skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
15 years linux user here, systemd is pushing me hard towards leaving linux. Please tell me what very real problems people care a great dead bout systemd solved by turning log files from text to binary.

Also I care about being able to use my computer and for the first in 15 years a systemd update caused my computer to needlessly dropping into systemd emergency mode at boot and this emergency mode being broken I was effectively locked out of my computer because an optional external usb drive that was defined in fstab with no issue for a couple years now required a nofail option. Now consider that this computer is located in a remote location 1000 km away from where I live.

To me systemd already caused way more very real problems I do care a great deal about than it has solved reducing boot time by a few seconds is not something I care that much about.
It's not just physical safety. In Russia we have a popular saying, "the severity of Russian laws is offset by their non-observance". Variants of the phrase has been attributed to various authors from the 19th century, yet it still holds true.
RCTL is a stateful database. It's not there yet, but the right solution for managing this declaratively as with anything else on a Unix platform is Ansible/salt/cfengine or something like that, not building those tools into a superset service that manages everything.

I will also add that managing disparate platforms is never a reality from experience. There are perhaps two core platforms at a company and they are migrated together in blocks, all together. For us, we have a couple of legacy Ubuntu machines that are being canned this month. Everything else is Windows 2012 R2 and FreeBSD 10.

The "systemd way" is to provide a monolithic abstraction over many things with a DBus API. It's the equivalent of adding WMI and a registry to a Unix platform i.e. it's against the fundamental tenets of the operating system. Having managed windows systems for years, this is really not something I want to see. Time will tell, but if I'm not right about that then I'll eat all three of my hats.

And yes I have experience with systemd as well through evaluation of RHEL7. Within two hours, I'd hit a wall with timedatectl enabling NTP on the machine. The steps to debug the mess were horrible and the issue eventually just spontaneously disappeared.

That's reminiscent of the stateful nature of windows which brings back many years of pain in the 1990's and 00's for me.
This looks like a reinvention of, and blurring of the lines between, voicemail and the phone call.

And actually, I like the idea.

Sometimes I find email and SMS a chore, but would love to leave my partner a 5 second "Hey I'm picking up milk, do you need anything else?" message that was auto-transcribed, and if I were on the tube (unavailable) she could leave a message for me "Yeah, some of those star-shaped veg, you know the ones next to the beans down the end of the second aisle".

She'd never have typed that into an SMS, and I probably would've just winged trying to think if there was anything she needed.

Metropolis transportation and living makes communication broken and fractured. Real-time mobile communication works only when both people are online... so a near real-time thing that overcomes the flaws of mobile coverage in cityscapes and their transport (cycling, underground metro systems, etc) and still retain a personal touch would be great.
DuckDuckGo is Blocked in China
Isn't that a pretty narrow corner case? I can count the number of times the process manager has been killed on one hand.
Even Grub isn't all flowery. I have a background of using what I think is now called grub-legacy. Then I ended up running Debian, with newfangled Grub. I needed to change some kernel parameter (IIRC) but all I could find was a mess of undocumented scripts which say "don't touch this". I don't know where the documentation went, and it seemed needlessly complicated to configure. Why couldn't I say man grub and learn all I need about it? I had other issues with Debian, but the last straw was when during a routine package update it decided to install a new version of Grub.. and the next time, it wouldn't boot anymore. Why was it so complicated in the first place? Why did Debian have to fix it if it's not broken? Why did it fail to do it right? I don't know, I don't really care... all I know is that needless complexity and churn caused trouble, again.

So I'm no longer using Grub or Debian. And my bootloader is simple. I've installed it once, and never touched it afterwards. It's possible to configure it a little, but there's no need for it. So what if it has fewer features. It only needs to load the damn kernel... and it works. I'm happy.
How often do you reboot your kit? Boot time is such a stupid metric even on laptops and stuff where you just suspend/hibernate.

My BSD systems (not front-facing and therefore on a lesser patch cycle) rarely get rebooted and neither do the processes so this is indeed moot for me.

Proof:

http://i.imgur.com/tZsM82Q.png

Yes that's a memcached uptime on a host that has had 10,185,367,932 cache hits...
I don't understand. If you're happy procrastinating, why do you care? Life is about being happy and enjoying what you do, not about just doing more work, coding more... You are a person, not a robot.
Digital Dangers: A Brief History of Computer Security Threats
A little blurb about this from Bruce Schneier: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/1998/04/the_secret_...
Just set in rc.conf:

defaultrouter="NO"

It shouldn't hang.
Sounds familiar..

One of my "favourite" problems with init scripts for service stop/start is that way too many of them basically throws their hands up if the contents of the pid-file doesn't match what it expects. Never mind that 90% of the time when I want to actually run stop/start/restart, it is because something has crashed or is misbehaving, and there's a high likelihood the pid file does not reflect reality.

So a far too common scenario is: Process dies. Tries to run "start". Nothing happens, because the pid-file exists and the script doesn't verify that the pid actually matches a running process (or it checks that it matches a running process, but not that the process with that pid is actually what we want).

Ok, so we try "restart" or "stop". Gets an error, because the pid-file content does not match a running process, and rather than then cleaning out the pid file and starting the process, it just bails.

Basically I don't trust init scripts from anyone but distro maintainers themselves, and even then there are often plenty of edge cases that cause problems.

Regardless of systemd, I really like the systemd solution to this of using cgroups to ensure it can keep proper track of exactly which processes belongs to a service without resorting to brittle pid-files which seem to rarely be properly implemented. Of course that cgroups approach could be implemented as a separate tool, but pid-files badly needs to die.
The history of public key encryption, and of encryption in general is covered pretty well in this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Code-Book-History-Code-breaking/...
nice idea, but content still needs more user traction and engagement to "curate" attractive experience
To maximize productivity, work for 52 minutes at a time, study says
I think the ideas presented in the 's6' init system address most of these issues, I don't know why none of the distributions picked it up as an alternative:
http://skarnet.org/software/s6/why.html
http://skarnet.org/software/s6/s6-svscan-1.html
Excellent points. Monocultures are terribly harmful, especially in the open-source side of things. While github is convenient, it's not the right answer for a lot of things and terribly inconvenient for others.

I use git without github. I use it with vim outliner and keep the issues in the repo.
The composition is both limestone and also red granite, which are both cut the same way. I'm also not an expert, but the idea of somehow pouring and curing granite doesn't seem to make much sense.
Scientific methods are useful, maybe be absolute sometimes, but it is not the everything. Truth, Empathy, Beauty are what we experience and live.
The Alternative History of Public-Key Cryptography
> It is a big like the kernel. Just swapping out Linux kernel with a FreeBSD one doesn't quite work.

Well, actually that's the heart of the problem right there. Systemd mangles and complects things. You can replace the kernel (see Debian/kfreebsd and to a lesser extent Illumos). Or you can make a "distro" like cygwin/mingw et al for windows and homebrew for os x. Because there are some more or less well defined interfaces between userland and kernel space. Not just "shit that systemd does that makes sense on recent linux kernels" (afaik there's no plans for supporting something like linux 2.4 on small embedded systems for example).
Tour de France Velogames Fantasy Cycling
Why blame it on the foods?

I'd rather have obese people paying a plus for healthcare.
On a Warmer Planet, Which Cities Will Be Safest?
Social regulation by Youtube commenters? What fresh hell is this?

Consensus is not sufficient. This is why rights-based approaches are developed. It has to be OK to live an unpopular lifestyle that's not harmful to others.
Ukraine Residents Protest Against Government
Only Tweeting in English? What about the other 70% of people on Twitter?
Japanese - 23.88%
Spanish - 19.40%
Malay - 15.45%
Portuguese - 10.45%
Arabic - 10.45%
French - 4.48%

https://twitter.com/reach7global/status/514357636360597504
How India Mounted the World’s Cheapest Mission to Mars
For me Linux is pretty dead already because I can't entirely trust the direct it's going in having survived the Unix wars of the 1990s. There are so many parallels to that at the moment, it's not funny. There are large vendors pulling it in separate directions (Canonical, Redhat, Google). At the end of the day, much like back then, customers will suffer from terrible support, fragmentation and political battles.

I just want to get shit done and solve problems and anything that risks that gets outed now.

FreeBSD hits the sweet spot, probably followed by NetBSD.
The problem is that some projects started depending on systemd behaviour now and the transition hasn't been smooth at all in Debian even if you want to stay with sysvinit.
I'm still on sysvinit with systemd-shim, and things started to break in KDE already, mostly related to authentication (can't mount USB devices, can't manage VPN connections, etc.).
In the end I'm afraid Debian users might not have much choice: either use systemd as PID1, or use another distribution (like Gentoo, etc.) that work without systemd.
Add enough machines, and "narrow corner cases" happens all the time and at all the wrong moments.

The bigger point is that there are lots of these "narrow corner cases" all over a typical SysV-init setup, not least due to tons of badly written init scripts. The number of times services have failed to start

To produce a systemd alternative, creating something that competes favorably with SysV-init is insufficient. Today you also need to demonstrate how you deal with those corner cases, or why they don't matter - many of us have no intention of going back to the bad old days.
Predict Billion $ Company by
Why? Standard trade comes with a lot of standard expectations: I buy, I own, as long as I can make sure I don't lose it.
On the plus side, maybe HURD will get more love and be pushed to production-ready status...
Another example of use of imagery for enforcing a minority's idea of "shouldn't": in response to Emma Watson's feminism, threats have been issued to leak nudes of her.

In a world where entirely realistic body images can be created of anyone, it becomes possible to threaten to "leak nudes" of anyone, even if they've never taken any.
Indeed, the book covers a large set of very interesting topics without ceremony.
My bet is what really took the wind out of InfiniDB's sails was Amazon's Redshift. It's new, shiny, ridiculously easy to use, has a strong pedigree and a fairly low initial capital outlay.
looking at his avatar - I'm not sure he's sharing the truth. If you're running all of these cutting edge anti aging experiments surely can upload a non pixelated photo?
I wouldn't mind bitbucket, either. Anything that would give this more exposure.

And, seriously, e-mailing patches is tedious, error-prone and ultimately inefficient. _anything_ that smooths the path for contributors is paramount for a successful project, and I, for one, would love this becoming more than a one-off, niche thing.

(I'd also like to have Alt-Enter instead of Tab on it, and a Mac port, and even though the first is trivial enough to do, the second requires a fair amount of time to implement)
Unified communications has a limited appeal, and I don't see anything in here that addresses the reasons for that limited appeal.
iPhone-only social app = public beta, in terms of maturity.

Unless it supports all three mobile platforms or has published a full-featured API (or protocol specs) from day 1, any proprietary communication app is a non-starter for me (Hangouts included).

How one is supposed to promote it over WhatsApp, Telegram, LINE, and the likes? Hey, this new cool app does almost the same thing, but it's not available to the majority of your contacts!

In the real world, popular apps may be walled gardens, but they are cross-platform. Whatsapp supports 7 mobile platforms, Skype supports 6 platforms (5 mobile), LINE supports 9 platforms (6 mobile), Viber supports 8 platforms (6 mobile), WeChat supports 12 platforms (9 mobile variants), Telegram supports 7 platforms (3 mobile), Kik supports 3 mobile platforms, even Google Hangouts supports 2 mobile platforms. How an iPhone-only app can be considered seriously?
Ask HN: What's going on with all the new cookie warnings?
Last week or so I've been noticing a ton of new approval requests for using cookies on large web sites (BBC, Google, and similar). It's all on my existing browser profile so cookies would have been accepted a long time ago.

Are other people noticing this as well or is it just me? Is there any new significant legislation that's causing this?
Not sure it was built for the task we expect a log facility to fulfill.
I mean the corruption issue is a built in feature of journald: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64116
A little bit complicated, but still interesting idea. Could you make it accepteble for tablets?
> in general people react less strongly to emotional expressions in a foreign language

As a non-native English speaker, I wonder if this affects programming. Do English-speaking people find beautiful programs written in English more beautiful than others ? Anyone here programmed in both their mother tongue and one other language ?
This is absurd. You're overestimating and basing all your theory on the thermic effect of food while failing to understand how hormones affect our metabolism.

Fat and protein are not an optimal source of energy and its use as such will force the body to open up certain pathways that are metabolically inefficient and potentially ruinous in the long term.

Cronic ketogenic dieters for example have extremely slow metabolisms and present symptoms of hypothyroidism.
Strife over worker wages causes strike at Amazon Germany
> fixing the C code, is in my experience, much easier

Really?

Did you account for the many very subtle ways you can run into what the C language defines as "undefined behavior"? I have only met a few programmers that truly understand that can of worms. Way too many don';t even know that compilers exploit these parts of the spec despite programming in C for many years.

http://blog.regehr.org/archives/213

http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-...

That's just the cases where it it is totally legal for the compiler to output random noise - or output nothing at all - instead of what the C code says locally. These are some of the nastiest "gotchas" I've seen in any language.[1] Even the best C programmers are occasionally bit by this class of bug.

I still like C (a lot), but it is not easy. It's just so very annoying and time consuming to track down a bug happening in "foo.c" that is actually caused by a variable in "bar.c" didn't get updated waaaaaay earlier because some bit of code in "quux.c" was skipped over due to undefined behavior. Especially it becomes a heisenbug due to that particular optimization being turned off when in in debug builds.[2]

Bourne [Again] shell has its own share of quirks and "gotchas", but they are usually easy to investigate, and they are generally easy to avoid once you've written a couple scripts.

[1] There are other important classes of bug; I'm just using undefined behavior as an example because of how amazingly subtle it can be and how many serious security bugs it has caused.

[2] Before anybody complains that behavior involving 3 files like that is bad design, consider that A) this happens all the time in real world C, and B) I agree. Which is why many of us are against systemd, which adds complicated interactions like this on purpose as a way to force vertical integration.
It says "scienceblog". It says "experiment". And yet I didn't see any science. Did I miss it?
Good call.

The iPhone might be the exception that proves the rule. The original iPod was OS X only, didn't have as much space as a nomad, etc. But people used it organically and pretty soon it took over.

The iPhone would probably have been Samsung's instead of Apple's without the whole iPod/iTunes/Movies business.
Its not your web-browser that is asking you for that cookie shit,

its the websites themselves implementing shit with javascript, css and html.

They do this because the EU put out a directive ordering basically every website which operates in the EU to do so. To tell the visitors that in fact they are storing "data" on your gasp computer maybe without your consent.

There is no way around it, as each websites implements it differently you cant just block it, thanks to the fucking EU for ruining parts of the web.
Also you depend every-day on another process that is special in some sense just as the process manager: Xorg.
If Xorg dies all your desktop applications die. By your line of reasoning Xorg should be moved into PID 1 too, which is definetely not a good idea.

I don't say that Xorg hasn't crashed, it did rarely when running RC code or proprietary drivers.
In fact I probably had as many Xorg crashes as kernel panics, which says something about how stable Xorg is.
Still I wouldn't want to run it as PID1, where a crash would really bring down everything.
what about the desktop oriented BSD such as dragonfly or pc-bsd ?
Webknife – a CSS framework
Legal changes in the EU, which have actually been in place since 2012.
Did you read the article? They are already working on supporting other platforms. It IS a "public beta", like you said.
Felixdicit: '4chan Is Kill'. How an Internet Dinosaur Was Brought Down
I don't do software, I'm an academic. At least in my subfield, I have a pretty good idea how many unnecessary barriers stand between laymen and the expert wisdom, and how how often experts use their expertise as a way to dismiss outside views without consideration. That's true even though, at the same time, most outside views are a waste of time (as I mentioned).

He's writing a blog post, and you don't need to be qualified to do that.

"Influence" is a fine book and I encourage everyone to read it including the OP. But that does't mean OP did something wrong, or was lazy, by using his finite amount of time to write up his thought.
Nicely written piece; to give some taste of the article contents:

"Height, then, played an important part in facilitating that speed. A trader’s physical height became an advantage, which is part of the reason some traders were former basketball or football players – “taller traders were easier to see”. In the 1990s, some traders wore high heels in the pits to trade faster, and inevitably experienced injuries due to lack of balance. This prompted the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) to impose a ruling making the maximum size of platform heels two inches in November 2000."
The main question is would it work?
For me systemd or applications starting to support systemd only break things (something wrong with policykit/consolekit for example with sysvinit+systemd-shim) that used to work.

Also there are some peculiarities in the way the LSB init script compatibility is implemented in systemd: it tries to be 'smart' and remember their state.
So you start an init script, and it failed for some reason / perhaps even exited with an error code, perhaps you are still developing that init script.
Now fixing the problem and running the init script / systemctl start doesn't even try to run the script because it thinks it has run it yet. You first have to tell it to stop it (which fails), and only then you can run it again.
but this has been around for a while, and I probably already accepted this a long time ago on all those sites. last week or so many sites I visit regularly started asking for another cookie approval, so I'm wondering whether there is some new regulation causing this to happen again.
Herbs That Keeps Your Eyes Healthy PART II
Best Way to Secure Your Emails
I was a Java Web Gui developer, typical stuff, so the architect of the project asked me to implement better security by reversing SHA512.

Specifically SHA512 he said, dont use SHA1 or SHA256 thats not good enough. And he explained several times how the security solution work, it would be based on reversing a hash function. As I shrugged it off, people say weird things sometimes, and offered a real solution he kept pushing for his solution. Weird but anyway maybe he just means what I mean but is using different words, so I implement a real solution, and then days later he questions my judgement and the solution because I didnt use his. Thats when I said "you cant reverse a hash function, in fact thats the point of it" and then point to the diagram he made see there, thats not mathematically possible. His title was Security Architect.
I think I'm missing the point. Why are all the reconstructed videos from the same angle? It would demonstrate it better if they repositioned the camera.
tracklist

1.	"minipops 67 [120.2]" (source field mix)

2.	"XMAS_EVET10 [120]" (thanaton3 mix)

3.	"produk 29 [101]"

4.	"4 bit 9d api+e+6 [126.26]"

5.	"180db_ [130]"

6.	"CIRCLONT6A [141.98]" (syrobonkus mix)

7.	"fz pseudotimestretch+e+3 [138.85]"

8.	"CIRCLONT14 [152.97]" (shrymoming mix)

9.	"syro u473t8+e [141.98]" (piezoluminescence mix)

10.	"PAPAT4 [155]" (pineal mix)

11.	"s950tx16wasr10 [163.97]" (earth portal mix)

12.	"aisatsana [102]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_cell#Individual_spe...
All I really want is an analog audio lane for audio to replace 3.5mm jacks.
I disagree. For startups it's usually more important to focus their resources than to support everything. http://blog.semilshah.com/2014/08/25/ios-first-android-much-...
I have some difficulty figuring out the use-cases for journald over (some) plainish text log files. Our disks are getting faster and bigger. If you need to consolidate logs you have many options (starting with rsyslogd). If you need to log gigs of data, that can't possibly be kernel/initd logs?! And if it's application logs why not pipe it through something for indexing? By definition if i need kernel/local/init log files it's because something went very wrong: in such cases problems with clean shutdown/startup seems very likely - and in such use - cases plain text to file/serial wins hands down.

I'm not against having a wrapper that magically slurps stderr/stdout to timestamped logs -- but if that can't be written cleanly with the apis we have, then surely what we need is to make the minimal improvement in our (probably kernel) api to make writing such a program a trivial exercise? Nothing I've seen of systemd has me convinced the project cares one whit about finding the simplest, least coupled solution to any problem.
Steven Levy's _Crypto_ (referenced in the article) is quite good (as is everything he writes).