skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At what point did OP focus on boot speed? Systemd has a bundle of other useful properties, like simple unit files and handling the entire boot process.

If you do want to talk boot speed, compare a sysv install versus a systemd install on an 850 Pro. There are a notable few seconds of difference!
How was that not already a liability?
> do you think that invasion would have still happened?

Most likely not.

But the WMD's that Iraq supposedly did have were used as a fig-leaf to invade anyway.

My reasoning at the time was that the fact that they were invaded more or less proved that they didn't have any and dr. David Kelly's assessment for UNSCOM pretty much proved that.

> I suggest that having nuclear weapons, and ideally global reach with those weapons, is a way to massively reduce the chances of being invaded by the US or anyone else.

Definitely, it's a poison pill.
What alternative is there? In my experience, if I'm providing anything other than work paid by the hour or day, then I am promising things I can't 100% guarantee I can deliver. I have every reason to believe I can deliver, but I can always think of some unlikely edge cases where things go terribly, irrecoverably wrong. This bugs me, sure, but the only way I can think of to never get sued for breach of contract is to never sign a contract.
Maybe on top of that we should consider that almost no one else would cared, there was hopes that IBM or Google would do it, but they didn't.

So if it wasn't for Oracle, maybe Sun's heritage would already have been lost much sooner.

Not that it excuses what happened afterwards, this is just the typical Fortune 500 attitude that only cares about Excel sheet reports.
They talk about it but they don't secede the Union because of the benefits to Californians. It's all about balance.
We already have the global free flow of capital, goods, information and pollutants in the oceans and atmosphere. At what point do we accept that we already have some aspects of world government and take steps to formalize it. I don't think cultural homogeneity is necessary or even desirable.

I quite like Neal Stephenson's idea in Diamond Age of some sort of enforceable world economic protocol.
I have used systemd only as one of the data points in overall state of the industry, please read my initial post. It is important point for me because I used to use Linux everywhere and rely on its modularity and security. I am looking at the big picture and how trends correlate, not particularly focused on systemd only. Rest of the conversation emerged because 'silent majority' (lol) focused on systemd only.

You are aware of the feature creep and taking over of every sane unix/linux utility? Usually with very questionable results, changing su or dns resolver, for the worse?

You know about number of vulnerabilities that are introduced by systemd, then dismissed and not-our-bug or wontfix?

You are aware of the tying in systemd with every other program they can get their hands on? That makes harder and harder to run properly secured machine that does not have systemd. Not saying to you since you know system administration but: This is a BAD thing.

You probably know about all vulnerabilities introduced by systemd? Coupled with inability to not use systemd, with its huge attack surface this makes Linux much less secure and monolith.

Back to my initial intention: there is huge trend throughout the industry that kills variety and ties in systems in a monolith mess. Systemd is just one of the data points. I care same way about Oracle buying Sun with one of the main reasons being MySQL. Thanks to MariaDB folks that lock in didn't happen but I was aware they will try it as soon as Oracle got hands on MySQL.
Tripling an Engineering Team in Six Months (Part One)
Yep. I thought the first thing they did was sue google over java usage in android.
In November 2016 the company I worked for was acquired, injected with cash, and told to 'go faster'. Over the next six months I led a recruitment drive that saw the engineering team (more than) triple. This is a 5-part blog series on that massive recruitment process; starting with the background story that led us to need to scale at such a pace.
I think most of the folks able to work on something different left a while ago. I am sure working on Solaris support at Oracle they saw the writing on the wall.

Also, some of those "firings" come with a decent chunk of money; maybe some of the folks who stayed made a rational choice of waiting until fired, then will move to a prearranged job somewhere else.
I can confirm they keep old data, you can get a sample when you download your data archive in your Facebook settings.
Happiness curve seems to inversely correlate with the work curve. The more hours per day we work, the less happy we are.
You should check out 'Pacificst Japan's' ability to do more than they are doing and and why before you compare them to the US. Hint: World War II did not exactly end the way 'Pacifist Japan' wanted.
What, they died or something? And now can't tell their story? That isn't survivorship bias at all. You can fail and still tell your story.
This is caused by every VC demanding that their stable of startups all shoot for the moon and become multi-billion dollar companies.

If moonshots weren't such a high priority, and instead startups focused on building a successful business, perhaps there wouldn't be so many dead startups. Doing a few tens of million a year in revenue isn't a terrible place to be after a few years!
This is the reason we need alternatives to iOS and Android - to allow real customer-centric mobile OS where users aren't held hostage. Would it be a big problem for OS manufacturers to add more options, such as paid upgrade that could retain access to previous version's settings instead of being completely sandboxed from it? Of course not. Would it be a problem to offer a year-long automatic upgrades while retaining the last version once payment runs off, instead of blocking access? Of course not. It's just greed, the need to have "predictable income" and to stuff it to the user that allows this to happen. Instead of trying out and buying an app as a one-off if I like it, I am not going to even look at a non-essential app that requires a subscription.
Imagine how socially liberal European atheists would feel about voters living in middle eastern theocracies being able shape the laws about how their daughters could dress. Now imagine the reverse.

Why would anybody be happy letting people with such fundamentally different belief systems make their rules?
Sure, not all of them are the same.

However those with heavy use of external consulting and off-shoring, seem to come pretty close.
Bingo. Way way too much of Linux these days is by devs for devs, and screw everyone else.

Note the rise of "devops" that is basically about getting a straight line from devs to management so devs can sideline ops and their naysaying of the latest shinies devs wnats to sprinkle the projects with.

Another thing is that there is less and less interest in maintenance, because maintenance is not fun. The GNU generation i slowly leaving, and is being replaced with the "fun" generation that is hell bent on rewriting working, if crufty, systems using the latest language fads over a caffeine fueled weekend...
Wars are stopped because they burn out or because peace is negotiated (if there is a clear victor, which definitely isn't always the case).

What is interesting - in a very morbid way, admitted - is that if you look at how much energy goes into war how little it usually achieves. The only wars that tend to change things in a meaningful way (for better or worse) are civil wars.
Where did BG do that? (Not disagreeing, just not remembering/catching the particular reference).
The trend of subscriptions seems to be accelerating, I think it is detrimental to the ISV ecosystem as a whole.

I have bought many macOS applications in the last decade or so. And like so many others, I do not shun to spend 50 Euro or more on an app. However, as of recently I have been more restrained in buying applications, since it seems that they could switch to a subscription model at any random moment. Instead, I have been looking more and more at FLOSS alternatives. Even if their quality is sometimes not as good, the prospect of being able to use an application long-term makes them more attractive. Moreover, I have also started donating more to FLOSS developers as a result.
read about stylometry - https://hn.algolia.com/?query=stylometry
read about OPSEC with the grugq - https://hn.algolia.com/?query=grugq
This too shall pass.

The us has been coasting on good will and trump is squandering it. Now that he world doesn't see the us as a reliable partner, we're going to see the rug pulled out from under us rather quickly. China right now looks like a safer bet if you're looking for an ally.
Rapid expansion of credit strongly correlates with insolvency.

There's an excellent paper by Gudrun Johnson back when she worked at the IMF that captures it in the sovereign insolvency context.
If you can't afford to pay someone to do something, you either do it yourself or it doesn't happen. This isn't particularly new, and if you look at most people's lives, they just aren't paying for every new thing as a service, if they pay for any PaaS at all.
Show HN: Junior dev jobs in Melbourne
Bloons Monkey City
Sure, but there's a simpler and already-well-accepted convention for doing this. Say "interpreter" if it takes a program and causes its effects to happen, or "compiler" if it takes a program and emits an equivalent program. If somebody says "transpiler", just mentally replace it with "compiler". Done!

Composition of compilers still works as normal. You can use tombstone diagrams to reason about complex chains of compilers and interpreters. And it demystifies the act of building compilers, which is important because otherwise you'll be shaming junior engineers for attempting what is not just the pinnacle of computer science but also our bread and butter.

Seriously! Of all the definitions of "transpiler" that I've heard of so far, "compiler but shitty" is the worst yet.
There is a great demand for systems engineers. It's _very_ hard to find low level developers on the market. Don't be intimidated by stupid requirements on job ads like "linux experience" - is easy to adapt to the OS-specific environment. The valuable skill is not OS-specific, it's "reading long piece of C with understanding"!
There are two jobs that were rolled into the developer role that we will sorely miss in the longer term, the first was 'analyst', the second 'sysadmin/sysop'.

Dumbing these down to make it possible to run these highly skilled and specialized jobs as part-time job without relevant training is one of the main reasons the state of software is what it is.
Who is your customer? Are you selling to a journalist that uses your app to write every day? Are your customers athletes that exercise 3 times a week? Then yes, go for it, charge for a subscription.

Or do you have a long tail of „casual users“? Bloggers that write an article or two every month. Casual runners that want to track their weekend runs. Someone who wants to touch up vacation photos once a year.

Then a subscription is unsuitable. Casual users will pay once for a premium app, especially if they expect to use it for a long time. But its gonna be hard to convince them to pay a monthly fee.

Most apps will have a mix of regular and casual users.

Just make sure to think of the different audiences your app has. Your business model will decide which of them you can keep.
As a note, this presentation is by the creator of Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan.
Really? I know scientific publishing is terrible in a myriad of ways, but communism? Communism? We have to throw out the underpinnings of modern advanced civilization because Elsevier makes too much money?
> Oh you seriously believe linux is not where it is due to huge sums from intel,samsung,red hat and countless of others ?

With the exception of Red Hat I totally concur that Linux has moved very far because of financial infusions from industry. But at the same time that 'toy operating system' was already quite usable before any of that happened.

As for Red Hat, they exist because of Linux, not the other way around.
We pretend we're on Hacker News
Not necessarily. Using a 64-bit system and think you're safe? But what if the binary you're running has been compiled for a 32-bit system? What if this is a cloud service you're not even aware of?

As a true example here, my parents' house uses a simple computer to automate watering of different places in their garden. Looked the chip up, 32 bit system. So this will definitely stop working on Jan 2038.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. 2038 is going to be a big issue.
I'd say if it doesn't output bytecode, its a transpiler. In bytecode I'd include JVM, LLVM and actual machine code.
There is some ambiguity for python, since python files are transformed to python bytecode before being interpreted.
>Self-interest runs the world and everything, including you.

It doesn't run everyone. Or at least what is defined as optimal self-interest does not correctly model people who have been subjected to propaganda, religion, etc (e.g. see suicide bombers).
I don't know; this is observational rather than prescriptive. "Don't be institutionally hypocritical as a society" is inviting, but has problems whichever of the views is chosen. The sociopaths seem necessary so long as geopolitics is simply gang warfare on a global scale.
Fitness Program Rates in Dubai – Iconic Fitness
That's an excellent point, which is why I think that the transition if it ever comes will be a gradual one somewhat comparable to the enlightenment for Europe.

Of course this has the potential for conflict as well.

In the mean time we seem to be on a regressive path and for now further unification is over the horizon. The cause - at least, in my opinion - was that the unification attempts that were made were made in bad faith, for short term economic reasons rather than for long term stability reasons.
I thought that IBM wanted to acquire Sun as well, but it was Oracle who simply outbid them ?
As a non-American, this Red Scare hysteria is hilarious.
React/Java/Spring project archetype with search and CRUD working out of box
A Simple Way to Be More Assertive (Without Being Pushy)
Sure, but when people say 'I don't like math' that is mostly about linear algebra, calculus and analysis.
Of course. Everyone who cared about Solaris immediately started a fork called illumos!
In animal intelligence studies, researchers have observed that species are more keen to learn from members of their own kind.
There's a great chapter in Frans de Waal's "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?"[0] which discusses the difference between wolves and dogs. Many people believe dogs are smarter than wolves because they are more keen to listen/observe humans. However when the tests are arranged so that wolves can learn from other wolves it becomes clear that wolves are far more intelligent. It's a matter of wolves not caring a bit about humans. de Waal goes on to discuss similar testing biases inherent in comparing chimpanzees and human children, with human children getting a one-up on chimps because the testing administrators are members of their own species.

If you're interested in diving into the motivation behind storytelling and how it effects us, I'd recommend reading The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall[1]. It's one of the most approachable book on the subject.

[0] Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are by Frans de Waal: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/06/are-we-smart-e...

[1] The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/books/review/the-storytell...
I'd prefer not to gamble millions of lives on the theory that people or states (especially states that are effectively just one person) are going to act completely rationally.

Here's one example where "rational self interest" doesn't seem to have worked out:

- Kim Jong Un could rationally (in both his and his countrymen's self interest) live the rest of his days in a gloriously well appointed Chinese estate, albeit in exile, perhaps as part of a transition negotation that sees his dynasty exchange their power in Korea for both their own safety and the good of the country.

- If rational action by people and states are as close to a physical law as is so frequently assumed, why has this not happened? Why does he not act rationally, and why do we imagine that he will act rationally in the future?

Here's the fundamental problem with the MAD / game theory / self interest / rational actor tack: the model implies that there's a 0% chance of nuclear weapons ever being used (because it wouldn't be in the self interest of the state), and therefore, the appropriate policy response is effectively to ignore continued accumulation of greater and greater stockpiles of nuclear arms, as no conflict can ever be possible. The MAD theory leads to a political calculus that promotes the proliferation of ever more nuclear weapons, and as we're seeing, ever more nuclear weapons in the hands of ever more unstable actors.

The MAD theory is unsound and fundamentally dangerous. Clearly, the chance of nuclear war is not 0% (a truly absurd idea), and so the policy response that MAD implies (perpetual deadlock) leads us down an even more dangerous road: perpetual stockpiling and proliferation, without any measured guarantees to stability.

We're placing very, very large bets (right now our civilization, soon the human race, one day the entire planet, even the rocks and stones) on an idea that we can't falsify and have never tested.
As a human the body count of communism is terrifying.
ZFS is definitely still a thing. With the creation of the OpenZFS project, and the Linux port, the future is looking bright.
My main issue with the term "transpiler" is not its existence per se. It is the effect that its existence has on a large portion of developers, having them reject some kinds of technologies for the wrong reasons.

If we look back to when the term "transpiler" was made popular (not necessarily coined), it is fairly widely acknowledged that it was through CoffeeScript, which defined itself as such. In a sense, I think CoffeeScript was right (or at least not wrong) to define itself as "transpiler" rather than "compiler". After all, it was a syntax tree to syntax tree transformation, technically involving no more than a parser and a pretty-printer (not saying there's anything wrong with that).

However, because CoffeeScript was the first language to compile to JavaScript, swaths of developers have associated the term "transpiler" to "compiles to JS" or "compiles to another language that also happens to be used as source language". Now, all these developers will systematically refuse to call TypeScript, ClojureScript, Scala.js, etc. as "true compilers" (let me list a few more in alphabetical orther so I'm not perceived as totally biased: BuckleScript, Elm, Flow, Kotlin, PureScript). Instead they insist on calling them "transpilers" and associating their characteristics to that of CoffeeScript.

Now that CoffeeScript is falling out of favor (in part because most of what it brought to the table has been picked up by ES2015), this category of developers associates any kind of language that compiles to JS as a thing that no one would ever want to use. Worse, they will often consider such languages as insults to their craft. "Why don't you just learn JavaScript and code in it?", they ask. This is a cultural problem, because this mindset prevents from even considering what other languages can bring to them.

Technologically speaking, there is absolutely nothing separating ClojureScript/Scala.js from Clojure/Scala. The former compile to JavaScript; the latter to JVM bytecode; but the amount of compiler engineering that go into all these compilers is basically the same. However, somehow, culturally, they are fundamentally different: ClojureScript/Scala.js devs should just learn JavaScript, while it's OK for Clojure/Scala devs not to "learn Java".

In the end, the existence of the term "transpiler" has a negative effect on the perception that many developers have on the quality of languages that compile to JS. You will often read things like "such transpilers always leak JavaScript in the end", which is simply not true for ClojureScript and Scala.js. Or "interop with JS libraries is always an issue with transpilers"; again, not true. And those misconceptions make them reject and bash on similar technologies, for no good reason.

And that is why I loathe the term "transpiler".
The SEC isn't there to protect the public. It is there to make sure the public will continue to trust the markets. Keep in mind that the whole game is powered by trust, if that trust gets damaged too much everything will collapse.
Think the fairest model is one where you pay once for the app, updates are free for a set period of time, then you have to pay again to upgrade if you wish to. If not, the old version is yours indefinitely.

Well aware that the App Stores do not offer this option, but it is possible if you implement your own billing system on macOS or Windows.
What about teaching everyone non-sociopathic realpolitik instead?
Common Antiseptic Ingredients De-Energize Cells and Impair Hormone Response
pretty sure capitalism is responsible for way more deaths
> Casual users will pay once for a premium app, especially if they expect to use it for a long time. But its gonna be hard to convince them to pay a monthly fee.

I don't think so. It may not be as easy to convince as "just $1!" but I bet the customers will come.

I also think they'll forget to cancel. That's where the real casual money is. Thousands of customers oblvious to the monthly fees.

It's like gym memberships but without the high pressure sales tactics. The customer signs up, uses it for a a week, then gets billed monthly for the next year.
No, the case made in the talk takes the example of Sci-hub and agreement with its principles into a wider scope to ask, if intellectual property is a problem (itself a radical idea, even on HN) what about property in general? And by this 'property' nobody means one's toothbrush, the Communists and anarchists mean private property. As Proudhon tells us the difference; near the beginning of his most important work (which went on to inspire Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Kropotkin and every other Communist and anarchist) he writes as follows:

"There are different kinds of property: 1. Property pure and simple, the dominant and seigniorial power over a thing; or, as they term it, naked property. 2. Possession. “Possession,” says Duranton, “is a matter of fact, not of right.” Toullier: “Property is a right, a legal power; possession is a fact.” The tenant, the farmer, the commandité, the usufructuary, are possessors; the owner who lets and lends for use, the heir who is to come into possession on the death of a usufructuary, are proprietors. If I may venture the comparison: a lover is a possessor, a husband is a proprietor.

This double definition of property — domain and possession — is of the highest importance; and it must be clearly understood, in order to comprehend what is to follow."

In my opinion, and apparently that of the person giving the talk, when we talk about science we don't only want the journals to be free (as in free speech), we want the "means of production" for it to be free. In this way, we believe, science can serve the broader community as a tool to advance knowledge rather than only when it's convenient for profit. As an example, look at how the funding was recently pulled (though I'm not fully up to date on the story) on a US government study into the effects of coal mining on health. I contend that there would have been less motivation to do this, if it was possible at all, in a Communist society.