skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My personal (limited) experience with FreeBSD vs my (extensive) experience with GNU/Linux:

FreeBSD pros:

Very stable

Excellent network support

Friendly, knowledgeable devs and tightly knit community

Runs most GNU/Linux apps via ports or jails, sometimes better than on Linux

Easy to learn given prior 'nix experience

FreeBSD cons:

Difficult to learn if you're new to the 'nix world

Smaller pool of compatible hardware[1]

The above has been my personal experience and obviously won't be the same for everyone. Also, I'm most comfortable with Slackware Linux, which is very BSD-like compared to other Linuxes, so that probably influences my point of view. Generally speaking, I like FreeBSD but I don't run it as a production machine (yet) since I'm happy with Slackware. Should that ever change (and there's only one reason it would, and that doesn't need to be rehashed here) I'd be able to switch to FreeBSD relatively easily.

Something else you might want to explore, as an easy introduction to FreeBSD, is PC-BSD. It takes FreeBSD and makes it much more user friendly, with a focus on being a GUI based desktop OS (though they do offer an alternate server installation as well).

[1] While the official list of compatible hardware is extensive, I've found in practice that certain COTS hardware simply doesn't work well with FreeBSD. I've even had professional workstations like a Lenovo ThinkCentre refuse to boot the installation media, throwing a kernel panic instead. I've also had poor luck with cheap motherboards. Generally, my best experiences with installing and running FreeBSD have been on Dell and HP workstations, and on quality motherboards from companies like Gigabyte and ECS.
People like to skin OSs in general because they want to change the appearance to something they like, while preserving the other familiar parts of the OS; I've seen Windows made to look like Mac OS, for example. Linux systems can be made to look (and behave) like any other OS, with enough customisation. It's understandable that people like the look of Android, but they don't want to deal with the rest of the Android ecosystem.
SIGSEGV

Not a "failure" of the libc call per se and it terminates the caller app which, frankly, is the only safe thing to do.

The Linux equivalent, while it can fail could be wrapped in a libc version that emulates arc4random behaviour (provide random or kill the app really.)
Memcached is a cache. Redis is a remote system for storing data structures.
>On the other hand, I do love how small and unassuming a basic Linux installation is

There is no "basic linux installation". Every distro is its own thing. Size seems like a really odd thing to bring up since every mainstream linux distro's "basic" installation is larger than the full OS of any of the four BSDs.
> I mean I'm a Unix guy at heart and I'm typing this on a Windows laptop. I've never used Linux on the desktop and probably never will.

Then you're not really a Unix guy at heart.

At home, all I run is Linux, including the laptop my non-geeky wife uses.

For me it was a hard choice. I knew she would object because it would be "different" and she's not really interested in learning a gazillion different computing-systems, but on the flip side it meant it was simpler, quicker and less work for me to maintain the computers at home.

Once setup things just work, and ensuring everything (including flash and other vulnerability vectors) is up to date is one apt-get upgrade away.
My summary/option: Technical leaders should be front-running the team so that, when less experienced engineers run into problems, the technical leader knows in what direction to point the team to find the solution to the problem.

Having technical leaders stuck on legacy Sisyphean tasks (a) sucks up the time that should be used front-running the team for solutions to future problems and (b) removes opportunities for less experienced engineers to learn new ideas and skills, hindering their education and development.
Why do you call his attitude seriously bad? I agree with him, portability leads to complexity and therefore isn't worth it when you are trying to move fast. You may disagree that OSS should move fast, of course, but why should you want to slow down others?

Free software doesn't need to even support free operating systems, for that matter. I'm sure that there are Windows-only apps that are F/OSS, though I don't know of any off-hand. Of course the systemd developers don't need to support any other OS to write "Free Desktop" software, any more then the FreeBSD developers shouldn't feel compelled to port their filesystems, init-system, or anything else to Linux.
I can't speak to AWS and GCE since I don't use them (or freebsd for that matter), but the DO for BSDs is vultr.
Here's a couple:

https://www.cloudsigma.com/landing/freebsd-cloud-hosting/

https://www.rootbsd.net/
Yes, that is what it says on paper, but I would submit that both 5.x and 7x were essentially EOL the day they came out.

Since 4.x there has been a huge focus on the upcoming releases. By the time the x.0 release comes out, all of the cool kids are working hard on x+1 and x+2 - you saw this especially during 8.0 and 8.1 when a lot of mailing list chatter from core developers revolved around nitty gritty details of 10.x.

By the time 7.1 came out (for instance) all new driver bug fixes, etc., stopped being applied to the 7 tree and the answer to every question was "it will be in (8/9)".

I do appreciate the fact that an 8.4 was created - it's a step in the right direction and a sign of some real understanding of the problems the end users are having with an inability to invest in FreeBSD and make long-term plans with their own platforms.

However, I still would like to see a release ... any release ... get to x.10 or x.11 - like 4 did. I even committed $50k to that end a few years ago (although I suppose that's small fries these days :)

If people would like to know my specific critiques, there was a long mailing list discussion in 2012:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-Janu...
Oh my gosh yes. I can't imagine anyone with JKH's particular type of cred in the Unix arena, who could more convincingly sell me on such a service. He cofounded such an iconic traditional *nix environment, and then spent years presiding over the technical direction of the internals for OSX.

I like to think JKH has already seen the future at Apple in terms of what worked, and what could have been improved. That JKH is back to working more closely on FreeBSD is exciting.
The Phi is SIMD with a thin memory hierarchy. So it's not really that different from a GPU...it definitely isn't general purpose.
I absolutely love what you have done with the site, with the exception of the colors chosen. IMO the dark scheme is not pleasant to look at. Just read https://medium.com/@erikdkennedy/7-rules-for-creating-gorgeo... the other day, it was a wonderful piece on aesthetics (read Part 1 first).

It seems the LinkedIn data scraper has problems with people out of the US. It fails to read my city and country.

I really REALLY like the game-ified intro. Are you using a library for those effects or are they developed inhouse? (if library: which one?)
Investigative Report on Benghazi Attacks, September 11-12, 2012
The Google+ page says they need to come up with a new name because it conflicted with the Quartz graphics stack name used by OS X. This might be why everything is taken down.
Actually, KDE made KHTML (for the Konqueror web browser), which was then used by Apple to create and evolve WebKit, and you know the story from there. But KHTML wasn't just a code name for WebKit, it actually came from outside Apple.
Freebsd has this Quickstart Guide for Linux Users[1] which is somewhat helpful.

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/linux-users/
Nanorobotics
Why does an electic skateboard need 2kW motors when motorized bicycles work just fine up to 18mph with 250W of support?
I had a typing class in my US high school, so I doubt it is uncommon (though this was in the early 90s on PC JRs).
But KHTML always referred to itself as 'KHTML, like Gecko' to ensure people sniffing for Gecko would be displaying the same HTML for KHTML as Gecko. This is why 'Gecko' remains in all major browsers.

Edit: Apparently Internet Explorer also has 'like Gecko'.
This dd(1) command line would get 1 block of 4 bytes from the /dev/random file and output it to stdout. Effectively the same as a call to arc4random():

dd if=/dev/random count=1 bs=4

On Linux, you'd use /dev/urandom cause /dev/random blocks stupidly.
What is Cryptoequity?
BSD is often just a little bit different. Hard to be unbiased. Some people prefer GNU make, some like bsdmake.

- kqueue is a very powerful event loop similar to epoll [1]

- the FreeBSD ports collection is very simple to use as far as compiling from source goes. I only really prefer Debian's apt-get and Gentoo's emerge

- the FreeBSD Handbook is a very well-maintained text [2]. I freely admit OpenBSD has the best man pages ever written, but the Handbook is good too. Not bleeding-edge talk like the gentoo-wiki or archwiki, just reliable information.

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=kqueue&sektion=2

[2] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/
So your contention is that there is no basic installation... followed by the assertion that the basic installation, which does not exist, is larger than that of any BSD. Sorry, I'm going to have a hard time taking this seriously. And, frankly, your statement about the "full OS" is meaningless, as unless you consider the "full OS" to be only the base system, it includes every possible package, which very obviously is NOT going to be smaller than anything you could consider a basic Linux installation.

I meant small in terms of packages. The kernel, a shell, and not much else unless you specify it. Obviously you will specify something else, but the point was that I'm used to specifying exactly what else I want, so I have that habit to break/relearn.

The point you ignored or missed is that as a Linux user with no BSD exposure there's a basic difference in philosophy that creates several kinds of tradeoffs that I find compelling and interesting. I'm not "bringing up" anything in terms of absolute pros and cons, I'm highlighting what I consider noteworthy differences in terms of learning more about things I have not used.
DoulCi Download Activation
Great anecdote about the perils of mgmt. But I think it shows that management in an org or sub-org that has a terrible culture is ... terrible.

I've been in and out of management, and how awful it is comes down to who's above you. I've had upper mgmt that was mercurial and weird, but ultimately fair and supportive when the chips were really down. Result: stress but no bullshit.

I've had upper mgmt that was "cool" and had me over to their $3m vaca house and threw great parties. When the shit hit the fan, things were weird, uncertain. In the end I was thrown under the bus. Result: foreground "mellow", background stress, bad outcome.

Whether or not I bought donuts for my directs had nothing to do with it. My approach toward employees was 1) service 2) work queue mgmt 3) technical mentorship. In so far as I stayed on the ball this worked out fine. Most issues were my mistakes, not some horrible political gaming fail.
I have access to manage them, however the private keys are either in various services or non exportable with AWS...
It's not the same mess as in JavaScript because we have checked mode which enforces the types at runtime. Combined with the static warnings we find this to be very, very effective.

I hope you don't just leave warnings in your project :) but if during development you want to try some code path you're pretty sure will work while you have fixed up other paths that have warnings, you should be able to. The philosophy is to make as many errors happen at runtime rather than "compile" time so that you can continue to work with out always having to satisfy the type checker across your whole program. This is one of the productivity advantages of dynamically typed languages. We feel that the combination of dynamic types and checked mode gives you the best of both worlds.
Actually, first there was NCSA Mosaic which came out almost a full two years before Netscape Navigator. The first 6 versions of IE were also based on Mosaic.
I don't blizzard set out to do it, but by offering pvp/pve/rp servers and separating players they finally hit on the one thing many MMOs were missing.

Safety. You were safe to play without having other people purposefully ruin your game play. In UO it was PvP, in EQ it was training mobs, and there were means in other games as well, where a person could interrupt another endlessly.

Was it a step back in some cases? Sure, I came from Asheron's Call, you could pvp, pvp lite, or just pve. Yet it was such an open and expansive world filled with housing of all sorts that WOW initially felt like a step backward (zones? Really???). Yet WOW made sure you knew what you were supposed to be doing.

cater to causals and cater to hard cores (even water cooler types) and they pretty much covered the two markets needing to be served. One thing MMO companies over estimate; at least for Western markets;is the desire for PvP. Oh initially you will find games that offer both server types with populations nearly split but age and the PvP ones fall by the wayside.

People will accept guidance, but mostly they want a safe and fun experience. Safe meaning other people cannot just ruin your day.
I enjoyed this article. It was quite different than what I expected.

By lost languages, I expected something along the lines of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) or another protolingual system, which would be so cool to have left some markers on our brains.

Here's an example of how PIE possibly sounded: How to Speak Proto-Indo-European http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jlcV7DYL3o

Does anyone know if there are vestigial neuronal constructs, similar to vestigial organs or genes, which could help us better understand our languages' origins through brain imaging studies? See also: Murray Gell-Mann: The ancestor of language http://www.ted.com/talks/murray_gell_mann_on_the_ancestor_of...
JSON is clunky, it's true, but it has advantages. It's very, very widely supported. There is no format versioning, there are no dialects, there is only One True JSON. It's incredibly minimal and supports no more, and no less, than it needs to.

It's not perfect, but it's a very good choice.
But what UA did Mosaic use?
Has a lot of spelling mistakes, guess they were rushing to get it done before lunch!
As an indie kid-friendly app developer with iOS and Android apps - don't do Android. You'd be much better off financially doing another iOS app.
I have few experience with Linux distros other than Ubuntu, so I'm only comparing FreeBSD with Ubuntu. Linux distros are so diverse I don't think you can just compare all of them with FreeBSD anyway.

I have both FreeBSD servers and Ubuntu servers. Thing I like the most with FreeBSD is its further separation (compared with Ubuntu) of OS (kernel and world) from third-party software.
In Ubuntu every package comes in multiple versions for different releases, in FreeBSD there's only one version.

There's no "because I want git 1.8 so I have to upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04", in FreeBSD you can install the latest version of git on all supported OS versions. (In my experience even a slightly outdated OS version can run latest third-party software quite smoothly)

Software in FreeBSD Ports (its system getting third-party software) catch up with upstream releases very quickly. You might think they have less testing than that is in Ubuntu/Debian, but I don't know if it's really the case. Though I rarely encounter bugs with these cutting-edge software in FreeBSD.

I speak mainly from the experience with Ubuntu, I'm not so familiar with other Linux distros.
We'd all be better off if they just stopped sending the UA string altogether
The majority of Utah residents, like 90%, live in urban and suburban areas. It is not a particularly rural state.
Because he's a developer for more than Linux services, he's also a developer for software like PulseAudio, which is supposedly meant to be kernel-agnostic. That is why I said Free Desktop software, not Free software. If he wants to restrict his viewpoint to the Linux kernel, that's his problem, but if he does, then he needs to stop pretending that he cares about Free Desktop environments and state that he's a Linux Desktop developer.
I honestly thought that was already the case. In fact, much of what the speaker wants are things that play catch-up.

- An automated dependency-driven and parallel init system → launchd, systemd

- An event notification system → notify, DBus

- Virtualization: VMWare for Mac, I guess, docker (LXC) for Linux

- Battery / ARM: a painful change for MacOS X first, then for Linux (when Android fought to improve it)

- Configuration: Mac is stuck with plist/xml (which, at this stage, is both a pro (single system) and a con (awkward system)), Linux is sadly behind. Having a configuration system is hard because many programs that want configuration wish to have a Turing complete one.

- GPLv3… well, MacOS X is actually behind on this one.
Skateboards apparently have a much higher rolling resistance than bicycles:
http://books.google.be/books?id=0JJo6DlF9iMC&lpg=PA162&ots=T...
It's not so much his opposition to portability that bothers me personally, which I personally disagree with and think that it should be strived for to a reasonable degree.

Rather, it's his patently false and almost obnoxiously smug view of the BSDs as these slow-moving operating systems that simply follow Linux's trail, and his deeper implications of forking being negative and that Linux should play a game of catching up against OS X and Windows instead of doing its own thing.

Then his reasoning against portability seems self-defeating. He says that "i need to reach customers using windows" is a good reason, in which case you can substitute "windows" with any OS and have a purportedly valid reason for portability.

Not living in an arrogant monoculture that seriously believes you're leading the pack and everyone else is biting your dust sounds like another good reason.
It's questionable whether it's worth doing an iPhone version. Most iPad kid apps aren't but I think this one might be worth it, since it appeals to more adults as well. The ability to make ringtones adds a lot of phone appeal too. Certainly much easier and financially rewarding than doing an Android version.
I don't think patting people on the back is useful but if you really want to help him build something awesome, be specific.

Your buttons are ugly because they are too small, the text is hard to read and the back button is actually slightly wider than the next button, even though they are joined together. Back is also red which tends to denote a destructive action that cannot be undone, a yellow might be better.

^ that is feedback. Saying your buttons are ugly is not helpful feedback.
You need to take a few steps back to fully understand the so called systemd controversy.

1) A number major commercial UNIX vendors have moved in the direction dumping the old startup scripts in favor of something more explicit and declarative. This isn't just engineering for engineering's sake, major corporations have customers with needs. Redhat and company are no different.

2) It's incredibly easy to be vocal. What's really lacking is a compelling alternative. The most vocal opposition have made anonymous web sites, have made tons of noise but done very very little in the way of actually solving the problem, many even refuse to acknowledge them.

It's really easy to think it's a civil war of sorts but the reality is it's mostly just a very vocal group that are against it, and FWIW, they don't seem to contribute that much. The BSD world has had it's share of these too, it's just a more dramatic fork when you startup OpenBSD project or NetBSD or DragonFly or one of the more minor forks.

Openness means you get to see the bad as well as the good, the decision. A very vocal group of folks were crapping on GNOME 3 when it came out, now it's good. If you think systemd was contentious, while I love the idea of unifying configurations, just wait until that debate starts... It's probably not possible to represent all of the different things that the "tower of bable" has without a nightmarish XML schema, if it can be done. I welcome the ideas though, especially if FreeBSD get's serious about mobile and power, there will certainly be some interesting stuff.
> This is a course of action, Hamilton said laughing, where people “would get you a doctor and put you in a nice little room where you were safe and you can’t hurt anyone.”

On a much much much smaller scale, this is also what I'm working on during my current sabbatical:
https://ripe69.ripe.net/archives/video/177/

I thought it may be relevant to post, as we our code is under GPL and willing to collaborate with anyone.
Is there any way to replace the Google logo with this? I'm not sure I could live without the recent thumbnail page on a new tab. Regardless, I love the idea.
I don't know who this is for but it's not for me. I need to be around to review pull requests and stuff. Sounds nice though
Wait what? You are stating an Ubuntu thing about versions that are non-specific to Linux and to a Distro.

Rolling release distros (Arch Linux, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, and Gentoo. n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_release

I like BSD but I prefer Linux BOTH are good. BSD is just a different flavor of NIX.
Show HN: Exoplanet Birthdays
Pointless cached version without the pretty pictures: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ypB2BA-...
The linked pdf is of chapters 3 and 4, but chapters 1 and 2 are also
available:

http://inside.mines.edu/~tkaiser/csci580fall13/one-day-1.pdf

All the other files from "Advanced High Performance Computing CSCI 580"
class also look interesting:

http://inside.mines.edu/~tkaiser/csci580fall13/
The culture is different. The most noticeable thing is of course simply size. FreeBSD is by far the largest of the BSDs, but it is a much smaller community than Linux. That means that it is easier to get involved, easier to follow what is going on - eg look at the commit log[1] - you can follow it pretty well, vs the Linux commits where each is a large merge of a nested set of commits[2].

Sometimes small size means things can change faster, eg NetBSD has had 64 bit time_t since 2012, while 32 bit Linux still has no roadmap to fix this (the BSDs are also have a different compatibility model). Other times it of course means that less is done and things take longer. You will often hear people say the BSDs are better designed, as perhaps prioritising limited resources leads to more design, or maybe there are just fewer people who need to solve a problem fast but not so well.

Including (some) userspace means that the tools are less bloated than the GNU ones which were designed pre Linux as portable tools, before the Gnu project had a kernel - remember GNU was the cathedral in the cathedral and the bazaar.

[1] https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/commits/master

[2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commits/master
Do they support NaCl and WebRTC and WebGL and WineVine DRM like Chrome, now that they stuff "Chrome" in their User-Agent? If not, what happens if a site (poorly) detects these features from the user agent?
biggest one is increasing connascence

Is that a valid argument? IMO, keyword arguments are just making it explicit.
You can use a different dummy subdomain as the first entry to issue another cert, adding the subdomains you really want as secondaries. See https://kuix.de/blog/index.php?entry=entry140827-231120
Mixed Feelings about W3C's Push API
http://www.w3.org/TR/push-api/

It an "open" standard, but still appears it will rely on Google's GCM, and Apple's APNS. Is this true? Or have I misinterpreted?
Show HN: Record camera snapshots securely to the cloud using HTML5/WSS