skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bitcoin falls to 11 month low
Fear, as you seem to realize, is a crappy motivator. It only work in limited circumstances and for limited periods of time. It doesn't really change behavior permanently. That "society" does it doesn't make it any better (and when was the last time a judge cussed out a defendant for receiving a guilty verdict?)

But I would argue that motivating through fear isn't even relevant to this situation. Is making death threats in order to convince somebody to stop doing something a valid way to motivate through fear? Is cursing somebody out on a mailing list really all that terrifying? If it is, is that the reason Linus, for instance, does it?

I think the answer to all of these is no.

Further, it may be appropriate to shame racists, homophobes or sexists into changing their ways (or, I would argue, just not espousing their views publicly). But is it really appropriate to do this, to this extent especially, to programmers who wrote bad code?

Programming relies on rational, careful cognitive consideration of problems. That's the opposite of what fear inspires. Fear-based "motivation" is lousy in general, and doubly lousy for open source software.
People also tend to ignore cultural differences.

Does Linus ever swear in Finnish? Because from what I've been told people in some Nordic countries will happily say fuck and fucking all day, but would be reluctant to use local language versions.
>It is almost like one needs a new form of Godwin's law for group arguments, the first one to go full "4chan" (or whatever) on a subject is declared the loser of the argument, whether or not they had a valid argument to begin with.

Except the anonymity involved means people on the other side send abuse to themselves and their side in order to shift discussion off of the topic and onto how their opponents are evil abusive monsters. And then of course people who just love stirring up shit send abuse to both sides purely because they enjoy it.
I know you make it out to be a selfish thing, and while that might be true on some level, it's fundamentally a selfless act. It's actions like these that are the opposite of the tragedy of the commons. If even 10% of people with means acted in a similar way, the world would be a better place in very tangible ways.
Create a color fence. You can create a polygonal fence that describes your preferred color set and calculate an intersection from the hue value in HSV. If my hue is 320, then I could find a nice shade of orange/red along the polygonal fence. This should give you controlled useable colors. The intersection length is the value, and you could store variable saturation on the fence points if you want to control the level of saturation.

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s6/sh/c48da69a-7056-4ee0-9bcf...
I think we all remember that review, because it gets brought out any time someone criticises an Apple product at launch.

In any case, I feel like it's a little unfair to judge in hindsight like that. It had no PC compatibility, nor USB connectivity. To anyone other than a Mac user it was a dud. At the time.
Previous discussion with a less flame-bait title:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859
Kerrisdale Capital to Host Live Presentation and Webcast on Globalstar, Inc
this looks amazing, and ruby based too! looking into it now!
I would have thought it would look exponential.
> While I don't think I'd be as caustic as Linus, I can totally understand the level of exasperation that saga must have caused him given the series of issues in question. And at the point of this outburst, nothing appears to have worked: the stream of crap had kept on coming.

I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but are you saying that being exasperated is justification to be arbitrarily caustic?

There are plenty of open-source project leaders who deal with incorrigible people and do not talk this way.
It reminds me of some of the names they have on their Jeepneys. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeepney
When I was there, I saw Jeepneys called "Disneyland" and "McDonald's", etc. Pretty random.
I think it is related. We will shortly see "Open Source Culture must Die" blog posts.

It's seems as if now it is okay to label an entire activity as a singular group that should be attacked, based on negative behaviour of individuals.

That it is now okay and acceptable to release pent up hatred upon a group, an eye for an eye, abuse for abuse. It becomes justified when the group says "hey, that's not fair" and fights back. A war then is started which further defines and entrenches both sides.

The only logical and ethical stand point is to be a neutral pacifist and have nothing to do with warmongering of any kind.
Overhyped, Overlevered and Ludicrously Overvalued
Do you seriously not see the difference between Lennart saying something like "if you don't like it, you're wrong and should use another distro" [that doesn't use Systemd] and Linus saying things like "you should have been retroactively aborted" and "you're so stupid I can't believe you didn't die as a child'?

Or the difference between him telling someone not to use his software and people setting up crowd funding to hire a hitman?
I get and support the use of psychedelics to demonstrate the mind's potential, but I'm thinking more day to day. When you "approach this state without drugs," is it in the context of interacting with people, or only through meditation?
Many phones have geofencing which should take care of switching on and off things like wifi at particular locations. Should become mainstream soon.
How you can not see that the introduction and adoption of his tools lead to the anger of users that get this forced down their throats? If there was no such thing as pulse audio or systemd, nobody would be upset with him in the linux community. And where i say attacks are justified at all? I hate violence in any form.

I wrote that i would prefer not to see any of his stuff, nor him in the linux community (for of product nr 3 i don't need). The whole discussion is waste of time and space, just like pulseaudio and systemd. And i wrote that one has to realise when others get SO pissed off they want to hire a hit-man, SOMETHING is up, perhaps requires a second thought. Consider making it optional? It's not a crazy idea.
>I've personally had nothing but great encounters with FOSS.

Same here. That doesn't mean there isn't a problem, though. I mean, I'm pretty much a nobody. I haven't contributed to the kernel or created a perl module or created systemd so of course I haven't had any issues.

I'm sure Poettering isn't making this stuff up. People are so pissed at him for systemd and it makes no sense. And he's right to call out Linus for saying those things. Whether you think the people deserve this kind of abuse or not it's just toxic for the community at large and there isn't any reason to say stuff like that (I'm talking death threats or the most hurtful insults you can think of). If someone drops the ball don't take their work and ask them to leave - if they don't, you should be able to ignore them.

>Saying open source is awful because you've encountered assholes is like saying free market economies are awful because some vendor overcharged you one time, or saying cars are awful because some guy cut you off yesterday, or saying free speech is awful because some guy insulted you in public the other day...

What he's actually talking about is a pattern of bad behavior. Of course there are going to be random assholes on the internet - that's not what he's talking about. He's talking about all of the abuse he gets from the actual community on a regular basis. Systemic abuse and vitriol.

I love open source. I owe my career to Linux and my passion about it. But that doesn't mean we can't make it better. And this internet bullying stuff is a real problem - it's very well documented. Ignoring the problem is the worst thing you can do short of contributing to it.

If we're going to have a real community then we have to make sure people feel safe and welcome.
Always difficult to restrain self promotion
That's what I thought too. But the curve is already looking pretty scary.
>> You have to understand that the alternative to "Linus is mean" is "Linus let a fucking patch enter the kernel, and it broke millions of machines around the world, causing millions of dollars worth of damage". Every single line committed in the kernel must be carefully checked, and if you lack the skills, just go away, because it will (1) spoil the precious kernel maintainers time and more importantly (2) do damages to millions of users.

This is a false dichotomy. You can tell people to go away or get better without telling them it'd be better if they'd never been born or wishing violence upon them. I honestly don't have a problem with Linus telling somebody their code is terrible. Linus has often taken it to another level in belittling and abusing the people around him.

Linus has a pattern where his first (or second) reaction to an issue is to START SHOUTING AND NAME CALLING in an attempt to shut down discussion. If the issue blows up he comes back and gives a reasonable, considered response. It's a pattern that's not helpful.
I'm not sure what to expect - linear, geometric, exponential. What do statistical models of infection normally look like?
Ask HN: Do you think Globalstar is really worthless?
Kerrisdale Capital is shorting Globalstar with target price of $0. I find it hard to believe that having wifi devices being able to "talk" with space is valued at zero. What do you think?
Does this present the opportunity for Apple to take a significant stake at a greatly reduced valuation?
Plugging HUSL [1], a color space created for this very purpose.

http://www.boronine.com/husl/
I find it surprising that Apple puts up with blatant and conscious violations of their rules from such a high profile app.
Yeah, sorry, I'm not good enough with the math behind crypto enough to have recognized that :(

learn something new every day.
Still broken as of less than an hour ago.
Get ready for a disturbing time when you read about surveillance on Wikipedia[0].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance
To get some insight behind linus behavior, I can strongly recommend his Q/A for latest debconf (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mg5_gxNXTo). It was quite interesting in how much he seems to like to exaggerate things, like the retroactively aborted comment, or how he can make two following sentences with "it is a horrible license" and "it is a great license" regarding the same license.

Linus do not seems to be a person one should quote, as context seem to be critical important for anything he says.
That sound like an entirely reasonable thing to say. If you don't like it, you can choose to boycott his system.

It would become unreasonable if he opened his emails with "YOU are full of bullshit. "
You make a lot of good points, but I take issue with:

> me for pointing out bugs in his software that he refuses to acknowledge

Sometimes this is a perspective thing. It's not always a bug just because some user reports it as a bug in their opinion. Don't know the story behind that anecdote, but perhaps you didn't understand the codebase like you thought you did, or what the expected behavior should of been?

In any regard, if the project maintainer does not consider it a bug and won't accept a PR, then that is their prerogative. You are [usually] free to fork the codebase and fix it yourself if you had a PR that wasn't accepted. With closed source, that isn't even a remote possibility.
I've had some arguments with people but in large part it is pleasant to work with most people in the open source world. I was just at JavaOne and "everybody meets at conferences for beers" really does happen. For smaller projects most developers are extremely happy when someone takes any interest in their project.
He's just one guy. Not an apologist; the guy is straight out not a great communicator and not really expected to be. But somebody has to be gatekeeper. Whoever that is, should do it to the best of their ability. This is likely the best he has to offer.
thanks for contributing your code
For me the FUD is more on the "Ermagherd! iBeacons can track you!" or "iBeacons will send you adverts!" level - most of it is down to bad journalism spreading fundamentally faulty information about how iBeacons actually work and what data is involved.

It would be much more powerful if tech journalists could actually convey in a "man on the street" friendly way what beacons actually do (i.e. basically sit there in a corner repeating their name over and over again) versus what apps could do and what kinds of data could be stealthily gathered as a result of beacon proximity (or lack thereof).

Also, I don't disagree that creating an infrastructure for the potential to gather data via a suitable app down the line without any real oversight is a bad thing.
> I find it very sad that we can't discuss this on HN.

It is intensely but shallowly interesting. Previous attempts to discuss it devolve into bad tempered argument.

No one learns anything from these discussions. No one has their mind changed.
For such a smart guy, Linus was being extremely dumb in this. Ok, I admit that's my opinion.

Most people are not going to see the context of that statement. I'm sure he had his issues with the developer and the relevant code, but that doesn't excuse such a public display. All he did in that matter is make himself look bad and, to a degree, made his project look bad. As it's been stated elsewhere, such actions most likely just drives people away.

Open source software, especially the big projects, are a public facing entity. Just like any large corporation. A public lashing with this type of language should not be considered healthy for the project nor the open source movement. It only causes negativity within and towards the project with the additional issue, as you show yourself, of not always actually solving the problem.

Each to their own I suppose.
Recommendation seconded, the Boucher anthology is full of great old stuff. There's a fuller description of it at http://www.philsp.com/articles/anthopology_101_07.html
This article mentions neither Apple nor iBeacon.
Unfortunately Linux IS the largest piece of Open Source on the planet, dwarfing the other stuff. So its fair to diss OS when Linux has issues.
From the picture it looks to me like egg is undercooked i.e. the white is still runny and kind of mucousy, ideally you want a solid tender white and a totally separate uncooked yolk. A slightly higher temperature (67 deg C) would ensure the white properly solidifies whilst still being cool enough to avoid cooking the yolk. 45 minutes is unnecessarily long a long as he egg remains under 70 degrees not much will be happening chemically once it's warmed through.
was playing with a similar idea for rendering small electronic boards (= Arduino type) last weekend, mainly to help with pinouts of boards: http://pinboardjs.divshot.io/ - what do you think, might this be useful to you?
Several commenters here have stated that Bluetooth beacon interactions are mediated by apps and they are therefore not surveillance devices.

That's just not correct. Bluetooth beacons can log and report information about devices that come within range of those beacons with active Bluetooth radios. Only interactive-time applications of a beacon need the cooperation of an app on a wide-area connected device.

Beacons that don't have external power generally can't use WiFi or mobile networks to do it, but this information can be uploaded on demand. For example, this information could be collected when coins from pay phones are collected.

Moreover, these beacons are reportedly installed in pay phone kiosks that do have wired connectivity. It's possible, even likely, that they "phone home."
Norwegian woman infected with Ebola
BSD init is certainly not the pinnacle of init systems. rc.d-based SysV init isn't either. upstart also has its warts.

For some people, BSD init works just fine and they're happy with it and they abhor the additional complexity. Without any doubt, Systemd also has its flaws - it's not compatible with *BSDs, or generally non-Linux systems, it's a departure from the "everything is accessible using a simple text editor" principle that has brought Linux where we're now, and there's a non-zero switching cost for each and every package.

Many people know polipo-audio (later renamed to pulseaudio) and the crashing propensity of its earlier versions, and who are kind of intimidated by the whole DBus/ConsoleKit tangle that introduces many moving components that are hard to debug when they fail. A system that is "perfect in theory" but crashes often is not that great.

So people are kind of apprehensive when the same guy who brought them crashing sound demons a couple years ago now comes over happily with a solution to replace the most central component for their system. Thus far, I've been pleasantly surprised by Systemd silently doing its thing and working as advertised. And I wouldn't swap it out for upstart if someone gave me the choice.

The morale? Yes, people grow up, complex systems become more manageable with time when people write debugging aids for them. (Including things such as VirtualBox which make debugging central system components much easier - imagine living in a world where your systemd crashes and bugs simply get closed with a WORKSFORME tag and ignored).
Switzerland definitely ranks very high in all your factors.
It's one of the safest countries for investors, has a growing startup scene, has two of the top engineering schools in Europe/World (ETHZ, Zurich and EPFL, Lausanne), has the highest rate of Nobel prizes per capita, very solid educational and healthcare systems, amazing quality of life (Zurich, Geneva, etc, often rank as the top cities in the world), and last but not least: you have amazing lakes and mountains everywhere!
I'm having a difficult time thinking of something I do that is not tracked by someone somewhere.

Even the city knows when I take a crap thanks to "smart meters".
Never had to participate in linux kernel development, so can't really comment on it (although I hear Linus can be rude).

But open source != linux kernel. There are so many small, large, medium project, that if you really want to - you can find where to contribute. It works the best when you actually need to fix something you use and you have developer expertise to fix it. But even when you can describe in details bug or feature - this is often is very welcomed by project maintainers.
Some places have historically not named their roads. Then westerners come around and say "this won't do, how will we deliver the mail?" and name them all. I'm guessing it all happened just before WWII or something.
I don't think so - it may be large by usage and codebase, but it's not where most people have experiences with open source development.
I have big misgivings about Poettering, and this post has done nothing to improve my opinion of him. But a lot of the systemd criticism is poorly argued.

> Sys V Init was simple and transparent, and it worked fine for anybody i knew working with linux

Sys V init only works "fine" for you if your needs are simplistic. If you have not dealt with dozens of badly written init scripts that turns restarting a typical server process into a matter of trying "restart" followed by a "killall", possibly rm'ing pid files, and a "start", then you have not dealt with Sys V init much.

If you have not dealt with essential system processes dying and not getting restarted, and having to implement monitoring and restart logic to deal with problems that would not have occurred in the first place without a process monitor, you have not been exposed to a lot of Sys V init problems.

If you have not dealt with process managers outside of pid 1 being killed.

If you have not dealt with problems retaining log output from early boot.

And so on.

Systemd solves a lot of real problems that maintainers of bigger systems are likely to have run into. I will agree that it solves a lot of real problems in contentious ways, including things I don't agree with (I, for example, can not agree with the arguments for binary logs - I love the filtering functionality that journald brings, but they would all be possible while retaining a text based format for the main log files)

> 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.

I agree with you about this, to a point. If you get some criticism, it's fair to assume that it may be their problem. If you become one of the most hated OSS developers in history, on the other hand, it should cause a lot of introspection.

To me it seems that there are a few separate problems:

- Poettering appears to have a very abrasive working style that wins him a lot of opponents. He may very well be a nice guy in person, but a lot of the time that appears not to come through online.

- There are some real assholes that go way to far in the way they criticise him, and he seems to use the illegitimate criticism as a way of ignoring the real issues and concerns people have with him. This is not that strange - if the outpourings of hatred towards you is not something you can easily reconcile with your own views about what you are like as a person, then it becomes easier to dismiss them all than to filter and accept some of them and dismiss others.

- Some of the technical decisions he makes are questionable and controversial, which is not uncommon, but rather than get resolved, due to the caustic environment created around him, very often it becomes impossible to deal with the actual technical issues and fronts harden.
ohh I remember when I built my first Von Neuman machine with eeproms, gals, flipflops and multiplexers, it was a 16 buttons "simon says" game, I used 6 protoboards and kilometers of copper wire.
I liked your original pre-edit comment, since it portrayed your attitude even better:

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahaahhahahahahahaha

Was about to argue the merit of this post, then noticed the author. Almost got me, Poettering ;-) Just another social/political manipulation to get his way at the expense of others. I would feel bad for the guy if he wasn't such a whiny prick the rest of the time."

I especially like how you admit that if this letter was anonymous, you would actually consider the argument, but since it's a particular person you dislike, you're OK with people advocating violence and attempting to hire hitmen.

Stay classy.
Ask HN: Which algorithms or data structures should every hacker know?
Megadeth's 'Youthanasia' was their first radio-friendly album, riding of the success of 1992's 'Countdown to Extinction', which was their most commercially successful album.

I discovered Megadeth in the 2000's and they quickly became my favorite band. I haven't kept up with them very much in recent years, but the band and the fans have always had a tight-knit community on the internet. It's interesting to see the impact that 'Megadeth, Arizona' had on the WWW at the time. We've really come a long way in the last 20 years.
Desktop/non-mobile link:
https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...

It's apparently impossible to go back to the desktop version from the mobile page. The "View Desktop" link in the footer takes you to the G+ homepage. Well done, Google.
To summarize:

The tech community has become weak because we have taken
a look at ourselves and realized that many among us are
brutish, brash, and generally all-around assholes. But
since these people are highly skilled, we should feel that
the fact that they are assholes should be swept under the
rug and we should "just deal with it."

I get that these things exist and that we have to deal with them (change doesn't happen over night), but that doesn't make then "right" or "ok" or "acceptable." Is it wrong to want to change things? Does that make one weak because they don't like the current situation and want to change it rather than "growing a tough skin" and accepting the status quo?