skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whoa. Timeout. This isn't political correctness--it's basic human decency. Political correctness is replacing the use of a term for a euphemism. Even putting this in euphemistic terms should be completely unacceptable. If I told somebody at work that they were so stupid, I wasn't sure how they survived childhood, I'd be asked to leave, post haste.

I think that the OSS community (and IT community in a broader sense) has this idea that "they're just words," and so therefore, they should just be able to say what they want without consequence. But, words matter. A whole lot. Empires are built upon words. People rally around words. Words convey ideas, thoughts, feelings, and everything that goes with them. Why is rampant bullying accepted in this culture? Why is it the norm?

I'm not saying that things have to be all sunshine and rainbows. Yeah, sure, it's stupid to read a byte at a time, but you don't have to be an asshole about it. You can say, "Hey, that won't work," and be done with it. People should be treated with a modicum of decency. Remember the human, and all of that.
Just curious - have you read some of Linus' posts referenced?

I personally don't think that a reasonable person who is familiar with such emails could honestly say that Linus is not a bully or that such behaviour is ever acceptable.

Being in charge of a very important project doesn't make it OK to tell people that they're so stupid they should have been aborted.
But $5 for a one time watch isn't too bad if you are only going to watch it once. Otherwise you buy it for $10-$15 and watch it once, and maaaybe come back to it later.

With kids movies on the other hand, kids tend to watch their movies more than once so the game changes a bit. $5 for 48 hrs vs 30 days vs $15 for perm access becomes a bit more complicated. I would feel bad for my parents if they had to pay for a TMNT movie each time I watched it :)
Breaking through text editor (or development tool) comes with old fashioned business model.
> but so far no studies have shown that plants experience a "subjective experience" or are capable of thoughts in the way we think of them

You could make easy arguments that this is true of most animals we eat. Does a clam really have a subjective experience?

Anthropomorphism is a powerful bias.

> If it's later proven that plants can really experience things like pain and emotion, then most ethical vegans/vegetarians would likely shift their stance and promote 100% artificial food for consumption, derived purely through chemical reactions and petri dishes.

I would think that anybody who's ever grown plants can recognize that they have an emotional life of some kind...they even like it when you sing to them! Plants have bad days and good days, get sick, move towards favorable stimulii and withdraw from unfavorable stimulii. They can communicate with each other and have fascinating and diverse sex lives (even evolving incredible pieces of aeronautical engineering to help them survive). There's considerable research that plants and humans can form emotional connections and self-support each other.

Any Vegan serious concerned about sentience should stay awake at night thinking if they're doing the right thing w/r to plants.

> then most ethical vegans/vegetarians would likely shift their stance and promote 100% artificial food for consumption, derived purely through chemical reactions and petri dishes.

I wouldn't be surprised if a Soylent-like movement would happen. I'm surprised it already hasn't. It seems like a heck of a lot less trouble for day-to-day living than what most Vegans go through.

Thanks for the thoughts.
Surely you can understand the intent of his message and of the phrase which you partially quote.

"Some elements of the open source community are awful to contributors"

"Open source is an awful place to be if you don't have a thick skin"

"The behavior I have observed as a prolific contributor to open source is awful"

All of these statements, I believe, accurately summarize his experience. All of these statements can be summarized "Open source is awful in many ways" for purposes of titling an article.

He's not trying to say that the concept of open source is awful. You don't have to jump in and defend that cause.
Here is one of his more infamous statements: http://lwn.net/Articles/430699/ "What I actually suggested in that interview was not so much that the BSDs should adopt the Linux APIs, but instead that people should just forget about the BSDs. Full stop."

He's also been an annoyance in Steve Langasek (Upstart developer)'s Google+ feed, and his post regarding the inseparability of systemd-logind as a main argument for why Debian should adopt systemd, at the time of the heated debates, is another. Among plenty of other examples.

His hijacking of Wolfgang Draxinger's CCC talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmPKDeo9Oow

Announcing udev becoming systemd-only while referring to potential detractors as "systemd-haters": http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-May...

That said, Lennart does not deserve the death threats and the extremer vitriol, but the jabs and sardonic humor are par for the course, given he is a divisive figure, and has made a lot of people mad for good reason.

He's not as abrasive and destructive as Drepper is, certainly, but some people actually find indirect and passive-aggressive attitudes to be even more offensive.
I think the parent was referring to HN's ranking system's tendency to apply a penalty to posts with many comments, in an effort to keep flame wars off the front page (if I recall correctly - it's been a while since I saw a "how HN ranking works" post and I can't find a source url, sorry).

This has the side effect of divisive issues not getting the same exposure as stuff everyone agrees on.
Official Google Indonesia hacked and defaced by Pakistani hackers
This is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859
Is Apple's Swift Worth Your Development Time?
Top 8 tools for Ruby on Rails code optimization and cleanup
Agree!

After reading this http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd , I dislike systemd also. The conspiracy side of my mind think redhead is pushing for systemd because systemd's complexity enable redhead to sale more support contracts.
>I don't know why you are responding so angrily

I'm not. Given that you can't tell someone's emotional state via text, it doesn't make much sense to assume an emotional state for someone else simply because it will make you feel better.

>The page you linked to explicitly says "Stability experimental"

So does every library. It is the default state of a seldom used feature that still hasn't been removed.

>I also don't know why you are behaving as if I dislike Haskell

I am responding to what you say. You said using a mutable unboxed array is hard. That is not a simple misunderstanding, that is either a complete lack of having ever tried to learn haskell, or a deliberate lie. There's literally no other options. I teach people haskell. They do not use lists for anything other than control. They have absolutely no problem using arrays.

>I also gave you a concrete example of a reasonable and necessary task I found difficult

But you didn't say what made it difficult. So a reader is left to assume you are trolling since that task is trivial.
I don't care to get into that, it is a more complex subject than a single work like OP's article or the entirety of this thread can do justice towards. I am merely sayng a good hack is a good hack and discussing it on its merits.
According to this interview from June www.businessinsider.com/linus-torvalds-qa-2014-6 he used a Mac Air but switched to a Sony Vaio because of the screen (no details given). Did he change again? Possible. Anyway, obviously Macs work with Linux. There were some little problems with Linux and the latest Macs when I made my research at the beginning of the year. That happened with the old ones too and were fixed along the months. I had to buy something pretty quickly in February (the old laptop was dying) so I went for a HP laptop I knew worked reasonably well with Linux despite being as new as those Macs. HP's cheap on site next business day assistance was part of the reason for buying from them again. Another reason is that I can open the back of that laptop without screwdrivers and swap RAM and discs. Apparently I can swap also the CPU but probably sockets will change before I'll need to do that.
What Category Do Haskell Types and Functions Live In? (2009)
We want to be "More than just printed books", allowing people to collect photos from relatives and friends in a private place, being able to turn them in a keepsake printed book within 1 click.

We've just updated the UI and added a new look&feel for the book template (code name 'magic-blur').
You can hand-pick photos for many social-network (we'll facilitate the import of multiple photos with a wizard within the next few iterations).

Any feedback is welcome.
I'm the founder, you can reach out directly to me at stefano at pastbook dot com

Thanks
Every single time someone brings up Linus' "abrasiveness", they never fail to leave out the thread preceding it, where the target of Linus' ire inevitably was being obtuse or childish. How long would it take you to stop being polite if someone refused to respond to anything but invective? And in kernel land, there are some simple rules that must be kept to very strictly, else you can forget about things like reliability.
He calls Linus out for being a toxic element in the open source (or at least Linux) ecosystem. This is quite probably true.

Trying to look at it from the other side, though, I wonder if Linus got to be the way he is because it's how he copes with the toxic effluvia he has to deal with on a regular basis. Surely Torvalds has to deal with even more of this than Poettering does. If these things were directed at me on a regular basis, I can't claim with confidence that my moral fortitude would be up to the task of remaining easy to work with either.
Hehe, around the line about the community being mainly about white males in their 30's and 40's, I for some reason felt that the Hitler card was coming :P
I've never used BSD before, but from reading FreeBSD's BSD vs Linux [0], I can't see a major difference aside of the license, and the number of distributions available. Can you please explain what made you go on off using BSD/Linux?

[0]: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-bsd/compa...
CHIP-8 emulator on JavaScript HTML5
TouchId does not replace the password, it is merely a shortcut for it, as far as the current implementation goes.
I'm pretty interested in that "Terminal" button on one of the screenshots. Having a *nux terminal available on my Android phone has proven to be pretty useful from time to time.
The real question is who can you convince to make it a talent acquisition?
Trying to figure out how to apply Charles' Rules of Argument to the situation, I realized I wrote an entire article on this topic (and linked to it from the OP):

http://lwn.net/Articles/351422/

Short version: ext4's behavior under default mount options changed. You can't blame it on someone mis-reading the docs.
I think there's another facet to the argument he made that he didn't make. When you're in a position of power and you have to deal with the work of other people you want to waste as little time as possible on people making stupid mistakes that shouldn't be made in the first place. You want to bring the quality of your contributors up.

One way of doing this is making people fear making mistakes. Society does this all the time: if you are a racist/homophobe/sexist people will ostracize you publicly in a number of ways. Essentially you get rid of racists/homophobes/sexists by making them fear voicing those opinions.

I personally don't think this is a particularly good way of dealing with problems, but it's what society does and it's how it works: based on mostly punishment. To then go on to say that what Linus does is somehow bad or any different seems kinda weird.
Hiram Bingham III
Your response is completely off the mark because in many ways "open source" is as much a community as it is a philosophy. Programming is as much a social activity as it is a technical one. You can release open source works, but if you don't use any social platform to distribute it, who's going to find and use it?
> Open source is not awful.

He specifically said 'in many ways', then elaborated on some of these ways. You're doing nothing more than fighting a strawman.

> Open source is merely the idea that sharing code is good

This is just an argument from being pedantic - he's obviously talking about the open source community at large (and specifically, some sub-communties), and I can't honestly believe you don't know that.

> I've personally had nothing but great encounters with FOSS.

Another classic false argument that comes up all the time - do you think your good experiences cancel out his bad ones, or the other bad ones discussed elsewhere in this thread?

> It's best to think of FOSS not as some community that replaces your interactions

More weird phrasing that seems a bit of a strawman. Who said that the open source community 'replaces' one's interactions? Can a community not have bad characteristics simply because it's not the only community you're involved in? This really makes no sense.

> but rather as a sharing philosophy

Again, this is an argument from nothing more than being pedantic. It's incredibly obvious that the original post isn't referring at all to the general philosophies of open source, but to the actual communities he participates in, in terms that are not remotely unusual. Even if you're adamant that open source as a term must only refer to the philosophy and none of the practical details, you've done nothing to affect the original argument, because it's still about the communities that exist around it in practice.

Overall, I think your post is a bit of a mess of bad arguments and classic fallacies.
Coming from iOS, one thing that I didn't really like about Android was how clumsy the decryption process was. The process is detailed here [1] and it involves the framework being put in a special mode that only handles password entry. In this mode, none of the regular services are running, so I'm not sure how incoming calls & SMSes are handled (or if they are even handled). It's like getting stuck at the boot screen with a password prompt.

In iOS, encryption is not performed at the block layer but at the filesystem level, and some files are encrypted with hardware-derived keys (thanks to a unique 256-bit AES key burned into the processor), allowing the OS to be booted normally, but not having access to certain files until the user enters his/her passcode (full details here [2]). Even if you don't immediately enter the passcode after boot, the phone is still in a somewhat functional state.

I'm glad that Android is taking steps to at least implement by-default disk encryption by relying on a hardware-backed key store.

[1] https://source.android.com/devices/tech/encryption/android_c...

[2] https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/iOS_Security_Guide_Sept_2...
There must be buy-in for a reason.

My impression, at least with systemd, is:

1) systemd put in a whole bunch of work to be backward compatible. They make migration easier, at the cost of some complexity within the codebase. It supports some compatibility with init shell scripts and has inetd compatibility.

If you want to take a dim view of it, it's a little bit like Microsoft's "embrace and extend". systemd has "good" properties for adoption. They do seem to engineer aggressively for adoption, rather than just trying to make the best technical solution. Pottering does have a good understanding of these politics, which makes people angry.

2) Features. Other systems are more "modular", but don't cover as much ground. There are some supervision toolkits like daemontools and runit, but they are meant more for servers. These systems leave it up to end users to do more work. systemd you can kind of drop in and it mostly works, until you have to debug it.

Again, this is sort of like Microsoft. You can stuff in features to satisfy all the different camps, even if the combination of those features results in a poor architecture.

3) Genuinely good ideas/features. I guess this is why Pottering is so controversial. There is a bunch of crap thrown in with some good ideas. Socket activation is genuinely a good feature. It's not new -- Apple's launchd and I believe Sun's SMF use it too. But yeah I think we should give credit to the good ideas for some of the adoption.

There's no doubt they put in a lot of effort to systemd. The only thing that compared is Upstart. It does seem that people paid to work on open source by companies like Red Hat and Canonical are the ones who really influence the direction Linux is going on.

People had issues with Upstart too, though not to this level. So really the high adoption of systemd is not that much of a surprise, given that there were few realistic alternatives.
I'm not making a generalization about people who are opposed to unions (much less your clever interpretation about what people who are opposed yo unions are really opposed to, though I don't think that that interpretation is at all consistent with as NY of the anti-union arguments I've ever heard, much less a reasonable description of the general basis of such opposition). I was making a generaluzation about "capitalist idealists" and what it means to be one.
Poettering's M.O. is basically to force people to adopt changes that piss off a lot of people, and then whine when he doesn't get his way or he gets push back by standards boards who aren't interested in his personal agenda. Keep flouncing, Lennart. I'm sure this is the best way to get people to be nice to you or adopt your changes.
Well, its that easy if you can live with slightly old version. There is CUDA package in official repo IIRC.
Minor correction: the person who CC'd Linus was Alan Cox, directing Linus' attention to Jukka Ollila's message.
Yes, most people I know, certainly. For example, since my phone uses Wifi at work and at home, my phone uses it most of the time.

I'm not going to turn off Wifi when I leave work and then turn it on again when I get home... I've never even heard of anyone doing that, it sounds pretty annoying to have to keep track of...
This domain is flagged as "malicious software/botnets"... be careful clicking on this link!
I kept thinking it was an attempt to emulate LCARS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCARS
So this really depends on how quickly you can do the job :)
Switching made a lot of sense. Great post.
Counter anecdote, I was an exempt salaried engineer at General Dynamics, and got paid time and a half for every hour over 40, if I worked more than 45 hours per week.

It boosted my annual salary noticeably, because we worked 45-50 hours nearly every week. I hear that the OT policy still exists, but few people still get OT because of the DoD sequester. But in 2010-2012, it was very nice.
It might be more accurate to say "the state of the open source community is awful", but for some folks that are deeply involved in that community that might simply be synonymous with open source itself.

In either case, I think the author made it fairly clear that he was referring to the community and not the concept.
Most of us did not bill ourselves as a movement though. Some money grubbing people did back in the .com bubble days. I did not make the OSI. I am not part of any movement. I write software I want, and give the source away freely for others to use if they find it useful. That's it.
>This is a Linus' flaw, of course, but one we can live with in the context of his hugely positive net contribution.

Said in response to a comment by Linus directly stating that someone should be retroactively aborted (murdered).
People should not be tracked. Full stop. Even with their permission. We are headed for worse than Orwell ever imagined. I cannot believe some people consent to this.

There will come a time and soon whereby people will not be able to do a thing without someone tracking it.
Pulseaudio still needs to be restarted every time an USB headset is plugged in, to get it to work as both input AND output card.

EDIT: Other than that, it _does_ work quite well nowadays.
No, really, historically it's been impossible to discuss. People flag the article off the front page or downvote anything negative about Linux or open source the same way they do anything positive about Microsoft.
I'm glad Lennart wrote this, though obviously I'm sorry he had to do it.

I'd like to think this would open up a bigger dialog about the truly decrepit level of discourse that is common on all too many OSS projects (not all, of course, but many of them, and oftentimes, the older, the more nasty), but I'm not that idealistic.

I don't think anyone, least of all Lennart, would say that his projects (particularly PulseAudio and systemd) aren't up for criticism or discussion, but what has happened to him has gone beyond criticism and into just nasty territory.

But here's my question:

With so much of OSS being funded by large corporations (often through these corps sponsoring employees to work on stuff full time), when do we finally drop the "it's all volunteers so this shit is acceptable" mantra.

It's not all volunteers. It's people volunteering their time and collectively sharing the source/combining efforts, but make no mistake, OSS is a huge enterprise and is primarily funded by the Fortune 500. I cannot imagine that the discourse that happens in some of these mailing lists and forums would be allowed to exist without consequence if they were happening on an official company listserv. I cannot imagine that Red Hat or IBM or whoever would let this go on on their official channels without HR getting involved.

So why is it acceptable and passed off on the "outer" channels?

Open source is no longer a new quirky movement. It's the status quo. Time for the whole movement to grow up and be accountable to treating people like human beings.
This is different for men and women.

http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-ar...

"Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7."

http://time.com/3305466/male-female-harassment-online/

The study pointed out that the harassment targeted at men is not because they are men, as is clearly more frequently the case with women. It’s defining because a lot of harassment is an effort to put women, because they are women, back in their “place.”
Yeah, he falls into the trap of having to "prove" something by disproving something else. I enjoyed listening to the essay but feel like he's cutting himself off from an equally important part of human experience.
I think I'd almost be willing to use this interface if I got a terminal. Fortunately I have the option of jailbreaking.
>but you have an opinion about Systemd and Pulseaudio that I simply cannot fathom as authentic or fact based.

You criticize people for being unfriendly and then say you "simply cannot fathom" that their opinions are authentic?

How long have you been using Linux? PulseAudio was almost universally major pain point for many years until other people came along and fixed Poettering's work up enough to make it marginally better than ALSA. If you "simply cannot fathom" that the poster's opinions are authentic, you have been living under a rock.

I thought engineering and "science" was supposed to be a place for objectivity and fact-based reasoning, not pathos and let's-not-hurt-each-other's-feelings-with-criticism.
> But it's important to acknowledge that Linux has thrived despite his abrasive outbursts, not because of them.

No, you don't really know that! These outbursts may bother you and other people but it is also possible that they have been very, very beneficial to the community. Like it or not, they are a form of humor to many people and that may improve team cohesiveness.

I for one think that the reaction to this particular retroactive-abortion-outburst as "not treating people as human beings" is taking things absolutely way too seriously.