skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author of this g+ post is the author of "systemd", a controversial new program being installed by default into some of the most popular distributions of the GNU/Linux operating system.

It seems that some Linux users are unhappy with systemd.

While I do not agree with any user being disrespectful to the author by targeting him personally, the fact that users are seriously upset about systemd as a program gives me hope for the future of the popular Linux distributions.

When the author says "Open Source is awful" maybe he is revealing his true colors. Perhaps he is better suited to closed source development which is insulated from public review by users and other developers at-large. But that is for him to decide.

There was a post on HN a little while back by the developer of a popular glibc alernative for Linux who told us he has been using a flat, linear /etc/rc file for over a decade and his boot times are substantially shorter than with systemd. But more importantly, his approach is simple by comparison. How many users will be able to debug systemd by examining the internals?

It is this type of "hands-on" user that gives me hope for the future of the distributions that are experimenting with systemd. I hope these users will speak up if they have not done so already.
Communities with corporate stewards are a lot more civil for obvious reasons
Please... leave your PC stance at the door. Really. Grown men are never offended at stuff like this...
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There's no double standard here. It's a conversation specifically about jerkish behaviour in the open source world, and merely having this discussion does not ignore jerkish behaviour in other companies, communities, etc.
Personally, I disable both WiFi and Bluetooth unless I'm actively using it in a trusted location for this very reason.
Not really, the same rule basically applies. If you have clout, people will tolerate your abuse (e.g. Steve Ballmer). If you don't you might get fired.

I think it's actually better in open source because the way to earn clout is through solid contributions. That is not really true at most companies -- you have clout through your title/position on the ladder, which may or may not be earned.
How you managed to read that into the message above is totally beyond me.
Do you ever wonder if the act of programming causes movement on the scale? Especially if done for a long time, especially if started when young?
I already contacted them, the answer (from a human) was the same. I emailed my point of view - the same I have expressed here.
> repeatable

Yeah, they've done that. If you do an exit and kill the product, the original need of users is left unfulfilled, so there's a space for someone else to do the same trick again.
Yes, for many years I intentionally did not release more open source due to only having people contact me to ask for help or criticize and never to simply say thank you.

Most recently I have decided that releasing open source is what I want to do, because it is what I want. I don't expect anyone to appreciate it any more.

The parser I wrote has actually made it into several linux distributions ( as well as on the distributed discs ). Several people benchmarked it and said it was amazingly fast. I'm pretty sure it is used by a fair amount of people, but since it is mainly distributed through CPAN I have no idea who really uses it or how many.

I think this is the case for what I wrote because it is a component. People in general I think appreciate tools much more than components, especially if the component is one of many somewhat inter-compatible other options. There is little love for "another thing added to the pile" even if it is different in fundamental ways.
Systemd and PulseAudio are getting pushed down everybody's throat, unasked for. They are both horrible to work with and suck quite a bit, both introduced way prematurely and buggy.

Why did he not roll his own distro fully based on systemd to convince people it is so cool? instead of rolling out his own distro, people responsible for distro package/rolling were convinced it should be added to the default; as it was so much cooler then Sys V Init. Nobody would have wanted to hire a hit-man for him making choices for his own distro. But no the choice was made to infect nearly all distributions with systemd.

And worst, it is not even optional, which is BAD. The package maintainers, the nerds that like to have meetings on what should happen with a certain distribution got convinced, or simply wanted to be the person to implement something new, without giving it some proper thought. It's a task, work where their name is showing. Which makes them think they are cool, special or any other term you think applies! That's what is wrong with people, we are all a bunch of hypocrite bastards, from the most recent baby that got born crying for a mothers tit from mother Theresa that wanted her place in heaven by choosing the life of suffering. It's in our nature.

Sys V Init was simple and transparent, and it worked fine for anybody i knew working with linux, nobody had the need for a systemd like .. lets call it a product as i don't want to use another insulting term, as the author apparently might get his feelings hurt. (one does not write such a blog post as he did, if you DO NOT care).

If his blog post was mine, and i would have re-read it before posting it, i would strongly wonder if i have not done something wrong, striking so many people the wrong way; SO MUCH SO, people want to hire a hit-man. If you need address so much bitching about your 'stuff' and still feel like stuffing it down everybody's throats, you miss some critical wiring in the brain. There were a lot of different paths that could have been chosen, but the path that effects nearly all linux users was chosen… WHY?

Yes i would like it very much if systemd, pulse audio and lennart pottering would disappear from the linux community. That is my personal opinion, shared and or opposed by many, deal with it.
Linus is clearly not malevolent, not ill-intentioned, but he's closed-minded somewhat. He hasn't seen what the effect might be if he was a little more inhibited about cursing people out.

I think of this as the nice vs angry coach sorta thing. There are sports coaches who are nice people and ones who are assholes and both groups include legendary successful coaches. Clearly, this is not a make-or-break issue, but also it's clear that being an asshole doesn't help, even though assholes often claim it does. Like successful asshole coaches, Linus clearly wants the best for the community, he just has this asshole way of thinking about how to achieve it, and he's wrong enough that he's clearly out of balance. And if something could convince him to just temper things or apologize a little, it would be a helpful step. He still deserves honor and respect overall regardless, but it would be better if we didn't have to qualify that.
You realise that there are large, commercial projects that are just as high stakes as the Linux kernel or arguably even higher stakes, and they manage to operate with reasonable team dynamics? There is no correlation between "runs an important project" and "must be an asshole" even though certainly everyone has off days from time to time (I've been known to flame people when reaching the end of my tether but usually regretted it later).

I think this notion - which Linus pushes - that the alternative to yelling at people and generally being short tempered is always "political correctness" ... well it's quite harmful. Yes, it CAN get that way, if people interpret criticism of their work as personal criticism and try to shut it down by complaining about it. I've seen that happen before. Some people don't know how to handle someone implying, even if politely, that their work sucks and can't handle it. But that doesn't mean it has to be that way and well functioning teams manage to avoid it.
http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html

http://woozle.org/~neale/papers/reply-to-still-harmful.html
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2015 will be the year of Linux on the desktop.
Am I the only one that feel like this article is a whole "I know best" than non-feminist group?
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The problem is that the Linux kernel is one of the longer running and most influential open source communities so too many people have picked up the idea that because Linus can say something mean, it's okay for them to do it, too — as long as they're technically correct, of course, but which flame-warrior doesn't believe that they're correcting an error?
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I don't know -- that's up to society to decide. If the people think Uber is harmful, they have a right to ban it. At the end of the day, it's up to the people to come up with some bargain that will direct their society in the direction they want. And if society decides one way, but some people prefer it another, well in this case the choice is easy: if riding or driving Uber is so important to them, they can try and move to another country/state/region where Uber is welcome. It's a bit like asking, but what about people who would really like to pay less taxes?

If we don't like our civilization, we're free to rebel. It would be sad, though -- at least in my opinion -- if the cause for rebellion would be a "ride-sharing" app that's become so synonymous with spoiled consumerism.
This coming from the man who, when people point out flaws in his design of systemd, says basically "too bad, I'm doing it anyway, and if you don't like it, you can take a hike."
I don't understand this perspective. One can be a very effective guardian of quality without being an asshole about it.

For example, this is what Linus wrote:

"Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?

Linus"

Instead, he might have been able to write something like this:

"It is a very bad idea to read one byte at a time with a system call, for a variety of reasons, including and especially performance."

I would love to hear how being an abusive asshole actually does any good? I see it as a way to artificially limit the size and diversity of the potential contributor pool.
It sounds like a form of spaced-repitition. It works for some things, but not otherd
Or you get promoted. It depends greatly on company culture.

What I've tended to see in companies, though, is that instead of venting like this and getting it over with, there is backstabbing, intrigue, and much worse insults veiled in language that provide deniability.

Personally, I'd prefer being on the receiving end of Linus' approach to most of the "nicer" hostility I've seen in corporate settings.
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I fail to see how the tools Pottering works on have any relevance to the discussion.

Are you claiming that personal attacks are justified if you don't like a person's software?
Lots of reasons. It can help with depression, anxiety and other states of mind that cause unhappiness in your daily life. It can help calm your mind and allow you to focus on what you're doing rather than worrying excessively about the past or the future. It can impart a pleasant feeling of acceptance. It can make you more tolerant of "bad" things that happen, and allows frustrations to flow over you (for example being annoyed at a friend being late for coffee). It's like packing everything you need for a camping trip and feeling prepared, without packing anything and knowing the unexpected will come.

I ditch all the rituals. You can get a lot from just sitting in a chair and meditating.
The only logical approach is to demand rigor in situations that demand it. For me this is not one of those situations, because the cost (to me) of the OP being mistaken in her conclusions or actions is zero, as it should be to you. So we logically we should support her because if she's right we all benefit.

For some reason something about the OP's position has made you angry and defensive, as demonstrated by the lengthy replies you've made to a number of people, in my case containing some quite personal comments. Up to you, but I'd suggest taking some time to explore why that is.
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Decades ago Cuba made training and exporting medical personnel their "thing" and they ended up owning that part of the world market despite being a small and very poor country.

There is a direct tech analogy with Finland and cell phones.

From the small country PoV, if you can't compete in the strategic nuclear bomber world market, or the manufacturing robot world market, you can probably find some market segment, however small, to focus on and take over. Like cellphones, or 3rd world medical care.

Other countries could, and probably will, do the same.

There is the interesting analogy that Finland isn't doing so well in the post Nokia, iphone and android world. Wonder what could happen to Cuba if the demand for docs dried up (optimistically due to 3rd world advancing into training their own medical workers, and not by the entire 3rd world dying of ebola or in ensuing strife after the epidemic)
You tried to open a flame war over licenses in discussion about hostile attitude in the open source community. Great work.

"The GPL license is arguably better IMO as well. Quite a few BSD devs, both kernel and userland, are grossly immature and tend to be vocal copy-left opponents for the sake of being vocal."
This reminded me of the "This is Phil Fish: A case study in internet celebrity" video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w

Phil Fish is an indie game developer, internet-famous for the game Fez. And "everybody" hates him. Though as the video explains, it's more complicated than that.

The video is notably also as being referenced by Notch (creator of Minecraft) as part of the reason why he decided to go into semi-retirement after the sale of Mojang.
> fall somewhere on the aspergers scale

That's really insulting to people that actually have autism. Don't do that.

(And you mean autism scale, asperger's was eliminated as a separate diagnosis.)
Open source is a software development model. It is also a community. If you bill yourself as a "movement", you're building a community around yourself, like the open source movement.

"Gamer" is a hobby, but it can also refer to a community that is much, much different from the broad spectrum of people who just play video games.
I didn't provide a ton of details because I think it is important to be constructive and just make the point that people should be more caring and positive. I don't want or need to try to bash these people. All I am saying is that they were somewhat mean to me. It is my personal perspective. I'm not sure what anyone will get out of reading this stuff in detail.

If you are so interested, I requested repeatedly to Brian and the list to approve the module after the name "Ginger" was agreed upon, but nobody with authority was willing to move it to the registered list. The leaders of CPAN basically stopped approving stuff. Registered modules were dropped entirely shortly after that.

I tried to talk reasonably to Brian, but he seemed oversensitive, likely due to being overwhelmed with his tasks. I am more sad that registered modules were dropped than anything.

It is likely that Grant McLean's comments attacking my module are no longer around; due to the changes to CPAN and the related bug tracking. He publicly stated that my XML parser has no right to call it an XML parser, in reaction to me including benchmarks showing how slow his parser is even when backed with LibXML.
> they were released unfinished

Isn't that how open source is /supposed/ to work? TBH, as a Debian user, I'm quite happy with the "Lennart releases theoretically brilliant but practically buggy apps, Ubuntu / Arch users suffer for a few months, Debian integrates the system once it's stable" workflow :)
> This manifests itself in nasty behavior towards women (underrepresented in our field and generally being more balanced personality-wise then men) and towards each other.

Apparently, it also manifests itself in taking things too seriously, not being able to understand the nuanced meaning behind insulting words, and reducing a person's personality to a few mean things he's said.

Nice sexist remark, btw.
Interesting article with historical context that goes 10 years back and many detailed insights!

Using pkgsrc at our company since a bit over a year has been excellent thanks to the great work from jperkin and many others.
It is one of the tools i wish i had known earlier about since it makes life sooo much easier.

- Quartly stable releases mean that you have recent software most of the time.

- It is available on many platforms (OS X, Linux, SmartOS/Illumos, the BSDs, ...) so you can use the same packages on all your systems.

- Very easy to build binary packages of custom software / custom options / different versions / add your own patches. This is critical for most sysadmins/ops people - and if you ever tried to setup koji for CentOS you will love the simplicity of pkgsrc...

In my opinion pkgsrc is the most underappreciated "devops"-tool out there.
It gave us much more control over our software stack and reduced the amount of work we had to put in to archive our goals.

I also expect the effort to reduce bulk-build times to further improve the software quality of all things in pkgsrc.
Instead of weekly/daily bulk-builds (depending on the platform) it will be possible to have 4 or more reports a day.
This quick feedback will make determining if/which commit broke/fixed something more immediate. Great stuff!
Yes, I think one culprit is misperceptions that the term "STEM" encourages (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). It's become a widespread marketing term, especially towards young people choosing education and careers. People are told that there's big demand in "STEM careers" so they should get a "STEM degree". But there isn't really a shortage of people in this cluster of fields across the board, mostly just of programmers and some kinds of engineers. For the most part, not of natural scientists, or of most kinds of mathematicians.

I think it's retained because it is a good marketing term, and lets technology (where the jobs are) benefit from an association with "hard" areas like pure math and astrophysics (where much of the prestige is). But that's a bit of sleight of hand: we get kids excited about "STEM" with documentaries about marine biology and astronomy, but then oops, that's not where the jobs labeled STEM actually are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk8n-I53Ib8 (Pulp Fiction, Wolf's speech)
Well it's a good thing you switched to Unix then, because Linux is not Unix.
In this case I would really appreciate it having an exit and killing the product.
does this obey robots.txt and have some sort of delay so it doesn't take down a site?
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Had this been Kay's first mistake of this magnitude, it would indeed have been reasonable to expect Linus to have been more civilised. Anyone who has followed this more closely would know that this was nowhere near the first time Linus had issues with his code. Yet he did not appear to be interested in listening no matter what Linus told him.
So I'm a blogger with posts that occasionally go semi-viral [1], and I've been subject to unpleasant comments on a few occasions. Here are a couple of posts which have gotten me quite a bit of hate:

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic...

http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/equal_weights.html

In both cases they are posts about mathematics which use other topics (economics, dating) as concrete examples and the examples draw hatred.

However, unlike many of the people subject to unpleasant behavior such as this, I'm going to suggest that the best thing to do is ignore it and move on with your life. I don't favor much in the way of systematic solutions. Assorted "codes of conduct" being proposed are blunt instruments and are easily used by people in power to bully others or to shut down discussion of "incorrect" opinions.

Furthermore, technology is fairly unique in it's communication. In many fields, communication is there to create a sense of community and in-group status - creating a tribe. In our field, most communication is simply about facts. It's quite easy to ignore "you're wrong because X,Y,Z and a big jerk" - just evaluate argument X,Y,Z and update your beliefs accordingly.

Back when I lived in NY, a coach told me (rough paraphrase): "Tu debil. Necesita para construir tu corpu." ("You're weak. You need to build your body.") In the recent past, the tech world's culture was a lot like that of a mexican boxing club. The correct response is "si, mi SQL debil, eu pratico." ("Yes, my SQL is weak, I'll practice.")

Somewhere along the line, we gave this up and became a culture where feelings matter more than results. I think the solution here is for the tech world to regrow the thick skin it once had.

[1] A post about functional programming is limited in it's eventual virality.
Though there are several services that offer this same thing, it's always good to have more available should they be needed.

Since the concept is not really novel, why don't you tell us about the implementation? What's running on the backend?
I disagree. He can produce the same excellent product without his childish name-calling. His ability to read and accept commits does not depend on his menacing replies to bad commits.
Historically, that's been kind of true, but it depends on the part, really, and is getting better all the time.
More info that points to what caused all the hate -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering
I don't think there's anything wrong with offering this as a receipt-only email.
It's quite possible to make it clear that he'd stop accepting code without descending to abusive language. Erecting a 'safety barrier' against someone who was doing a poor job and being verbally abusive are entirely unrelated.

You say that blocking these merge requests would benefit many; so be it. Being polite about doing that would benefit the same set of people, and may others at the same time.
not my startup
This comment needs a disclaimer that I think it's possible to be opposed to the use of systemd, and not be flamey about it. And I don't mean to suggest that you're the flamey sort of systemd opposer.

That out of the way, I really hope that the FreeBSD community is not inundated with the flamey kind of systemd refugee.
Go ahead and Google my name. You'll find that it is mostly just attacks on my character related to an incident with UMD and the FBI. Unfortunately people don't reference facts; news ( and people in general ) just believe what they want.

Once again, my point in referencing these people is to say that negative attitudes and attacks are widespread, and happens by many professional ( the people I mentioned ). I don't blame them; it is a hard community; I'd just like us all to have better attitudes.
discussion about petition on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3385276
Apple has a long history of ditching features that power users demand and call omission "crazy", then seeing the industry ditch those same features a few years later.

Floppy drives. CD drives. Ethernet ports. Flash support.
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