skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With the caveat that I haven't kept up closely with systemd

1. It is attempting to unify a bunch of previously disconnected functionality into a single program. Typically unix is composed of small single-purpose utilities that perform a single function, rather than a giant monolithic blob of code (with obvious exceptions, like emacs).

2. Partially because it has been around for so long and has so much history, and partially because it follows a unix tradition of using plain text configuration and shell scripting to solve problems.

3. The systemd folks believe that sysv init isn't capable of doing things that are important to modern systems (ex. dependencies between services, reacting to devices coming and going, intelligent daemon management, etc), and that doing those things correctly requires that an init system be 'more' than people previously thought it needed to be. They are also very....confident in their ideas, and don't hesitate to re-implement functionality (like logging) if it makes is easier to interoperate with their other code.

People opposed to systemd believe that it is too complex for such a critical piece of system functionality. They also resent the fact that systemd seems to require tight coupling to the rest of the system, and that it is aggressively pushing into so many linux systems. Many of them also probably have a long history with sysv init, and are comfortable with the way that it works. (Some portion also probably recall pulseaudio, which had similar grand visions, was similarly aggressively pushed into use before it was fully baked).

4. I think 1-3 probably cover most of this.
Yes I have. And Rawstudio. And Raw Therapee. And while darktable is the fastest evolving one it's still not close enough. But I'm keeping tabs on it. Lightroom is slowing down and to be honest it's way past the diminishing returns elbow at this point so maybe next year. I no longer do photography professionally so it's less and less of an issue.
You're misunderstanding the question. What you're asking is "how do I find a problem?". Answer: get a job. Automate it. (???)?
Some people don't like it per se, but mainly what they don't like is that it's going to be the only viable init system in Debian, since many maintainers don't have any intention to support the others.
> All businesses are subject to market forces and cannot sustain a monopoly

This is a very old view of free market, and perhaps only the proponents of classic economics can agree with you. Market forces have a natural tendency for monopoly, which is why monopoly laws are needed in the first place. For example, oil companies and ISPs are all monopolies naturally formed.

Now, the IT companies may be different. As you say, the technology in this area advances so rapidly that a monopoly at one time soon becomes irrelevant at another time. Still a monopoly Microsoft is in the area of desktop operating system, but the power of such monopoly has faded away.

But I don't think the European regulators would take this into account.
Some hardware is well supported by Linux, some is not. Same with Windows, though most vendors support Windows if they support anything on x86. But it's not always that clear-cut. Particularly on laptops, if you diverge from the OEM-included drivers you can have issues. I had a Dell laptop that I obtained second-hand, and I reinstalled my employer's stock Windows 7 ISO on it. It randomly blue-screened even with the latest appropriate graphics drivers, until I went back to the Dell website and found the exact version of the driver needed for that laptop.

FWIW OpenBSD, which I had installed on another partition, ran flawlessly with the exception of suspend/resume. This was a couple of years ago, I think there have been improvements since then.
Not sure you're caught up... http://clojure.org/

It's not the most popular language, but it's well respected for exactly the reasons you say LISP died out.
Probably something like this

https://xkcd.com/705/
This is an excellent attitude to have and may be the only healthy attitude.

As opposed to the conventional wisdom, which wants us to Never Settle by keeping on jumping between things, reading broadly and pretending you are a coding god after reading all the X vs Y articles, never building up enough expertise in any one thing, while holding out for that one gig that will hit the spot.

And Just Getting It To Work as is commonly understood really translates to Do a Shoddy Job So It Looks Good On The Surface, Fuck Understanding Or Actually Getting It To Really Work.
Can you give examples of the most important ones? Are there any that are technical rather than philosophical?
I take issue with the idea that if every developer was pulling in the same direction we would be somewhere better than where we are now.

I view the diversity and freedom in Foss projects as a feature, not a bug.

First off, assuming you got a group of people together who agree that they should all pull in the same direction, who gets to decide which direction that is? Why that person, and not this person? Secondly, speaking for myself only, being told to work on projects I'm not interested in will produce sub par work and will drain my motivation to both work with that team and the project itself.

Everyone has a different idea on what it would take to get to the Year Of The Linux Desktop, call me when you reach consensus on what exactly the requirements for that project are. Not to be cynical but reaching consensus seems like the biggest blocker, the fact that there are people pulling in multiple directions I think is a symptom of this problem.
That's an ideal scenario, though, that implies that all of your view/controller/model through-lines can be isolated vertically from each other. In fact, controllers often coordinate the actions of multiple models to achieve higher-level objectives, and it's at this point that the relatively greater cohesiveness of layers versus features becomes apparent.
Servies – a bash micro-framework
Nightingale [1] is a community-supported fork of Songbird (development of songbird is discontinued).
It has a bar-like "mini player" mode. Size and functionality (and availability) of that mode depend on the skin selected, but in general there are buttons for prev,pause,next track, volume control, current trackname, length and current position. It does not have a separate playlist though, but double clicking it brings you back to the itunes-like "main player" mode.

The mini player is still somewhat bulky, for my taste. I remember Songbird had some skins, that made it even slimmer. I fixed this for me with a small AutoIT script, that fades the player to 10% transparancy when the mouse is not hovering on top of it.

[1] http://getnightingale.com/
Those are good questions, but answering them won't fit in a comment. It takes more like a book.

One of the best books on the Unix philosophy is "The Art of Unix Programming", which is available for free. (I recommend getting a hard copy and reading the whole thing.)

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/

Other books include The Unix Programming Environment by Pike et. al., though it's less explicit about the philosophy.

Here's one part of the argument: systemd breaks the Unix design style because it's monolithic: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html#id2...

But then systemd developers claim it's not monolithic because it's actually composed of multiple processes. They say there is a misconception that all code is contained in PID 1. There are many executables and many processes, so they would say systemd is modular.

But the problem is that all the binaries are released together, without well-defined interfaces. Moreover they are also tightly coupled to kernel features.

If you have 2 binaries A and B, but the interfaces between them is not documented or stable, then it's not really modular, because you can't write your own B' to work with A or A' to work with B.

The recent thread here about dbus is a good example. Traditional Unix is simple text protocols. dbus is this weird text/binary RPC-ish mix which is not documented.

There are lots of other issues with systemd and the Unix philosophy, but that should give you a flavor.
These problems you describe aren't present for the people being asked to solve the problem, so they don't volunteer their time to fix it.

In my experience they aren't even problems for beginner computer users or people who don't need to unlearn Windows/Mac-isms post Ubuntu and modern hardware detection.

edit: I should add, I'm not saying a project solving these problems wouldn't be popular among users or generally great for Gnu/Linux as a whole, I'm explaining why it's not popular among potential developers. And when you aren't working in a market capitalism framework a large number of potential non-contributing users isn't enough to get things done.
Could you recommend some? "Google it" is a non-answer.
Is that fee that bad compared to companies that are doing exactly this? I assume places like HomeJoy and Handy have greater than 20% margins on the services they sell. So if all the service providers start using this instead of Handy they would see an effective increase in their income.
Good luck trying to ban that, the Chinese seem to love puns. It will be probably as successful as smoking bans, or getting people to follow traffic rules.

However it looks to me that this has been blown out of proportion. Just guessing from the quotes they gave, they want to stop sloppy use of language in media, so kids don't pick up the wrong phrases. Imagine a news anchor saying "for all intensive purposes", or someone in a medical show talking about "old-timers' disease" or "high pertention". If it's clearly a joke, it's one thing, but if it's ignorance or sloppyness, then I'm sure its frowned upon here too.
Congrats for bringing this to the world. A few questions:

1. Are you doing the encryption in a browser plugin?

2. How do you send the email without learning who the recipient is? Are you saving it on the server, thus not using SMTP, and then requiring both the sender and recipient to be users of Scryptmail?
I read about half of "The Score Takes Care Of Itself" by Bill Walsh on a flight a few weeks back, and it makes me question your reasoning.

It sounded like the team that Bill Walsh coached was playing an (at the time) similarly unloved playing style, and didn't have the favored players in the NFL (especially before the winning began), but (supposedly, I don't know anything about NFL) Joe Montana is now seen as one of the best quarterbacks, despite not being well suited to other teams' strategies.

In that sense the full court press sounds like a similar strategy to the west coast offence where you can take what are otherwise seen as poor players and transform a sport by taking championships.
I haven't used systemd yet, but I'm concerned about having to learn a completely new way of doing things. I manage a number of servers, and it would be a huge inconvenience figuring out systemd. The old way works fine for me. Unfortunately most of the servers I work with are CentOS, and it seems Redhat has switched to systemd so I'm not entirely sure what I'll do in future. I guess now I have another option.
This is very interesting that I found out about this on HN. I just told my family and they were all surprised. It goes to show how diverse HN may be. I have seen the cartoon version of the show playing recently. When I was a kid it was "Chavo del ocho" and "Cantinflas" on tv, both really Mexican comedians who have infiltrated all latin america. Only followed by "Sabado Gigante"'s Don Francisco.
Suck at arithmentic. But this took me 20 seconds to write.

setInterval(function(){ $("#question-answer").val(eval($("#question").text())).trigger("keyup") }, 2001);
No, no, no. Stupid name.

In the name of tradition, you want a name which is an acronym that says "is not that other thing" or something like that and is perhaps infinitely recursive.

How about WildOS?

"WildOS is like Debian, omitting systemd"

Or some other "-ild" word besides "wild". Gild? Mild?

Definitely not DildOS though. :)

Debrogas:

"Debian rid of gnome and systemd"

Retains the Latin flavor of Devuan, in any case.

Rejected bloopers, from my personal cutting room floor:

BSDOS:

"Because systemd, of course, sucks"

Windows:

"What-I-need Debian: out with systemd"

# # #

However, in the end, I think a really good name for this fork would be:

Defiant!

But: not pronounced like the word "defiant" but with emphasis on the first syllable, so it sounds like debian: 'DE-fih-ənt.

"What are you running on that server?"

"Defiant six dot three!"

"What? Debian?"

"No, Defiant! D-E-F-I-A-N-T, spelled like the word defiant."

I love this one. It captures defiance (getting upset and making a fork), sounds indistinguishable from Debian when uttered by a drunk hacker through a G.711 ULAW speech codec, and has an unusual pronunciation so we can endlessly correct people who just say "de-FIE-unt", who instantly identify themselves as not-in-the-know outsiders. Remember all the fun with Lie-nucks versus Lee-nucks versus Li-nucks.

Lastly:

Deviant

(Also pronounced differently to sound like Debian.) PRO: changes only one letter in Devuan, and deletes one. CON: less abrasive than Defiant. It's deviant because it's forked; it deviates from some originally intended path.
Linux doesn't dominate the mobile environment. A very specific port of it, by Google, does.

Given that it's Google, that's hardly a compelling argument. They could've made Windows NT dominant if they'd so desired.
That site does seem to show an odd disconnect, it seems to mention "init-freedom" alongside "...the first goal of removing systemd...". Surely true "init-freedom" would be to give the end user a choice between sysvinit, bsd init, sysmtemd, launchd, android's init, and so on.

Of course such true init-freedom would be near impossible. IMO people should just pick one, forking appropriately, and stop having such huge arguments over something the average user neither knows nor cares about. Just call Devuan the sysvinit fork of Debian and see how it goes...
I don't see why meditation needs to be associated with relaxation, at all. Meditation (at least as I understand it) is giving your conscious mind absolute concentration on a simple thing or task, so as to give quiet and calm to the rest of your mind. One of the places I try to practice this is on my motorcycle. I give absolute attention to the act of motorcycling, paying attention to every little detail, until the background threads of my mind stop singing stupid songs and asking dumb questions. Nothing to do with relaxation. It's actually a lot of work.
Nightmares of Java, .NET and Perl
His shows where well written, clever, entertaining and quietly delivered a strong social message about poverty and social disparities in latin america.. all while being really, really contagiously funny.

Many of his funny lines are now part of the daily latin popular culture.

Take care Chavo, say hi to Don Ramon up there..
I fear we'll meet in the middle. China is getting more and more (economically) open, and captialist. At the same time, western governments have acquired a taste for surveillance and authoritanism. As if people were trying to get the worst from both systems...
This. I'm not saying modern Windows is fault free. It may have an inconvenient user interface for some things, it may not always do the thing you want it to etc. but it never fails to boot, everything but Apple hardware runs it flawlessly and it has a massive third-party software selection.

For me, though, Ubuntu's user interface is just so much more convenient for programming and the other things I do that I manage with debugging the occasional failure to boot, install etc., but that's because I have unusual priorities and good google-fu.
"Think of the children!" Whether it's for backdoors to your data in the cloud or facial recognition, protecting the children is ALWAYS what governments claim they need the tech for. Their track record is terrible, almost always using it for control and surveillance.

I want to see cameras on every police officer in every city, before even considering more giving them more surveillance technology.
And Pandoc is great (but not perfect) for two way conversions to/from various formats now that it supports org files.

I still keep all my stuff in org files, but it's only fair to warn people that these don't work very well as a format when sharing those files with people of arbitrary technical knowledge.
This seems dangerous. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it incredibly unsafe to run most standard nix packages on untrusted inputs?
Yeah, I can't imagine someone who's proficient with Scala seeing anything special in Clojure. I'm just a sight-seer in those languages, but I can see there are some neat things in both.

Parenthesis are always offputting to me, even though I like a fair amount of clojure concepts. I often feel like functional programming has made a cottage industry around putting obfuscated names around relatively simple ideas (see transducers for example)
This is a disingenuous presentation, though I would not expect any different from a systemd proponent, or opponent, for that matter. I wrote about the follies of systemd debates here: http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/

The speed benefits come at the trade-off of integration complexity potentially diminishing them: http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Optimizations/

Whether or not it is easier to maintain cannot really be objectively gauged. As for declarative configuration, I will grant that. systemd is not the first to do this on Linux, though. eINIT was, though it used XML as its configuration language (similar to launchd and SMF in fact, though not as verbose). eINIT also had the benefit of a modular plugin-based architecture, a property also shared by finit and initng.

Change does not imply progress. This should go without saying.

No, a lot of objectors simply come from having different opinions on process management and general software architectures. That said, there is a contingent who did approve of the old approaches, yes. I dislike sysvinit, but I can understand them. Serial execution with a concretely defined boot sequence that is easy to reason about can be a benefit to some. In contrast, the systemd approach eschews any definition of "boot process" or "boot sequence" that can be specifically intervened in by order, instead taking the philosophy that specifying a unit's dependencies and relative order to a target/synchronization point is enough, the rest being handled by internal transaction and job semantics.

systemd most certainly is monolithic. It is also modular, but to a partial extent. System generators and various auxiliaries (journald, but also some of the more minor tooling) cannot be disabled at build time. Certain things like Plymouth communication are also explicitly done at runtime.

launchd as a whole is still a much smaller system than systemd, at the end of the day. This is because launchd has a concretely defined purpose. systemd has little in the way of that other than vague descriptions that ultimately amount to being "as much as possible between the kernel and base libs+utils".
I recently moved to San Francisco for a software engineering position. So I am clearly "part of the problem" more than I am "part of the solution". I lived in Philadelphia previously and the homelessness in San Francisco has been absolutely shocking to me. I don't live in a great area (near 6th street) so I really see some of the least fortunate people in the city.

If I had real problem-solving money (think Bill Gates) I'd go for homelessness first. I think that as a nation we have a fundamental duty to make sure that everyone gets basic comforts like shelter, heat, food, and water. I hate that I am paid a high salary to flip bits on a computer while there are people a block from my house sleeping on the sidewalk in the rain.

That said, I don't really understand why this all has to be portrayed as a phenomenon caused by the influx of tech workers into SF and the Bay Area. Tens of thousands of people move in and get jobs paying $80-200k. They all pay very high taxes. Why can't the local government take that revenue and help those who need it? Why can't the expanded tax base be part of the solution for the problem? It seems crazy to me that it's a "problem" that so many people are moving to one area for high paying jobs. That sounds like high economic production and many cities would love to have that "problem".

As an individual I am horrified by my inability to help the homeless while people like me are portrayed as villains in the media. I wish there was something I can do. I donate to youth services and homelessness-centered charities but I know that's not going to fix things (it never has). I don't see anything that can be done but the local government stepping up and making serious changes that will stabilize the housing market and help those who are already on the streets get into a better situation. I'm not an expert on the topic so I don't have specific suggestions here.

That was a bit of a rant and I don't have much advice to offer. I just think we are looking at this all in the wrong way. There is now a lot of money in the area and huge economic growth. Let's use this to improve the lives of everyone, not just people like me who learned JavaScript at the right time.
On the one hand, this seems wildly misguided; the Debian distribution for people who don't want to run systemd is still just Debian, and that'll remain the case through at least jessie, and for as long as people continue putting effort into keeping it working. So it's sad that the effort going into this fork doesn't instead go into maintaining the necessary infrastructure in Debian. I'm sure the maintainers of systemd-shim and cgmanager would welcome additional contributors.

On the other hand, perhaps this will provide a more useful outlet for the set of people who keep claiming they'd use a fork if available, so that they can actually go use one and stop griping on Debian mailing lists.

Nope, sorry, couldn't keep a straight face while saying that.
> Perhaps it can made into a lessons learned (yet another one) for high up government officials.

I'd be much more interested in comparatively low level people, maybe a team lead or something? I feel the exact same way -- how could someone not be genuinely curious about this type of thing? But I'm a little weary of getting a 'series of tubes' style answer from someone (see the White House response to Healthcare.gov as perhaps a best-reasonably-likely-case scenario -- it didn't foul up the explanation completely but also didn't really speak to the details in any way that you or I would like).
I take issue with your hypothesis.

Tablets and chromebooks have already been around for several years. Why do I still use a desktop for work? Why don't I just ssh everywhere from my eyepad?

Because they suck at making me productive.

Desktops and actual laptops are not going anywhere, because they run fully featured OSs that people can contribute to, not some nasty walled garden of corporate shrink-wrapped ToS turds and ignored pull requests (if you're so lucky to even come within barfing distance of a FOSS component on lobotomy-hardware).

Look, IBM started predicting the death of the desktop, what, 20 years ago? 30? It's not going to happen. Then laptops came around. They're gonna kill the desktop! O noes! Not gonna happen. Ultrabooks are gonna kill laptops! Yeah, maybe.. Depends on how much they wind up resembling good laptops.

Starts to sound pretty familiar after a while.
I'm arguing that a truly effective meritocratic system should be able to recognize merit that might be hidden by the kinds of social circumstances that affirmative action attempts to compensate for. Even if you don't think industry should address these issues, there's a chance that the game theoretically optimal option is to make special consideration for underrepresented groups.
Any many are probably earning a good deal more money as well. The wealthiest self-employed people I know are in trades, and they make a lot more than a web developer does.