit of edge cases though, so the definition of medical device actually has a guidance document that gives a bit more context (http://ec.europa.eu/DocsRoom/documents/10278/attachments/1/t...).

> I worked producing software that segmented images produced by a medical imaging device. The software would be built-in but it was the kind of thing one could have also have done exporting the images to Photoshop.

Segmentation software could certainly be considered a medical device if it has a medical purpose. For instance, if the segmentation is used to produce a diagnosis or a measurement. If you would like to sell it to medical professionals you would be required to have a medical CE for the software. Photoshop might have the same functionality, but it does not have a medical CE, so in principle it should not be used by medical professionals.
Ah, yes: When is a bug not a bug? According to the systemd developers, it's when we don't encounter it on our personal machines.
> I see no issue with splitting up a problem into multiple parts that, if sufficiently different, could be hidden from each other.

I'd go so far as to say breaking a problem up into black boxes that solve smaller parts of the problem is one of the most basic skills in programming.
Proximity to both ETH and EPFL, two relatively well regarded academic institutions ?

Full disclosure: I'm certainly biased since I'm both Swiss and a recent graduate from EPFL.
> We also put out some company wide guidance on cellphone account security.

Are there published best-practices somewhere on a per-provider basis?
Our grandpa's were running banks with 20 cobol programmers, they were not even calling themselves engineers
That's it? Man that's just the start...
I would pay a lot for a good N900 successor with the same keyboard but a larger and more responsive touch screen.
Limited access highways that have on/off ramps instead of intersections.
I think the main point is not that the system can handle all edge cases, but that it can handle more edge cases more reliably than humans can at the aggregate level. That is what really matters. A computer never gets drunk, tired, sleepy, sick, etc.

Furthermore, when autonomous vehicles become common, human drivers will also end up in fewer accidents because they won't have to worry about the unpredictable behaviors of other human drivers (such as suddenly changing lanes without signaling).

Edge cases are important, but at the end of the day, they're just that: edge cases. By definition, they will be very rare.
> If an attacker gets access to your machine (e.g. to get your KBDX file), they can get all that other info too.

Well in theory yes, but one typically wants to slow an attacker down. I'm not saying a KDBX file is entirely useless, just cumbersome if an attacker now has to replay the decryption using various disparate key parings. Most attacks are smash and grab jobs where all the low hanging fruit is gathered, and attackers (generally) don't lie around on a box waiting trying to figure out the inner workings of your KeePass setup.
I always feel like it is unfair how we place different European nations in same category as the US in these rankings or whatever, and for the US, we average over all the states in the US. As homogenous the US is, different states have different economies, different laws, in some cases, some slight but important cultural differences. Is it really fair to say have the US compete on terms of "competitiveness" or in other cases, happiness, education standards, with Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, or is it more fair to have them compete with California, Texas, New York, etc.
I've had and heard somewhat similar experiences as the person you are replying to. Buying? No problem. Selling? An error, but only once you go the actual page to do it. No notification on the main accounts pages and no information with the error. Just something like 'there is a problem please contact support' (which of course means waiting a couple of business days).

If I want terrible, uninformed, opaque service only when it is convenient for the other party, I can already get that at every bank I've ever dealt with.

You could be better than that, but it is hard to believe that that is what you are trying to do.

From your link:
"As a result, the decision to support a business is not solely up to Stripe; it involves the various financial companies in the credit card processing chain. Their restrictions tend to be broad and, as a result, often pretty confusing."

You don't deal with visa/mastercard payment network companies do you? If not, how can you have the same rationalizations as Stripe? And of course if you share the same problems as credit card companies (of which there are SO many), what problems are you solving?
The Story Behind Claquette – Animated Screenshots for Mac
The problem is that for x86 the way the opcodes are defined (both Intel and AT&T syntax) suggests a much more orthogonal instruction set than it is (in x86-64 it is even worse). So I consider the problem that you tell in your second paragraph as the classical problem of hitting the walls of a leaky abstraction (full disclosure: for some private side project that I work on I try to develop a way to mitigate this problem; don't ask me about details yet).
Probably because Melinda herself worked in tech (how do you think she met Bill?) and therefore has more of a connection to this industry then to sanitation workers.
Pardon my potential display of ignorance, but how does one steer a rocket, anyway?
Monkey sees, monkey does.

Hard to go against some million years of evolutive heritage.

At least one person has to try (so the rest can laugh about it)
Oh man.

I am searching (thrashing) around for my next "big" project. i have been thinking of drones measuring roof / building quality and the CV/ML requirements are fairly high - getting my teeth stuck into these would really give me a better feel for training my own system.

The problem is, how do I feed my family while taking the six months to do it all?
Skynet ensues ... :)
Not the commenter you're replying to, but at least at my organization we borrow the term from Spotify.
The one thing that is painfully obvious about the situation with init systems is that people have strong opinions about their preferences. And that makes the systemd situation even more terrible, since it's a choice unwillingly foisted upon a huge number of people. This situation really deserves some choices. For me, that is the number one reason I do not like systemd, even if it's solved some problems.
The US producers have promised they would turn fracking back on if oil crossed above the mid-40s. Canada will also be back online as the wildfires have burned out.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/29/us-shales-message-for-opec-ab...
I basically agree with everything you're saying, I just think if the people who think systemd is misguided spend their time writing blog posts about it, nothing will change and the people actually writing the code will have the final say, right or wrong.
If it leads to losses, then yes, UPS would drop Amazon in a heartbeat.
I'm almost tempted to sign up just to see what that's about, but I'm sure I would just be torturing myself at this point. I've been going through a mortgage refi, and my bank was just the worst offender, but some of the other site from which I needed to retrieve documents were almost as bad (I'm looking at you Principal).
As the other reply said, the problem is that newcomers aren't allowed to hear the anti-systemd facts, as the systemd gods have already decided that all Linux users (or at least all distros) must bow down and accept them, and no dissenting opinion is allowed to stay on the front page of HN for long (this post has already been brigaded off the front page, apparently).
Arguably, braces make it harder to read code because you can have misleading whitespace. But I mean, this is what linters and formatters are for.
This just feels like a lazy solution.
> It's a niche product, but a fairly large niche.

How large?
Of course, it would result in less hours/pay for some, but I'd still welcome effective robotic (solar-powered?) weeding anytime. Maybe it would work with corn, but the vegetables I'm accustomed to are delicate and I suspect it would be a great undertaking to duplicate the efficiency of the hand on a large scale. I'm honestly not sure if "trimming" would work or not. Seems frightfully difficult to me, but so is ingenuity. PS: I am not a professional farmer, so take my opinions accordingly.
When I was in an apartment I hated it when USPS got my package. When I wasn't home, they'd take it back to the post office which meant I had to then drive to the post office, at a time when they were open (which conflicted with my working hours). UPS or FedEx would leave it at the office.

Now that I'm in a house, I much prefer USPS if only because my post man comes by at 9am and UPS/FedEx don't come by until 2-3pm.