Systemd-logind must be restarted to prevent delay - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/1591411 <comment><USER2> Before visting the link and reading my guess was some quadratic algorithm in logging code, but after reading it seems to be a sudden jump and the explanation in poettering's fix here isn't clear either: [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/3191](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/3191)

"On overloaded systems this means that only 30 connections may be queued" \--- what is it about logging in (and out) multiple times that causes a system to become "overloaded"? 1000 _simultaneous_ logins might, but AFAICS this bug seems to be about sequential login-logout-repeat.

Edit: this is what's actually causing the problem: [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/1961](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/1961)

<comment><USER3> And if you follow the github thread to the bottom, the problem seems to be tracked in this freedesktop.org dbus bug: [https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95263](https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95263) (which is no longer responding, at least for me right now).

<comment><USER4> Try waiting 25 seconds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems like more of an issue with dbus than systemd, based on the comments on the bug tracker.

<comment><USER6> Thing is, why is systemd so reliant on dbus? A bus introduced to handle signaling between desktop programs.

Things used to be done kernel up. But these days it seems that things are happening DE down.

Meaning that where before if the kernel came up, i had a reasonable chance of getting a shell and firing up everything else i needed from there.

But these days if you don't get to the display manager you may as well hit the reset button, because something between the kernel and the display has gotten is panties so much in a twist that there is only the Windows solution.

<comment><USER7> > Things used to be done kernel up. But these days it seems that things are > happening DE down.

The software hierarchy in order of importance, starting with most important:

1\. User's needs/wants

2\. User's applications

3\. User's operational environment

4\. application APIs

5\. OS services

6\. OS Kernel.

The point of a OS is to make it easier to write and run applications. That is it.

The 'kernel on up' design is fantasy and is NEVER how it was done in Linux or GNU or anywhere.

GNU knew that User/User applications were primary importance. This is why they designed the OS following established APIs designed to help with application compatibility. Those APIs and GNU environment dictated the design of the kernel. Now as the requirements on OS rise so does the complexity. New needs/wants/desires dictate new design choices, of which filter from application on down.

Besides that it is pretty obvious that the standardization of systemd and the elimination of distribution-specific scripts and services has resulted in massive reduction of bugs and complexity in the Linux OS. Accounting for each distribution individually, counting those bugs up, adding all them into one lump sum... I am willing to bet that for every 1 bug that systemd introduces into the OS it has resolved at least a 1000.

<comment><USER8> > Besides that it is pretty obvious that the standardization [..] has resulted > in massive reduction of bugs and complexity.

If that were true it would be easy to see the difference in outstanding bugs between distributions that adopted SystemD and those who haven't, since their bug-numbers would be orders of magnitudes larger. To my knowledge this isn't so.

From a larger perspective you are arguing for the benefits consolidation and unification, as in 'If only we had one X (where X can be a Desktop Environment, GUI toolkit, Editor, etc), every developer could focus their effort on that, innovation would be quicker and adoption of the OS would be better (and we would finally have "the year of the desktop").

It is a pretty idea, to boost productivity through standardisation, but by now decades of free OS development (and proprietary OS development, to illustrate the value of mono-cultures and cathedral planning) have shown it does not work.

As of now, SystemD adoption hinders the development of:

-alternative cgroup managers

-non-affiliated container development

-DE development on non-linux systems

-GNU running on alternative kernels

-adoption and development of alternative init systems

Now none of these directly affect the Desktop Experience, so many will not care. But standardisation is not necessarily a direct benefit, or even a net benefit from a larger--long-term--context, especially in the Free Software world.

<comment><USER9> Successful standardization of protocols and formats tend to benefit the entire software ecosystem, both open source and otherwise.

Standardization on a specific implementation has a greater risk of stagnation, and encourages fragile software relying on undocumented and sometimes unintended behavior.

<comment><USER10> > Successful standardization of protocols and formats tend to benefit the > entire software ecosystem

It depends on how good those protocols and formats are. Let's look at OSI protocol stack which is failed miserably on that task exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's okay. Sooner or later they'll get around to integrating ssh into systemd to fix this.

/joking

I hope.

<comment><USER12> I hope they replace PAM first; I've never had a good experience with it.

<comment><USER13> What makes you think they'd do a good job?

<comment><USER14> PAM behind the scenes seems fine, it's the interface that's clunky and prone to error.

Imagine a world where a PAM would come with a file /etc/systemd/system/sssd.pam which specified all of its dependencies, what services it should be installed in, and uses Before= and After= to determine its position.

Enabling SSS auth would be as simple as systemctl enable sssd.pam. And since sssd.pam would depend on sssd.service if sssd.service fails for some reason the pam module could be disabled to keep the junk out of your logs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> And now they're taking over mounting and unmounting filesystems, too. What's it going to take to get this cancer out of Linux distros?

<comment><USER16> Moving to BSD and Gentoo in the business space.

taking money away from the main driver; Red Hat.

Unfortunately most companies that use Red Hat products don't actually pay for it already (My multi-national company uses CentOS)

<comment><USER17> That seems extremely unlikely. All the people who care about systemd spend their time groveling incessantly on the internet about it. And all the people who don't care, just use it without ever giving it a second thought.

And moving to BSD or Gentoo only costs businesses more money, there's no rational reason to do it for a business.

<comment><USER16> I care about systemd.

Thus all my personal infra is using variants of BSD fit for the purpose and I'm pushing for my next game launch to be on FreeBSD where POSIX/Unix is required.

Change is slow but it will happen if people can make convincing arguments against systemd to people who just want it to work and not break with the least amount of money.

Topics like this help my cause. It's not about grovelling it's about sending a message that "if you're going to try to be the alpha and the omega then we will hold you responsible when you fail to deliver"

Nobody asked them to do this, people fought against it. But here we are and they are absolutely responsible for the bugs they inflict on the world and their hostile attitudes towards other projects.

<comment><USER17> My point is the overwhelming majority of (technical) people simply don't care about init. I search for 'how to enable service in Linux X'. If I'm a real wizard, I might even write a simple init script. But the amount that I care or think about init is basically nil.

<comment><USER16> the problem isn't necessarily init.

it's everything else.

The lock in, the increasing lack of interoperability, the hostility, the increasing controversies.

But also, it's a little bit the init, which could have been designed much better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In Ubuntu 15.10, systemd-login was crashing at each login. Now this.

Is systemd production ready? Since it affects login, can this systemd be trusted ? Is it safe ?

<comment><USER10> There's only one USE-flag in Gentoo to disable systemd completely. [https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Without_systemd](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_Without_systemd)

<comment><USER19> Alternatively there is a Funtoo, a fork of Gentoo which blocks systemd.

<comment><USER10> Actually there's more distributives without systemd, Gentoo is different because it just gives a choice - with systemd, udev, dbus or almost anything else.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I reverse engineered Byte and created my own Byte web app - <AUTHOR> https://www.byte.community/ <comment><AUTHOR> Last week I reverse engineered a new app called Byte and created an unofficial web app for it. Byte is basically Vine reborn and it's even from the same cofounder of Vine.

This is the story of how I reverse engineered Byte, ported its mobile app functionality to the web and unofficially implemented a missing feature that was heavily requested by its users.

The creator of Byte, Dom Hofmann actually noticed what I did, complimented me on my work, and didn't even ask for me to take it down, so if you want to check out what I built and explore bytes on the web, visit: [https://www.byte.community/](https://www.byte.community/)

The code is open source on GitHub: [https://github.com/CaliAlec/Byte- Community](https://github.com/CaliAlec/Byte-Community)

I wrote a Medium article explaining how I did it: [https://medium.com/@calialec/how-i-reverse-engineered- byte-a...](https://medium.com/@calialec/how-i-reverse-engineered-byte-and- created-my-own-byte-web-app-2828f5520b25)

</comment><comment><USER2> Pretty nice work, and a great write up. It looks just like the real app.

Also, did you create those tweening stars on the "Spotlight" button?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! No, I'm using Byte's assets for everything which is why it looks like the real app. The stars on the Spotlight button is a gif background.</comment></comment>


What if IKEA used 3D printers - <AUTHOR> http://www.foture.net/blog/2012/04/24/huge-changes-for-ikea-customers/ <comment><USER2> _Imagine walking into an IKEA store, and instead of seeing every exposition and every decoration hidden in the different parts of a huge store, you simply sit with the consultant and discuss your needs._

Wow. Talk about missing the point of Ikea. Ikea showrooms are big meandering labyrinths full of vignettes telling you little stories about what your life could be like if you'd only buy you some flat-packed goodness.

I'm not discounting the possibility that large fast 3d printers might someday replace some warehouse space and allow for wider selections of inventory, but a "consultant" and a computer would be a mighty thin substitute for the Ikea experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> I get your point, but don't use yesterday technology for future experience. Instead of a "consultant" imagine interior designer, instead of a "computer" imagine a 3D holographic projection. No more labyrinths to go through. Instead, a personal 100% customisable showroom that can be designed just for you. And printed and delivered on the same day.

<comment><USER3> I think noonespecial's point is that much of Ikea's income comes from people meandering through these labyrinths, being exposed to item after item until they see something that they "must have". It would not make sense for them to cannibalise this by completely changing the business.

You do raise some interesting ideas, and I think there is a place for 3D printing in Ikea's business model, especially in customisation of off-the- shelf items.</comment></comment></comment>


How Skype onboards new users - <AUTHOR> http://www.useronboard.com/how-skype-onboards-new-users/

<comment><USER2> Hi all! I'm the person behind this. If you have any questions, please just let me know!

</comment><comment><USER2> Thank you very much for adding this, Metafunctor!</comment>


The Secret of Immigrant Genius - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-secret-of-immigrant-genius-1452875951 <comment><USER2> > (Einstein's) "miracle year" (...) occurred after he had emigrated from > Germany to Switzerland.

Does the author even know (or does he just want to hide) that Zurich is in a German-speaking part of Switzerland, and that Einstein surely didn't feel like an "immigrant" there?

Isn't it annoying reading how Einstein is used by a lot of writers as an attempt to prove any claim they make?

The claim that Freud's "immigrated" is equally absurd. Wikipedia has the name and the location of the place where he was born: "Freiberg in Mähren, Moravia, Austrian Empire." (Now it is in Czech Republic and called Příbor, but it's still the same place). He just grew up some 200 miles southwest from his birthplace, right in the capital of the Empire. His father actually brought him and the family to Vienna as Freud was only 4. He certainly never remembered any other place and went to all schools in Vienna.

<comment> david-given > Does the author even know that Zurich is in a German-speaking part of > Switzerland, and that Einstein surely didn't feel like an "immigrant" there?

That's not _precisely_ true. Zurich speaks German, true, but it's Schweizerdeutsch --- it's a quite different dialect to the Hochdeutsch they speak in Germany. I live in Zurich; a German-born work colleague is actually taking formal lessons in it so he can understand what the locals say. It's that different.

Everyone here speaks Hochdeutsch too, or at least does now, so Einstein would probably have gotten along fine, but he most likely wouldn't be feeling like he was at home.

<comment><USER3> > but he most likely wouldn't be feeling like he was at home.

I'm an Austrian and yes, the German variant in Switzerland is different but I would never consider Switzerland as a country or culture where I could possibly feel estranged.

It's not like you moved as a German to the Ottoman Empire, everybody can understand you if he/she wants to, the landscape and weather is similar (at least for Austrians), the culture is very similar and so is the food, sports (Skiing) and everything else.

<comment><USER4> What you said, plus non-native speakers often strongly exaggerated the difference between the Swiss dialect and German German (which people usually refered to as High German).

Yes, it is a strong dialect, but still a dialect. Tyrol, Styria, Salzburg, Bavaria - heck, even some parts in Germany (despite their tendencies to eradicate dialects) - have equally strong dialects

<comment><USER2> > even some parts in Germany

My favorite joke video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJaXEYkKUuo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJaXEYkKUuo)

"70 million people in Germany don't speak Plattdeutsch" (Low German, which is on the North! More details in my other posts here). Here the bank robber doesn't, don't ask me which dialect is his.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German)

I wish some native speaker would transcribe these joke videos for us who aren't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article has the causation backwards: being an immigrant does not make one bold and creative.

Instead, people who are bold and creative are more likely to take the risk of packing up their lives for better opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER4> > Freud is a classic case. As a little boy, he and his family joined a flood > of immigrants from the fringes of the Austro-Hungarian empire to Vienna

Freud a classic case of immigration? Příbor the fringes of the Austrian Empire? He moved at the age of four 130 miles southwest to the capital. The Austrian Empire included at that point parts of Ukraine. That is hardly immigration, let alone a classic case.

> He wore lederhosen and played a local card game called tarock

Neither "lederhosen" nor "tarock" is local to Vienna.

Sorry Wall Street Journal, but please get your facts straight before writing rubbish. Also, as the article is drawing comparisons to the flow of migrants right now, it should be noted that the current events are not comparable to any of the given examples in the article.

<comment><USER6> >Neither "lederhosen" nor "tarock" is local to Vienna.

Vienna had its own tarock type that did not survive WW1: [http://i-p- c-s.org/pattern/ps-14.html](http://i-p-c-s.org/pattern/ps-14.html)

Lederhosen were once popular all over the Alpine Region, so I'm sure that they were popular in Vienna, too.

<comment><USER4> > Vienna had its own tarock type that did not survive WW1

It is/was played there, but not exclusively.

> Lederhosen were once popular all over the Alpine Region, so I'm sure that > they were popular in Vienna, too.

True, in the Alpine regions of Austria, Switzerland and Bavaria they are still somewhat common, mostly in the rural parts. Vienna has never been Alpine nor rural.

<comment><USER6> >It is/was played there, but not exclusively.

I don't think the author ever implied that tarock or Lederhosen were exclusive to Vienna, but that both were common there at the time, so Freud acquired both to fit in. I think you're reading too much into the text.

<comment><USER4> What I was referring to is that neither is Tarock a local game nor were lederhosen common in Vienna, both which is implied by the article. That can come to show how well the author did his research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have a different theory on why this happens, as a potential immigrant myself: it's a giant sorted hash-set.

My reason for immigrating is simple: in a developed country I'll make more of a difference with the same amount of effort. My "hash" inclines me to move to developed buckets (and also privileges me with the means to do so). Take Elon Musk as an example. If he attempted to start SpaceX in South Africa (his country of birth) he would have been hemorrhaging capital via the corrupt government tender process. There is also the added problem of a lacking employee pool due to the on-going brain-drain. His "hash" landed him in a developed country and is demonstrably an advantage because of many factors, including the support of the American government.

I really don't think that immigration changes people; it's merely a tool that the inspired use to achieve their goals. The anthropic principle could be invoked here in a contrived way.

<comment><USER8> > There is also the added problem of a lacking employee pool due to the on- > going brain-drain.

Not to go off topic too much, but it should be noted that in South Africa there is also an extremely authoritarian form of affirmative action or black economic empowerment, etc. which effectively means you _have_ to employ people based on their skin colour when your business reaches a certain size or effectively you can't do business in the economy. It's a form of justified- racism directed at a minority group (< 10% of the population is white) that stifles the labour market and makes things like SpaceX impossible.

The "brain-drain" you speak of is skilled white workers who are leaving the country because they can't get work or can't advance in their careers, etc. A completely stupid problem created by the government's own ineptitude.

<comment><USER9> Unless you can demonstrate that it's actually detrimental to the average South African, then it's not really a problem or ineptitude is it?

Notably, you didn't even try to make that argument, you were more concerned with the problems it causes for less than 10% of the population that used to benefit from an "extremely authoritarian form of affirmative action".

<comment><USER8> Are you telling me you actually hold to the belief that having a policy which contributes towards driving away skilled professionals because of their race is a benefit to the average South African?

<comment><USER9> Yes. A situation in which a large company can't find any roles for 90% of the population is clearly unsustainable and needs to be fixed. It's apartheid in all but name. Getting rid of that also had negative consequences for some individual people, but was clearly the right thing to do, and benefitted the average South African.

<comment><USER8> Yes because 90% of the population is clearly black engineers, doctors, scientists, etc. and the only reason they're not being hired is because they're black and there's some racist conspiracy going on and not because these people don't actually exist. You can't just "will" a skilled professional into existence.

<comment><USER9> If, as you claim, black doctors, engineers and scientists do not exist in South Africa and the country is > 90% black, then clearly that is a problem for the country as a whole, and fixing it will improve life for everyone.

One supply-side fix for that is to send more people to school to learn these skills. One demand-side fix for that is to make sure that the people who have those skills get jobs.

I can well imagine, that after decades of being systematically excluded from these positions, the transition will be hard. Unlike you, I'm not rushing to blame the current government for the impact of decisions that were made many years ago.

<comment><USER8> What you are describing is racism. You're dressing it up in a way that makes it justifiable. What you are suggesting is no better than the architects of apartheid. Good luck building a non-racist society based on selective-racism as the driving force to "fix it". You can try to rationalize it any way you want.

<comment><USER9> > What you are suggesting is no better than the architects of apartheid

Let's just leave it on that note of hyperbole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Having lived in 4 countries for at least 9 months each over the last 5 years, I agree with the conclusion of the article but not necessarily with the underlying reasons. Yes, getting to know a new culture reveals new ways of thinking and behavior that one would otherwise have missed. But I think more critically, leaving another place also frees one from the constraints of that place (be it personally, socially or culturally) It provides opportunity to rethink ones priorities in life and to dare to do things differently

</comment><comment><USER11> Immigrant does not mean poor. Often immigrants are the most wealthy, connected, and educated people from their countries. Poor people are usually stuck wherever they are.

A more accurate title would be: "The Secret of Rich Genius"

But it's pretty obvious why the elite have such a huge share of success in all things.

<comment><USER12> As has been pointed out on here before, usually rich immigrants are called expats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I would say moving to another country itself takes lots of courage, and this can be one of the reasons why some of them can be successful and innovative.

<comment><USER14> I think it takes more inquisitiveness than courage to voluntarily move to another country. I'm specifically discounting those who move to another country as a refugee or asylum seeker.

I've lived in four different countries for periods of 12 months or longer (including the country of my birth), on three different continents. I don't think it took or takes specific courage to make such moves, more like an innate sense of inquisitiveness and lust for adventure. I wanted to experience different people, cultures and norms.

In someone much smarter than myself, this may help to encourage their genius. In my case, I mostly just had a good time, but also I believe became a much more tolerant person.

<comment><USER15> > I don't think it took or takes specific courage

I am assuming you are from a developed country and probably white which is why you are saying that. Ask people who are from developing countries who have to put a major chunk of their life savings to get a resident visa move to a different country use their savings again till they get a job in their own domain.

People from developing countries also have to face the humiliation from their friends and families incase they dont get a job and have to move back.

I think courage is the right word.

<comment><USER14> Good points and agreed. I did specifically think of and note those refugees or asylum seekers who do for sure need courage. However, I didn't consider economic migrants from developing countries. I can see there is courage required for them too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The argument made is a corollary of "openness to experience" indicators for creativity - just, with immigration, once you make the big leap more of the new experiences automatically come to you during ordinary life.

If you're already seeing exciting new things happening around you(and they aren't the same exciting new things everyone else sees), you may be getting as much of the effect as needed.

</comment><comment><USER17> Humans are lazy thinkers. We need some impetus to break ingrained patterns of thought.

</comment><comment><USER18> I suspect it has to do also (in the basic idea of the article) to knowing a different way of doing things.

Those who are born in one place and keep doing the same things won't know about ways of doing it differently

The article seems that it's trying a bit too hard though.

<comment><USER19> I think that the gist of the article is that you can be more creative (i.e. come up with ideas that hardly anyone thought of before), if you have more distance from culture. In other words, people that are deeply entrenched in culture, can only think of doing things in the way that the culture is doing it now.

Alan Kay tries to express this concept in his talk "Normal considered harmful", it may give a different perspective on the same concept.

I think it's very good to point this out in relation to immigration right now. However, it's just one of the reasons we should be open to immigration: humanness (brotherhood); a better outcome for both parties ("immigrants" and "natives") in the long run if we give immigrants a possibility to start a "normal" life as fast as possible; we can share the workload and may alleviate the problem of ageing western societies; etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Fusion of different schools of thouht brings unexpected results. Nothing to do with immigration, but highlights how important it is for the academics to communicate outside of their tiny local environments.

</comment><comment><USER21> they forgot to mention that sometimes an entire nation/city has their head up their ass and pretty much anyone from outside can see it... i'm not referring to anyone in particular, so please, no butthurt...

</comment><comment><USER22> 'Today, foreign-born residents account for only 13% of the U.S. population but hold nearly a third of all patents and a quarter of all Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans.' Nearly a quarter is 15% - not much more than 13%. Sensational writing for a fact that could also be explained by, perhaps, the fact that a large number of people go to the US specifically for education. The 'one third of patents' is more interesting, but even then I have to wonder how much of that is simply people with a dream moving to America to patent their invention and start a business. I am sure immigration can indeed spark creativity, or at least select for creative people, but the article reads as just a little too click-baity for my tastes.

<comment><USER23> Err… a quarter means 25%, not 15%.

<comment><USER24> I thought maybe at first GP meant the actual percentage of Nobel prizes awarded to immigrants was 15% and WSJ was rounding that up to a quarter but it seems they're actually rounding down. 30.7% of U.S. awarded prizes are given to immigrants [1].

[1] [http://iir.gmu.edu/research/immigrant-nobel-prize- winners](http://iir.gmu.edu/research/immigrant-nobel-prize-winners)</comment></comment></comment>


Did the NSA secretly make a major math breakthrough? - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/politics/nsa-rsa-encryption-crack-prime-numbers/

<comment><USER2> Probably not - think DigiNotar on a global scale. Now which of the tens of CAs trusted by your browser are cooperating with NSA? That's the actual question, IMNSHO.</comment>


What does an idea person without software skills or business education do? - <AUTHOR>

A very good friend of mine is an idea person and we spend a lot of time discussing our different ideas for web/iphone apps. I am (thankfully) a programmer so I can prototype my own ideas and put it on the www to get feedback and see if any of them catch on (none have yet). A recent conversation led to a discussion on what options she has. She is not a programmer and works as a part time web designer. When we discuss ideas, we are so not on the same page, so I am not super motivated to spend too much time developing an idea I am not convinced of. Her interests are very different from mine so I often pooh-pooh her ideas, but a few months later she shows me similar ideas that have been successful businesses or products.<p>What would you advise a person who is a good ideas person? She doesn't enjoy programming, so programming classes may be only the last resort. <comment><USER2> Everybody has ideas. Your good friend is no different from almost everybody else on the planet. Ideas aren't worth anything. If they were, there would be a marketplace or exchange where you could buy and sell ideas.

Implementation is everything. If she can't or won't get the skills and education to implement her ideas, then pity her.

</comment><comment><USER3> Get some skills? If she already knows some web design, polishing up her skills in that area is a useful skill for a tech startup. With a few months of self- study, or finding some relevant work experience, you could probably get enough basic business education to be of some use. So you were to team up, and you were to focus on building product, and she worried about polishing up the frontend, managing various marketing channels, doing market research, sketching out financial projections, etc - it could work out.

</comment><comment><USER4> Ideas have a negative value, if anything: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1191242>

It's pretty harsh, but anyone can come up with a hundred ideas they have no hope of implementing. Myself included ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps she could find a job in one of the companies who have built successful products matching her ideas. That will give her a chance to see up close how it's done, while building her own skillset. She might meet some new people who she could then team up with to start something of her own.

The other thing of course is to just take a chance and try making something, if she can find someone to work with. She could look into outsourcing the programming.

Generally, it's hard to say anything useful without knowing what her ideas are about.

</comment><comment><USER6> She should learn to write well and share her ideas. Then she has well- articulated ideas that people may pay attention to.

</comment><comment><USER7> If she is already working as a web designer, learning JS (with libraries such as jQuery) would be a great first step. This way, she could start prototyping her UIs to convince other people to help with the server-side components.

Also, she could take that skill to a design-challenged startup with a hot idea!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Has anyone seen Quirky? <http://www.quirky.com/>. Seems interesting. Pepsi Refresh is also interesting (if your idea has a benevolent aspect to it): <http://www.refresheverything.com/>

</comment><comment><USER8> IMHO -> ideas != product. if she could find a way to shape her ideas into actual product plans then maybe it would be easier for other people to realize their potential. more often than not, ideas are only as good as how you're able to convey them to others.

</comment><comment><USER9> Goto university, get an MBA or business degree. She needs some foundations and skills and techniques to progress ideas through innovation, market development, etc. Refer her to Steve Blank's web site and/or book.

</comment><comment><USER10> why don't you realize her ideas, and you two create a company?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wish, but I have too many of my own projects going on, and her projects arent interesting to me. But there is historical evidence that her ideas are good for the niche long tail community she is a member of. Some iphone apps that I dismissed later made a pretty penny for some other people</comment></comment>


YouTube's Bandwidth Bill Is Low - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/youtube-bandwidth/ <comment><USER2> This would be more accurately stated as "YouTube's marginal bandwidth cost may be close to 0". They're peering with enough providers that they don't pay for bandwidth like, say, Wired does. While Wired pays for the amount of data they send out (or expect to send out), Google mostly pays for the infrastructure, not the data.

Peering like this isn't all that new. Roughly 80% of our transit goes directly to our host's peers, which means they're probably not paying anything for that traffic (though they're charging us for it). We're happy with this because if it's going through a peer, it's much snappier for those particular users.

<comment><USER3> What you're missing here is that Google has built its own network with large global reach using dark fiber. Almost everybody will peer with a party like Google if they pop up at the local exchange.

By doing this Google can skip most of the usual transit bandwidth tax, which is where most of the money traditionally goes to if you're sending massive amounts of data to end-users.

<comment><USER4> _transit bandwidth tax_

What tax? Sure, Google doesn't have to pay for transit while us mere mortals do -- but that's just because Google provides its own transit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article glosses over the fact that maintaining that infrastructure costs money as well.

> Its costs for bandwidth are then amortized across the life of its fiber and > routers.

It's basically the difference between 'renting' and 'buying', the costs can be (and probably are) significant though.

If you rent some resource you'll be paying bit-by-bit (pun intended), if you own it outright you pay it all in one big 'bite' .

So, their bandwidth bill is far from 0, it's just under a different heading on the balance sheet.

<comment><USER6> Exactly what I came in here to say. If I said I got free housing, you'd be quite disappointed to learn that by "free" I meant that I owned a home and hence don't pay rent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> while the subject of the article is interesting, it's a rough read because of the author's seemingly ignorant suggestion that google abuse net neutrality, and the several typos. not really typical for wired.

</comment><comment><USER8> So the actual cost is somewhere between $0 and $1,000,000 per day. tl;dr we have no idea.

<comment><USER9> From my experiences, if we assume that Youtube's bandwidth costs are similar to what Akamai charges for an extremely large video site, and their claim of 1 billion videos viewed per day is correct, they're probably paying about $5-10 million per month. Obviously, if their bandwidth is cheaper than Akamai, adjust those numbers accordingly. And it might be larger if 720p HD being the default mode sticks (those have 4 times the bitrate of their regular videos).

<comment><USER2> The whole point of the article is that they're not really paying for bandwidth like you would if you were buying from Akamai. When you peer with someone, you rarely pay by the mb. It's more like a direct crossover connection from your router to theirs in some peering facility.

<comment><USER9> The reason bandwidth costs money is not because ISPs and Akamai and other CDNs are greedy, it's because the infrastructure behind it costs money.

Building your own inftrastructure doesn't make bandwidth free, it just eliminates the cut that the provider normally takes.

Also, Akamai doesn't charge by the megabyte either, they charge by the mega _bit per second_ , as does most anyone once you start dealing with Facebook or Youtube-size loads.

<comment><USER2> Yes, that's what I meant when I said "mb", perhaps 95th percentile billing would have been more explicit. And when you start dealing with Facebook or Youtube sized loads, you generally start peering rather than just buying transit from various providers.

When you peer, you no longer pay a 95th. You work out a peering deal with some provider you send a lot of traffic to and effectively connect directly to them in some shared facility. _Some_ providers will charge you a 95th rate when you peer, but even then it's vastly cheaper than what you'd be paying for normal transit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was wondering what they were going to do with all that dark fiber that they purchased, and now we can see.

<comment><USER11> I guess it pays off to hire geniuses eh?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> title feels a little misleading.

the best way to not have your cost scale is probably to do what spotify is doing - make every user into a peer in a bit-torrent network and have them share the vast majority of the bandwidth consumption

A Glance at Spotify's Peer-to-peer Streaming: [http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&...](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=3&ved=0CBEQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ietf.org%2Fmeeting%2F75%2Fp2p-presentations%2Fdocuments%2Fspotify- gunnar- kreitz.pdf&ei=fuPYSue3BJTCsQOCwpGyCQ&usg=AFQjCNGSfDf_xcyc6fi2l24khllPSmv2_Q&sig2=3NeObomiQH5tlwp5 --SR-g)

<comment><USER2> I dunno if that's the best way. If you're large enough to make your own infrastructure worthwhile, I suspect that's way more robust than a relatively complex end user p2p setup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Come to think of it, large scale there could be a sort-of market in bandwith based on content. Between google and isp, who wants youtube to have bandwith more? You could say isp take data from youtube and sell it to the final customer. The only reason they historically get away with charging both the content provider and the content consumer is the balance of power: any single content provider is of little value to the isp, but the isp is of great value to that provider.

Now that google is a large enough force it could very well make money from offering bandwith, and isps will bid for it because not doing so would cost _them_ customers.

<comment><USER14> The key here is that Google bought up enough dark fiber to make itself in effect an ISP. Therefore, it's a negotiation between equals more than it is a content provider and an ISP. The fact that Google can make its services slower for users of a particular ISP if they cause too much trouble probably pushes the balance of power in its favor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If an ISP hosts content, would analysts also say that they "have no bandwidth bill"?

This article states that "[Google] has purchased unused fiber optic cable known as 'dark fiber'. ... Its costs for bandwidth are then amortized across the life of its fiber and routers." Sounds logical to me -- it doesn't seem like Google is "getting away" with anything here.

<comment><USER2> _If an ISP hosts content, would analysts also say that they "have no bandwidth bill"?_

Yes, they very well might. The ISPs costs are largely fixed, it doesn't really cost them much to stream you a movie or whatever.

<comment><USER16> Everything costs nothing while you're using resources that you've already paid for, is a more accurate way of looking at it. At the point you exhaust those resources, the cost is the cost of adding more.

It's like the old memory/cpu/whatever is cheap argument. Yes it is, until you run out. Then you're in trouble.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> More info:

[http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/200...](http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2009/10/youtubes- bandwidth-bill-is-not-zero-i-expect-more-from-a-wiredcom-story.html)

I'd recommend Dan Rayburn's blog for a real-world perspective on CDNs, video etc.

</comment><comment><USER18> Google has a lot of fiber and plenty dark fiber. But peering is not free bandwidth. A lot of people peer and depeer ask Cogent and Sprint :). Fiber is not free, power to routers is not free. But a headline like that will get you more clicks and use more bandwidth.

<comment><USER17> You can peer quite heavily without a fibre (or any) backbone. Akamai peers heavily but has no backbone.

Power is a major issue in datacentres here especially ones in large cities. I also wouldn't be surprised if Google use software routers instead of hardware beasts that cost as much as a house.

<comment><USER19> Forget about routers, Google has designed+built their own 10gb ethernet switches: [http://www.nyquistcapital.com/2007/11/16/googles- secret-10gb...](http://www.nyquistcapital.com/2007/11/16/googles-secret-10gbe- switch/)

<comment><USER20> When I traceroute youtube the last host my ISP owns is actually named google-10ge.bredband2.net. My ISP peers with google by AS29518 SKYNET-AS to AS15169 GOOGLE.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I remember a post on here a while back that suggested that YouTube costs Google about $1.6 million per day. :D</comment>


In depth comparison of different energy sources - <AUTHOR> http://www.withouthotair.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I read it a few years ago and seems a good resource in the current context. It's detailed and with good sources. Takes UK as a case study, but can generalized reasonably well. A teaser: [http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c4/page_32....](http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c4/page_32.shtml)

Look for the bar graphs on the right side of the page (page two of the link above). They're at scale all through the book.</comment>


::<> - <AUTHOR> https://turbo.fish/ <comment><USER2> No Javascript, all the animation is in this CSS file: [https://turbo.fish/turbofish.css](https://turbo.fish/turbofish.css)

</comment><comment><USER3> is this like animated perl operators?

<comment><AUTHOR> Animated Rust operators. This is the Rust operator affectionately known as "turbofish", used in the unusual case of needing to disambiguate a type.</comment></comment>


PEP 435 Accepted – Adding an Enum type to the Python standard library - <AUTHOR> http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0435/

<comment><USER2> Can someone help me understand how this helps? I'm only a mediocre programmer, and I'm having trouble understanding the implications.

It seems like you declare these like any other class. So what's the difference between this, and creating a class full of ints?

If I have class Color: red = 1 blue = 2

etc, wouldn't I get the same thing?

Is the difference that you don't need to instantiate an instance of it?

I know I'm being dense, and I've read the PEP, but it's not quite clicking yet.

<comment><USER3> In this case, the attributes are not ints.. so If you defined that class functions that took it's attributes would need to accept an int, and if I passed max-int or something it'd be up to your function to go figure out whether my argument was a valid value for Color.

The enum class gives you that stuff. The argument you'd expect would be instanceof(arg, Color) == True (I think that's how they did it) and if it was, you'd be assured that the value was a valid value for Color.

So you could do it yourself, sure.. but to get all the little benefits, you'd have to do more coding than naming a bunch of ints in a new class.. It's subtle though. Not a wild game-changer or anything :)

<comment><USER2> Thanks.. That makes sense.. And I suppose it also helps satisfy the "explicit is better than implicit" edict, by making it clearer what you are doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The syntax strikes me as somewhat strange. It requires writing out enum values (and thus avoiding duplicates or, for a cleaner look, just keeping them sorted), necessitating unnecessary effort when new values are added in the middle, and misleadingly implies that the enum values are merely class-level integer constants. I would have preferred a more explicit API that used a list of strings for the enumerators.

<comment><USER5> I completely agree, this disgusts me:

>>> Animal = Enum('Animal', 'ant bee cat dog') >>> Animal.ant <Animal.ant: 1>

That being said, I welcome enums - I made classes to basically represent an enum a bunch of times.

<comment><USER6> What disgusts you about it, in particular?

<comment><USER7> The fact that it allows whitespace-seperated words. It's just wrong.

It's weird, unnecessary, it just shouldn't be there.

Personally, I would've preferred:

>>> Enum('Example', 'foo', 'bar', 'baz')

(ie. Enum(name, *values))

<comment><USER6> That syntax is a bit unusual, but it has the clear advantage of being far less verbose. Consider this:

* The functional API is mostly for short code snippets and experiments in the shell. For real programs, the standard class syntax is preferred and recommended. * namedtuple already uses the same functional API allowing space-separated members, and it's a popular tool in the stdlib. Yes, the first time you run into it it feels a bit odd, but then you get used to it and it's not a big deal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Guido's approval message: [http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- dev/2013-May/126112....](http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- dev/2013-May/126112.html)

<comment><USER8> I prefer the Michael Ford proposed syntax and would gladly port the implementation if possible. Having to specify either an ordinal number like in BASIC of 1980 or have to specify symbols as strings looks dodgy to me.

<comment><USER9> Since Enums are mostly unmagical (apart from the member wrapping), you can use a compact syntax:

      class Colors(Enum):
          red, green, blue = range(3)

<comment> iso8859-1 will

        red, green, blue = itertools.count()

work too?

<comment><USER9> If it works in a Python shell, it will work for an enum (this doesn't).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't think that enums should have values (i.e. numbers).

Nearly every language does it that way but isn't that just because C originally implemented enums with numbers? Modern languages are much higher level.

Java enums don't have any numeric equivalent value, they are just objects, with textual names if you must convert them into something more primative.

<comment><USER11> Efficiency/speed?

The user doesn't necessarily need to have access to the raw numbers I guess, but when it comes down to comparisons/branching etc, numbers are pretty much always going to be fastest and simplest.

And if they _are_ going to be based on numbers underneath, why not let the user/coder/whatever have access to them?

<comment><USER12> Everything is numbers underneath, so you could ask the same question about all data types. For example, if pointers are going to be based on numbers underneath, why not let the programmer have access to them? Lots of good reasons, actually, which is why most languages don't provide that access. Many of those reasons apply to enumerations too.

<comment><USER11> Well, you've outed me as a C programmer there I guess :)

I don't really subscribe to the idea that languages should force people onto rails. I love higher level languages for their rapid development of course, and the high level constructs. But there's something about being able to get your hands dirty, right in the guts of a problem...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13>
      Enumerations support iteration, in definition order:

      >>> class Shake(Enum):
      ...   vanilla = 7
      ...   chocolate = 4
      ...   cookies = 9
      ...   mint = 3
      ...
      >>> for shake in Shake:
      ...   print(shake)
      ...
      Shake.vanilla
      Shake.chocolate
      Shake.cookies
      Shake.mint

Python's execution model sez that the class declaration is nothing more than code that is exec'd in a dictionary. We know that Python dictionaries do not perserve order, so why is this iteration in definition order possible, barring modification to the interpreter or dict type ?

<comment><USER6> It's possible by using a __prepare__ method in the metaclass of Enum, which allows to return an essentially ordered dict for the __dict__ of enumeration classes.

<comment><USER13> I guess this is new to Py 3k? Thanks for the tip!

<comment><USER14> Right, PEP 3115. Indeed one of the reasons is that "there is an important body of use cases where it would be useful to preserve the order in which a class members are declared."

<http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3115/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Python has been getting bloated in recent years. Why not just do the following?

      def enum(*args):
          return dict(zip(args, range(len(args))))

      colors = enum('red', 'green', 'blue')

      # {'blue': 2, 'green': 1, 'red': 0}

<comment><USER16> There are a few things this proposal does that improves upon yours:

\+ Enum values of different types are incomparable. This is widely seen as a good thing. \+ Enum values are instances of their Enum; this allows more flexibility in user code. \+ As a result of the above, you can have a dictionary without Enum values of two different types colliding. \+ Enum values print in a more friendly way. This is expected to help debugging. \+ To support the above, enum values know their own name. This is likely helpful both for debugging and for various introspection hacks. \+ Enums can be iterated over in a fixed order. This allows automated help systems and similar to maintain consistency between runs, improving user experience. \+ There's a lot more error checking provided to avoid cases like defining the same enum value twice.

But I understand your sentiment. We always enjoy smaller languages because it helps us keep them in our heads. But note that Enums aren't a new language feature -- this PEP simply adds another module to the standard library. The code your provide, flawed as it is, is still a pattern common to many different libraries, so it would be good to put it into the stdlib; but if we're doing that, might as well do it right, don't you think?

<comment><USER15> Fair enough. The enums themselves aren't a problem; they just seem symptomatic of a pile-on-more-stuff mentality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When will this ship in python? I don't know a lot about the typical time between a PEP acceptance and a release containing the feature.

<comment><USER6> We expect the implementation will be committed in the next few weeks, and you'll be able to give it a try using Python's tip revision ("trunk"). It will actually _ship_ with Python 3.4

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting that this is PEP 435 and the prior attempt was PEP 354.

<comment><USER19> The permutations will continue until the PEP improves.

<comment><USER6> Yes, I noticed that curiosity :-) Not intentional!

Luckily there's no need for more permutations - this PEP was accepted. I expect PEPs 534 and 543 to surface at some point, but it isn't likely they will deal with enums.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Stupid me, I was using enums the wrong way. I was using an enum like a constant.

I.E. If my database takes a 'Sex' parameter, with Male as 1, Female as 2, Unknown as 3, Both as 4 - I'd use an enum like so:

        update person set sex=Sex.Male

Looks like I can't do that with this enum class. Well, I suppose I'd have to do it like so:

        sex = Sex.Male.value

not very sexy...

<comment><USER21> Wouldn't IntEnum fit your case better?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Could you not use mock.sentinel values as an enum? Also, you can create a poor man's enum from 2.7+ with:

        from collections import namedtuple
        myenum = namedtuple('myenum', ['a', 'b', 'c'])(range(3))

        myenum.a == myenum.a

<comment><USER23> That's not even a poor man's enum, it's just an enum. Named tuples can be used for everything an enum can be. This doesn't seem like a necessary PEP, but I've made my peace a long time ago about Python's bloated standard library. It's not the end of the world, and I still love Python, but this doesn't seem necessary to me.

<comment> iso8859-1 You don't have methods and you don't have a proper repr(). Also, even if you don't assign numbers, the fields are still ordered (which they shouldn't be).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What purpose would Enums serve in a dynamically-typed language?

<comment><USER5> Even though dynamically typed, it still have the concept of types. There are good examples on how it works in the PEP.

<comment><USER25> And more the the point, Python is strongly typed in the sense that it has very few automatic conversions between types, in contrast to, say, Perl. As the PEP says, this means that you can't accidentally compare an enum value of one type to an enum value of another without a runtime error occurring, instead of an infuriatingly subtle bug.

Python may defer its type checking to run time, but it still has it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Iterating over the members of an enum does not provide the aliases

Anyone know the motivation for this? Seems like a source of frustration to me.

<comment><USER9> The aliases aren't part of the enum, if you think of the enum as a set of values. Iterating is done on the values, not the names.

(the next paragraph gives you the __members__ ordered dict, if you want to iterate on something else)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seems a bit dodgy that enum values can be _any_ value. What happens if you use mutable values and later change them to be the same?

<comment><USER28> Objects can be mutable or immutable. The value of a mutable object can change to another value, but it's not that the _value-in-itself_ is mutable.

[http://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html#objects- va...](http://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html#objects-values-and- types)

<comment><USER27> So can I declare an enum value to be e.g. a list? Is that value "frozen" when the enum declaration is processed or what?

<comment><USER28> A list is not a value, it is a type of object. The second to last paragraph of the section in the reference manual I linked may help:

      Some objects contain references to other objects; these are called
      containers. Examples of containers are tuples, lists and dictionaries. The
      references are part of a container's value. In most cases, when we talk
      about the value of a container, we imply the values, not the identities of
      the contained objects; however, when we talk about the mutability of a
      container, only the identities of the immediately contained objects are
      implied. So, if an immutable container (like a tuple) contains a reference
      to a mutable object, its value changes if that mutable object is changed.

PEP-435 says enums are bound to "unique, constant values" -- not that you can bind enums to arbitrary types of objects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Barry gave a good talk about this at DCPython on Tuesday.

</comment><comment><USER30> Interesting. It looks like if you want to use enum in 2.7 you have to use a package called flufl[1].

[1] [http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~barry/flufl.enum/trunk/view/hea...](http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~barry/flufl.enum/trunk/view/head:/flufl/enum/_enum.py#L170)

<comment><USER6> flufl.enum was the initial candidate for PEP 435, but the current approach changed and uses implementation techniques not available in Python 2.7

We may create a almost-compliant back-port for 2.7 as an external library though

<comment><USER31> You sure it's not better spending the energy elsewhere? Python 3 needs more exclusive features to encourage people to migrate from Python 2.</comment></comment></comment>


Grothendieck's notes to be released on 10th May - <AUTHOR> http://www.liberation.fr/sciences/2017/05/05/les-notes-du-mathematicien-alexandre-grothendieck-arrivent-sur-le-net_1567517 <comment><USER2> Some English background on this saga, for those unfamiliar: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/alexander- gro...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/alexander-grothendieck- legal-battle-over-scribblings-of-20th-centurys-greatest-mathematician-and- the-a6815216.html)

TL;DR: he's "regarded by some as the greatest mathematician of the 20th century" so his last 20 years of notes (written in seclusion) are a big deal

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought Grothendieck made it clear that he did not want his notes to be published. We have little respect for the dead.

<comment><USER2> You're right.

"I do not intend to publish or republish any work or text of which I am the author, ... Any edition or dissemination of such texts which have been made in the past without my consent, or which will be made in the future and as long as I live, is against my will expressly specified here and is unlawful in my eyes. ... If my intentions, clearly expressed here, should go unheeded, then the shame of it falls on those responsible for the illegal editions, and those responsible for the libraries concerned"

Source (orig. & trans.): [https://sbseminar.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/grothendiecks- let...](https://sbseminar.wordpress.com/2010/02/09/grothendiecks-letter/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, this is incredible. Grothendieck was one of the few mathematicians in recent history who made field wide contributions and probably rivaled Euler in talent. It'll be great to see what he's cooked up :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Translation:

Mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck's notes released online.

An agreement has finally been found between the mathematician's family and the university of Montpellier, which owned 28.000 pages of notes. They will soon be available on the Internet.

We had left Alexandre Grothendieck's archives in an unstable situation last December. Things have advanced ever since the director of the department of mathematics of the université de Montpellier, Jean Michel Marin, has started a constructive dialogue with the mathematician's heirs. For years, the institution and the mathematician's five children looked at eachother with distrust when it came to answer two questions: who owns do the 28.000 pages of notes retrieved by the university? Could we make his writings, as he said "scribbles" available to the scientific community?

[[http://md1.libe.com/photo/1019323-math.jpg?modified_at=14939...](http://md1.libe.com/photo/1019323-math.jpg?modified_at=1493991747&width=750)] If the drawings found in the archives could let you believe that Alexandre Grothendieck's works are accessible, it still requires ten hours of work to an exprimented mathematician to decipher one page of his notes

This will be done on Wednesday, May 10th at 16h30 on the unversité of Montpellier's website. At first, 18.000 pages will be in free access. For the rest, mail essentially, you will need to wait for the green light from the people to whom were adressed the mails, Alexandre Grothendieck keeping a copy of each one.

100.000 pages never seen before

The one we often refer to as the greatest mathematician of the XXth century - Deceased at 84 years old in November of 2014 in Lasserre (Ariège), where he lived as a recluse for 23 years - had left behind 100.000 pages of notes to which noone ever has access to. To the 28.000 pages from Montpellier, we now have to add 65.000 carefully stored in fourty boxes custom made, and found in his house after his death.

What can we find in this treasure? Maybe nothing, unless... Alexandre Grothendieck worked at night and gave the fruit of his sleepless hours to scribes who spent hours transforming his intuitions in clear and irrefutable theorems. His goal can be shortened in a few words: reconcile algebra which demonstrates and geometry which shows. A goal still not yet achieved, on which geometricians and algebraists are still hard at work. Born in 1928 in Berlin, arrived in France on the eve of World War II at the age of 11, average student until a professor more curious than others incitees him to go to the Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris, when he gets his licence at the université of Montpellier. Alexandre Grothendieck is in his twenties when he discovers he has a gift for mathematics. He joins Nicolas Bourbaki's group of collaborators - this polycephal mathematician who invents collaborative work in the 40's - and earns the Fields medal, equivalent of the Nobel prize for mathematicians, in 1966.

His life will be made of breakage. Conceptual breakage first, when he pushes algebraic geometry forward with novel concepts, such as motives. But also social, familial, cultural, political and friendship breakage until the end of his life. In 1969, he invents with other what will become radical ecology, and breaks with scientific research which, to him, will end up on the end of the "eveything", according to his expression. In 1991, he retires in Lasserree, where he refuses to see visitors, whom he removes something smoothly, and sometimes with sharp verbal spikes.

The deciphering work is only beginning

If the question of the Montpellier archives is answered, now remains to find a solution for the 65.000 pages in Lasserre. Will they be sold? Will they be accessible some day? For now, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (TN: National Library of France) and the Institut des hautes études scientifiques (TN: Institute of higher scientific learning) cannot formulate an offer to the mathematician's children. The key question being: does this treasure have a price?

Those who will cliok on Grothendieck's archives must be warned of one thing. They rest as the foot of a mathematics Himalaya, since every handwritten page requirees a dozen of hours of work for an algebraist geometrician used to Grothendieckian 'scribbles'. Things now laid down flat, work begins.

To organise this deciphering, it will probably require a team of mathematicians working together throughout the world, not unlike the Polymaths. A mathematician asks a question, and whoevers has a piece of the answer brings his contribution. The final publication could mention fourty researchers who would only have met digitally.

Philippe Douroux, journalist for Libération

<comment><USER6> Anyone can explain the term radical ecology?

<comment><USER5> Radical ecology (écologie radicale in the article) considers that Men (and every other living species) are just another part of their natural environment. There are no independent events, but rather an intricate web of phenomenons that are fundamentally linked. It is a way of thinking that puts forward ecocentric values, respecting values inherent to non-human life.</comment></comment></comment>


Why AI is a threat to democracy–and what we can do about it - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613010/why-ai-is-a-threat-to-democracyand-what-we-can-do-to-stop-it/ <comment><AUTHOR> "We're starting to see the negative effects of the tension between doing research that's in the best interest of humanity and making investors happy."</comment>


Hackers steer Tesla into oncoming traffic by placing three stickers on the road - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-hackers-steer-into-oncoming-traffic-with-stickers-on-the-road-2019-4 <comment><USER2> From yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19536375](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19536375)

</comment><comment><USER3> While I'm hugely skeptical of the current state of self-driving cars, you could probably get human drivers to make the same mistake if you were to repaint the lines. However, humans will also notice the oncoming cars (if there are any) and avoid getting in a head-on collision.

The thing missing from this test is that critical practical piece: if there was an oncoming car, will the Tesla do something to avoid the collision? I would assume that not getting in a head-on crash is higher priority than staying in the lane markings.

Without oncoming traffic, all this is testing is what the Tesla considers valid line markings. I'm sure there's room for improvement here (such as checking where the other lane is, raising the requirement for how well-defined the lines have to be, etc), but those are also going to involve trade-offs where there are legitimate situations that will stop working.

I think you could just as easily title this video "Tesla auto-pilot follows road markings even if they're really bad".

Edit: The best shot I could get from the video [1] makes me even more upset at this test: these look like the temporary markings often used during construction, just before they come and paint the normal lines using the big line-painting truck. There's not even regular lane lines after this. I wouldn't even be surprised if this is something Tesla specifically trained the software to handle.

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/aLbhnzQ.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/aLbhnzQ.jpg)

<comment><USER4> > The thing missing from this test is that critical practical piece: if there > was an oncoming car, will the Tesla do something to avoid the collision? I > would assume that not getting in a head-on crash is higher priority than > staying in the lane markings.

Considering that a Tesla is happy to ram you into the back of a stopped vehicle, at highway speeds, I wouldn't have that hope.

Autopilot does two things - follows the vehicle in front of you, and stays between the lane lines.

<comment><USER5> This isn't strictly true - Teslas have the ability to perform emergency stops if they detect something in front of them.

I don't believe that they're likely to pick up something driving straight at them, as it's not something the neural net has been trained for.

My Model X often alerts me to parked cars, thinking I might drive into them :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We are definitely not even close to having "solved" self-driving cars.

<comment><USER7> If you listened to the hype, yes we are not close; but that'd be your fault for giving in to the early hype, written by tech/science journalists without domain expertise or insider information.

If you look at the reality, certain companies have advanced a TREMENDOUS amount in the last few years. It was less than 2 decades ago that DARPA introduced its self-driving vehicle challenge and none of them could even make it a couple of miles.

If you asked me 20 years ago, would there be a driverless taxi service in Phoenix in 2020, I would have said absolutely no way, the y2k bug scare, tech so hard, we'll never get there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why are these cars legal on the road?

</comment><comment><USER9> No shit. What about when you erase all the lines on the road? What about when you remove the road? What's next, "Luxury Tesla defeated by a cheap piece of duct tape over the main sensors"? "We removed a wheel from a Tesla and it crashed into a wall!". These tests are so contrived, honestly.

<comment><USER10> They're not contrived tests. They're attacks that work on specific NN-powered self-driving cars but don't work on humans.

No human would be tricked into driving into oncoming traffic by the three small stickers in the road used in this attack.

<comment><USER9> You've never seen a car that's accidentally driven into wet concrete/pavement? If a construction worker places the pylons a little too far apart, it looks like you might be able to use the lane!

<comment><USER11> Ah, the good ole "You can't make X _perfectly_ safe, so therefore we shouldn't try to make it any safer than it is right now!" argument.

A favorite of gun enthusiasts and gun lobbyists.

<comment><USER12> A case in point about human perception: while you read jbob2000's comment that way, I read that same comment as nothing more than a counter to the idea that humans were somehow invulnerable to errors.

This seems a bit strange, given the main argument in favour of replacing human drivers with AI is that it _should_ be possible to make one that works as well as the best human driver, only without getting tired, high, or distracted, and with reaction times measured in microseconds instead of hundreds of milliseconds.

We're not there yet. I don't know how far we are from that future.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: The Top Websites of 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://statvoo.com/top/sites <comment><USER2> Hey, this looked really interesting to me. But I went to [https://statvoo.com/page/statvoo-rating- system](https://statvoo.com/page/statvoo-rating-system) \-- to check out how the ranking system works, and it doesn't seem like it gives much information. Care to explain it a little more in depth?

I like the idea. I'm trying to think of some applications for the data.</comment>


Advantages of Functional Programming in Java 8 - <AUTHOR> https://bulldogjob.pl/articles/156-the-advantages-of-functional-programming-in-java-8 <comment><USER2> The article isn't about functional programming.

Functional programming is programming with pure (mathematical) functions. As a consequence, functional programming is also programming with (immutable) values (i.e. persistent data-structures, etc).

This isn't pedantry. The whole point of FP is being able to have your code be "referentially transparent", a property that gives you "equational reasoning", making your code more composable, more testable and easier to understand because you can take any function, divorce it from its surrounding context and still make some sense of it. Of course, there's no silver bullet, yada yada, but take those traits away and the definition loses meaning and usefulness almost completely.

And btw I shouldn't need to specify "pure" or "mathematical" if programming wouldn't have overloaded the meaning of the word "function". We could have stuck with "procedure" or "routine" or "sub-routine". As in jumps in code that push and pop the call stack and that have side-effects. And if you want to express the act of programming using side-effectful functions, there's also a perfectly adequate term for it already: " _procedural programming_ ".

Yes, it's cool having closures and anonymous functions in your language. It's sort of a prerequisite if you want your FP code to be comfortable. But that's not FP. There's actually nothing resembling FP about the code samples in the article. And the implementation of AccountConverterImpl would make any programmer that likes FP to cringe.

On Java 8: yes, it's becoming possible to do FP, sort of anyway. But it's still painful as hell, with the environment actively working against you. First of all there aren't many libraries that do FP in Java, I only know of functionaljava.org. So you're swimming against the tide, with the standard library itself being actively hostile to FP. And you can start from the fact that Java 8 was released in 2014 and even its new Option type is breaking the Functor laws, because map(x).map(y) != map(x.andThen(y)) and lets not even mention the word monad because it scares people.

But I guess that if you're forced to use Java, well, then you can find some ways to cope with it (especially if you aren't scared of building your own stuff).

<comment><USER3> So Lisp is not a functional language...

<comment><USER4> So R isn't a functional language...

To be fair the vast majority of people would say that it isn't BUT hidden inside is a very Scheme inspired system that can make pretty functional programs.

[http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-40447-4...](http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-40447-4_12#page-1)

<comment><USER5> Scheme isn't a very good functional programming language either. Even cons cells are mutable objects with identity: just use eq? everywhere instead of equal?, and use set-car! and set-cdr! instead of creating new cons cells, and you're back to JavaScript.

\---

Sorry, can't reply properly, I'm "submitting too fast".

<ignore>I understand neither the form nor the content of your objection. Is Scheme a programming language? Yes. What does this have to do with whether it supports functional programming reasonably well?</ignore>

Scheme is a higher-order programming language: procedures are first-class objects whose identities can be bound to variables just like any other value. I'm not sure about calling it "functional", though: the type of procedures isn't fully abstract, because you can query the physical distinction between two procedures that have the same behavior when called. In other words, in Scheme, procedures are _objects_ , but they are not _values_.

<comment><USER4> Scheme is a functional programming language yes?

Sorry but I am an old timer and seeing people blast the paths that led us to where we are is very frustrating to me.

Edit added is a functional

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am really wondering why this is on HN front-page. It does not provide any good, in-depth analysis of FP in Java 8. In the contrary, the writing seems to be incoherent and assuming knowledge of a certain Java stack.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. A major red flag is the omission of generics usage on their methods. Just using List or Collection without type parameters is just dangerous and very bad advice for a novice programmer seeking enlightenment for Java 8 programming.

<comment><USER8> It looks like the generics used to be there but have been removed. Because there is one generic type 'T' left in the implementation of ClassUtils.setIfNotNull.

So about this setIfNotNull: I don't understand why this method is used in updateEntity. To me it seems the accountType property in the dto can be set with whatever is in the entity, null or not null. And of course, Java 8 has introduced the Optional class as a better way of dealing with null values, so why bother writing a workaround at all?

<comment><USER9> I see now, probably just something to do with formatting/escaping, the <> are being swallowed.

Yes, it's strange. I'd prefer to map a null in a DTO to an empty optional. I'd like even more to never have nulls in the dto in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For me the biggest advantage of FP languages is exactly not have to deal with `GenericConverter`s, `AbstractDTO`s, `BaseEntity`s and other overly-complex constructs that many OO languages inflict upon the programmer, but to create a small and simple sub-language that solves my problem without making it even more complex.

<comment><USER11> You can horribly engineer things, regardless if you use haskell or Java.

I've seen Java code like you described, but I've also seen big java projects written in clear, no-nonsense style. For example, look at any open source Java projects released by Google.

I've also seen FP projects that require all engineers to learn category theory. Even when armed with programmers proficient in FP, project did not seem significantly more productive or less buggy from the outside. The approach-ability was lower - you couldn't just quickly glance how something works, even if you knew FP.

The most successful approaches I have seen involved adapting good functional concepts - referential transparency, immutability, compos-ability, minimising local state, functions as objects. They rarely went dogmatically all-in on pure-FP/category-theory/DSL-all-the-things. I strive to write code adhering to those rules, even in non-FP languages, but ultimately favouring practicality and I believe that I get the best of both sides.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Every time I see a class like ClassUtils I remember that OO is only good for half of the programs we have to write (1). Problem is, it's a half of each source file. On the other side, OO is a very convenient abstraction for the other half.

(1) I'm sure there are more gracious ways to do that, but maybe not in a single line. That's why we keep seeing classes whose only purpose is to be bags of random methods.

<comment><USER13> Even C++ has the solution to that - separate namespaces and classes. Allow standalone functions.

        namespace Utils {
             void setIfNotNull(const Supplier& getter, const Consumer& setter) {
                 ...
             }
        }

        ....

        using namespace Utils;
        setIfNotNull(...);

<comment><USER14> I believe you can achieve the same in Java by static import.

EDIT: Also, I think the parent comment was not complaining about the missing possibility of creating standalone functions, but rather saying that not every functionality can be forced into objects, i.e. there is still need of standalone functions in OOP.

<comment><USER13> You still have to put each method in some class in java, in C++ you can just put it in namespace. It makes more sense, even if in practice the difference is minimal.

> there is still need of standalone functions in OOP

Yes, and that's what I've shown?

<comment><USER15> It's a syntax issue. Final class with private constructor and all members being static is effectively a namespace.

<comment><USER16> I think it's more than just syntax - it's culture. In C++, free standing functions has been a part of the culture of the language since the beginning. The design of the language encourages them - there are even cases, such as operator overloading, where it's preferable to implement it as a free standing function rather than a class method. In Java, when I write a class that is a collection of static methods, I feel like I'm fighting _against_ the language and it's culture, even though they are sometimes used.

<comment><USER15> How much do you write code on Java?

Such functional namespaces were part of Java from the very beginning (Math is a good example and with release of Java 8 now there are many more in standard library). I have not seen an enterprise project yet, in which there's no something ending with Utils or Helper, that is just a collection of functions. Such naming is an anti-pattern, of course, but still, almost every developer in Java world uses this and has it part of it's development culture.

<comment><USER13> > Such naming is an anti-pattern, of course

This is exactly the cultural problem with too strict adherance to OOP :)

It's like people saying "nails are anti-pattern of course, but people still use them, so we've added hammer-heads to our screwdrivers".

<comment><USER16> Yes, that was the point I was getting at. It's obviously part of how real Java code is written, but I feel like I'm going against how the language was designed when I do it. (Clearly, everything is _not_ an object, and a class is not always the most appropriate way to group code.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's something about these kinds of threads that seems somewhat snobbish and tribalist. There was a similar rant a few weeks ago over whether your 'FRP' is really 'FRP' ([https://medium.com/@andrestaltz/why-i-cannot-say-frp- but-i-j...](https://medium.com/@andrestaltz/why-i-cannot-say-frp-but-i-just- did-d5ffaa23973b#.7ht5m8am1))

I think we can all agree that there's a certain beauty and elegance to completely functionally pure programs. CycleJS for example, really pleases me compared to the complexity of React.

However, like everything in life, the real world is messy and hard to squeeze into binary categories. I can't forsee any large scale program that adheres to such constraints without bending over backwards in weird contortions to meet the limitations imposed, to the extent that such code may even be harder to reason about than mutative code.

I think practical languages 'win' by being 'worse', by compromising and allowing the developer to shoot themselves in the foot a little.

<comment><USER18> Haskell is absolutely capable of mutation, it's just controlled and tracked. IMHO, immutability is simply a saner default for a high-level language. I think languages "win" due to socio-economic reasons, not technical ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > _Adding a new Converter for another entity-DTO pair (like User, Address, > etc.) needs just creating a new UserConverterImpl class, implementing its > own UserConverter, which in turn should implement GenericConverter._

This is exactly what is wrong.

Unnecessary complications resulting from not merely over-engineering but piling up completely unintelligible crap, produced in order to... well, use some Java 8 features.

Imagine that in math instead of doing algebraic simplification one would go into the opposite direction.

Same kind of madness, BTW, is going on in the realm of Javascript frameworks.

</comment><comment><USER20> FP in Java. HA HA HA OH WOW</comment>


A Not So Distant Mirror: Jack London's Political Writings - <AUTHOR> http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/tharsing_sp17.html <comment><USER2> Great read. Among the more telling paragraphs: _I had the sense that the twentieth century might as well not have happened. In the first part of the century, labor won the right to unionize, and through the middle of the century labor got the government to establish the minimum wage and the eight- hour day, to end piece-work, to outlaw child labor, and to create the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. With the exception of child labor and minimum wage, most of these accomplishments were largely undone in the last part of the century, as government came to be seen as the servant of business, not of the people._

<comment><USER3> It's startling how much the current era reminds me of the late 1800s/early 1900s, as well as how little that era was focused on in my history classes. We jumped from the Civil War to World War 1 pretty quickly, with scarce attention paid to the social upheaval and long, often violent struggles between workers, governments, and the upper classes. Nowadays, we act as if the Industrial Revolution evolved into shared prosperity naturally; we mock the Luddites, the utopians, the Communists for being unable to see how the disruption caused by technology would lead to positive outcomes. But these outcomes took a long time, were not inevitable, and they did not come from capitalism alone; they were fought for, every step of the way, in a long, complicated, morally ambiguous struggle to shape the new world. We seem to be entering another age of disruption, and would do well to look back on the previous one to understand what was fought for and why.

<comment><USER4> In a global economy, governments don't have the leverage required to keep the capitalists in check. The US still has its environmental and labor laws, but because corporations can ship the work over to countries whose people are willing to work for $0.40/hr, our labor laws don't mean a thing.

We really need to take a good hard look at globalism.

<comment><USER5> > We really need to take a good hard look at globalism.

Or capitalism in a global economy.

<comment><USER4> Capitalism can exist without exploiting foreign labor.

<comment><USER5> Not without shutting down free trade agreements and becoming protectionist, which virtually everyone agrees is a bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> HN algorithm magic. You submit a leftist story (that is no propaganda but it just paints the world in its factual colors). The story gets upvoted quickly so it makes it to the front page (which will get it up voted even more). Then the magic invisible hand of the market appears and the story gets lost in HN underbelly.

Note to self: Why am I still bothering with HN? It is exactly like the general IT crowd. Anything worth discussing is not.</comment>


Maple Syrup Revolution - <AUTHOR> http://modernfarmer.com/2014/01/maple-syrup-revolution/

<comment><AUTHOR> This article (which I found via Kottke: [http://kottke.org/14/01/say-hello-to- big-maple](http://kottke.org/14/01/say-hello-to-big-maple)) describes a new method of producing maple syrup which could increase production by an order of magnitude given the same amount of land.</comment>


Online courses - <AUTHOR> https://learndigital.withgoogle.com/digitalgarage/courses <comment><USER2> Thanks, this looks great. Surprised I haven't come across this too as the course videos date back to 2017.</comment>


Google SketchUp - <AUTHOR> http://sketchup.google.com/spectrum.html

<comment><USER2> The title sucks... any moderators out there?

The link is fairly interesting... about an offshoot of Google SketchUp intended for autistic people, called Spectrum.

Maybe the title could be something like "Google SketchUp Helps Autistic People Express Themselves"

<comment><USER3> wow, yes. Mod the title someone! I clicked through and "confirmed" it was just a link to Sketchup - totally missing that it wasn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting link. I have an older relative with Asperger's syndrome who is a complete frickin' genius at three dimensional thinking. He supported his family for years by selling specialized machine parts for flowing and binding fabric through industrial sewing machines. The guy is completely self taught. He's also pretty good at measuring to the millimetre by eyesight, identifying screw threads at a glance etc.

<comment><USER5> Wow, that sounds really interesting. Is there anywhere I can read about this/his story? Blog, portfolio, etc...</comment></comment>


How much do you charge for your services, with how much experience? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a developer looking for freelance work, and have been coding in PHP for almost 10 years now. What I want to know is what the rest of you either charge for your service, or would pay for an experienced developer. I'm trying to get a feel for the general market rate, to see if my $50/hr rate is too high, low, or spot on. <comment><USER2> Charge double the hourly wage you would work for as a full-time employee. If you're worth $25/hr as an employee, then $50/hr would be about right for freelancing.

A more in depth look: <http://www.antipode.ca/2009/what-your-time-is-worth/>

</comment><comment><USER3> This helped me get an idea for what I should charge, <http://freelanceswitch.com/rates/>

Of course a lot of different factors go into what you feel you are worth. I found it best to be flexible with my hourly rate based on the type of work that is to be expected.

An example is if another developer comes to me looking for an extra hand on a project to knock out some code and I don't have to manage the project in anyway, I charge a lower hourly rate than if a business owner said they have an idea and wanted to start from scratch.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, that was a cool link. And it did come to about twice what I get paid hourly as an employee, so I guess that's a good heuristic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Depends a lot on cost of living. For example, I'd never work for as low as $50/hr unless I was very desperate, but I also live in NYC. Typical contractor wages seem to be about $100/hr depending on YOE and type of work.</comment>


SUSE will soon be the largest independent Linux company - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-new-suse/ <comment><USER2> I was wondering "What about Canonical" but it looks like SUSE's annual revenue is about 4 times that of Canonical, and of course SUSE requires a contract to get patches etc. where Ubuntu doesn't.

I'd be curious what the difference in the install base is like.

<comment><USER3> Considering Suse has Walmart, Kroger (and their QFC, Fred Meyer, etc subsidiaries), Safeway/Albertsons, and numerous European & African chains using SLES as the base of their retail systems, they likely sell many more support contracts.

SLES has pushed deep onto back office computers and embedded devices like deli scales, which ia a big stretch from where it started (as an IBM 4690 OS replacement).

<comment><USER4> Yep suse is big in retail, IIRC they service about 70% of the top 100 retailers or something like that. Also the car industry seems to rely on suse quite heavily, and I think the US defense and airforce use SLES as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Personally, I admire the fact that openSUSE polishes KDE and GNOME (Xfce4 as well) pretty well, satisfying details, really makes the effort to make the distro more user friendly and easy to use. However, I wouldn't use it as personal workstation distro (I currently run Arch Linux and Fedora 29, I wouldn't mind running Manjaro, Kubuntu/Xubuntu or Debian).

I have been under the impression that SUSE has kept changing ownership since Novel took over (then Attachmate, merger with Micro Focus, now sold), never settled, it's simply a a risk to many businesses running Linux with commercial support.

During my tenure with Citrix (XenServer team), the product team made a big decision to switch dom0 (not just the kernel) from SLES 11 (I could be wrong about the release) to CentOS 7, which I personally thought was the right move. Don't want to talk about XenServer rebrand and what happened to the free edition here (simply search xcp-ng as alternative).

NOTE: In the past 11 years working in Australia, I have never seen a single production system running on SLES (I've seen Gentoo though). Above doesn't mean openSUSE/SLES isn't a great Linux distro.

<comment><USER6> > I have been under the impression that SUSE has kept changing ownership since > Novel took over (then Attachmate, merger with Micro Focus, now sold), never > settled, it's simply a a risk to many businesses running Linux with > commercial support.

Absolutely not - this just proves that there's no commercial risk involved. Red Hat was recently bought as well, which unlike the SUSE sale might actually have an impact on the company.

<comment><USER5> Those decision makers (sign the POs) normally don't have insight into the IT industry ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its good to see the brand reemerge. For a while there I thought they were done.

<comment><USER8> Do you use SLES? Because I do everyday and its garbage. SLES 15 is a shit show... Rather use RHEL any day before SLES.

<comment><USER9> What's the problem specifically? When I had to check it out recently as a customer wanted to move to MariaDB I didn't find info about support for the older 5.7 version which is the last version identical to MySQL, and which would be helpful as an option to have for pinpointing errors.

I wish they'd produce a systemd-less version like Devuan.

<comment><USER7> > I wish they'd produce a systemd-less version like Devuan.

I've been hearing similar often. What's the beef with Systemd anyway? I've haven't heard much and Googling will surely just turn up a bunch of theoretical, philosophical, or hate posts. Why is Systemd bad from the perspective of a regular user.

<comment><USER9> I takes over so much of regular infrastructure - starting and stopping deamons, logging (writing log entries into binary files only systemd itself can read), login, time synchronization, network setup, and an ever-increasing number of unrelated tasks remotely associated with managing computers.

Some of us like the Unix way where things are predictable and composed of small, transparently-working programs that do one thing, and do it well. Nothing that systemd solves is worth abandoning established ways of system automation and follow Poettering's (author of systemd) vision instead. Systemd in its entirety is approaching the size of the Linux kernel itself. If I wanted that kind of monolith, I'd be running Windows, or AIX (where ironically Linux is heading with RedHat being bought by IBM). Have fun with IBM Tivoli SystemD cluster manager some ten years down the road.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why do people seem to give SUSE the cold shoulder? I haven't tried it (see?) but I've never really heard anything bad about it. A quick poke suggests the software packaging situation for it is excellent as well.

<comment><USER11> Every time I've tried to use it, as a desktop, it just wasn't great. Edit: let me clarify. It just didn't work great out of the box. Maybe it was hardware problems, or general weirdness and brokenness, but it felt "off".

<comment><USER12> When I started with Linux, the first few years I used SuSE. At that time it was quite normal that a lot of tweaking was needed to get things running. But later on when the landscape modernized, it was noticable that SuSE uses a lot of custom solutions. For instance the /opt directory used to be more in use, likewise a lot of configuration was done via YaST instead of /etc or standard tools that can access /etc.

So when bugs appear one needs to wait for SuSE to fix them or work around them. Ubuntu did a much more standard approach, they have (like Debian of course) less customizations in place making users profit from both upstream and 3rd party packages without SuSE focus.

Anyways, other distributions don't seem to have a tool like YaST which does _all_ the system configuration and has both proper shell and UI integrations. Also KDE feels more natural on SuSE I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm also pretty sure that SUSE is currently oldest active distro as well, it's based on Slackware.

<comment><USER14> Genuinely don't see how an RPM based distro is based on slackware... What am i missing?

<comment><USER15> > In 1994, with help from Patrick Volkerding, Slackware scripts were > translated into German, which was marked as the first release of S.u.S.E. > Linux 1.0 distribution. It was available first on floppies, and then on CDs.

RPM was first released in 1997.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUSE_Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUSE_Linux)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> And SUSEcon starts tomorrow in Nashville. Anyone else going?

</comment><comment><USER17> And they fail so much it is painful to watch. Strangely in capitalism the fit will sell themselves when able to get a really sweet deal. But the unfit will "survive" in some sense as "independent" units.</comment>


14 hackathon product ideas worked on at Garage48 Music Tallinn - <AUTHOR> http://garage48.org/blogger/ideas-pitched-at-garage48-tallinn-music

<comment><USER2> Great event, first time about Music and Entertainment Apps. Mentors from US, Germany and Finland :)</comment>