Philip Roth has died - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/obituaries/philip-roth-dead.html <comment><USER2> I started reading Roth a couple months ago as part of a project to learn how to write better fiction (I also chose Philip K. Dick at the same time for some reason...). I partly chose Roth after seeing by how much he outnumbered any other writer in terms of entries for best 100 novels of the 20th century (I don't remember who published the list, but it was something pretty credible, and he had 6 entries on there IIRC).

I started with Portnoy's Complaint and enjoyed it, but I wasn't blown away or anything. More recently I've been reading a novelette + 5 short stories in a single volume (named after the novelette) titled, "Goodbye, Columbus"—and I've been seriously impressed. I finished the novelette and 2.5 of the short stories; both short stories were astounding (IMO), and the novelette was damn good.

My understanding is that the themes of being Jewish in the U.S. and male sexuality are solidly mainstays in his writing, which at first seemed like would limit the material's interest to me, since I'm not Jewish at all—but if you read descriptions of his novels across the years you'll find a very interesting (bordering on bizarre at times) range. I'm looking forward to reading more.

<comment><USER3> I love Philip Dick but I wouldn't recommend emulating his writing style. None of his accomplishments are a result of his prose. His character/plot development, dialog, scene... they're all just mediocre imho. However, his ability to touch a contemporary nerve with a concept or plot device is singular, although I think Mary Shelly comes close.

<comment><USER4> There is a reason why Dick is one of the most adapted authors but almost none of those adaptions are particularly faithful. He was amazing at creating high concept ideas, but often the execution failed to fully capture the potential of those ideas. I wonder if he was some 20 or 30 years younger whether he might have spent his entire career in movies and TV which has a more collaborative creative environment that could have let his strengths really shine through while hiding some of his weaknesses as a storyteller.

<comment><USER3> I agree a modern day Philip Dick would be amazing. There was nowhere near the appetite for Sci Fiction back then as there is now. Dick churned out dos-a-dos bound pulp paperbacks, and most of his work is in short stories he published in magazines. He's a bit like Dickens in this way. All his ideas had to fit within pretty tight constraints, within crude mediums.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Last year, he was one of the 18 authors to be published, while still alive, in the "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade". (More than 250 authors has been published in this collection)

It is a reference edition in France of the complete works of classic authors.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblioth%C3%A8que_de_la_Pl%C3%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblioth%C3%A8que_de_la_Pl%C3%A9iade)

</comment><comment><USER6> His book "Plot Against America" helped to change my worldview. It was the first time I thought about the fact that it was not a foregone conclusion that America is a country that hadn't fallen to fascism in the mid 20th century, and led to me start reading history with a more critical eye. After that I realized just how much history is comprised of shades of grey rather than right and wrong.

<comment><USER7> I have made the experience that merely anything in life has shades of grey. It causes a lot of cognitive dissonance for me. For most people, including me, it is thus easier to simply stick to one particular world view. At least for a certain time.

So as a smart person, either you are some sort of "schizophrenic" or you ignore some facts and possible interpretations and stick firmly to one side of the coin. Both is difficult

<comment><USER8> I disagree. You can realise your ignorance without having to immediately correct every instance of it. And you can enjoy the slow uncovering of new information and points of view, building each into your worldview bit by bit. This is part of the joy of life, for me, the journey to deeper and deeper levels of understanding of the world.

And a decision to stick to one side is, in my opinion, a little lazy. No insult meant, it's just that you seem unwilling to do the work and exert the extra mental effort, which is the dictionary definition. It seems like you have deemed dealing with complexity impossible so as to give yourself an excuse to remain biased. It's not so difficult to enjoy being skeptical of both sides, and to prevent yourself from blindly accepting the narrative of one coin. And I feel like the world would be a great deal better if we all stopped preferring one side of the coin and appreciating both.

<comment><USER9> Fish or cut bait.

Often the expected value of committing to one side, even if it is not the optimal choice, exceeds the probable value of the optimal choice delayed for additional evaluation.

But there is a human tendency to increasingly feel that one's choice is more obviously correct than it really was, leading to discounting contrary evidence and even demonizing those who make the opposite choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just learnt about him and ordered my first book of his last night. Odd.

<comment><USER11> >I just learnt about him and ordered my first book of his last night. Odd.

No odder than any of the billions of cases of people who hadn't just learned about him and ordered their first book of his last night, though.

Edit: this is the same fallacy behind a good portion of claims of "miracles" and "supernatural" phenomena, and other apparent coincidences. If no one bought his book on the night before he died, _that_ would be odd. Not sure why all the hate.

<comment><USER10> It's an odd experience for me personally, not an odd experience for the cosmos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Guardian: Readers' memories and tributes

[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/23/at-each- book-i...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/23/at-each-book-i-gasp- in-admiration-your-tributes-to-philip-roth)

</comment><comment><USER13> There is a scene in Peter F. Hamilton's SF novel "Fallen Dragon" which immediately made me remember the restaurant "joke" from "Portnoy's Complaint".

SPOILER

Only here, the protagonist vomits violently after learning he's been treated (by his weirdo girlfriend) to some actual real meat from, yuck... a killed animal... not your regular vat-grown meat that every civilized person eats.

Oh, the power of childhood programming/imprinting...

<comment><USER14> I remember that scene, and I remember in my own childhood reading a similar scene in an Efremov novel (Andromeda or its sequels I can't recall which).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> David Foster Wallace wrote a review of an Updike book in 1998 that also shed some light on Roth:

[http://observer.com/1997/10/john-updike-champion-literary- ph...](http://observer.com/1997/10/john-updike-champion-literary-phallocrat- drops-one-is-this-finally-the-end-for-magnificent-narcissists/)

<comment><USER16> Brilliant and spot on. Everything here applies to the only Roth novel I read, Everyman.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> [https://outline.com/p3eJS4](https://outline.com/p3eJS4)

</comment><comment><USER18> The article called Roth "one of the last great white males". I had to read that five times to make sure that phrase was actually used. wtf. How is this okay on any level?

<comment><USER19> Calm down.

I believe the term has to do with age, and not race.

It's a post-war (WW2) term that's been used for decades to describe Roth and certain other writers, such as Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Salinger, Bellow, Updike and others. It's a term to describe a group of certain authors that wrote about certain themes, similar to the Hollywood term "Brat Pack".

<comment><USER18> Silly me, I didn't know "white" is a term that describes age.

<comment><USER19> It's often used (as in this case) a colloquial term alluding age via hair color (IOW, "white-haired" old people).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Should have won the Nobel. Why they never picked him is beyond me.

</comment><comment><USER21> An astonishing writer who couldn't write a bad book.

But one is allowed to pick favorites, so here they go: Operation Shylock, I married a communist, and The plot against America.

<comment><USER22> I've read only 3 1/2 of his books: Operation Shylock, Plot against America, Portnoys complaint: and part of American Pastoral -- which I had trouble getting through. I wonder if others found it too dense?

Otherwise, the above 3 books are really great!

<comment><USER23> Read all of American Pastoral. After the sad and slightly less interesting middle section, the plot flares up right at the end, as a long prepared payoff.

<comment><USER24> So much subtext in that book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Never heard of him before this news..I imagine he wrote good things</comment>


Ask HN: How/where to sell a side project? - <AUTHOR> For those of us who have side projects that have paying customers, what's the best way to sell these off if we no longer have the time to support them? I know of places like Flippa, but the buyer would require some technical chops to maintain the project. What are some other places? <comment><USER2> When you say "side project" how large are we talking? If it has $15~$25k a year of profits or so, consider talking to FEInternational -- I sold both of my companies through them.

At the "few hundred bucks a month" level you're probably looking at either Flippa or finding someone through personal networks.

You might consider posting on e.g. the Indiehackers forum or HN if you're looking for entrepreneurially interested people with technical skill, FWIW. There have been far less obvious places where business deals started.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sell it here on HN. There is also bizbuysell.com</comment>


Facebook underwriters holding the price with green shoe - <AUTHOR> http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/05/18/1007071/with-facebook-give-thanks-for-greenshoes/

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenshoe#Risk_to_Investors>

      The SEC currently does not require that underwriters publicly report
      their short positions nor short-covering transactions. Investors who
      are unwary of underwriter stabilizing activity who choose to invest in
      what they perceive to be a stable issue can encounter volatility
      when the underwriters pause or complete any stabilizing activity.
      "Cast in the most negative light, price stabilization might be seen
      as a means of transferring risk to a relatively naïve segment of
      the investor population."

How is this allowed by the SEC?</comment>


Should Facebook Manipulate Users? – Jaron Lanier - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/01/opinion/jaron-lanier-on-lack-of-transparency-in-facebook-study.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region

<comment><USER2> Someone in another thread mentioned they have unfollowed all their friends and likes. Let's empty out our timelines. Short of leaving facebook, that's the only hope.

</comment><comment><USER3> Should politicians manipulate citizens?</comment>


Website load and speed analyzer - <AUTHOR> https://varvy.com/pagespeed/ <comment><USER2> What does this tool do that others haven't already done?

* [https://tools.pingdom.com/](https://tools.pingdom.com/)

* [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/)

* [https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/s...](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/staticscan/)

* [https://observatory.mozilla.org/](https://observatory.mozilla.org/)

* [https://securityheaders.io/](https://securityheaders.io/)

* [https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly](https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly)

I'm sure there are a lot of others...

<comment><USER3> On that note, GTMetrix just did a great write up comparing a few [https://gtmetrix.com/blog/the-difference-between-gtmetrix- pa...](https://gtmetrix.com/blog/the-difference-between-gtmetrix-pagespeed- insights-pingdom-tools-and-webpagetest/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Getting rid of image metadata is _not_ optimization, that is simple information loss. I hate it when speed tests tell m the progressive jpgs are not optimized because they have EXIF; EXIF is part of the image.

<comment><USER5> What is the use of metadata of an image while rendering an image on a webpage?

<comment><USER6> Its not uncommon to download images from a website in general, however more specifically I know my mother - an avid photographer - uses a plugin to inspect metadata to find how and where a photo was taken.

<comment><USER5> That is not the typical use case. As web engineers one of our goals is to make websites faster. Speed is a very important UX.

Also unless you have a fast website, people will drop off your site and google won't rank you. No point of having great images with good EXIF data if people never see the image.

For photography websites, it does make sense to keep it but in general no point wasting those extra bytes which add upto GBs in wasted bandwidth.

<comment><USER7> I disagree that as web engineers, our goal is to make websites faster. Our goal is to make a website that suits the customer's needs.

Sometimes, that can even mean making a website slower. I've had that request before because end users were surprised that the site loaded so fast. We made stuff slow on purpose so that the user thinks we are crunching data hardcore and giving their request some real thought before presenting the results.

Sure, if the customer asks for ultimate speed and explicitly does not care about image metadata availability, then removing that metadata is fine. But otherwise, removing those few bytes probably won't change how fast your website loads by a significant amount. You're better off working on caching, reducing TTFB, automatically adapting image size to screen size, spriting icons with http1, server push with http2, gzipping, reducing the size of Javascript/CSS and working on perceived speed. This will probably be orders of magnitude more useful to users than removing image metadata. And it won't remove that useful information from images.

<comment><USER5> Wow! I primarily work on consumer facing web products where speed does play a big part but glad to know where you are coming from. I have not had such request or perspective. :) Thanks for sharing your experience.

Agree, that its not the first thing you should focus on. But saying you should not do it is what I was protesting.

When you run your site through speed analysis tools like the site posted or WebPageTest(my favourite), you do get a set of tasks based on priority and removing exif data is generally low and I am not advocating against that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems to be wrong about caching.

Tells me:

        Browser caching not enabled for all resources.

And then gives an example of a file that is delivered with this cache header:

        Cache-Control:max-age=3600

Also it seems to put DNS resolv time into the "Server response time". So if you get "Slow server response time" that might be something that is happening between this service, it's DNS provider and your Nameserver. Then when you try it again, suddenly it's "Fast server response time" because DNS caching took place.

<comment><USER9> That Cache-Control header specifies one hour. My resources specify a month or two, and the tool doesn't complain about any.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> IMO, inlining styles is rarely worth it. Just include a single CSS file in the head and call it a day. There's value in simplicity.

If I'm given the choice, I usually avoid web fonts. Most platform's built-in fonts are usually pretty good and fast. It's fine for a website to look different on various browsers and operating systems.

<comment><USER5> When your CSS file gets large. Which is the case in most sites today thanks to frameworks like Bootstrap. Your page will wait for the CSS file to download, process and repaint. Inlining some of the CSS i.e. critical path CSS can give you lighting fast renders.

<comment><USER11> Also don't forget to strip your unused classes, which I'm embarrassed to admit, I did not start doing until recently

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It incorrectly reports that browser caching is "Not enabled for third party resources" on my site: [http://blog.zorinaq.com](http://blog.zorinaq.com)

It gives absolutely zero details about why it thinks it's not enabled, and does not say which are the affected "third party resources"... As a matter of fact I only have 1 third party resource ([https://fonts.googleapis.com/](https://fonts.googleapis.com/)) and it properly sets Expires and Cache-Control...

</comment><comment><USER13> I've used [http://yellowlab.tools](http://yellowlab.tools) religiously in the past, glad to see more solutions coming about.

Although it is frightening that we need these in the first place, to be honest.

<comment><USER14> Varvy is not new. It used to be feedthebot and has been operating like it is now without any updates for a least 2 years. Maybe longer.

<comment><USER13> Ah gotcha, thanks for letting me know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ok - it works and I get a nice report.

Does this offer anything more than WebPageTest.org, Google Pagespeed, or auditing in Chrome?

</comment><comment><USER16> Would be good to be able to kickstart the process via a query string, i.e. varvy.com?q=[https://my.url](https://my.url)

</comment><comment><USER17> I hate how all of these tools complain about google fonts. This looks like Google's page speed tool with a nicer UI.

<comment><USER18> I think all the tools are trying to tell you something. Using fonts is in fact the largest dependency with many websites.

<comment><USER17> I specify only the characters I use in custom fonts. I budget no more than 30kb to fonts when making a website.

These tools complain that Google font's css is only cached for 2 hours. Which is something none of us can control. Even Google's own page speed tool complains about this. I get perfect scores in everything but Google fonts so it sticks out like an eye score.

<comment><USER19> Cant you serv them from your own server?

<comment><USER17> Google does optimisations based on user agent. Ilya Grigorik does not recommend hosting the fonts from your own server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hey UI point - you might want to set a consistent height for those grid elements in the list -- would do a lot to make the elements more consistently laid out.

It looks like the individual tiles vary in about 2-4 lines for the below-title description text, so I fiddled around for a bit, and it looks like this is just about right:

      .card {
          height: 25em;
      }

Of course, if you're going to set the height of the card you should probably go in and set the heights (in em or percentage) of the children elements, etc.

(just noticed the results page cards are a lot bigger, so probably scope that rule down to only the cards on the landing page)

</comment><comment><USER21> I noticed the site is reporting JS and CSS sizes AFTER gzip, not before. That seems unnecessary. Browsers will download the compressed version, so it's the compressed version that determines the page speed.

</comment><comment><USER22> What are you supposed to do about image alt text when the image is purely decorative, like a border?

This complains about alt="".

<comment><USER23> Some people would say use a div and background image CSS property. Not sure if that's the recommended solution though.

<comment><USER24> Well - I would try to omit the image at all and use border style properties to do it. This way I would omit an request totally.

But maybe someone with real experience (not some hobbyist when it comes to front end work) should chime in.

<comment><USER25> Per [https://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML/Elements/img](https://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML/Elements/img)

> A purely decorative image that doesn't add any information In general, if an > image is decorative but isn't especially page-specific, for example an image > that forms part of a site-wide design scheme, the image should be specified > in the site's CSS, not in the markup of the document. However, a decorative > image that isn't discussed by the surrounding text but still has some > relevance can be included in a page using the img element. Such images are > decorative, but still form part of the content. In these cases, the alt > attribute must be present but its value must be the empty string.

I have always understood that (and earlier spec incarnations) to mean that <img alt=''> is correct for these cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Many of these recommendations are at odds with HTTP/2 recommendations, practices.

</comment><comment><USER5> WebPageTest offers more actionable insights. Chrome Developer Tools and Google PageSpeed offer almost the same features.

</comment><comment><USER27> [http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com](http://www.confessionsoftheprofessions.com)

It probably blocked you but it's been over 5 minutes... [https://www.screencast.com/t/CFkwelblQ](https://www.screencast.com/t/CFkwelblQ)</comment>


I work at an accelerator. My boss asked me to predict the year 2043 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.raywu.co/2043 <comment><USER2> Unfortunately, it seems like this was written by someone without a science or engineering background.

Here are some errors in content or presentation:

1\. "Concrete jungle"... assuming gravity is supplied through rotation, the structure would be under constant tension, which makes concrete a very bad choice of material.

2\. "Synthesized photosynthesis"... "Photosynthesis" is a process, "synthesize" is what you do to a substance. "Artificial photosynthesis" is the correct term.

3\. "Renewable energy, however, will never live up to its promises. Hydrogen will be abundant from synthesized photosynthesis"... Artificial photosynthesis is a renewable energy source, so it is contradictory to say that renewable energy will never live up to its promises.

Here are some criticisms:

1\. "AI" is a dream of the 1960s, we now understand that the problem with AI is that we don't understand "intelligence" with sufficient depth to describe what makes an AI different from an ordinary computer problem. I would say "automated mission to Europa" instead of "AI mission to Europa".

2\. I don't think wired infrastructure will go a way. We are addicted to bandwidth and fiber is the way to get it. We will only use wireless at the bottom two levels or so.

3\. Protein will be significantly less difficult to supply than suggested.

When I read this, I feel like I'm reading predictions of a global network of flying zeppelins from the early 1900s. That's not to say it's avoidable. It's not avoidable. We can only really predict what will happen in the absence of technological revolutions.

What's really _missing_ is a description of what humans will do for a living. White collar jobs are getting automated, and everyone graduating collage is competing with the people who used to do what the computers do, except for the percentage of graduates in the non-automated fields (like software development).

<comment><USER3> And Antarctica is unlikely to host many servers because it has long latency, no power generation, and an unclear legal environment.

<comment><USER4> The legal environment could be cleared up, if nations had some motivation to do the negotiating and paperwork. Latency would matter less if lots of servers were all hosted there :) And as for power, there's no NIBMYs to complain about nuclear power down there!

<comment><USER5> latency matters if your users are all spread over the country, at the speed of light it takes at least 47.33 ms, I just went to speed test and my ping was 16 ms for a server 20-30 miles away. so you could use Antarctica for mass data storage or processing. so it would work for archiving

<comment><USER6> So you're saying Antarctica would be a good fit for Amazon Glacier ([https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/](https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/))?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The problem with this article is that it was clearly written ~2013. It talks about all the current buzz words. Elon Musk. Google. 3D Printing. Tesla. Bitcoin. In 30 years these will be distant memories or absolutely commonplace / commodities hardly worth mentioning.

</comment><comment><USER8> Put your money where your mouth is: [http://longbets.org/](http://longbets.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is cool, never saw this before. There're some titans betting against each other. I'm not a betting man, but I see your point.

<comment><USER9> How confident are you that these will come to pass?

How confident are you that half of your predictions come true?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to find a way to remind myself of this piece by 2040 and see how far/close I am. It's incredible how some technology titans from the past were spot on with their predictions (Asimov, Tesla), and some we yet to see (Burke).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Ah, the poor people and their quest for affordable protein. Even in 2043, it should now dawn on people that the witholding of basic building blocs of life is the most efficient way to subjugate the lowered classes. In the meanwhile, there is a colony on the moon. TLDR: not much will change.

<comment><USER11> The one bet I'll make in the global protein race is that people will be consuming a lot more insects given how easy they are to farm/grow. I know some energy bars are already using cricket flour as a base and I recently had my first taste of some delicious insects at a street food fair and they tasted great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One thing I may add is the analytics of ones own health. Consider this...

2024: A person wakes up to a daily health report, an email with a daily breakdown of their health. Through the use of their smartwatches and other wearables, all kinds of analytic data gets streamed and analyzed automatically, blood pressure, heart rate, even analyzing a person's blood, all gets sent through algorithms looking for potential health issues. Those who are more affluent elect to have their data analyzed by a real doctor. Preventative medicine arrives.

<comment><USER13> 2025: Thanks to intense lobbying all healthcare providers have now access to that data, too. All companies state that they will only use this in your best interest.

2026: In western countries the medical wearables are declared mandatory, because of all the benefits they provide. This is another major lobbying breakthrough for the healthcare industry, which stated that their data models will work much better if everyone provides data to be analyzed as input.

2027-2032: Healthcare providers start to use the mandatory data to predict your value for society. You didn't do enough sports last week? That's bad. Thanks to the new unified healthcare data model (UHDM) you are now demoted into category 2, which excludes you from almost any job, because you could be a 'risk' for prospective employers.

2033: The world is parted into category 1 and category 2 people with no way to go back up from 2 to 1. Even living a perfect healthy life (according to the 'guidelines' provided) doesn't help as the UHDM says that any category 2 person is damaged beyond repair. Category 1 people live in constant fear of doing anything not according to the guidelines helpfully provided by those in charge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A blind eye turned to medicine there, the most important technology. Also one of the most likely to produce disruptive, revolutionary advances in the next couple of decades, given the relationship between computing power and the life sciences.

<comment><AUTHOR> Completely overlooked. Thanks for pointing this out :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Three machines. How could you overlook the three machines that will change our future forever?

One to extract food from the soil. One to extract water from the air. One to extract energy from the sun.

With these three machines we will free human beings from the scarcity problem leaving plenty of time to pursue more gratifying endeavors like terraforming the moon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you referring to James Burke's post-scarcity economy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Let's look back 30 years... 1984

Since then: Transportation, air ground and sea, virtually the same. Personal computers were there. Cell phones were there (larger, more expensive). Space program maybe in a better state. Space shuttle. Medicine hasn't fundamentally changed our quality of life.

What has changed? Not that much. We have progresses but not much in the way of revolutions.

The earth's population has grown, a lot. Computing devices are more ubiquitous and the Internet. The world has become a smaller place and people are a little less different. The Berlin wall has fallen. 9/11\. Those of us with jobs are working harder. Gaps are growing between rich, middle class and poor.

2044

Climate? Population? Super bugs? We are likely to be closer to a "world state" but there's always a chance of some major war. Nuclear weapons? Major disasters?

Technology wise we will probably get self driving cars in this time frame. Maybe space exploration will advance but I don't believe in any major way, perhaps the ground work would be laid for some more major shift there. Life expectancy will probably increase somewhat. In many areas we are hitting some system complexity limits in being able to make major progress. This has been happening already. We'll get more bandwidth to our homes, have somewhat faster and smaller computers, and likely new display technologies (3d/VR ...) We will have more robotic devices around performing various functions but nothing like Asimov's world... I think client vs. server will shift back to more client side similar to the mainframe->PC shift...

<comment><USER17> > Medicine hasn't fundamentally changed our quality of life.

Maybe not for you, but I think many current and former developing countries would strongly disagree. Take a look at this: [http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/#section=home](http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/#section=home)

<comment><USER16> For sure there have been a lot of changes but my intuition says progress over the last 30 years wasn't so great. I'm pretty sure the spread and severity of Malaria has grown. HIV. Air pollution in China.

Let's look at the link:

\- It looks at 50 years, not 30 years.

\- Very anecdotal. With regard to Mexico I'm not sure if it's better off than it was 30 years ago. What about the drug wars?

\- Seems to equate more money with better outcome. High-rises and modern bridges = progress.

\- "more than one billion people in extreme poverty," \- today

\- "Income per person has in fact risen in sub-Saharan Africa over that time, and quite a bit in a few countries", inflation adjusted? Doesn't look like it is. I was just looking at Wikipedia's Health in Kenya article: "The 2010 maternal mortality rate per 100,000 births for Kenya is 530, yet has been shown to be as high as 1000 in the North Eastern Province, for example.[5]This is compared with 413.4 in 2008 and 452.3 in 1990"

All that said, the world is hopefully moving towards a more stable population and a larger middle class (percentage wise) but I would need to see a lot more data before being able to say a lot more for sure about changes over the last 30 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is the problem with futurism, it becomes a projection of the small unit of time we currently reside in.

Reading Brave New World in an updated edition, the preface was about the nuclear arms race and how Huxley wished he had focused more on that as threat. Since I was reading that in 2002 or so it seemed that elements of the book itself were more relevant.

To solve this we would have to figure out which technologies have a future trajectory, try to ascertain what that is, and also predict unexpected events that would change those trajectories.

Let's say that we think electric/autonomous cars will become a majority. We first have to figure out the factors that will drive that, whether it is ecological consciousness, the price of fuel, simple competition between established car markers confronting upstarts, safety concerns, etc.

We also have to consider the darker sides of human nature, and the intervening events that may shape the years between now and then.

</comment><comment><USER19> Most long-term predictions tend to be made by people living in pockets where the future has already arrived, but it seems appropriate to recall Gibson's prediction about uneven future distribution. Trying to extrapolate based on local maxima will always produce a trendline that outpaces reality. To his credit, I don't see any flying cars here; the author bases many of his predictions on innovations and trends that are already to some extent or other in progress. But in order to bring a change from possible to widespread, it has to be commercialized first, and I struggle to see a profit motive for some of these things, even in the next 30 years - i.e. energy consumption monitoring by Google when electricity is cheap thanks to nuclear fission, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very insightful! Thanks for mentioning: Gibson and local maxima. I completely agree with your view on commercialization; in terms of monitoring consumption: I think there will be money in analytics/data that help us push forward ubiquitous computing (even if electricity is cheap)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure about Google getting specifically into power monitoring. After all they already tried that with Google PowerMeter and stopped in 2011. I think the Nest purchase was more about getting into the internet of thing/connected devices market and _all_ the different types of data they can capture.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ubiquitous computing…but I'm guessing it's the data that's important?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The odds that anyone will think "The Third World" is a good name for their virtual reality seem minimal at best.

<comment><AUTHOR> What's your take?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> hey Ray - just came here to say it was a brave attempt at near-casting.

About your "Third World", have you read D Suarez's "Daemon"? He develops a darknet which is FB on steroids (to put it mildly).

Also, you didn't manage to address the issue of climate change and global warming. I'm rather pessimistic on those counts.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't, thanks for the rec! That's really cool.

Yes, I overlooked that, too (along with personal health). We probably won't move away from coal and crude oil economies soon enough (even as we adopt more nuclear) for earth to avoid a climate disaster in the next 30 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great read!

With your article in mind, what would you guess are the best investments following the same timeline?

<comment><USER23> Even if you know the _industries_ that will grow exponentially, it doesn't guarantee stock success. I've just recently seen an episode of Haven, where one guy gets sent into the past and tells his grandpa to "invest in the microprocessor". I immediately thought "what does _that_ mean?! Invest in Intel...or VIA?". What he said would is no different than saying a few years ago "invest in smartphones".

So if I tell you nanotechnology, biotechnology and 3d printing are "the future", in which company do you invest now?

<comment><USER24> I don't know if you're right about this. If you know which industries will beat the market at large, then you could make money by getting a loan and investing it in that industry, spread across all the companies, and weighted by doing some due diligence on the companies (basic financials, how close they are to mass market, team, product-market fit, etc)

<comment><USER25> Industry specific index funds?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> history tells me that big companies like Google and Toyota are unlikely to still be around making a huge impact. A newer, younger company is more reasonable

<comment><AUTHOR> I hope so, too

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> fascinating. wish this were a movie! just one question: why exactly do you believe intercontinental travel will become more expensive?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was always afraid that we'd have to choose a place to settle down permanently as a kid.

It's the oil price (current combustion systems) that I think will render traveling economically infeasible—temporarily, until new energy source gets implemented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great vision! Like your vision on energy usage

<comment><USER23> I actually thought his energy vision was pretty off the mark. Oil won't peak when when we'll be able to extract less than before. It will peak when electric cars will start becoming _mainstream_ , and I expect that to happen at least a decade earlier, with most cars "in production" being electric cars happening about 2 decades earlier (so about 10 years from now).

He completely dismisses solar power, even though it has seen accelerated decrease in price/Watt already, in some countries/regions even surpassing coal-based energy in price, and it's still very early days. I also have quite opposite views about fission. If we figure out _fusion_ , we might use _that_ quite a lot, but I really doubt everyone will use an order of magnitude more fission reactors than we do now to power the 3d-printing and space economy.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point: peak when electric vehicles become mainstream. Is transportation the main driver for crude oil? How about plastic?

I'd love to see solar take a dominant role in energy—the question I have is will PV technology and geographic climate constraints push solar forward fast enough?

Writing a response to you also made me think about energy storage. I think that'll play a much larger role and I didn't think of it earlier.

<comment><USER29> The energy storage issue for renewable energy can be solved with today's technology just by making the grid bigger. Think of distribution networks spanning multiple timezones and geographic region.

For plastic i believe the recycling rate is already very high.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting, I didn't know; what are some companies betting on energy storage?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> My own assertions about 2043, for what they're worth.

Space is going to continue to be a novelty as far as Joe Public is concerned. If space-hotels exist, they will only be available to the very rich. There will be no "Elysium" space city or prototypes thereof. Mining of non- terrestrial resources is a somewhat unlikely possibility; if it is done, it will be done with robots.

People will not share driver-less cars, although driver-less taxi services will be cheaper and more convenient than the current taxi system. Driver-less cars will cause some big shifts in entertainment. Music consumption (esp. via radio) will no longer be the only thing you can do while traveling in a car; radio's listener-ship will decline.

VR telecommuting is farfetched, it would definitely be possible but no one would use it outside of small tech companies. We will be making good progress on direct brain<->computer interfaces but they will not be mainstream yet. Using them will require training, and the limited functionality they provide will make that training unattractive to anyone other than technophiles or people with disabilities. There are some who are interested in testing them in children, but this is... unpopular.

Sensory augmentation will be entering the public consciousness. Devices like cochlear implants will have reached parity with our natural senses, some people will be getting elective implants.

I shudder to think what would happen if an unregulated crypto-currency became the de-facto currency of a country or several countries. The sci-fi fan in me thinks it would be cool, the scientists in me wants to see what would happen, but the realist in me thinks that the results would probably be really unstable economies that would hurt the participants.

Countries that are traditionally thought of as "3rd world" will continue to improve, and the world as a whole will continue to grow more peaceful. The US will continue to lose its superpower status.

3D printers will exist and be adopted beyond makers and techies. Most people will use them to make key fobs and whacky utensils for parties since they don't know how to do their own 3D modeling. Some companies permit their customers to print replacement components, others attempt to remove 3D models of their parts from the internet. Food printers are a possibility, but there will not be much use outside of confections. The medical and industrial use of 3D printers will be somewhat common, and increasing.

Artificial meat will receive serious consideration for use in the fast food industry; whether it takes off or not is a matter of politics, not technology.

The US's energy infrastructure will limp along for the foreseeable future. Coal power will slowly lose out to natural gas. Solar panels will continue to become more economically attractive. Batteries become better as well, leading to more and more houses to go completely "off the grid." (There may be some interest in wiring such houses for DC power only.)

Global warming will not have been addressed in any meaningful manner. There are some buds of interest in geo-engineering as way to avoid the consequences.

There will have been no "miracle cure" discoveries for diseases like cancer, Alzheimer's, or diabetes. Significant progress will have been made on prevention, but the treatment options will only be slightly better.

People will not be afraid of AI, they will like that they no longer have to wait to speak to a support person. AI will not be delivered as such, it will come in bits and pieces; by the time people realize we are leaving too many tasks up to computers, they will be too comfortable to want to change back. Some examples of the "bits and pieces" we are likely to get:

Medical judgments. Doctors and pharmacists will still be busy, but they increasingly leave diagnosis and treatment decisions up to their computers.

Literature review. Researchers use computer analysis to identify gaps or inconsistencies in the scientific literature without having to read or understand the literature themselves. The computer can even suggest what procedures and statistical analysis would be best to use. Lawyers can also discuss their case with a computer and have the computer provide relevant laws and precedents.

<comment><USER31> That seems extremely conservative. Many people are predicting the singularity around the 2040's. Even current AI is starting to revolutionize the world and allow for robotics and automation almost everywhere. Many of the technologies you mention already exist, it's just a matter of how quickly they will be adopted (which is happening faster than ever [http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/technol...](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/technology%20adoption%20rate%20century.png))

<comment><USER32> It's smart to be conservative, in my opinion. Although technology is developing at an ever faster pace many people still overestimate what will be done within decades. There are surprisingly few accurate predictions from 30 years ago and most of them then thought we'd be a lot further than we are.</comment></comment></comment>


Passion Is Overrated - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.in/Dilbert-creator-Scott-Adams-illustrates-why-goals-are-for-losers-and-passion-is-overrated/Dilbert-creator-Scott-Adams-illustrates-why-goals-are-for-losers-and-passion-is-overrated/slideshow/46246132.cms <comment><USER2> The headline is kind of stupid and clickbaity, but the points he makes are 100% correct. I'm not sure why there's no discussion here yet.

Millions of hungry artists and musicians and philosophy majors can tell you that "do what you love and the money will follow" is utter bullshit, and it doesn't take a genius to see why. So it is weird how so many obviously successful people keep repeating such a pants-on-head stupid platitude. I wonder if they've actually just never considered that there are lives and experiences unlike their own, or if they subconsciously shy away from narratives that don't make them the most awesome person in the room.

<comment><USER3> It's only correct if you are following your passion to achieve some other end. If it's means based, then everything this guy says is completely wrong. Under a means based approach, you wouldn't care about great fame/recognition, because, for instance, painting everyday and being a community college arts teacher to support yourself is sufficient to make you happy.

I do agree 100% with what he says about systems vs goals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When someone asks me for this wisdom one day, I'll tell them I'm just lucky, but lucky in this sense: [http://lifehacker.com/5791032/improve-your-luck-by- relaxing-...](http://lifehacker.com/5791032/improve-your-luck-by-relaxing- keeping-an-open-mind-and-paying-attention-to-the-world-around-you)

<comment><USER5> That's a great article. Side note: I used to do some amateur track racing when I was younger. I noticed that the more hyper-focused on the "line" I became, the poorer I did from a time perspective. But when I opened up my vision to peripheral information and took in the whole track in addition to the line, I could make better and more appropriate decisions. Long story short: stress can lead to myopia (tunnel vision) and lost opportunities if you're not careful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> 1\. If you find your work boring, and don't make enough money at it, then quit and find something that either makes you money or stokes your passion.

2\. If you find your work boring, but you make plenty of money at it, then find side-passions.

3\. If your work stokes your passion, but you mooch off other people to make ends meet, it's not a great way to live.

4\. It's easy to be passionate about something. But will you be able to sustain the passion for years? Through the ups and downs, and the late-nights and the disappointments?

5\. Here's my list of top resources that helped me understand the importance of habits, long before this excellent slideshare by Scott Adams.

[http://tempr.org/54e03ee74f60d.html](http://tempr.org/54e03ee74f60d.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Watching an actual talk (as opposed to a slide deck optimized for reading, which is arguably a paradox ;P) is much more fun, especially given that this is much shorter and mostly a teaser of the concept that Scott Adams talks about in more depth.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJVxkr9eE9A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJVxkr9eE9A)

<comment><USER8> that was fantastic, the contents of the talk were really interesting but the presentation itself is among the best I've seen so far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is the guy that popularized affirmations, in which he wrote his goal down 15 times every day for months on end:

"I've often written about my own experiences with affirmations, the practice of writing your goals 15 times a day. It seems to work much of the time, at least in my experience, but presumably not because of any magic. At least one probable explanation for its perceived effectiveness is that focusing on goals changes the person who is doing the focusing." \- [http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/the-...](http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/the- secret.html)

<comment><USER10> The article you're talking about is written 7 years ago, so it makes a lot of sense that he learned and improved his thinking over that time and now he has sone new (and maybe better) ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I gave up on the idea of following what I thought of as my passion (studying military history) as a profession in high school because of writing anxiety. I picked up programming because it was usually enjoyable, but the only passion I have about it is seething hatred for terrible UIs and poorly-documented nondesigned APIs.

</comment><comment><USER12> Non-spammy version: [http://www.slideshare.net/Scottadams925/goals-are-for- losers...](http://www.slideshare.net/Scottadams925/goals-are-for-losers- passion-is-overrated)</comment>


Scala: Next Steps - <AUTHOR> http://scala-lang.org/news/roadmap-next <comment><USER2> Some context - the lead developer on the Scala Compiler, Paul Phillips, went slightly AWOL last year, and presented the talk "We're doing it all wrong" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg) [http://www.slideshare.net/extempore/keynote-pnw- scala-2013](http://www.slideshare.net/extempore/keynote-pnw-scala-2013)

He still seems slightly burnt by the whole thing: [https://twitter.com/extempore2/status/493633548994097154](https://twitter.com/extempore2/status/493633548994097154)

Other critiques of Scala collections have been made with the Typelevel library [https://github.com/scalaz/scalaz](https://github.com/scalaz/scalaz) which aims to fix these issues.

This post, 'Next Steps', seems to have come out of Martin Odersky's response to the situation. I commend him for taking practical and thought out action.

</comment><comment><USER3> Summary:

Scala 2.12: Focus on leveraging JDK8 features and interop

Scala next: Collections framework simplification

Scala next next: Language improvements

<comment><USER4> It's a shame they are not focusing on the most lagging bit - CLR/Mono support.

<comment><USER3> There doesn't seem to be much demand or interest for that overall. They recently discontinued the .NET support. Almost everyone was using it on the JVM. Any specific reason why you'd need CLR instead of the JVM?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love how they don't take backwards compatibility so seriously. A lax attitude to backwards compatibility means they can actually have the syntax get less bad over time, instead of becoming C++. Scala does have some less- than-obvious things that need to be fixed.

<comment><USER6> It's a double-edged sword. C++ is C++ partly _because_ the language doesn't change willy-nilly from underneath you. I could probably still compile C++ code from 1996, you can't even compile Scala code from 2012.

To you, that's a feature. To me, it's a sign that the language designers don't know what the heck they're doing and are throwing everything at the wall, watching what sticks and what doesn't.

I have _very_ little faith in Scala because of this. It's a language that doesn't know what it is now, what it wants to be tomorrow, what it wants to look like to act like...I _despise_ C++ but I'd never, in a million years, start a new project in Scala. I'd have to rewrite it in a year.

Maybe once the Scala gurus figure out what they're doing and release some kind of stable "spec", it'd be worth checking out. Until then, it's just a cool toy.

On how that's done, look at Go. Go 1 was released over 2 years ago and there have been no backwards-breaking changes yet, nor will there be. _That 's_ how you build a community.

My 2 cents.

<comment><USER7> Did you just make that up, or is there any actual experience backing up your claims?

Sorry, but that just reads like the usual "let's throw some random claims together I have read on the Internet from people who never actually used the language either" which everyone knows by now.

Do you have anything worthwhile to add to this discussion?

<comment><USER8> > _Do you have anything worthwhile to add to this discussion?_

Do you?

For one, he mentions what he wrote is just his "2 cents", and he is entitled to his opinion.

Second, he provides factually true statements to support his opinion, e.g that you need to make syntax changes to compile previous Scala code on later versions of the Scala compiler.

You might agree or not agree with him, but he states what he believes, and supports it with arguments and counter-examples (e.g the Go reference).

OTOH, besides the insult to the parent, your comment is content-free.

<comment><USER7> >> Do you have anything worthwhile to add to this discussion? > Do you?

I already have?

> he is entitled to his opinion

This doesn't mean he should be immune to scrutiny when making claims which are intended to drag the discussion into boring flame-wars.

> he provides factually true statements to support his opinion

Like "I'd have to rewrite it in a year."? Have a look at how long Scala releases are supported, both officially and with commercial support. That statement is just factually false.

Apart from that it's the usual comparison with C++ which don't provide any interesting insight except showing that the author has not much clue about the topic.

> release some kind of stable "spec"

Scala, like Java or C++, are evolving languages. While having some kind of mechanically checked spec (which is what Scala developers are working on) would be great, we have to accept that almost no language manages to do that.

All three languages (and most other languages as well) have compilers which differ from the spec in some cases, and specs which leave out important details important to compiler implementations. I don't see the reason for singling out one language.

> Go [...]

Well, it's not kind of hard to have a stable language (let's just ignore all the changes in Go which broke programs for a minute (Go's runtime and its "GC" are probably the largest offenders)) if it could have been rightfully called obsolete in the 1970ies.

What's missing in this comparison is the level of usefulness achieved by the language. As an example, whitespace and brainfuck have probably been stable right after their creation, it's just they are no that useful to solve today's problems.

More expressive language are harder to keep stable, but it's not that you don't gain anything in return.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really wish they'd stop grouping procedure syntax in with things like xml literals and forSome syntax. Procedure syntax is still used a majority of the time when able judging by the commits on github and it has several benefits whereas the others are rarely if ever used. Removing it while leaving things like postfix operators in, but behind a -feature flag is senseless.

<comment><USER7> Compared to the other features you mentioned, procedures are actively harmful. That's the reason why they are (slowly) going away.

<comment><USER10> In what possible way is the procedural syntax harmful?

<comment><USER7> People want to write methods, but forget the =. In the worst case, the result is silently swallowed and the bug manifests itself only later at the use-site, not at the point of declaration.

<comment><USER10> The exact same complaint could be registered about any function that doesn't have an explicit return type, yet there is no move to make that mandatory.

<comment><USER7> No. If the method has no explicit return type, it is inferred. It's really reducing the usefulness of type inference if a trivial error can flip the switch from "the return type is computed from the last expression of the method body" to "the method body is ignored completely, and () is returned instead".

Apart from that, there is a move to make explicit return types mandatory in some places; for instance when defining implicit conversions or when declaring abstract methods in traits.

<comment><USER10> And yet, if there is an idiomatic Scala (and the lack of one is a huge problem with the ecosystem) it's that nobody uses function syntax for Unit return types. So in order to get rid of a class of bug that is minuscule compared to others you are going to require hundreds of thousands (millions?) of lines of code to be changed. It's that kind of lack of real world perspective that causes the Scala community to be derided.

The most recent version of the Xlint/future features are useless because of this blind spot making so much noise in the output.

<comment><USER11> > And yet, if there is an idiomatic Scala (and the lack of one is a huge > problem with the ecosystem) it's that nobody uses function syntax for Unit > return types. So in order to get rid of a class of bug that is minuscule > compared to others you are going to require hundreds of thousands > (millions?) of lines of code to be changed.

If there's an automated conversion tool, who cares?

<comment><USER9> Will the tool scan github, epfl papers, and the rest of the internet and fix the Scala there, which is still being produced using procedure syntax?

<comment><USER11> It will scan the code you clone, copy, etc. from those places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It feels like a faster complier is still a ways out.

That's really too bad.

<comment><USER10> I really do not understand this continued complaint about Scala compilation. I've been developing in Scala for over 4 years full time and have never had compile times be the major bottle neck in my workflow. Between incremental compilation and good modularity test times dominate my "waiting" cycles and that is on the order of seconds. Hardly noticeable given my think/type loop is much slower than that.

I have any number of complaints about Scala but compile times is way down on my list. I'm generally interested in what sort of compiler performance is expected.

That said, it might be a generational difference as I've worked on projects where full compiles happen overnight...

<comment><USER13> How much code are you compiling? At Foursquare (with 100s of thousands of lines in our bigger servers) compilation times are awful. We're solving this by better modularizing, but it's a long journey.

<comment><USER14> It's too easy in scala to create a giant mudball codebase where every file depends on half the project. Managing the compile graph is almost impossible when you have 20 hackers on the same codebase.

Sometimes I wish that scala had some compiler-flag that signals these problems, maybe a restricted mode or something with annotations.

<comment><USER7> Like this: [https://github.com/lihaoyi/acyclic](https://github.com/lihaoyi/acyclic)?

<comment><USER14> I tried it, it's not flexible enough for my needs.

<comment><USER7> File issues and describe your use-case! :-) The author usually seems to be quite responsive.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


C++ template meta-programming shell - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sabel83/metashell

<comment><USER2> The project is a good idea, but the point of having C++ in a shell is a bit odd. I think the whole language doesn't fit so much in an interactive shell though to push commands in very few lines, perhaps somethign that looks more like a ipython notebook would expose better the transformations and results.</comment>


wrong submission, ignore. - <AUTHOR> https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/dists/xenial/stable/binary-amd64/Packages <comment><AUTHOR> If you're using apt.dockerproject.org as your docker-engine source, please understand that docker 17.05 (edge version) was pushed in lieu of the stable (17.03), make sure you don't accidentally update, and move your apt sources to download.docker.com (new repos).</comment>


Ask HN: Review our startup, PollerBare - <AUTHOR>

Hey everyone. Our site, http://pollerbare.com has been live for about 10 months. It's a site for indie musicians to post their music in a downplayed battle of the bands theme.
We have kind of put this project on the back burner because we don't see how we can monetize it right now.
For a while, we thought we should pivot to pictures (become a hot or not/dating site, ehhh) or videos (via youtube). We even finished sketching up the UI/UX for the videos pivot, but pulled off last second.
Any thoughts? Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> 1\. The UX needs some work. It looks late 90s-ish.

2\. The name is a little cheesy. I'd really consider changing it.

3\. It's not immediately obvious how to play songs. Can you put a play button under each song? Ditto for picking the winner - put a "This is the best song" button under each song.

I do like the music though. :) And it's a cool idea. Have you considered approaching local Battle of the Bands competitions and getting them on the site? Sell it as a all-in-one promotional type of thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. You're definitely right. We're not front-end guys really.

2\. Haha, really? Is the logo cheesy too? We kind of thought it was clever and cute all in one. "Poll" on "bare" (raw) music talent. Fair enough though!

3\. Yeah, we've been trying to work on making it less confusing. Will do though.

Surprisingly, there's some good music on there, right? We've gone to local music festivals and whatnot - but not with much luck so far. We'll keep trying though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The logo looks cute even though I'm not sure what it has to do with music.

I agree the user-interface needs a lot of work. Maybe a nice splash page which clearly shows what the site is for could help. Splash pages don't need a lot of design...even a large picture would do. I was just looking at Path's site (<https://www.path.com>) which did just that.</comment>


Gimmie Hackathon - <AUTHOR> http://wehack.it/hackathons/1-gimmie-hackathon

<comment><USER2> the first online only mobile game iOS hackathon has 2 teams competing with people around the world. We're happy to sponsor it. I think that this idea has a lot of potential and we're stoked to know Diego at wehack.it for helping us.</comment>


70% of the billion dollars startups are in SF  - <AUTHOR> http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/10/30/heres-the-billion-dollar-startups.html?

<comment><USER2> A sample size of 24, eh?</comment>


San Francisco Parking App Refuses Shut-Down Order - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/san-francisco-parking-app-refuses-shut-order-24335049 <comment><USER2> >Dobrowolny said MonkeyParking doesn't sell parking spots, but convenience.

>Herrera spokesman Matt Dorsey described MonkeyParking's statements as "verbal gymnastics." "It's like a prostitute saying she's not selling sex — she's only selling information about her willingness to have sex with you," Dorsey said in a written statement.

Unless something has changed since the last time I was in San Fransisco, the backpages of just about every alt-weekly are loaded with ads for people technically only selling "escorting." A couple hundred feet from my hotel was a bathhouse that technically only sold massages. There was an awful lot of businesses that technically were only selling "glassware" and not recreational drug paraphernilia.

</comment><comment><USER3> And who exactly, is preventing the city from building a better mousetrap and making a more convenient app for the same thing? That's a win/win/win!

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, it's a work-around, but it totally makes sense, at least until the city comes up with a better solution for the parking issues in the city.

<comment><USER5> No, this app is predatory and profiteering of tax payer owned property.

People using that app are a bunch of highwaymen trying to extort a "bridge toll", if you ask me.</comment></comment>


Sentry launches new visibility features - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sentry.io/2019/03/06/new-features-greater-visibility <comment><AUTHOR> For the curious, all of this is powered by Clickhouse, which has been a phenomenal addition to Sentry's stack.</comment>


How to get more email newsletter subscribers? - <AUTHOR> I want more subscriptions on my Magneto store. Please help. <comment><USER2> Start with giving value to your visitors, if visitor don't see value on your store, he/she won't give you their email address.

Learning from my past experience.

1\. Offer exclusive subscriber only discount. 2\. Freebies for joining your mailing list. 3\. Build trust and confidence using email nurture. 4\. Don't sell directly if not required. 5\. Don't spam or buy list.</comment>


Two variations on old themes - <AUTHOR> http://www.pvk.ca/Blog/LowLevel/two-neat-tricks.html <comment><USER2> A better title is _Ticket Spinaphores and Robin Hood Hashing_.</comment>


Linux greybeards release beta of systemd-free Debian fork - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/29/systemd_free_debian_fork_devuan_reaches_beta/ <comment><USER2> One major problem with systemd is that beta software is released as stable and incorporated in distros. I've just realized that systemd-coredumpd is used to save crashes in the journal and write the files somewhere to /var.

This has the problem that I have to vacuum or nuke the journal if I want to remove knowledge of past crashes because coredumpctl tool has no delete command. And coredumpctl hard-codes GDB as the debugger.

To fix all of this I've overwritten the systctl.d file and made it write somewhere I know and can find without the use of an unfinished tool.

I have also regularly had it happen that bootup would intermittently hang up or shutdown as well. There are also unfixed warnings and errors during shutdown on multiple machines.

My conclusion is that systemd uses the broader population for beta testing, even if you don't follow Fedora Rawhide or Arch rolling.

<comment><USER3> Same thing with Lennart's previous project PulseAudio which also has no real stable releases and basically relies on distros to try and take the beta- quality upstream releases and turn them into something that actually works reliably. (My favorite was the PulseAudio release that shipped with a change that was literally incomplete, changing the interal resampling API without changing all the resamplers affected. Crashing ensued. Was rolled back in the next release, but that came with a whole new set of feature patches with the same level of QA applied.)

It probably doesn't help that they're both heavily developed by Red Hat, who see taking open source software and turning it into something stable and end- user viable as their secret sauce that justifies paying them lots of money.

<comment><USER4> I agree with the rest of your post but I can assure you it's not the policy of Red Hat to release unstable upstream software. I am a Red Hat employee and I'm as annoyed as anyone that systemd doesn't have separate upstream development and stable releases.

Also what's with the stupid versioning of systemd/udev? Having a single version number is simply a dumb idea.

<comment><USER5> Now _that_ is a real problem! I checked the git tags, and the major versions are indeed added over different time intervals... I had no idea there wasn't a time based release schedule. Do you know what the reason for that is?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't believe anyone would like to keep using sysvinit-scripts or RC- scripts.

I love bash, I love nitpicking about how to use bash along with the other bash nazis in #bash@freenode. But I would never put myself through sysvinit again. I thoroughly enjoy using distros like CentOS 7, Fedora 23, RHEL7. They're a joy to manage and work with, in part thanks to Systemd.

I never want to debug, troubleshoot, or even look at another sysvinit-script again. :)

<comment><USER7> I'd argue that one of the biggest things that made sysvinit so ugly was that distro maintainers didn't enforce any type of startup script hygiene. Take a look at BSD-style init scripts some time. They're beautiful in their simplicity and readability. They source a common set of functions, have well- defined variables to control execution, and end up with a length about that of systemd units, without sacrificing the power of shell scripting. Systemd threw the baby out with the bathwater, and just makes diagnosing boot problems all that more difficult when you have to start tracing through magic symlinks.

<comment><USER6> I actually came from FreeBSD to Debian 8 years ago and the funny thing is that I don't remember editing rc scripts anywhere near as often as I edited sysvinit scripts on Debian.

But that could easily be explained by the average complexity of services increasing along with my career path into Linux and Devops.

I don't remember any clear differences between sysvinit and rc, the scripting is still left up to the user which means code style can diverge from whatever the maintainers had in mind.

Systemd, albeit a binary blob, at least eliminates that from the equation and breaks down services into a limited number of types that it handles equally every time.

I actually liked upstart too. :) I might sound mad for saying that but as a user of Linux upstart gave me just what I wanted.

Bottom line is that I think discussions about scripting style have no place in the context of service management. Services should be dealt with in a simple way like upstart or systemd. If you want to add more complexity you can write a start script for the service but that should not be the norm.

<comment><USER8> > scripting is still left up to

This is commonly provided by the port maintainer - I haven't conducted a survey but I'm pretty confident that service scripts in FreeBSD ports rarely make it into rc.d without a deliberate freebsdization.

<comment><USER9> I have read all of the rc scripts that come with base FreeBSD and PC-BSD, and some of the NetBSD ones too. Coding style with Mewburn rc is nowhere near as divergent as it is with van Smoorenburg rc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One giant program to rule them all was never the Unix way. System's monolithic architecture will be its downfall. Rather than stabilize I predict that systemd will get more and more complicated and eventualy fall due to unwieldy maintenance problems at which point someone will come up with a better more modular system.

<comment><USER11> The Linux kernel itself is a a monolithic kernel and it beat out Hurd which was a micro kernel. I would say Linux has a history of certain programs being monolithic being a good thing.

<comment><USER12> Linux is a kernel. Monolithic and micro kernel architectures are a different problem to the Unix philosophy which specifically concerns design of userspace programs. I don't see how having pipes between kernel components would be a useful feature for a user.

Also, the userspace of GNU/Linux isn't called Linux. Linux isn't an operating system.

<comment><USER13> I think you're post-rationalizing. The kernel is an exception today, true, but that doesn't mean it _needs_ to be special.

The established Unix philosophy of everything being "one program that does one thing" would be hugely beneficial if applied to an OS kernel. Wouldn't it be great you could just run different drivers and file system in userspace rather than having to compile a big kernel?

Not to mention that it could be much easier to develop them if they could just run as processes and die if they failed, as opposed to inducing a kernel panic.

<comment><USER12> > Wouldn't it be great you could just run different drivers and file system in > userspace rather than having to compile a big kernel?

Except that it makes debugging almost impossible and the overhead of IPC is very large. I'd argue that most popular kernels today (k{Free,Open,Net}BSD, illumos, Linux) are monolithic because that model makes development much simpler than a microkernel (not for historical reasons). Hybrid kernels like NT are a compromise for efficiency against the benefits of having a microkernel.

The panic argument is a good point, until you realise that kernel drivers don't panic --they oops. And a kernel oops just kills the thread it was running in. Linux has kernel threads that can be killed, but they're all playing in the same address space. So you can think of that as having the advantages of a microkernel without the debugging issues.

<comment><USER13> Debugging would be _easier_ in user mode, surely. You could attach with gdb or whatever.

Last I checked, IPC overhead was not a barrier to performance in modern microkernels. QNX and XNU (used by OS X) both use microkernel-type IPC and are fast. XNU is even able to survive with an old Mach kernel.

If a kernel driver ends up in a faulty state (accesses invalid memory, does the wrong interrupt thing) then surely the whole kernel will panic?

NT is frequently referred to as "hybrid", but it's a frequently misunderstood design. First, while it uses IPC internally, it's not really comparable to microkernels since there's no context switch; every participant in the IPC communication is in the kernel. This is done purely as a way to isolate internals behind a rigorous, message-oriented API. Secondly, almost all of NT's services run in the kernel. A fairly small number of services run in userland: There's the user-mode driver system (UMDF, available since Vista), and graphics drivers also have the option of running partly in usermode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Counterpoint from a former systemd skeptic who now likes it: [http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9655-count-me-as-a- sy...](http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9655-count-me-as-a-systemd- convert)

<comment><USER15> It's a reasonable counterpoint, but limited to the part of systemd that manages starting and stopping services.

It also takes over virtual terminals, syslog services, login management, network interface configuration, dhcp, system time, udev device management, containers (machined, dbus, cgroups).

That, to me, is where more of the concern lies.

<comment><USER16> Indeed, trying to get a full understanding of systemd is not easy, it's so large. It's like trying to understand a large piece of corporate software.

<comment><USER17> Also, the point of switching and studying is not clear. If all you need is service startup and keeping up, a few more polished tools exist with a dramatically ssmaller footprint.

<comment><USER16> _" a few more polished tools exist with a dramatically smaller footprint."_

Which tools did you have in mind?

<comment><USER9> To learn about the wide range of toolsets that have been available for decades, start with these:

* [http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/](http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/)

* [http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/da...](http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/daemontools-family.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Init should be just this: [http://git.suckless.org/sinit/tree/sinit.c](http://git.suckless.org/sinit/tree/sinit.c) , systemd incorparates too much funcitonality IMO, I cant get used to it. Well, but its a free world, I have even written a Go init, some guy did Rust based, and upstart is still being used by Ubuntu 14.04, I like choices, and happy to see this alternative as well.

<comment><USER19> 1\. If the only thing you needed from init was to reap reparented zombie processes and manage to not die, why have init at all? Why not tell the kernel to skip reparenting processes (and just reap them internally if their parent is dead) and not treat pid 1 as special, allowing it to exit? That's less userspace code _and_ less kernel code.

2\. Speaking of kernel code, have you looked at how much stuff is going on in the kernel? Why does pid 1 get this much scrutiny, but the kernel, which _definitely_ can't die, gets a free pass? On my system there are 77 kernel threads. Seventy-seven! What are they all doing??

And there are plenty of alternative kernels you can use. Multiple ones even have Linux binary compatibility.

3\. Is the argument for suckless init the same as that for EWONTFIX init (on which it is based)? If so, would a fork of systemd that split it into two processes, PID 1 that reaps reparented zombies and tells PID 2 about it (over a one-way pipe, so PID 1 has no increased attack surface), be an acceptable option?

<comment><USER5> For point 2, I think you can use:

      ps -eLf | grep '\['

I put in a grep root for good measure:

      ps -eLf | grep '\[' | grep root

Incidentally, why would a zombie process need to be reparented? Surely it has just not been removed from the process table and all that needs to occur is to remove it fully... I can understand reparenting an orphan process, but a zombie process?

<comment><USER19> A ps roughly like that is how I got the number. That doesn't explain what they do. I'm sure I could dig into kernel sources, but... for instance, why am I running "xfsalloc", "xfs_mru_cache", and "xfslogd" when I have no XFS file systems?

The point I'm making is not so much that I'm curious (although I am), but that the kernel is exempt from the scrutiny that systemd gets, and the kernel has a ton of fragile crap running at full privilege. If systemd even shipped three XFS-specific binaries, people would be upset, but the kernel can run three persistent kernel threads and nobody cares.

<comment><USER5> You either have the xfs filesystem module loaded or compiled into your kernel.

I just tested this out:

      chris@libreoffice-ia64:~$ ps -eLf | grep '\[' | grep xfs
      chris@libreoffice-ia64:~$ sudo modprobe xfs
      [sudo] password for chris:
      chris@libreoffice-ia64:~$ ps -eLf | grep '\[' | grep xfs
      root      6731     2  6731  0    1 16:53 ?        00:00:00 [xfsalloc]
      root      6736     2  6736  0    1 16:53 ?        00:00:00 [xfs_mru_cache]
      chris@libreoffice-ia64:~$
      chris@libreoffice-ia64:~$ sudo rmmod xfs
      chris@libreoffice-ia64:~$ ps -eLf | grep '\[' | grep xfs
      chris@libreoffice-ia64:~$

<comment><USER19> I mean, I know exactly why it's there. :-) GRUB's os-prober is trying to mount all filesystems as all possible types, which autoloads xfs.ko.

My point isn't so much what _my_ three kernel threads are doing as why nobody asks these questions, _in general_ , about the kernel. Just about every criticism of systemd applies double to the kernel, but nobody is forking Debian to replace the kernel. (And very few people are contributing to the existing efforts already in Debian to officially support alternative kernels.)

<comment><USER5> Ah, I'm following :-) I think perhaps the kernel is more esoteric than systemd, and as a team they have proven themselves over time. I think they get a fair amount of scrutiny from competitors (the BSDs, and Microsoft) and they have a very robust development process so that might explain why it's not as controversial.

<comment><USER20> The kernel also lives in kernel space, so unless one go micro-kernel, and dumps everything but the bare minimum into user space, a kernel will always be a big blob of code (most of it drivers, btw).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Everybody mentions the Unix philosophy and that is a very valid point, but I would like to mention the freedom philosophy that open-source/Linux gives (or used to).

These guys who wanted systemd muscled their way in to get this software into the Debian system. They also adopted an "all or nothing" approach, depriving the greater community of something bigger than "do 1 thing and do it well", which is "freedom to do as you wish and choose".

Debian wouldn't have split had they maintained they made systemd opt-in or Poettering and co. maintained their own Debian-systemd version. That didn't gel well with Redhats version of what Open Source is, and so many were deprived of their freedom to NOT CHOOSE systemd BUT still use Debian.

For all the talk of how good/bad systemd is, the proponents for systemd should remember how they deprived others with the freedom to choose, no matter how "ignorant" or "backwards" the detractors are (or how "shit" sysvinit is).

<comment><USER22> [https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel- announce/2014/08/msg00...](https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel- announce/2014/08/msg00001.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Meh. Systemd is pretty great. The *Nix purists hate it, but it solves a lot of problems and does it fairly consistently. I love using it in Fedora now where journald has basically replaced syslog completely.

<comment><USER24> Honestly journald is probably the only thing I don't really like about systemd and not for the reason you might think I'm about to say. I just rarely need to use it, because everything pretty much just works 99% of the time. So I end up forgetting how to use journalctl by the time I need it again and have to Google/man. Yeah I know, that's my own problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Glad to see this coming out.

[https://www.devuan.org](https://www.devuan.org)

Downloading via torrent now, it's 10G via torrent? Anyways it seems the file server there is under pressure now.

I for one don't want to deal with systemd from the start. Never liked its intrusive, all-in-one, hard to debug design approach.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I dislike systemd but I'm not going to abandon the Debian Foundation over it.

<comment><USER26> This is the real point. I have my issues with systemd.

For example, I just had an interesting discussion on GH with Varnish packers about changing a daemon arg (in that case, the bind address/port).

The way systemd "recommends" to change the arguments passed to a daemon is to write a drop-in file (i.e. /etc/systemd/system/service- name.service.d/something.conf) that overwrites the ExecStart line. To do so, you have to do:

        [Service]
        ExecStart=
        ExecStart=<original ExecStart line with wanted changes>

For Varnish, this isn't the end of the world - it only needs a few arguments - but it's still a lot less simple than the pre-systemd "standard" for Debian, which is to use a /etc/defaults/<service> file to allow changing daemon args via variables. This method can be still used (via either EnvironmentFile, or via built-in systemd "Environment=" statements) but the former is _specifically_ mentioned as "not recommended" by Lennart, and the use of Environment= in service files seems very much like a feature that no one is keen to acknowledge or make use of, and it has it's own issues, as the way variables, white space, escaping etc are handled is specific to systemd and not immediately intuitive for someone used to a shell environment.

But as you said - those issues, are not enough to give up on the benefits of Debian stable. In theory, all packages in Debian stable that need an init script are _supposed_ to still supply a sysvinit script (I was actually quite surprised by how many packages rely on systemd's ability to load sysvinit scripts and don't ship their own systemd service file) so you could choose to use sysvinit instead of systemd, for now at least.

I _do_ appreciate the theoretical goal - you describe how your daemon should be started, and let pid1 handle the specifics of actually starting it - to me that makes it _much_ easier for a lot more people to create reliable daemon packages.

I just wish the project wasn't taking such a "everything plus the kitchen sink" approach.

<comment><USER5> That's interesting... Does Lennart explain why he doesn't recommend the environment file/directive?

<comment><USER26> He explains about EnvironmentFile in [https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/1082#issuecomment-...](https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/1082#issuecomment-136452207)

The Environment= thing I haven't seen any official comment about its recommended-ness but it has some quirks in syntax so it needs pretty rigorous testing before being used for anything that might have values that need to be quoted/escaped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I like systemd from the perspective of a service-writer/maintainer, the service files are nice and simple and don't have the repeated boilerplate of old init scripts.

However I still dislike its monolithic nature, its folding in of journaling and udev, and all the rest of the creep.

<comment><USER28> Ditto the first part. I have a .service file for haproxy, one for my node app, one for rethinkdb, they generally just work.

I understand people that dislike monoliths, but I also appreciate the DRY nature of systemd - the System V, bash, cron, at, various process monitors, syslog combo was a lot of code with a lot of overlap. I'd expect systemd is actually smaller in LoC that what it replaced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Don't fork in anger.

There's such a long history of projects starting out of a desire to not change, and so many of them (most, I would wager) fizzle out soon after. Being against some specific feature or architectural change is not the same as having a future vision that can drive a person to work on something, for no pay, for years or decades. Anger fades...the people you're angry at ignore the new project, making it unsatisfying in terms of vengeance. And, again, it just doesn't stick with you the way a desire to do something new and better does.

I'm not even saying systemd is great (it's good and bad in all sorts of novel ways), I'm just saying that the people who are just reacting against it, when the industry and community has been so clear about it being the future they are passionate about, are unlikely to do anything more than spin their wheels for a few months, and then fade away (as a project, I hope they all stick around as contributors to OSS things).

</comment><comment><USER30> It is amusing and unsurprising that, in 91 comments, the word Devuan is used a total of 2 times.

<comment><USER9> I've just mentioned it. So it's 3 now. (-:

What you observe is emblematic of the problem with Devuan, and a few of the Devuan people themselves acknowledge it. So much of the discussion centres upon "how to remove evil libsystemd0" and suchlike that what is lost is the supposedly intentional focus of the Devuan project on _init freedom_. That surely means the freedom to run systemd as well as to not run it.

* [https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20150208.110824.579d17...](https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20150208.110824.579d179c.pt.html)

And as you can see, that bleeds over into the press coverage seeking headline material.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Given the popularity of systemd as a discussion topic on HN, I'm surprised there isn't much about OpenRC[0].

Does anyone know if Devuan have given it any consideration?

[0] [https://lwn.net/Articles/512719/](https://lwn.net/Articles/512719/)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is press coverage. The actual announcement page is discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11593674](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11593674) .

</comment><comment><USER32> Nice, but from the users' standpoint it would've been better if they had worked with Debian rather than rolling out their own distro.

<comment><USER33> Do users care though? I don't. I select a Linux distro based on how popular it is because frankly they are all pretty excellent these days.

I go for popular distros because it's more likely that bugs are found and community help is available.

I also do very little customization. If the default window system is Gnome, that's what I use. If it's KDE or something else, that's fine too. Again, they are all good enough.

I use Linux, I'm a huge fan of it, but I'm not dogmatic. Using Linux is a way for me to get work done, but it isn't the goal itself.

<comment><USER32> Exactly, I use Debian because it has a large user base and community. But that's precisely why it's important than the mainstream distributions continue to support the traditional Unix init. People don't want to have to switch to some obscure distribution simply to avoid systemd.

<comment><USER34> There isn't much reason for a mainstream user to touch a system with a traditional init nowadays either.

<comment><USER33> There isn't much reason for a mainstream user to care what the initialization sequence looks like. Can they run the applications that they need to? That's about all a mainstream user cares about. Linux is just boring infrastructure that needs to be there. All the interesting stuff happens in user land.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I understand this because I can't get used to systemd. The learning curve should be better than rc.local for my taste.

Problem is systemd helps you booting fast and this is important both in the cloud (where every minute is a billed), and in telecom (where you have a stringent SLA to cover).

<comment><USER5> I would have thought a fast boot would be important to pretty much everyone...

<comment><USER36> Why? When I used Arch Linux I did not ever turn off my laptop, but hibernate it. I only ever booted it when I stupidly forgot to plug it in before the battery runs out. And 10-20 seconds spend on a sequential boot every 10-20 days is just no time. We spend at least 100x that time in the toilet every day.

<comment><USER5> I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> No point in discussing systemd anymore quite frankly, it won, doubt that it's good it did, doubt the methods by which it won - I do both - but it won. Many of the major distributions are not really following the Unix philosophy anymore, heck, some stopped quite a long time ago to do so.

I run sever operating systems because I like to have the control, the minimalism, the elegance, the security. By trying to be more of a desktop orientated system, Linux actually looses what attracts people like myself to using it. I doubt they care, I don't think they have to, just as I don't have to use it.

"This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface."[1]

"Much of the power of the UNIX operating system comes from a style of program design that makes programs easy to use and, more important, easy to combine with other programs. This style has been called the use of software tools , and depends more on how the programs fit into the programming environment - how they can be used with other programs - than on how they are designed internally. But as the system has become commercially successful and has spread widely, this style has often been compromised, to the detriment of all users. Old programs have become encrusted with dubious features. Newer programs are not always written with attention to proper separation of function and design for interconnection. [...]

This style was based on the use of tools : using programs separately or in combination to get a job done, rather than doing it by hand, by monolithic self-sufficient subsystems, or by special-purpose, one-time programs. [...]

One thing that UNIX does not need is more features. It is successful in part because it has a small number of good ideas that work well together. Merely adding features does not make it easier for users to do things - it just makes the manual thicker. The right solution in the right place is always more effective than haphazard hacking."[2]

 _Still reading at this point? Great systemd free Linux distributions: Gentoo, Funtoo, Void Linux, among many others and there is also something called BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD)... you should check it out. Also see www.suckless.org_

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Quarter-Century-UNIX-Peter- Salus/dp/02...](http://www.amazon.com/Quarter-Century-UNIX-Peter- Salus/dp/0201547775)

[2] [http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/unix_prog_design.pdf](http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/unix_prog_design.pdf)

<comment><USER5> I'm a tad confused... you cite that famous Unix philosophy quote "This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together"... but I don't see how that doesn't apply to systemd?

Could you clarify?

<comment><USER38> "Systemd" isn't really a single program, it's a collection of 69 binaries, that together handle a number of functions that were traditionally handled by separately-developed pieces of software. It handles init, user logins, the console, system event logging, network interface configuration, time+date settings, and device management (udev was merged into Systemd in 2012, apparently).

A lot of those components have interdependencies (so they can't all be replaced piecemeal), and some userspace things like Gnome have come to have dependencies on things provided by parts of Systemd.

This has benefits: Things tied tighter together know more about the states of other parts, and that enables various optimizations. This has issues: Replacing individual components (if you don't like their behavior) becomes more difficult. Whether it's worth it or not seems like a philosophical debate.

<comment><USER5> I was genuinely not aware that the components are that intertwined that they rely on each other. Which components are problematic?

In terms of Gnome - well, Gnome is Gnome. I'm not going to start defending their decisions, I disagree with quite a few of them myself.

<comment><USER36> Udev (AFAIK a program that recognises and mounts plug-in devices, but I'm not sure) is developped by systemd guys and they recently told that they won't care about the case where it is used w/o systemd. It is an important part of GNU/Linux distros. Tho I used Arch for about two-three years I guess (since just before it switched to systemd as default til two monts ago), and I never had to fiddle with it, so I don't know how it affects people. Gentoo forked it to maintain a version that did not depend on systemd.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, that's precisely what it does - it's a daemon that interacts with the kernel for hotplug devices, etc.

Is udevd used by anything other than the kernel though? If not, then I don't think it's a huge issue if those who want to use a different init system maintain their own version!

<comment><USER36> Why waste all that effort of maintaining forks when it can be avoided? Systemd folks are being hostile to the wider community of Linux users with that.

<comment><USER5> You don't need to - there shouldn't be anything that stops other init systems from using it.

<comment><USER36> But there is, and that's why people forked it.

[https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Eudev](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Eudev)

<comment><USER5> Uh, that wasn't forked because udev can't work, it was forked because it fit the needs of Gentoo...

Have a look at Devuan, I think you'll find that they use the same udev as Ubuntu and Debian.

It's not hostile if someone forks a project to meet their requirements but the old software is used by everyone else!

<comment><USER9> > _Have a look at Devuan, I think you 'll find that they use the same udev as > Ubuntu and Debian._

Yes, in amongst all of this systemd discussion, please do look at the notional actual topic of this page. And discover vdev. It's explicitly mentioned in the release notes.

* [https://github.com/jcnelson/vdev](https://github.com/jcnelson/vdev)

* [http://judecnelson.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/introducing-vdev.h...](http://judecnelson.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/introducing-vdev.html)

* [http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/devuan-417...](http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/devuan-4175540922/#post5354824)

<comment><USER5> Ah! Thanks - I didn't see this! Appreciate the info :-)

<comment><USER5> Interesting - so vdev might be ported to OpenBSD! That's pretty awesome :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Move over, Flame: New Messiah-themed malware targets Iran, Israel - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/07/move-over-flame-messiah-themed-malware-targets-iran-israel/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+All+content%29 <comment><USER2> It's interesting to speculate whether the Middle East is just more susceptible to attack, or if these hacks are just cyber-weapons deployed by a Western power. It seems like the US could be hit just as hard, unless there's something fundamentally insecure going on in the Middle East.</comment>


LunchMeet: it's like meetup for LinkedIn - <AUTHOR> http://www.lunchmeetapp.com

<comment><AUTHOR> It's built for face-to-face networking meetings with other LinkedIn users, based on location and availability. It is currently in iPhone app store, free, and wide open to feedback and suggestions. Got any?

<comment><USER2> Android support would be excellent!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion! That's very high on the list of future improvements. The back-end is already cross-platform capable, meaning Android users would be able to arrange meetings with iPhone users, etc.</comment></comment></comment>