skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With respect to the RFCs, it's not required to issue STARTTLS before AUTH so that's probably why billyhoffman said "optional". One is certainly free to use authentication without requiring encryption although, in practice, I'm not sure why you would want to do that (with an exception being when all MUA -> MTA traffic remains entirely within a private network, perhaps -- but even then, why not add encryption just for good measure?).
> I really don't get the systemd "hate" that is still floating around.

I found a message that might shed some light on it:

"[...] Let me turn your question around: we swapped out one of the most central pieces of Linux systems, one of the pieces that is probably the most core of what administrators interface with every day. How could this change ever have gone without any noise?"

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-Oct... (read the whole message, it's quite interesting).
> needing no further experimental work

General relativity is an incredibly impressive theory, even more so when you take into account how few experimental observations were required to formulate it. Basically "the speed of light is the same in any frame of reference" and "being in a gravitational field is (locally) indistinguishable from being in an accelerated reference frame". (For the second one, think about being in a rocket ship accelerating at a constant rate... you feel a force pushing you into the floor, just like you would if you were standing on the Earth's surface.)

If those two things are true, then GR is the only logical conclusion... but we might have gone another 100 years without reaching that conclusion if it hadn't been for Einstein.
Are you a home-row typist? I am not (my hands float freely above the keyboard, generally angled with respect to it, so my wrists are not bent), and I attribute my 23 years of RSI-free near-daily computer use to being home-row-free.

(Albeit, like you, mice started giving me trouble after about 8 years of mousing. The problem was gripping while moving the wrist. Solution? Trackball.)

(EDIT: Tangentially, I keep my eyes in shape with "preventative" eyewear: I don a pair of (weak) reading glasses ~33% of the day to shift the focal point of my monitor further away. Keeps eye strain at bay.)
Not to mention that quite a few people contribute to systemd [1], even if Lennart is still leading the pack.

1: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/graphs/contributors?from=...
3 Reasons Why Open Source Alone Isn't Enough for JMeter Experts
Well, each of those permissions they request ties to a very obvious and useful feature.

Camera/Photo for QR code-based 2FA, Bluetooth permissions and Internet Data to handle local connection to trusted machines and callbacks from sites like Coinbase (when I log into coinbase, I get a handy 2fa notification from authy that leads me right to the code)

Log data is the most questionable, but it really makes debugging so much easier when you can see what's going on, and is a pattern/permission they share with Evernote, foursquare, fring, Netflix, Rdio, Dolphin Browser, AccuWeather.com, Hotmail, doubleTwist Player, MOG, Handcent SMS, Bump, TweetCaster, etc.
Nice. I would consider turning off motion in the settings because it would look less quirky in the videos
Looks like it's based on "swift2js", which I hadn't previously heard of and seems pretty nifty:

https://github.com/swift2js/swift2js
“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.”

― G.K. Chesterton
dang, thanks for the explanation. I think you should keep the piqued code in so that we can go 'meta' and have 500 submissions about why an overused meme is dead. :-)

I probably should read the HN FAQ again - its been quite a long while.
we make use of and love the angular/firebase/angularfire combo. for all it's faults and the complaints about how the web was not designed to be an app platform, it's what we have right now and these technologies (among others) really bridge the gap between 'app' and 'web'.

i really hope firebase doesn't get broken up or otherwise disappear into the goog.

and congrats btw!
You are not allowed to discuss what is on your mind. On HN, you can only share opinions consistent with the HN norm.
The one thing I like about stow is that I can choose to only add configurations that make sense for the machine I am using. If don't have a certain application, I don't 'stow' the configuration for that application in my home directory.
Probably because mass consumption of carrots isn't a top public health issue? If consumption of carrots rivaled that of soda I'd be willing to bet there would be more studies on it just the same as there are studies on various other foods such as red meat, egg cholesterol, fish oil, etc.
I remember giving advice once, to someone who did that and then

git clean -dfx
I maintain environments on Windows (Cygwin), Linux, OS X and Solaris machines.

Some of these are work, some are home. Not all files overlap.

Additionally, I have scripts that are only relevant when I have a certain program installed, or a certain source tree available.

I ended up spending a weekend writing my own system that composed a PATH, .bashrc, .bash_profile etc. based on machine configuration. A single git clone isn't quite enough, especially if you don't want to smash everything into one repo (I don't have my home stuff installed at work, for example).
Some couple of startup ideas for wantrepreneurs
I think you're underestimating the number of poorly configured/written SMTP clients and servers out there in the wild. As an example, here's smtp.comcast.net on tcp/587 (SMTP submission):

Connection to smtp.comcast.net port 587 [tcp/submission] succeeded!
220 resomta-ch2-12v.sys.comcast.net comcast ESMTP server ready
EHLO [2601:b:x:x:x:x:x:x]
250-resomta-ch2-12v.sys.comcast.net hello [2601:b:x:x:x:x:x:x], pleased to meet you
250-HELP
250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN
250-SIZE 36700160
250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES
250-8BITMIME
250-STARTTLS
250 OK
AUTH LOGIN
334 VXNlcm5hbWU6

That's right, the customer-facing SMTP server for the largest ISP in North America will happily let clients authenticate via base64-encoded plaintext without doing STARTTLS first.

At least with tcp/465 (SMTPS), the SMTP session (and the potential to send plaintext credentials) won't even start until the TLS session is up. That limits the attack surface to, "Does the client do something stupid with TLS, like not verify the peer's certificate or accept an aNULL/eNULL ciphersuite?"

If the MUA has a "Use SSL?" checkbox in its SMTP settings and it's not checked, then the MUA will send its credentials in the clear on tcp/587 if the server advertises/accepts AUTH LOGIN/PLAIN/CRAM-MD5/etc. before/without SMARTTLS, like Comcast's SMTP servers do. This scenario can't happen with SMTPS.
I happen to like modern daemontools-like init systems a lot, (runit, s6) but I use various init systems depending on what I want, and that's great IMO.

The problem is that systemd is that is being forcefully pushed to all distros. For instance, by merging udev with systemd. We want to keep all the alternatives open.
Kind of a weird moral code here (paraphrasing) - "it's ok to do terrible things if you have a profit motive. But, if you are in any way associated with the people doing said terrible things, even as a 'passerby,' then you are slime."

Wouldn't all of the Whisper employees be covered by the monetary motive clause (i.e. they are getting a paycheck)?

Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Pretty sure, as always, the people who deserve the most shame are the ones who are directly responsible.
Quickne.ws, the best way to follow the news
"Firebase is here to stay, and it’s only going to get better at Google"

I'm curious if that is written contractually, specifically in the deal that you made. Is it? If so exact what is the wording in the contract?
I'm not going to get into the fake programmer vs real programmer thing, but I will mention the thing that most excites me about programming. For the the author it was "design," and for me it's similar: communication.

I love being able to take a fuzzy idea, decompose it into discrete (and concrete parts) and then transposing that idea into programming language in such a way that not only solves the problem, but also communicates clearly what the original intent/idea/solution is.
Little incentive? Even assuming sociopathic tendencies, it doesn't make sense to renege on the pledge and be branded a money-grubbing liar. The internet has a long memory, and people would not trust you in the future.
Are there any studies that associate telomere length with actual organism longevity in primates?
I don't think ad-hominem apply's when the counter argument is:

"The evolutionary phenomena championed by Laland and colleagues are already well integrated into evolutionary biology, where they have long provided useful insights."

AKA, sure what your saying is true, but these are old ideas.
Believe me I have seen the writing on the wall

example 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8314517

and 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8478953

I think your piece is very much on point although I only read 50% so far I will finish it and go through the code as well. It is well written and your arguments are solid.

The only thing is I disagree on one thing for server side code I think .NET will evolve and adapt.

On the client the war is over JavaScript has won, and its given us what .NET and Java promised all those years ago; true cross platform UI/client apps.
Seeing more and more thoughts be published like this in the last few months. It seems developer discontent might be growing with Apple.
It's hard for me to understand the whole soda phenomenon in Canada and the US. Is it as addictive as cigarettes? Does it make you crave for more? Or it simply tastes so good that you can't get enough of it? Why not eat a bunch of apples instead (if you don't care about the amount of sugar you consume)? Wouldn't they taste better?
It never completely did, and I certainly don't think it should. I was just referencing the similar arguments against systemd.
Well, you could use it for that in theory yes, though no one has tried yet as far as I know...
I didn't notice the effect until I scrolled back up and saw a jerky movement in the buildings. Then tried scrolling back down and up not getting it to work until I noticed it moved with the mouse movement not the scrolling.

I would consider redesigning it.
I sure hope so...
Quick Reference Guide to 500 Startups Batch 10 Demo Day
I got into Firebase because of Angular, and I am so far really happy with AngularFire. I am looking forward to even better symbiosis between the two! Especially considering all the serious vulnerabilities disclosed recently, I think a lot of people appreciate having a managed platform like Firebase to take care of the back end. AngularFire has the potential to become a significant standard if it continues on course.
This debate has been raging for the better part of two years and many of these alternatives didn't exist when it started. Really though, systemd has the momentum and I don't see anything else remaining a mainstream alternative unless it just emulates systemd's functionality.
Was it really profit motive that had them giving data to the DOD? Seems like it was more likely to do with legal pressures. I certainly don't know for sure but that would be my guess as evidenced by all that has come out over the last year with U.S. Govt. trying to force companies to give over their data.
>>>If that alone was the reason, then your interviewer did a bad job.

Then most, if not all these of recruiters are bad. I like to think through things and take time solving problems. If I see myself doing something and struggling to complete it, I haven't thought it out properly or I have rushed into the problem.

Some people will call you "slow" which I find insulting. For example, When I read a book I like to read the actual sentences rather than skimming over them. I like perfecting details and that sometimes takes time.
Another thing I also think they got right was sectioning content by the date. That essentially made me feel like I had to check everyday, since there was a completely new set of content each day for me to check out.
I presume this is supposed to appeal to the "i dont have any female friends because i am a nerd" crowd. Speaking from personal experience, this ends around 18-19 years of age. Unfortunately - in my opinion - at that age, an "average" guy can barely afford clothes, let alone a personal-shopper-girl he needs to pay money to for the privilege. For older guys, they almost certainly have a friend or a buddy's sister or whatever.

So, if the younger age group is in fact the target, would the girl also be of similar age? Otherwise, i dont see how a 25 year old can shop well for a 17 year old.

What is the ultimte goal here? to make guys more appealing to the opposite sex? Why not take them to a salon instead? A nice haircut and an eye brow plucking would go a long way for many.

Better yet, why not organize group movie dates or similar instead?

PS: Serious thoughts above - really...
Since I have a setup script I run on any new installation creating symlinks from my git repo isn't a big deal.

https://github.com/aclough/dotfiles/blob/master/setup.sh
Not really, I use a dozen init systems, each for a different situation, and I'm interested in keeping it that way. The problem is that systemd is that is being forcefully pushed to all distros. For instance, by merging udev with systemd.

Maybe those forks don't add nothing for you, but for me they're beneficial, because I think Darwinian evolution also applies to software.
I'd like to take that devil by the horns and strongly suggest that companies like Firebase, who clearly deliver a critical infrastructure dependency for anyone using their service, should open source their platform as an act of good faith toward their customers.

No one wants to run yet another cluster, but anyone with an eye to business continuity ought to want the assurance that they can migrate to and from their own servers if that need should arise.

That might not be in the short term interests of Firebase, but it's definitely in the long term interests of their customers. Why would anyone ever base the future of their own business on the exit needs of another company's investors? It is a ridiculous risk. As much as I love what Firebase has built, I'd never use it for anything more than a toy project for that exact reason.

Basho, ElasticSearch and Docker(?) seem to be on a good path with commercial open source models. Is there any reason that a startup like Firebase couldn't do both? Offer their open source product as a service with non-critical value adds? GitHub is another example that comes to mind. If they were to get bought and shut down, it would be a pain in the ass to set up new remotes, but no one would have to stop using git.
Vcsh: config manager based on Git
Remove metadata from JPGs with jhead
Pretty sure it's mostly due to marketing and also vertically integrated markets. You can't get away from soft drink advertising in the US. And the stuff is literally everywhere. In many (most?) restaurants, your beverage choices comprise soda and water.

I would not be surprised at all if soda alone accounted for a double-digit percentage of the obesity rate.
Manage Your Configs in git with vcsh
Seems likely. It's not like objective-c is closed to other people, and the extensions to Objective-C that Apple has made are open.

Swift and Objective-C are based on LLVM, which Apple has supported since very early on, and which is open sourced itself.

It would be kinda out of character for Apple (the real Apple not the boogeyman Apple which is mostly a straw man) to not release a programming language as open source.

Hell, the core of OS X (and iOS) is open source... they've only kept the UI layer closed source (notice Google has not open sourced their platform- map reduce, page rank, everything related to source they kept closed source. They only open sourced Android to try and be the Netscape Navigator to Apples Internet Explorer (iOS). Note that like Android, Navigator was free. Only after netscape ended did it become firefox, which is open source. Google shares android source, but to be official "Android" you have to license it from google, and that comes with a lot of requirements. So, Android is more properly understood as free)
I don't get why people tend to think that computer science is something different from "actual programming". In the end everything you can program can be expressed formally and vice-versa, the only thing that changes is how much you abstract from the actual implementation, which is handy in order to catch defects in the approach you are taking to certain problem.
>Does it make you crave for more? Or it simply tastes so good that you can't get enough of it?

Yes to both.

>Wouldn't they taste better?

No? This seems like a pretty bizarre question. People eat what they like. If apples tasted better (to them, it is subjective obviously) then they would be eating apples. I like coke, so I drink coke. I do not like apples, so I do not eat apples (unless they are in pie form).
I take offense at your gross misconceptions. JavaScript is by no means an "easy" language, certainly not orders of magnitude easier than whatever it is you do. The skills of a "JavaScript developer" include combining object-oriented and functional design patterns to organize a codebase, efficiently managing asynchronous communication and state, profiling and optimizing rendering and execution performance across the CPU and graphics card, designing and implementing for network security (including testing for HTTP headers, XSS, CSRF, etc.). What is it you do again?
and history.
Heavy sugar consumption actually does cause dependency. You are genetically hard wired to crave fats and sugars, and refined sugar interacts with the reward centers in your brain in a manner somewhat similar to cocaine.
Others working on systemd shims out of necessity is a sign, IMHO, that systemd is in reality a hard dependency in the near future (and developers trying to free from that dependency).
I don't say systemd is not useful, GNOME using it shows also to good sides of it, but others feeling a little forced to choose systemd or The Unix Way I think is the wrong way to do it. Why can't we have both(modern init system and unix philosophy)? Not possible? Not enough interest/resources?
Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos
Welll.... almost. Curation was done via a small group of friends. Much like Hacker News, not just anyone can come and join the fun. It's not as democratic as you might believe. Go submit your product and see if it's listed anywhere (even with 0 votes). Go login and try to comment.

Product Hunt basically captures the buzz of Silicon Valley. It does so very, very well. That's fine. I mean it's like the celebrity A list in a sense. We like looking at these things. However, let's just keep this in perspective here. It is strongly bias curation.

Whether that was something they got "right" remains to be seen. We'll see if that scales (I think the big question people have right now).
I have Lyme disease. Tick bite when I was 10 years old, finally discovered I have Lyme at age 26, after years of suffering and getting more symptoms year after year. I'm now at the beginning of a long term antibiotics course. After 2 months of antibiotics, my foggy brain is starting to clear up again... for one or two hours a day in the evening I can think & focus again. The rest of the day I'm useless.

So it seems 2 months isn't enough to get rid of all the nasty bacteria, let alone two weeks! Yes, long term antibiotics has it risks but I wouldn't call it stupid when there's no other choice.

Furthermore, every 2 months the doctor switches the antibiotics, prescribes refrigerated probiotics with trillions of living cells & does regular blood checks (also for yeasts).
You didn't answer his question, though. His question was whether COBOL was being used for new development. Is anyone, when writing a new program from scratch, doing so in COBOL? I hope not.
Not to mention it can cause diabetes and it's horrible for your teeth. For me, it also caused acne. Soda's really, really bad for you, and I think at this point it would be viewed the same way that smoking is viewed if it weren't for the fact that soda affects only the consumer whereas cigarettes produce second-hand smoke and a suffocating odor that fills the room.

Maybe 2050's Mad Men will shock its viewers with how office workers in 2000 drank soda in the office.

(This is coming from someone who used to drink soda on a daily basis. I learned to stop when I had to get a crown on a molar in my early 20s.)
Marketing combined with willful ignorance.
Did they describe how they controlled for behavioral habits? It seems like, as a group, the type of people who would drink large amounts of sugary soda would be less likely to make healthy behavioral choices in other aspects of their life, compared to people who drink fruit juice or diet soda. This could also explain the disparity between soda and non-carbonated sugar-sweetened beverages

This study doesn't seem to show that soda ages you (as the article states), but instead that sugary soda consumption indicates a tendency towards other activities/habits that may prematurely age you.
> The point is that energy expenditure is a function of foods eaten.

But there is a lower bound. If you carry some bags up the stairs, drink cold water and excrete warm sweat, inhale cold air and exhale hot there is some value of energy that you had to expend that's calculable by physics only.

Also energy intake is a function of lot's of stuff but it is not higher than the energy you could get from food by burning it (also calculated by physics or rather simple chemistry).

If you choose foods and activities so that there is a match between the upper bound of intake and lower bound of expenditure you will loose weight. That sounds like a sure recipe for weight loss for me.

> But they still don't address the psychological barriers of weight loss. People don't want to feel hungry, or cold, or exhausted. If they are required to do so to lose weight, it probably won't happen, as being too fat causes them less acute discomfort than the effort to not be too fat.

Yeah. You are right. But what makes me wonder is why gut reduction surgery works. If people physically can't eat as much as they are used to, they somehow magically are able to bear all the consequences of extremely low energy intake. They don't stuff themselves with pure sucrose and lard to maintain high calories at reduced volume.

> Give encouragement, not advice. Most of the time, a fat person knows exactly what he must do to not be fat.

Fortunately I don't know any fat people that I could hurt by my simplistic approach to what is for me almost purely intellectual problem.

What always made biggest difference for my weight was routine changes. Public transportation or cycling or walking instead of car for commuting, skipping the lunch, unsubscribing from meals cooked by my mom, not buying cheese. That's what I would advice. Skip some meals, change the way you usually move around.