Lennart Poettering on the state of open source communities - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/posts/J2TZrTvu7vd <comment><USER2> I'm very grateful that Lennart Poettering wrote this post. I don't necessarily use the software he writes (my next distro will be systemd based) but I'm still happy that he writes it. It has advanced the state of Linux distributions (due to PulseAudio, lots of ALSA driver bugs were found and fixed, systemd has prompted improvements to other init/acpid/udev/automount/etc software too) regardless whether you use the software he wrote or not.

But the amount of flak he receives is unacceptable. The tone which people talk about him and even _to_ him is despicable.

I'm glad he spoke up and hopefully people will realize that open source contributors are people too. If you have a _technical_ reason to disagree, taking it personal is not constructive.

<comment><USER3> I don't advocate bullying nor would I dare to justify such personal attacks. But the abusive content aside, he does deserve _constructive_ criticism because, frankly, his contributions towards open source have brought far more problems than any of the solutions he looked to replace.

I could write a lengthy blog post about the unnecessary problems that PulseAudio and systemd have thrown up over the years (problems I'd never had an issue with in all the years of running Linux and other UNIX-like platforms), but those topics are done to death now. However my point is I think Lennart's been so carelessly cavalier in rolling out his code, and so unapologetic about the shitstorm he started that he's gotten a lot of peoples back up. Obviously this doesn't warrant the kind of bullying that he discussed in his post; however although he doesn't deserve such attacks, he has largely brought them on himself.

Maybe instead of fighting against the community as he tries to impose his own imperial vision of Linux, maybe if he worked with the community then the aggressive dickheads might leave him alone (or at least he'd receive more supporters from friendly folk - of who massively outnumber the aforementioned dickheads).

But just to be clear, as much as I think he might draw negative attention to himself, I think that any kind of personal abuse, let alone of the quantity that Lennart's been subject to, is absolutely disgusting and undeserved. Period.

<comment><USER4> I agree with most of your post. His attitude toward keyscript users is less than inspiring. But I still try - yesterday I spent 4 hours tweaking my VM builds against debian sid; by the end I had found a way to segfault systemctl, filed a bug, and still have absolutely no debugging info that explains why docker.service doesn't start at boot on its default network.target.

But the elephant in the room is that distros have adopted systemd and pulseaudio en masse. There must be buy-in for a reason. This outpouring of faux outrage is being leveled at an individual, what of the distro vendors?

<comment><USER5> "There must be buy-in for a reason."

Never forget chronology. The ideas and architecture in systemd are nothing new, in fact they're kind of obsolete. What has changed politically / strategically such that this specific instance can be rammed down everyones unwilling throats?

Lets run a thought experiment about if this hatred is a result of technical actions and behaviors or back room politics. Lets try... the upstart init system. A direct competitor. How many people have threatened to kill the authors of upstart? Oh, none you say? What a complete non-surprise.

This is the key weakness of his post. Hatred of authors of badly architected software is very rare in open source. Hatred of back room political dealings and extensive "embrace extend extinguish" product tying, well the feeling of hatred is completely unsurprising given that behavior being the opposite of the meritocracy straw dog he tries to tear down, but some claimed behavior does sound over the top (hire a hitman? really? a bit ridiculous if true). He could have made a decent post about misbehavior and over-reaction in politics and it would have been a correct and good post, but he can't admit in public the corrupt way an unwanted systemd is being shoved down our unwilling throats, so we end up with ridiculous "I am a technical guy" LOL yeah as if anyone believes the reported social problems are due to that.

<comment><USER6> You are spot on. As you said, Upstart probably never received death threats. I also agree the post could hae been a decent post because there are definitely some problems in some communities but he couldn't even resist gunning at Linus and Gentoo to make a point (or was that to discredit "resistance" ?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's rather "Lennart Poettering on how communities react to him". He's very controversial person and it's not like he didn't earned that title by himself. Of course stuff like death threats cannot and shouldn't be justified in any way (however, they're not uncommon in any large community when dealing with highly controversial topics), but things like petitions are just hyperbolic opinions on Poettering's work and on how it affects all of us.

Poettering is no longer mere "technical guy" from "technical community". He's more like political figure, and political figures have to deal with various political reactions.

<comment><USER8> > however, they're not uncommon in any large community when dealing with > highly controversial topics

Come on. We're talking about init systems here, not the Palestine/Israel conflict. It should be possible to have a level-headed discussion without insults and death threats. Saying "Poettering is a prominent, controversial person, therefore it's OK" isn't right.

<comment><USER9> Small correction: we are not talking about init systems. We are talking about the change from a "distributed" userspace to a "centralized" one. It's an highly political debate while also being technical. Tempers are gonna flare.

<comment><USER10> Go to your local town hall and threaten to kill the mayor because you don't like his opinions/work. Try to explain all your neighbors that that was okay, because "Tempers are gonna flare".

This is, by the way, an offense you can end in jail for, for good reasons.

<comment><USER11> Only that the open source community is a lot larger than your local town, so it's natural that you will get more extreme cases in the fringes.

I'm quite sure the mayor of New York gets death threats on a regular basis.

<comment><USER10> That might be the case in the US, but not everywhere.

<comment><USER12> You think people like Boris Johnson don't receive the occasional death threat? Laughable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Death threats aside (violence it just silly, please stop it?)... How many persons managed to acquire the amount of hate Poettering did? Jup, not many.

From my experience the OSS community can be quite dismissive of people who ignore prior art. Its a protective shield against bad design. You can not write good software as a large group by accepting people who fumble too bad. It's ok to submit a patch with a bug, its ok if the first implementation isn't any good. But when you have people who consistently push bad design, at some point it will slip through and the next generation of engineers as to deal with someones bad idea. Thus a conservative stance makes sense when it comes to APIs and architectures.

Now I know Poettering mainly for PulseAudio and systemd, both systems I really don't care for. My distribution of choice doesn't ship those, so I don't really have any gripes with him, but the fact that he is backed by a large vendor (RedHat?) is scary.

 _Imagine_ systemd/PulseAudio/whatever-to-come will be pushed into the "Linux core" by corporate pressure, funding etc.

How will I explain to my children that they are stuck with shitty-software-X? "Sorry son, there is no technical merit, its an ambitious guy's fault who was backed by RedHat."

I am already stuck with ALSA, if getting into a mud fight would help to avoid future clusterfucks, you could count me in. I don't think it helps though, so there is really no point in flaming the dude. Instead I suggest to use all this energy to discredit/control/QA his work on a scientific level.

<comment><USER14> If you dont want to tell your children that they are stuck with shitty- software-X.

What mrottenkolber, is stopping _you_ from being an ambitious guy who writes non-shitty-software?

Write better tools, and software than Poettering, and leave him alone to write his.

Nobody is actually forcing you to use any of his software, no not even Redhat or any other distribution, this is free and open source software, you havent payed for anything, you are free to use whatever software you wish.

You have a problem with Poetterings software? _Do not use that software_.

How fucking hard is that?

<comment><USER11> >What mrottenkolber, is stopping you from being an ambitious guy who writes non-shitty-software?

>Write better tools, and software than Poettering, and leave him alone to write his.

The general perception is that Poetterig is able to push his software thanks to his position at Red Hat instead of its technical merits.

<comment><USER14> Why dont you get a position at RedHat or make your own company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Take a group of ill-tempered, aggressive bears. Walk among them wearing a suit made of salmon. Not going to end well.

Much of what Lennart says about the kernel community is true. Much of what they say about him is also true. While he might stay away from invective and hyperbole, the underlying contempt and dismissiveness of reasonable concerns is still there. This is one fight where nobody in their right mind would want to support either side.

</comment><comment><USER16> Circa 2002-2006 I was quite active in the Linux community I.e. I contributed some code to a few GNU projects and a couple of kernel patches to solve problems that were, quite selfish really. But hey it turns out it wasn't just me or my company so I thought I'd contribute them. They solved real problems to be honest (driver bugs and crashes).

Having been on the end of a chunk of hate for about 40% of my work simply on political grounds rather than any technical grounds, I can understand this entirely and I have no problem with Lennart at all on this basis. I'm talking about patches, not reengineering either.

The basic problem was raising a defect "X doesn't work properly, here's a tested fix that we deployed in production". The answer was ticket closed. I reopened, and asked for an explanation. Literally "get fucked, we don't want your 'fix'". I replied "I'll patch my own kernel and SRPMS then" followed by a massive lecture from one of the project leaders on how I should be communicating with the community and that I need to be part of the special circle jerk club on that project to get a patch in. The defects were even removed from the trackers if the community members were rude to the outsiders to hide the fact.

So out of the goodness of my own heart I wasted 5 days with GDB debugging shit, wrote a patch that fixed it and raised a ticket with the patch attached, was closed, BANG. This happened 4 times on different projects.

So yes I do find that a number of the higher profile projects are purely powered by liquid asshole.

Unfortunately that makes me want to rely on the platforms less and has made me shift my focus to the Windows and BSD platforms which are surprisingly less political.

Argh. I even hated writing this.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't know much of the drama around systemd, but this sounds like a typical "everyone's an asshole except me" post. First, he's shooting a broadside against all Open Source communities, but it all seems to be about 'I don't agree with Linus'. To me the Linux community seems to be quite successful in quickly identifying and kicking out destructive assholes and drama queens which don't help solve problems but only create new ones, otherwise Linux wouldn't be in the state it is.

<comment><USER10> For me, it sounds more like an "that weird, abusive shit people talk about? It's real!"-post.

He does, for example, admit that he did not always live up to those standards he wants.

<comment><USER17> Sure, but why is he specifically calling Open Source communities 'sick places' when this happens everywhere else too, including the real world outside the internet?

<comment><USER18> "Why doesn't he address all other evils in the world before the one I feel defensive about? The hypocrite!"

It's probably because he specifically works in and identifies with the larger open source community, and because people who (pretend to?) collect money to get him killed specifically identify with the open source community too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not every open source community. The LibreOffice community is very positive and encouraging. The codebase needs lots of refactoring, but we are all in this together and we are getting results! And we are doing it by being _nice_ to one another.

Frankly, I don't think we'd get any momentum if we didn't.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I agree that the atmosphere and the rules enforced differ between communities. It's also true that the Linux kernel community is known for its strong language and personal attacks (the last time I remember it being featured prominently on HN and elsewhere was when Sarah Sharp called out Linus on his behaviour [1]). But maybe LKML feels like it needs drama from time to time?

1: [https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/19/634](https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/19/634)

<comment><USER20> Most of the particularly vicious flak Poettering gets isn't even really from the Linux kernel community, but just from random internet people who have an opinion. There's traditionally a bit of an expectation of a "meritocracy of code" in LKML where you can't yell too loudly if you don't also contribute (not necessarily literally "code", also documentation, testing, code review, hardware specs, etc.). I think the degree to which it's an idealized meritocracy can easily be overstated, but it does tend to at least raise the bar for ranting, since you can't _only_ rant without ever doing anything else. The general internet doesn't really feel constrained by that, so you have people who know next to nothing about the Linux kernel who nevertheless feel entitled to very strong and intemperately expressed opinions about it.

<comment><USER21> This is pretty much it: Linus Thorvald telling people to go screw themselves is an argument of "I am widely recognized to have the loudest voice because of many useful contributions, now accept my opinion or go away".

This carries the danger of people shortening it into "I have the loudest voice" in their mind, which begs the question how other communities unite the role of "last instance for contentious questions" (aka benevolent dictator) with the ideal of being nice to everyone.

<comment><USER20> Linus's flames also tend not to be personal: they're more like "this architecture is shit" than "you're shit". They can be taken personally (and imo are sometimes over the top), but they don't seem intended in a more vicious way as trying to "hit" a particular person. When he does criticize people it ends up being pretty measured, e.g. a widely talked about blog post where he "attacks" RMS [1] is not a flame at all, but just him saying he isn't a huge fan of RMS and thinks RMS is a bit of a single-issue, black-and-white type of person. Which is a personal criticism, but a pretty civil one. And he definitely doesn't stoop to starting campaigns to try to drive people out of the open-source community who he doesn't like; he just works with them or doesn't.

[1] [http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and- white....](http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white.html)

<comment><USER22> >Linus's flames also tend not to be personal: they're more like "this architecture is shit" than "you're shit".

I don't see how it gets much more personal than starting off a mail to a new contributor with the line:

      *YOU* are full of bullshit.

Even the supposed 'meat' of the argument was a thinly veiled personal insult:

      Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

[http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus](http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus)

<comment><USER23> Nothing like a good old cherry-picked fiery comment out of the thousands of public messages Torvalds posts. Not to mention that you've sizably mischaracterised the 'meat' of his argument - which I find more offensive than hearing someone called 'full of BS' followed by an explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm not defending shitty bevaiour at all (and taking it to a personal level such as killing people, thats just insane). Having said that, I'm not surprised though that the shitstorm is hitting systemd (and Lennart Poettering) perhaps most of all.

My observation of whats happening is quite frankly that people do not like the enforcing approach of systemd. There is no humble approach, it's the systemd approach and don't stand in the way.

<comment><USER18> > (and taking it to a personal level such as killing people, thats just > insane)

It's not "insane". It's a thing people do because they get the impression that it's socially acceptable, because see, everybody sympathizes with people griping about systemd, right? Everybody agrees that Poettering is the devil, right? He's bringing it on himself by sneaking into people's houses and installing systemd on their computers, right?

It's not insane. It doesn't stem from some imbalance in brain chemistry or some other mental issue. Labeling it insanity belies the community's responsibility for setting standards of acceptable behavior.

<comment><USER24> If people take it to the level of actually murdering him, then yes, it's insane.

<comment><USER25> It's hardly an OSS problem though. It's practically a "western society and the internet" problem. Death threats are probably less common now then they were in the early anonymity days of the net, but conversely they're a lot less mundane.

But this a problem which turns up in _every_ community where there are politicized issues. See: anything to do with women talking about video games.

We can take this problem even wider and start looking at say, American domestic politics and it's infatuation with "second amendment solutions". It's apparently socially acceptable to drop that phrase when discussing elections, policy and the president when you're a state or federal representative. Locally in Australia we've got an entire political party that carefully fans the flames of almost but not quite encouraging violence and intolerance.

You can certainly improve things at a community-by-community level, and OSS definitely should try to do so (and there should be support to do so in sensible, constructive ways). But this is a problem which goes _a lot_ further then software development.

<comment><USER18> It's certainly a problem in a wider scope than just software development, and not really inherent to software development at all, but I think it manifests in open source communities in a particularly insidious way. Everybody thinks they're philosophically on the right side anyway, they're too smart for prejudice and too useful a community member to possibly be part of the problem.

Also I figure people rely on meritocracy being some sort of infallible system, in some sort of just-world fallacy where they figure if this guy who's screaming bloody murder on the mailing list were wrong to do so, surely someone would have stopped him, right...? But he's got all these patches in the tree, so that means he's correct by definition, and that's more important than "real-life" social norms anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Before we throw any more hate again, here's what I understand:

* Most Linux-based OSS communities (specially the kernel) market themselves as a Merry Community

* In reality, they're not, they're full of bullies who won't hesistate to call you or your mother names

* You must equally be a bully enough if you want to stand on your own

And I relate with this a lot. Bullies act like this in groups, and they always feel extremely proud and righteous of themselves, and think they're doing God's Work. But beyond all that overflowing sense of righteousness, bullying is simply, plainly, wrong.

Unfortunately, most of these Linux-based communities have grown to become bands of bullies, and they are also extremely proud of it. Such a sad situation to be in. Folks who call themselves "Freedom-loving FOSS members" behaving in polar opposite to the values that they supposedly care about. Some things are just unacceptable.

<comment><USER21> IMO, you misunderstand some of it:

"communities are full of bullies who won't hesitate to call you or your mother names" \- I think this is best put as "doing controversial things will attract trolls and haters".

"you must equally be a bully enough" \- no, you just need to tune out the haters and continue to work towards your goal.

Lennart and the others underwent a ginormous effort to grow systemd from a borderline dangerous "I'm smarter than everyone else" toy project into something that's actually useful.

They did that despite the fact that the problem in question had been solved a couple times over (upstart was the last in a series of "improved" versions of SysVInit), and despite the fact that systemd adoption incurs a large switching cost of re-writing init scripts for all packages.

The art of leading a successful open source project is partly in tuning in to useful feedback and tuning out the haters who have nothing to contribute. Yes, the haters function based on ways that are similar to bullying. But while you can keep them off the mailing list, you can't ban them everywhere.

The more visible a community or an undertaking, the more visible it is for haters and bullies, and the more effort is lost on policing them or tuning them out. There's no way around it, other than educating the general population or staying a small, very technical in-group.

<comment><USER27> > the problem in question had been solved a couple times over

This seems a bit disingenous. Unless you think upstart is literally perfect, the problem is obviously not solved, only iterated on...and without further arguments there's no reason systemd shouldn't attempt to be the next (further improved) iteration.

Systemd certainly has features upstart doesn't, some of which are prominent arguments for its adoption. So it seems the community doesn't agree - no, upstart is not the pinnacle of init systems.

<comment><USER21> BSD init is certainly not the pinnacle of init systems. rc.d-based SysV init isn't either. upstart also has its warts.

For some people, BSD init works just fine and they're happy with it and they abhor the additional complexity. Without any doubt, Systemd also has its flaws - it's not compatible with *BSDs, or generally non-Linux systems, it's a departure from the "everything is accessible using a simple text editor" principle that has brought Linux where we're now, and there's a non-zero switching cost for each and every package.

Many people know polipo-audio (later renamed to pulseaudio) and the crashing propensity of its earlier versions, and who are kind of intimidated by the whole DBus/ConsoleKit tangle that introduces many moving components that are hard to debug when they fail. A system that is "perfect in theory" but crashes often is not that great.

So people are kind of apprehensive when the same guy who brought them crashing sound demons a couple years ago now comes over happily with a solution to replace the most central component for their system. Thus far, I've been pleasantly surprised by Systemd silently doing its thing and working as advertised. And I wouldn't swap it out for upstart if someone gave me the choice.

The morale? Yes, people grow up, complex systems become more manageable with time when people write debugging aids for them. (Including things such as VirtualBox which make debugging central system components much easier - imagine living in a world where your systemd crashes and bugs simply get closed with a WORKSFORME tag and ignored).

<comment><USER28> Also, with consolekit you could use any number of inits. Drop logind on top of anything but systemd and it will simply refuse to function.

Meaning that if any of the older inits balk you can bring up the system piecemeal manually and get to town figuring out why it balked.

There are a number of experiences documented on G+ and forums of systemd getting into a deadlock, with no useful error messages, and where it can't be brought up piecemeal for diagnosis as everything relies on systemd running as pid1.

That is the kind of boot time Russian roulette that MS products have been lambasted for in the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Yes, Open Source communities can be bad. But there are also good ones. And if you think Linus is bad, read some comments from Theo de Raadt.

The first opensource project I tried to contribute to when I started coding has been a horrible experience. When I asked about some directions regarding some details, the only responses I got were not nice, to say the least. f.i. they complained that i mixed british and american english, and that was the most constructive response. Well, stuff like that can happen if your 13, from austria and never had a proper english-teacher before ;-)

OTOH there are also the good experiences where people help each other out and aren't afraid to teach someone how things work. there are a lot of good FOSS communities out there.

For me personally the guys around the Aboriginal Linux project stand out. They have been really helpful on IRC and the ML is also refreshing to read :)

</comment><comment><USER30> >The Linux community is dominated by western, white, straight, males in their 30s and 40s these days. I perfectly fit in that pattern, and the rubbish they pour over me is awful.

Maybe you are the problem. I don't know a single OSS developer that is more hated than you. Ever wondered why this might be?

<comment><USER31> It's because he implicitly and explicitly points out the very real flaws in desktop linux. And then he has the audacity to try and fix things by _changing_ them!

If there's one thing people hate more than having flaws pointed out in something they like, it's someone else changing that thing and making it better. Not only does it feel like an insult, but it means that all that pain you went through to learn bash/xfree86.conf/ifconfig/alsactl/etc. is now irrelevant.

I don't see how you can seriously argue against systemd. The lack of integration and modernity in desktop linux _has_ hurt it. Does no-one remember how much of a pain in the arse it was to simply connect to a WPA2 wifi network for __years __? That was because wifi configuration was a jumbled assortment of (really secure no doubt) shell scripts - not something that is easy to interface to a GUI. We should be celebrating the fact that someone is fixing the mess that is the linux userspace.

Anyway, none of this justifies the stupid amount of hatred inflicted on him. And I've still yet to see a sane technical criticism of systemd.

<comment><USER32> Actually, the main problem with wifi on Linux was that the drivers were crap and there were a bunch of competing WiFi stacks with mutally-incompatible APIs. If you had a decent driver, connecting to an access point and authenticating was - and still is - handled entirely by a small, single- purpose monolithic program called wpa_supplicant. The "jumbled assortment of (really secure no doubt) shell scripts" didn't need to know or care whether your network was WPA2. All they had to do was start wpa_supplicant and wait for it to tell them it had connected. Most of the complexity and issues came from older, incompatible drivers with their own built-in WPA supplicants (or no WPA support at all) that aren't supported anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> And Mr. Poettering should know all about being an obnoxious asshole: [http://youtu.be/_ERAXJj142o?t=16m31s](http://youtu.be/_ERAXJj142o?t=16m31s)

<comment><USER34> Why is that video always brought forward? Datenwolf obviously has no clue what he's talking about and Lennart tells him where he is wrong.

<comment><USER35> Datenwolf looks at the problems from the sysadmin perspective and all he is seeing and complaining about is complexity that introduces hard to debug problems and bugs. Sure his criticism is derided by Lennart as he has far more intimate knowledge about the software. However 'Did you file a bug?' and 'Do you hate disabled users?' actually are not helping here either.

It's complicated and modern Desktop Linux userland (ConsoleKit/PolKit/dbus/pulseaudio/GNOME...) feels like a sub-optimal solution from a sysadmin perspective. Maybe systemd will fix some of these issues but some are afraid it will introduce others.

Having dealt with "modern Desktop Linux" I can totally relate to Datenwolf. I understand that he lacks knowledge but if you are not a developer of these systems it's impossible to deal with this mess. And yes - I think it's largely a undocumented, poorly implemented and overly complex mess.

<comment><USER28> And that seems to be the eternal issue. Poettering seems to come at this not from an admin perspective but from a developer perspective. And with RH shifting their focus more and more towards cloud computing, so is systemd.

And in cloud computing the admins are not kings, but peons.

Peons tilling the cattle (server) farm of 100s of servers, each running any number of VM instances. If one or more of those instances go down, new ones are spun back up.

And you see this attitude within systemd. If a daemons crashes you don't leave it down and try to figure out why it crashes. Instead systemd will simply restart any daemon it finds not to be running when it should.

Basically this is not uptime by way of applying carefully measured and maintained administration. This is uptime by machinegun.

It is what allows anyone with some grasp of php to rent server time on a amorphous blob like the Amazon EC2 and spin up the next Twitter or Facebook.

No need to optimize for or maintain the hardware. If the current load is too much, wave your credit card and have 1000 fresh instances behind the the load balancer, courtesy of Amazon or RH.

Datenwolf is demonstrating the kind of exasperation that have in the past driven people to look for alternatives to Windows. They thought they had found the promised land in Linux, but now the blight is coming over the walls and taking up residence even here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I know nothing about this man, so I decided to look him up...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering#Controversi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering#Controversies)

"The "Poettering effect" is now sometimes used as a negative term for presumed damage his mindset is doing to opensource communities."

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.raspberry- pi/...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.raspberry- pi/-02E5S4E6bI/NsFZgjv62yEJ)

I guess there's two sides to every story...

What a strange situation.

<comment><USER37> But notice that's all technical in nature--what he's discussing is abuse and harassment. I don't know a lot about the context, but if he's right, those are very different things--not really two sides at all.

<comment><USER36> He says "Wow, what an awful community Linux has!". How is that "technical in nature"?

<comment><USER37> No, the reasons people dislike him are primarily technical in nature: they don't trust the things he creates. They respond by attacking him in a very personal and abusive way.

That's not an issue that has two sides. That's an issue about his technical work, and then some people doing something abusive. There's two sides to that technical debate, but there's only one side to the other debate, and that's "stop being awful." There would only be two sides if the technical issues surrounding his work somehow justified the abuse. And they don't, because basically nothing justifies that kind of abuse in the tech world.

The comment "Linux is an awful community" is not technical, but it came after the abuse. Hopefully you can see that there's a difference between that and threatening someone.

<comment><USER36> "Poettering is known for having controversial technical and architectural positions regarding the linux ecosystem"

It seems to read that he is basically going around systematically "upsetting the applecart".

Now, whether he's doing that technically or otherwise, it's still having an effect on the ecosystem. You can't detach yourself from that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The problem with "communities" that mainly exist online is that they are not really communities at all, instead they are people scattered across different websites with only the loosest of connections and absolutely no barrier to entry whatsoever and there is no way with which people can be expelled. Therefor it becomes easy for any online community to attract many people who are more interested in the drama and tribalism that surrounds the community than the goals of the community itself,. Posting "systemd sucks" (or more personal things) is much lower effort than actually building an alternative to systemd.

<comment><USER8> There is nothing hard about kicking repeat offenders from an "official" mailing list/subreddit/IRC channel for breaking community guidelines. You just need to set up clear rules, explain them if needed, and expel people too thick to follow the rules, and have enough moderators. Trolls may still complain on other forums, but it will make the place much more liveable for people actually interested in exchanging and contributing.

<comment><USER38> In the article he talks about people posting stuff about him to other websites, namely youtube , 4chan (or at least in 4chan "style") and petition websites.

<comment><USER8> Fair point. You can't really police the Internet. I had more in mind some ridiculous overreactions that have happened in the past in various forums. But you will always have the cowardly, usually anonymous abusers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Well, the "western, white, straight, male, blah, blah" rhetoric should at least bring out some pavlovian support these days. Maybe it's time to replace Linus as BDFL, and this could be a fine tactic too.

I stopped caring so long ago that I wasn't even hit by pulseaudio, so both Lennart and Mr. Drepper have my sympathy and support, as long as they keep to Linux (thankyouverymuch).

<comment><USER40> First they came for Linux, and I did not speak out— Because I was not using Linux.

...

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I don't think this problem is anything particular to open-source communities. There's lots of popular software that is poorly received (Windows 8).

There's the software people hate, and the software nobody uses.

(Of course turning it into a personal attack is very poor behaviour.)

</comment><comment><USER42> Oh, come on.

Poettering wants to show how his community is nice and welcoming, and he does it by... making gratuitous attacks at Gentoo? Sounds legit.

</comment><comment><USER43> Any group of people that grows will eventually accumulate traits that resemble humanity in general. This means that once a group is sufficiently large enough it will probably contain some of the jerks, too. The proper response, of course, is to ignore them unless you have evidence of some actual specific threat which should be brought to the attention of law enforcement, not complained about on the web. Any group that grows eventually has to deal with these jerks, and most learn to just file the rant based "threats" to /dev/null where they belong.

There is one data point you can possibly extract from the sudden appearance of jerks ranting about your work: it is a rough heuristic that suggest that group of people has grown "sufficiently large". People working in the arts sometimes take this as a suggestion that they have "made it", as they have finally achieved an audience that is large enough that touches on a diverse cross- section of the population, and n not just their original niche.

So this suggest that the thing Mr. Poettering is complaining about... is that the _people whgo oppose his software_ have become so large that _normal users_ from random parts of society are complaining. It is proof that it is not, as many suggest, a small amount of unix beards[1] that are doing the complaining.

Mr. Poettering just needs to learn that when you make it big by trowing your weight around - _especially_ when you deliver your own testosterone-fueled challenges and insults - you are making yourself a target. This may or may not be deserved, but if you want to survive in a world where assholes and jerks still exist you need to learn to not take their insults too personally.

/* I'll point out that this general advice is true for anybody with a large audience. If I were to reply to the long history of how systemd forced a coup and hostile takeover of the linux community, then i might suggest that while there area always assholes, this _does_ stink a bit like he's responding to a situation nicely setup for him by some agent provocateur. It certainly fits his cabal's historical style. _/

Edit; for the record, in no way am I _condoning* jerks that merely throw around insults and threats. I am simply stating that they are inevitable once your audience is big enough.

[1] myself included; also: [https://imgur.com/QWkbh](https://imgur.com/QWkbh)

</comment><comment><USER44> Excuse me if I don't trust Lennart "all pulseaudio problems are driver/application problems, get fucked" Poettering to tell me about online communities.

<comment><USER45> Your point might be better made if you weren't anonymous. Also if it had less victim blaming.

<comment><USER46> Are you trying to win an irony award?

<comment><USER45> That would only work if my username wasn't -astonishingly- easy to link back to my real self. Not even 5 minutes of work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Every time I see a similar submission on how bad FOSS communities are, I can't help but wonder - what do we do about it then? People react violently not always solely because of their nature, but also because they don't see a reasonable way to change things. It probably would help better for Poettering to write a post addressing systemd criticism, maybe there is one, but it never made to HN for some reason.

</comment><comment><USER48> lennart poettering is the santa claus politician of *nix , well just Linux because none of his garbage ports.

He promises stuff that does magic and its free, but the reality is hey can deliver, nor his sycophants and minions, anything that works.

He is poetter-izing linux, making it suck in the same ways as many commercial OSen.

I have to say systemd is the crappiest rip off of SMF I have ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER49> Poettering is a complete asshole and deserves all the hate he gets. He replaces perfectly fine software with his own shitty code, and has done noting innovative in his entire life.

</comment><comment><USER50> Pottering needs to toughen up if he wants to dictate the majority of userland. His attachment to Google+ is a bit annoying from a FOSS perspective too.

<comment><USER51> "Torvalds needs to tone down if he wants to dictate the majority of kernel space" isn't much of an argument, is it? I don't see how your comment regarding Pottering is any stronger.

Our attachment to Hacker News is also a bit annoying from a FOSS perspective, unless there's been some release since the suggestion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006037](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006037) . Torvalds uses Google+. How is your comment any different from the pot calling the kettle black?

<comment><USER50> Torvalds needs to tone down nothing. The Kernel would be utter shit if he wasn't cracking the whip on people. I personally find his language on LKML hysterical and enlightening; he writes well too. I appreciate when people are honest and don't sugar coat things.

I wasn't aware Torvalds uses G+, shame on him for doing so. The comment was more about the absurd policies the user signs off on to use the service more than the lack of source code, not that that isn't an issue.

HN being closed source is a bummer. I respect a webmasters choice to refrain from publishing server side code. But considering most of the content discussed on HN, it is hypocritical. As unethical as HN is from a FOSS standpoint, I can't turn away from a site where the user-base falls on the right side of a bell curve for I.Q. Too good to pass up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> >My involvement with the kernel community ended pretty much before it even started, I never post on LKML, and haven't done in years.

Poor baby. Why is everyone so mean to him? He's western, white, straight, male, 30s-40s (really?).

> I can only imagine that it is much worse for members of minorities, or > people from different cultural backgrounds, in particular ones where losing > face is a major issue.

Speaks for itself.</comment>


Mozilla plans Firefox fix for same malware vulnerability that bit Tor [updated] - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/09/mozilla-checks-if-firefox-is-affected-by-same-malware-vulnerability-as-tor/ <comment><USER2> see also [http://seclists.org/dailydave/2016/q3/51](http://seclists.org/dailydave/2016/q3/51)</comment>


3D Printing of a Steel Bridge in Amsterdam - <AUTHOR> http://heijmans.nl/en/news/heijmans-and-mx3d-collaborate-3d-printing-steel-bridge-amsterdam/

<comment><USER2> I fail to see the hype of 3D printing. We have milling machines for ages. As I understand it, what printing brings to the table is good niche applications where the shapes would be difficult for traditional machinery. Or when the printers are so cheap that "everyone" can afford them (not really there yet). For most applications it seems more a "because we can" than actually solving a problem people have.

<comment><USER3> Well this particular use seems a bit weird. But in general 3D printers are extremely useful, mainly as time savers. Yes you _can_ machine most shapes that you'd want, and you'd probably end up with a nicer result. But it's far more difficult, expensive and time consuming.

1\. You have to manually do all the work, or at least set up tool paths which is a pain (and good software for this is even rarer than good solid modelling software).

2\. You can't do as complicated shapes. I'm not talking fractals, I mean can you mill a plastic latch as easily as I can 3D print one? No way.

3\. It just takes longer. Once I've done my CAD with 3D printing the work is basically done. With machining it's only just beginning.

4\. If I make a mistake in my model and have to make a change, it is extremely quick to just do the modifications and reprint it.

5\. If I want more than one of them I just click print again.

You're right that good 3D printers are still quite expensive (FDM ones aren't really worth it, but there are SLA printers for a few grand now). However good milling machines cost a similar amount, and CNC milling machines cost more.

The image problem with 3D printers is because all the cool and _actually_ useful uses are one-off and in companies so they don't get talked about as much trinkets and jewellery. For example I made a mount at work that attaches a stepper motor to a linear slide. Can't release it to the world though.

<comment><USER4> Counter points to all of that:

1\. All of the software that creates printing paths is a derivative of the work done to turn solid models into milling machine tool paths. That software has existed for well over 30 years, and the proprietary stuff is excellent.

2\. This is the big advantage of 3D printing. Arbitrarily complex shapes don't increase the cost. That said, you can do some insane things with a 5-11 axis machining center.

3\. It's impossible to say as a general rule which one takes longer. If you have a shape that is relatively close to the full volume of the stock, then mills will be faster than 3D printing. If you are spending a lot of time cutting down stock to get close to the final shape, then 3D printing might be faster. Either way I would expect finishing steps.

4\. Either way you are starting from scratch, this goes back to #3. No one really wants to do rework unless you are building very expensive industrial parts in low quantities, and at that scale you are unquestionably milling.

5\. CNC mills are exactly the same. Actually most of the ones in a factory take the raw feedstock in and spit out finished parts, no human intervention required. 3D printers generally don't do this yet.

I get the impression you haven't worked with advanced CNC machining centers. I've worked with $50,000 mills (and $500,000 mills). I've also worked with $50,000 3D printers. The $50,000 mill beats the pants off the $50,000 3D printer every day of the week.

At the hobbyist level and a budget of $2,000 things are different, but serious industrial production is definitely better done on CNC milling machines. If you are comparing manual mills to CNC 3D printers, that is pretty apples to oranges. That would be like comparing a CNC mill to a guy holding a hot glue gun.

Source: I've been a mechanical engineer designing manufacturing systems for medical devices & nuclear submarines.

<comment><USER5> I am pretty sure 3D metallic sinter machines will replace many (not all) CNC mills/turns (incl 5 axis) machines in the industry in a few years. Some car manufacturers of expensive sport cars already use them to create whole parts of the cars engine and its exhaust system. It allows them to print them complex metallic parts including moving gears all in one step without any assembly or finishing step at all - something that would require multiple parts and many human work hours using CNC mills/turns.

Source: I have background in these field as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am surprised at the negativity here. I learned from the little bit of information I have gathered from the historical development of computing that computers were initially only designed for circuitry to _automate_ stuff. Speed was an afterthought. Fast forward to today, reiterations on speed have broadened the uses of computers beyond simply automation.

Likewise, this kind of work is not really just about the hype on 3D printing but it's the ability to automate things. Tomorrow, reiterations on 3D printing will bring speed, accessibility, and democratization of abilities, not to mention the lowering of cost.

Then after tomorrow, or maybe even today, we will have 3D dismantling. Again to automate recycling and reuse of resource.

<comment><USER7> > Likewise, this kind of work is not really just about the hype on 3D printing > but it's the ability to automate things. Tomorrow, reiterations on 3D > printing will bring speed, accessibility, and democratization of abilities, > not to mention the lowering of cost.

That argument doesn't work. Computers were the quickest growing and improving technology in history.

I actually like 3D printing, and think it's pretty neat, but it's also pretty limited right now. I believe it will improve, probably a lot, but it's asking a lot comparing to computers.

<comment><USER8> I guess that is if you mean digital computers. We could sat that _computers_ started in 1801 with the Jacquard Loom, meaning we may have to wait about a 180 years to see what 3D printing turns into.

Then again, could we say that the Jacquard Loom was actually the first 3D (2D?) printer?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems a lot more practical to have a stick of rebar that a multi-axis robot can cut and spot weld then to create each member from scratch.

<comment><USER10> Would spot welding rebar piece by piece convey the same tensile strength as forming each member?

<comment><USER11> The process this 3d printing technique is using is welding on top of itself, so the whole thing is filler material. Definitely not up to code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Would this actually be a pretty bad application of 3-d printing? I thought the metals were generally or exclusively done through sintering, and and for some reason (may be incorrect) it didn't do as well with tensile & deformation stress. Not to mention porosity. Seems like something a casted product would be better for.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why don't we have evacuated or argon chamber 3d weld printing? Too much electricity? That feels like a $5k/month project. Does this already exist? Or should we build it? :)

<comment><USER14> Some Direct metal laser sintering processes [1] use an argon flood already! It isn't necessary for all metals though.

[1]: [https://www.solidconcepts.com/resources/design- guidelines/dm...](https://www.solidconcepts.com/resources/design- guidelines/dmls-design-guidelines/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This advances the art, but it is not clear that economies of large scale production can be easily overcome and thus it is likely that the future will be a mix of mass produced components assembled by various automated processes.

<comment><USER10> I noticed both on their website, their article, and their video that they're using two industrial robots for the task. Why could this not be scaled up with additional robots working in cooperation for larger jobs? You're limited only to how quickly the material cures so you can begin using it to further advance, and the complexity of adding additional workers in the space constrained 3 dimensional workspace.</comment></comment>


Hitachi 2807/C – First Note Cleaning and Ironing ATM [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.hitachihyoron.com/jp/pdf/1994/09/1994_09_00_sinseihin.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> > The notes are heated to 200 deg C in order to sterilize them and then they > are ironed out flat to get rid of any folds or wrinkles.

[http://www.telecompaper.com/news/notecleaning-atm-from- hitac...](http://www.telecompaper.com/news/notecleaning-atm-from-hitachi-- 32229)</comment>


Google account activity - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/03/giving-you-more-insight-into-your.html <comment><USER2> Pretty ironic that Google--a company that gained notoriety for its minimalist search engine--has a "company blog" full of ridiculous eye candy. On my laptop screen, the top bar (which stays as you scroll down) takes up a ridiculous amount of space. Then I accidentally moused over the bottom part of the page as I was reading the end of the article, triggering yet another bar popping up from the bottom and telling me about other Google sites.

The icing on the cake is that the whole thing takes a bit of time to load (showing you a gear much reminiscent of the old "Flash intro" days)--all to load some sort of header with ugly colored balls that move around when you move the mouse.

It's 1997 all over again, folks. Only I would have never expected _Google_ , of all companies, to fall into the eye candy trap.

<comment><USER3> _"The icing on the cake is that the whole thing takes a bit of time to load (showing you a gear much reminiscent of the old "Flash intro" days)--all to load some sort of header with ugly colored balls that move around when you move the mouse."_

You can say a lot of things about Google but they've got balls. :-)

The irony is even stronger than you realize, Google has been on a kick 'make the web fast' for a while, when they first kicked it off in 2010 I pointed out that most of my pageloads were hung waiting for doubleclick to load (which got fixed by the way, they are a lot faster now). So the notion of pushing a bunch of non-useful eye candy is kinda antithetical to that theme, but they do it anyway.

Perhaps their release process is broken, I have wondered what would change if they could make it a corporate priority that no Google generated page should take longer than 500mS to load on a 1Mbit connection. They could at least lead by showing best practices for fast loading web pages. Perhaps a current employee reading this will pass it along.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps, that is what you get by putting ex microsoft employees in charge.

<comment><USER5> Who are you referring to, specifically?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This doesn't even scratch the surface of what Google _could_ show you. If they showed us the extent of what they can actually infer from our activity, some people would probably shoot their computer, burn their router and modem, and never look at a screen again.

<comment><USER7> What additional information do you think Google has available about its users that they are not showing?

<comment><USER8> One thing that Google knows: other accounts you have with non-Google services. For example, when you setup your G+ profile, they offer to link a Twitter account that they suspect is yours.

<comment><USER7> Twitter used to offer an api to lookup a user by email. So this does not have to be something they figured out by parsing your Inbox for Twitter signups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I love the unintentional creepiness of this quote:

"Data deletion at the data source, e.g. in your Web History will have no impact on issued reports, however reports can be deleted at any time"

As in - if you didn't know already, GOOG's Web History is a superficial front- facing report, all your personal data is happily sitting in GOOG's databases, is tracked, related, and available to whomever has the appropriate power to access it.

<comment><USER10> I don't think the quoted sentence says that. It rather says that Web History is the source of the data, and even if you delete it there, it will not affect reports that have already been issued in the past.

The question is what they mean with "issued reports". Are these reports that are being issued or reports that have been issued? It's a bit ambiguous, I think. But then again, English isn't my native language, so maybe I am just confusing some Grammar rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > For example, if you notice sign-ins from countries where you haven't been or > devices you've never owned, you can change your password immediately

When I was att CCC this winter I noticed that a russian ip had logged into my gmail. Turns out it was CCC who had rented a russian ip. Scared me quite a bit for a few hours and resulted in me changing my password.

</comment><comment><USER12> My report says my 3 of my 'most contacted' emails are gmail accounts I've never heard of. Googling these email addresses returns lists of known spammers. However clicking on the emails in the report itself shows no known results in my gmail. Has anyone else seen this? Should I be concerned? What should I check for?

I already re-checked that I have no forwarding addresses set; the addresses do not show up as autocomplete if I begin to type a message to one.

Could it just be a bug? The numbers are "14 emails sent", so not a huge amount, but I'm slightly disturbed by this and can't find any other clues yet.

<comment><USER13> Pretty sure this means the spammers "contacted" you. I had the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Has anyone opted in and received their first report yet?

<comment><USER6> I opted in, and I get a notice that it can take a couple of the days for the data to appear. An email notification should be sent to me at that point.

<comment><USER14> It took lest then 30 minutes to get my first email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't live in America and haven't been for years. Noticed I have logins with "tch network services" and have no idea why that would be the case. I don't use any VPN services (esp. not to login into my accounts). Anyone have any ideas?

<comment><USER16> I have the same issues. Any ideas yet?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Mirror: [http://www.businessinsider.com/giving-you-more-insight- into-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/giving-you-more-insight-into-your- google-account-activity-2012-3)

OP link is returning a blank page.

<comment><USER18> Not for me. Do you have Javascript turned off?

<comment><USER19> Amazing, it loads scripts from three domains to display six paragraphs of text and an image.

<comment><USER20> ... and the fallback for browsers with JS turned off is a completely blank page.

Why do Google hate the web?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice feature. Next, please let me delete activity from my history, so Google forgets they saw it.

</comment><comment><USER22> I would love to see a similar visualization for the entire Google Apps Domain for admins

</comment><comment><USER23> Is this an indirect way of (re)activating Goolgle history for our accounts?</comment>


Diablo II original code lost with no back-ups - <AUTHOR> https://www.gamespot.com/articles/diablo-2-devs-recount-almost-losing-the-game-expla/1100-6471517/ <comment><USER2> > _" [We] finally rebuilt a lot of it through what people had at their homes," > Erich Schaefer said. "I had a big chunk of it. Went home, pulled out the > hard drive or whatever we did back then. Spent a few days reconstructing it, > which ended up working fine, except that we lost all the history. We lost a > lot of the assets, art assets. It would make it very difficult for Blizzard > to do a Diablo 2 Remaster because all the assets we used are pretty much > gone. They'd have to make them from scratch."_

Wouldn't the assets be present in the shipped games?

<comment><USER3> Audio and artwork are shrunken and compressed from the original resolution they were created in to fit on the CD. A remaster would need the assets in the original level of detail they were created in.

<comment><USER2> > _A remaster would need the assets in the original level of detail they were > created in._

Wouldn't the original artists / graphic designers have those?

Besides Diablo II came out in 2000. Even the high res Illustrator/Photoshop/assets might be mediocre res for today's monitors...

<comment><USER4> I imagine it's easier to recreate remastered assets from copies at the original res, than doing it from low-res versions.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Reviewing Ethereum Smart Contracts - <AUTHOR> https://blog.gdssecurity.com/labs/2017/9/27/reviewing-ethereum-smart-contracts.html <comment><USER2> I saw this on Twitter today:

Cyber security is a nightmare.

Crypto asset security is a 10X nightmare.

Smart contract security is a 100X nightmare.

[https://twitter.com/lopp/status/911020364829884416](https://twitter.com/lopp/status/911020364829884416)

<comment><USER3> But if pioneers do not grind their teeth on real world implementation, application, and hardening how do you expect those scales to change? Was it better when even US mil branches roamed the public internet and people dialed in with naive attacks?

I applaud these developers like those who died exploring countries unknown, minus the raping and pillaging and colonizing (not ironic; I just know people on HN will call me out if not clear preemptively).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It remains a complete embarrassment that Ethereum is based on a home-grown trainwreck of a programming language instead of one of the existing well- supported, battle-tested verifiable programming languages out there. Honestly, they could have used C and been better off because of the amount of C verification tools out there - Solidity hardly seems safer than C and its compiler has a history of potentially catastrophic newbie mistakes [1]. Note that some of these bugs are in _an optimizer_ , something a security-focused package handling money shouldn't even need, especially if it risks compromising correctness of the contracts.

People talk about Solidity being JS-inspired, but simply using JS would have also been better, because there is verification tooling out there for it, along with compression tooling to make it smaller. And people can use higher- level to-JS compilers like Typescript to get stronger safety assurances if they wish.

Any claims that performance justifies the use of a home-grown language are also absurd: High-performance trading firms like Jane Street make use of verifiable functional programming languages like OCaml despite the importance of speed & latency in order to turn a profit. [2]

No amount of effort from security researchers is going to completely compensate for the fact that the people running Ethereum have incredibly bad taste and make poor decisions. I remain concerned for people who put their wealth at risk investing in smart contracts because the average contract probably has unnoticed issues.

[1] [http://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/bugs.html](http://solidity.readthedocs.io/en/develop/bugs.html)

[2] [https://www.janestreet.com/technology/](https://www.janestreet.com/technology/)

<comment><USER5> Whoa there! Sure Ethereum has it's problems, but going as far as "the people running Ethereum have incredibly bad taste and make poor decisions", displays a huge amount of ignorance towards some incredible engineers who have built a fantastic (and very successful) platform.

Ethereum is far more than just the contract language -- it's the distributed consensus system, the merkle-tree backed blockchain, the p2p network, the cryptographic transaction ledger, the virtual machine, and much more. It is way more complex and sophisticated than you're giving it credit for.

There have been multiple languages to target the EVM, and they're been getting incrementally better, and will continue to evolve rapidly as more PL experts have gotten involved.

So for all the things they've got wrong, they've got lots more right -- and it's only been a bit over two years since the initial release. Give them a break!

<comment><USER6> The EVM itself is fucked, not just Solidity. It has poorly defined semantics and has a number of strange behaviors that you don't want in high integrity systems.

<comment><USER7> For example?

<comment><USER6> Exception semantics are unclear, requiring explicit checks only in some cases depending on how a function is called.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Imagine if Windows 95 stored your payment data and was bridge-connected to the internet. This will give you an idea of how I look at these smart contracts.

Is there any reason to think of it another way?

<comment><USER7> Yes: smart contracts are extremely short programs, usually doing very simple things. A thousand lines is a fairly large contract. It's feasible to spend a lot of time refactoring to make them as simple and clear as possible, to unit test extensively, and then pay several expert parties to review them in detail.

We're not quite at the point of being able to do formal proofs of their properties, but that's on the way, and also relatively practical given how short the contracts are.

We can see whether contract authors have done these things because unlike Win95, smart contract source code is always published, since everyone knows a closed-source contract could trivially steal their money.

<comment><USER9> Smart contracts are not that short, and if you look at entries for the Unhardended Solidty Code contest you'll discover just how easy it is to implement a vulnerability due to the nuances of Solidity and the runtime.

The virtual machine is also not even remotely proven yet.

There is a lot of risk.

<comment><USER7> I write and audit Ethereum smart contracts for a living. Most of the projects I work on aren't much bigger than a thousand lines, and many are less. Some especially large projects are several thousand lines, still many orders of magnitude smaller than Win95.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The World According to the 1580s - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/bunk/the-world-as-it-appeared-in-the-1580s-51aa4e3295f0 <comment><USER2> Damn.

I wonder whether all those details from so much of North America implies that Europeans visited all those places. And left their diseases. Or maybe they relied a lot on native informants. But that was also a disease pathway.

This does support the hypothesis of mass die-offs before substantive visits. As discussed in Mann's _1491_.

<comment><USER3> I've seen a lot of different hypotheses arguing settlers reached Americas earlier and more-often than has been recorded. A couple days ago some were talking about one idea, here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19674298](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19674298)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unrelated (sorry), but here's what I see when I open that Medium link in Safari. It's quite a challenge to find the article between the pop-ups. Screenshot: [https://i.imgur.com/XbYLs5c.png](https://i.imgur.com/XbYLs5c.png)

But they haven't improved that in years, so I suspect it must actually be working for them and convert well!

</comment><comment><USER5> In 500 years, somewhere, there will be an article like this about how people pictured space in 2019, and how off the mark they were.</comment>


All HTTP-based services are unresponsive on BitBucket - <AUTHOR> https://status.bitbucket.org/?Date=2018-Mar-02 <comment><USER2> Discussion over here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16501731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16501731)</comment>


Amazon RDS for MySQL Now Supports Read Replica Promotion - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2012/10/11/amazon-rds-mysql-rr-promotion/

<comment><USER2> I feel like I'm missing something, aren't read replicas run in read-only mode? How would one run long running DDL operations on them?

<comment><USER2> In answer to my own question, looks like it's possible to disable read_only:

<https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=281451></comment></comment>


Self-Replication Process Holds Promise for Production of New Materials - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111012132651.htm

<comment><USER2> This is the start (progress?) of the much-anticipated and denounced molecular nanotech. Notice the article carefully avoids calling it that...

</comment><comment><USER3> The science is awesome and terrifying. It brings us one step closer to the grey goo doomsday outcome.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't worry much now. Natural self replicators abound. The synthetic one described here require very specialized conditions and resources. I think the man-made replication has a long way to go before outdoing Nature.

<comment><USER5> Except for the fact that natural self replicators are in a predator/prey balanced ecosystem, synthetic replicators could be a monstrously invasive species.

<comment><USER6> If your replicating in the wild your basically stuck with organic chemistry as building blocks (C,N,H,O) plus a few 'exotics' when you really need them. Add to that the need for a plentiful energy source to replicate rapidly. We may be able to improve on some things and make a better form of chlorophyll etc., but as long as we are using organic chemistry it's going to be very hard to create something that does not quickly end up as something else's food or host.

<comment><USER7> Don't forget that organic bacteria/virii/fungus can also be extremely deadly. Even artificial ones. But yes, it'd be more like biological threat than "grey goo scenario".

What if they "eat" electronic devices and other human artifacts instead of organic compounds? Would that contain enough "exotics"? It wouldn't be as directly deadly as nanobots eating meat, but could do great harm to our civilization.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


You are not a unique snowflake. Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything - <AUTHOR> https://www.databaselabs.io/blog/Startup-ideas-are-worthless-execution-is-everything <comment><USER2> >Every day, someone posts on /r/startups about how they have a really great whiz-bang secret idea that will revolutionize everything and make them billions of dollars. Now they "just" need some investors so they can hire contractors to develop it.

I wonder if any of those have worked? I've been approached by a couple of people like that apart from 'billions' and don't have the brilliant ideas as I couldn't be bothered signing a NDA.

<comment><USER3> From my (serious) email archives:

Anyway, i'm interested in starting a top notch word press website with user login and plenty of functionality. Ranging from finding friends creating groups, joining a lobby, voice and video capability, commentator's and even more. She told me that you know a lot about web design and website procedures. I have looked at your website and it definitely appears as if you know what you're doing. I was wondering if you could give me an estimate on how much it would cost for me to create and maintain a website like this, and where the expenses would be coming from? __It would have to be able to host as many people as facebook. __

_The BEST part_

 __If this project happens to be lucrative, I 'd be open to reimbursing you for your advice. __

<comment><USER4> In a field which is not programming, I've been that guy who sent that email. It is pretty easy to fool yourself into thinking you're starting to sink your teeth into something when you're going in the wrong direction entirely, and to think the time has come to reach out to people on your next steps only to receive a gentle push back towards the fundamentals.</comment></comment></comment>


Senate Panel Passes Cybersecurity Act with Revised "Kill Switch" Language  - <AUTHOR> http://www.opencongress.org/articles/view/1773-Senate-panel-passes-Cybersecurity-Act-with-revised-kill-switch-language

<comment><USER2> The article is pretty horribly written, but the act does indeed have some pretty serious ramifications. Would Wikileaks constitute a "cyber security threat"?</comment>


Point of WebGPU on Native - <AUTHOR> http://kvark.github.io/web/gpu/native/2020/05/03/point-of-webgpu-native.html <comment><USER2> I'm really rooting for WebGPU as the "cross-platform 3D-API for the rest of us" (where "rest of us" is everybody who isn't a highly specialized rendering engineer in an AAA-game engine team).

There's "one small thing" I'd like to see in WebGPU for the native use case: an optional compile-time configuration feature which allows to pass in "backend-native" shaders so that all the runtime-shader-translation code isn't necessary.

Example size for compiling "Hello Triangle" on macOS before and after stripping, both using the Metal backend:

\- with sokol-gfx: 95 KB, 91 KB

\- with Google Dawn: 5.2 MB, 4.0 MB

I bet that most of that 4 MB overhead is coming from the integrated shader validation and translation code. I haven't tested with wgpu-native, but I guess the size overhead will be similar.

Since native applications don't need the strict shader validation of the web platform, this probably would also speed up pipeline creation a bit :)

PS: clarification, the executable size for Dawn is _also_ using sokol-gfx but using its new WebGPU backend and statically linked against Dawn (which in turn is using its own Metal backend), so not a 'Hello Triangle' built directly on top of the webgpu.h API. The size difference should be negligible though (at most a few Kbytes more).

<comment><USER3> > where "rest of us" is everybody who isn't a highly specialized rendering > engineer in an AAA-game engine team

Then you should be looking at WebGL, not WebGPU!

<comment><USER4> No, WebGPU will be easier to use than WebGL, because it doesn't have the global state. Global state is the worst thing about OpenGL and requires a lot of code to get it under control.

<comment><USER3> WebGL is different than legacy OpenGL from 20 years ago. WebGL is pretty easy to work with.

WebGPU is a low-level API is more flexible than WebGL, which means more complexity. That is why it is being introduced, after all!

<comment><USER5> However It still use global state, you need to flush state everywhere when switch scenes.

Run another filter? good, switch everything on global state. Render another scene with different texture? Set everything again.

Moreover... if you forgot to reset something after change it. You got weird bug that only happen under some specific order of operation. Because everything share a global state.

And it is full sync. A shader takes long time for render also makes your whole page non responsive, which is a pain. (open the list page of shadertoy, you will know what am I saying)

<comment><USER3> You don't need to reset everything, only whatever you change. Yeah, other APIs allow you to keep the state pre-packaged and switch from what appears a single command, but the state is still there nevertheless.

The full sync is a problem of how WebGL is provided. They could easily change it to allow parallel rendering as long it is to independent contexts.

<comment><USER5> I am not sure it is easy to change opengl to run parallelly given it all shares a global state. How do you not mess up anything when render two scene at same time if two pipeline shares the same variable but you want to fill it with different value? And if you really want to change it so hard to give pipelines standalone context. Why not use the webgpu? It seems just designed in a stateless way that I just described.

<comment><USER4> OpenGL wasn't designed with multithreading/parallel execution in mind. Before running any OpenGL call, you have to bind the application-wide context to a specific thread. Vulkan, DX12 work differently - they allow you to create command lists from separate threads, but in exchange you have to work on the synchronization yourself via semaphores and fences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Web and client-side WebAPI has security first in mind. The conception of WASM and WebGPU is pushing Web into wider audiences and influence, taking up what used to be OS' market.

On the OS side, Google the capability-based OS Fuchsia. Someone in Google understands that user's consent over their computation resource (file/directory, network) is more important than ever.

And then there's WASI where it will enable OS to directly host WASM while allowing controllable gates over computation resources. WASI might be an important endeavor in the future and I think WebGPU design should have WASI in mind.

Those may have conflicts of space and market in the future, but all are moving into the same interest, the balance of user's consent over resources, security, and performance. It seems these standards are in good hands.

<comment><USER3> Capability-based systems have been a thing for decades but never took off for lack of interest and complexity.

What I am missing is not a Web replacing operating systems, but better operating systems!

<comment><USER6> Non-technical users are driven to rely more and more on the web app than direct-to-OS-apps due to how easy to build they are.

> What I am missing is not a Web replacing operating systems, but better > operating systems!

But, that I cannot argue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Besides, real Vulkan isn't everywhere. More specifically, there are no > drivers for Intel Haswell/Broadwell iGPUs on Windows, it's forbidden on > Windows UWP (including ARM), it's below 50% on Android, and totally absent > on macOS and iOS. Vulkan Portability aims to solve it, but it's another > fairly complex layer for your application, especially considering the shader > translation logic of SPIRV-Cross, and it's still a WIP.

Wow. Has Vulkan failed as a standard then? I'm interested in this area but came away from the article feeling extremely confused about what the future of portable graphics programming looks like.

I know despite the hopes for WebGPU there's NWIH I will invest time learning it while everything is so up in the air.

OpenGL is great despite its warts, I've had a lot of fun programming with it over all the years.

<comment><USER8> There's no Vulkan on MacOS/iOS (though there may be some 3rd party library that will translate to Metal).

<comment><USER9> While true this boils down to "Apple won't support anything it doesn't have control over", as demonstrated by them using veto power to pick WebGPU's shader language (a custom one) instead of using the shader IR literally everyone else wanted. It doesn't make a ton of sense to evaluate the success of APIs and standards this way because Apple has a long track record of refusing to implement stuff or deprecating it once they had an interest in promoting a proprietary alternative.

<comment><USER10> That paints Apple in a wrong light. They agreed on the WebGPU Shading Language proposed by Google (!) (previously called "Tint"). This is something Google is interested in, as well.

<comment><USER9> It's literally in past WebGPU meeting minutes: Apple objected to SPIR-V due to disputes with Khronos. Tint is a compromise, it doesn't matter who proposed it.

"MS: Apple is not comfortable working under Khronos IP framework, because of dispute between Apple Legal & Khronos which is private. Can't talk about the substance of this dispute. Can't make any statement for Apple to agree to Khronos IP framework. So we're discussing, what if we don't fork? We can't say whether we're (Apple) happy with that. NT: nobody is forced to come into Khronos' IP framework."

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F6ns6I3zs-2JL_dT9hOkX_25...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F6ns6I3zs-2JL_dT9hOkX_253vEtKxuUkTGvxpuv8Ac/edit)

<comment><USER10> I know, I was there. I also think that objection to SPIR-V wasn't completely unfounded. SPIR-V is a nice binary representation of shaders, but it has problems in the context of WebGPU adoption:

1\. It's so low level that generating HLSL and MSL from it is more painful than it could be. For example, it represents branching in the form of a Control Flow Graph (which is typical for an IR). This is lower level than either a source language people would use (e.g. GLSL), or the destination backend language we need to produce (e.g. HLSL or MSL). This is unnecessary complexity for translation.

2\. It has a lot of instructions, covering wide range of hardware (somewhat similar to Vulkan). In contrast, for WebGPU it would make sense to have fewer instructions for the ease of securing it and translating to other representations.

3\. Friction in the features we need, vs features Khronos needs.

There is also a situation where there is no single well specified and tested textual shading language. HLSL doesn't have a spec. MSL has documentation, but not enough for a spec, and it's not portable. GLSL kinda has a few specs, but realistically it's just specified by the implementation of glslValidator.

<comment><USER11> I think this is actually something that might be deserving of a blog post itself, if you had the time.

There's a lot of opinions from people outside the working group for WGSL as to why it exists.

I think most of the PR damage right now comes from those people not having enough context and thus framing it in a negative light.

A blog post with more context and information would probably help imho

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most of this is "head-adjacent" for me, but there's one point where I'm confident the author is not seeing the whole forest, and that is the comparison to Unity. I'm sympathetic that someone working so hard to make WebGPU amazing would perceive the value of Unity through the lens of not having to worry about arcane device compatibility concerns.

However, that's just a tiny slice of the reasons driving Unity's runaway success train. After all, if this were true, everyone would just be using ThreeJS. And don't get me wrong - ThreeJS has a massive and well-deserved user base, but few see it as a serious platform.

Unity is crushing it because they provide an almost VB6-like canvas to paint on; because they have the most outrageously comprehensive asset-store ecosystem I've seen for any platform period; and because they frequently support the cool new toys like ARKit the day that they are announced.

Unity is hands-down my favourite way to introduce day-one noobs to programming. I can take someone who has never programmed before and lead them through creating a VR experience where they can fight a giant spider with a burning sword in about an hour.

The idea to payoff pathway Unity offers someone who is deciding whether to pursue programming in real time is _crazy_.

<comment><USER2> That is definitely (mostly) true, but integrated engines like Unity or UE4 also heavily nudge you in doing things their way and come with a non-trivial size overhead (e.g. it is complete overkill to use Unity for your next Tetris clone).

And let's be honest, if you sit beginners in front of Unity they don't learn programming, instead they learn "Unity problem solving", e.g. "Unity trivia" which is hardly applicable to other contexts.

In my opinion, Unity is the Photoshop for game creation, you work on a very high level, but it's also very convenient (if you actually follow the rules and workflows).

But there are quite a few commercial games which use Unity only as a 'cross- platform wrapper', because their game client is more or less just a dumb input+rendering client, and the actual gameplay stuff all happens server-side.

It would be awfully nice if Unity could be split into a couple of standalone products (however that probably won't happen because it doesn't make much commercial sense):

\- a low-level platform-abstraction library which contains all the driver-bug workarounds and behind-the-scene-fixes that have been accumulated over the years

\- a 'bring-your-own-engine' asset pipeline and editor

\- and finally, the actual Unity runtime engine, split into modules

<comment><USER12> I dunno. This is all so subjective. I don't think Day 1 of programming is about picking up programming. It's about seeing if there's going to be a Day 2-4.

And if Unity isn't in the picture, they sure as fuck aren't going to be hearing about WebGPU for the first 3-5 years of their journey.

Photoshop for game creation is a little bit loaded. I'll take it in good faith but point aggressively to how wrong you are because it's possible you just don't realize how much cutting edge engineering is being deployed.

For example, there's currently a major push towards moving everyone over to a job scheduled, burst-compiled data-driven architecture so that you can have tens of thousands of actors on screen at once. I stand by what I said about a VB6-like UI experience, but nobody is building anything real without learning a ton of C#, Quaternion math and shader language.

<comment><USER2> "Photoshop for game creation" in the sense of: Unity has become the standard tool for creating games, and definitely has "democratized" and standardized creating games. But with this standardization also came a loss of diversity. Just as all drawing programs more or less became Photoshop clones, all integrated game development solutions eventually became Unity clones because that's exactly what users expect nowadays.

The under-the-hood technology in Unity is definitely bleeding edge, but the user-facing workflows aren't anymore, they simply cannot "revolutionize" their workflows again as they did a decade ago, because that would alienate their own user base. Being the "industry standard" also has its downsides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Fantastic blog, I've devoured its few articles describing the whole history of WebGPU from the WebMetal prototype in 2016 until where we are today.

It definitely got me excited for this new piece of technology.

</comment><comment><USER14> The author states something like:

Use XXX API and deal with bugs, incompatibilities, etc. etc.

What makes him think that this new API will be free of any of things he mentions above? As far as I can see this whole high performance graphics area has always been a wasps nest of various vendors each trying to pull the blanket to their side. I doubt adding "Web" to it will make life any easier.

<comment><USER10> At some point, it comes down to the amount of momentum behind the API. In case of WebGPU, we have strong support from Intel and Apple, which are hardware vendors, as well as Google, who can influence mobile hardware vendors. We are making the specification and have resources to appropriately test it and develop the necessary workarounds. It's the quantity to quality transition that sometimes just needs to cross a certain threshold in order to succeed.

<comment><USER14> _" It's the quantity to quality transition that sometimes just needs to cross a certain threshold in order to succeed."_

So until that happens it is still: Use XXX API and deal with bugs, incompatibilities, etc. etc. We are back to square one.

I would really love it if we have some decent multiplatform high performance graphics API (with single shader language). I would also love said API to not require one possess PhD. However looking back the last 20 years does not inspire much optimism.

Wish you luck anyways

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This touches on apps vs. web a little. Fundamentally what's the difference between mobile apps and the web? Is one naturally faster? Smoother? More cross-platform? Better at sensors? Offline mode? Not at all, not fundamentally at least. They are both just code on a machine. Either of them can make their runtimes do whatever they like whenever they like. If the web dedicated all it's resources to performance they would be smooth as native - there is no physical law prohibiting that. And vice versa for cross-platform compatibility. The fundamental difference is philosophical. The web consortium starts with consensus and cross-platform compatibility as a core tenant, while native pumps out proprietary features. They both strive for the same point but approach from opposite ends of the spectrum. As time goes on they might converge on the same point - which philosophy will win?

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if we'll see any 2d UI frameworks built on this in an effort to get around the DOM entirely? Similar to what famo.us tried to do with 3D accelerated CSS.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is there an easy way to get Dawn or wgpu attached to v8 or SpiderMonkey without having to involve the entire rest of a web browser? I see there are a number of language bindings for wgpu in the wgpu-native repository, but surprisingly not JavaScript. I found commits placing it in servo, but I don't see why the vast majority of the API surface should be reliant on a browser :(. As an analogy, I can use OpenGL without a GUI toolkit, and the only parts that are really connected to the GUI toolkit are a handful of presentation functions at the very top: the headers and libraries for OpenGL are abstract/common no matter what toolkit you are using. I want to use WebGPU in all the same contexts I use OpenGL: to do accelerated rendering operations, not merely to display graphics. I would thereby expect that I would have bindings for WebGL/WebGPU (with all of its safety/security transformations) at a lower level that can target a JavaScript engine API and then I can build whatever GUI I wanted at a higher layer. Where is the impedance mismatch in what I am thinking vs. how this always seems to be implemented?

<comment><USER18> Browsers are Javascript bindings to WebGPU :) But more seriously, there is a [https://github.com/maierfelix/webgpu](https://github.com/maierfelix/webgpu) that implements node bindings for Felix's Dawn fork. The fork is close to upstream and Dawn is close to "webgpu.h" so it should be easy to repurpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sounds promising — would be great to know the history on why the other people who tried to make the one graphics api to rule them all failed? Seems like that could be helpful in the whole "learning from the past thing".

<comment><USER3> Because hardware vendors don't want one. Lock-in when you are leading your particular niche gives big profits, so companies go for it.

That is why Microsoft, Sony, NVIDIA, Apple, Xilinx, etc. create their own platforms and APIs.

<comment><USER20> > Because hardware vendors don't want one. Lock-in when you are leading your > particular niche gives big profits, so companies go for it.

Complete nonsense. All the hardware vendors except Apple support Vulkan and contributed towards it.

NVIDIA hasn't created their own graphics API since... ever, actually. They _have_ their own APIs, of course (cuda being an obvious one, but there's also NVAPI), but they don't do graphics. Because hardware vendors have no interest or motivation in making more drivers than they need to, because drivers are hard & expensive. So much so that driver _quality_ is a better lock-in for them.

Consoles use exclusives to drive lock-in, not APIs. Consoles have their own APIs, but historically that's always been a performance thing. They want to give game devs the rawest access they can, to make the best looking games they can. Maybe low-level APIs like Vulkan will end up changing that, maybe it won't, but it's not a "lock-in" thing. OS's use APIs to do lock-in, but they don't make hardware (Apple being the exception here, of course).

<comment><USER21> Sony and Nintendo definitely make hardware.

Microsoft not only does not support Vulkan, ICD drivers aren't allowed in Win32 and UWP sandbox models.

NVidia designs their hardware in collaboration with Microsoft, giving first class support to DirectX, and only afterwards they port the features as extensions to Vulkan/OpenGL.

Latest two examples, Ray Tracing and MeshShaders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A web page is for presenting structured text with embedded media, and optionally associated—and user-replaceable—style information.

A web page does not need direct or even indirect access to your GPU, and it does not need to run a Turing-complete language.</comment>


Ask HN: Cost estimation for a text-based chatbot (Dialogflow and Messenger) - <AUTHOR> Hello,
In Dialogflow Enterprise Edition, a text query costs $0.002 per request, and there is a limit of 600 text requests per minute. https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow-enterprise/docs/editions https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow-enterprise/quotas
I am trying to estimate the costs of a Messenger bot based fully on text requests. I am using this calculator: https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/ For the average number of sessions each user has per month, what's a session? How do I estimate that?
And then there is the average number of text interactions per session. Now, the problem here is, let's say I have 5000 monthly users, and each user has 20 sessions with 200 messages per session, that's USD 40,000.00 per 1 month, what if the number of users grows rapidly? That would be 100K+ easily, am I estimating this correctly?
The issue here is that a user can send unlimited text messages, even sending a single letter or whatever counts towards the limit. How do I limit that per user? Can I write some logic in Cloud Functions?
Also, what happens when 1000 users message the bot within 1 min? What happens to the 400 users since the limit of 600 requests per min is exceeded?
Finally, is using a web hook with fulfillment can help reducing these rates? <comment><USER2> I haven't used Dialogflow so I'm not much help for your questions directly, but I know that Google people sometimes respond to Stack Overflow questions.

It might be useful to take this question to Stack Overflow (as one or more questions). If the pricing is confusing, I bet other people would benefit from having the answer in a convenient format like that too.</comment>


Show HN: English-speaking jobs in Germany - <AUTHOR> https://englishjobs.de <comment><AUTHOR> So this is the product of quite a lot of hours of work. I know that most of you have no intention of moving to Germany and this is not relevant to you, but nonetheless I would be grateful for any feedback you can give me.

If by any chance you're a English-speaking employer on the area, shoot me an email and I'll be happy to send you an invitation to post your jobs.

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice job! If I may ask, what percentage of the postings come directly from companies vs automatically filtering out non-english jobs? (I understand if you don't want to disclose this information)

Not a major thing, but "questions" is misspelt in the title text.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. It was only 3 weeks ago that I send a few invitations to companies to publish their jobs directly. Right now there are only 63 own jobs for 1183 external. I hope that changes in the future but I guess it will need time and more exposure. Typo fixed!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> On a side note, if you want to know how a GO app + elasticsearch stuffed into a $5 digitalocean droplet looks like feel free to snoop around [https://englishjobs.de/status/](https://englishjobs.de/status/)

<comment><USER3> Interesting stats. How did you set that up?

<comment><AUTHOR> Old fashion manual way, just standard debian packages for nginx+elasticsearch and one go binary controlled under runit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would also be good if it show how much English is required for the job. Great work btw!

</comment><comment><USER5> Great work! I wish there were one of these for Russia.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! There wasn't one for Germany and I needed it, so I scratched my own itch. if you have the knowledge go ahead and do it yourself!

<comment><USER2> I wonder how hard it would be to extend it for Austria.

<comment><AUTHOR> not hard, but I'm now sure if there's enough offer/demand for Austria to justify losing the focus on Germany.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


ASK PG: Did the home page algorithm change? - <AUTHOR>

I'm noticing 5 days old stories hitting the home page again. Also "Ask HN" posts are hitting the home page again after 20-15 hours of being posted. <comment><USER2> No, but I see signs of something odd happening. Will investigate.

<comment><USER2> Somehow the top stories stopped getting sorted. In the past there have been bugs that caused the thread that resorts the frontpage to stop working. Presumably it was another one, but this time the cause was gone by the time I looked. I resorted the top few pages manually. I hope they will now stay sorted.

<comment><USER3> Does the fact that this 791 day old story made the front page again fit with what you're suspecting?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=872283>

<comment><USER2> Once resorting breaks, anything that gets upvoted can get stuck on the frontpage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> they sure have a lot of points in relation to the ewest items. Might be a devaluation of the amount of points due to an increase in users/votes ?

What really happened aboard Air France 447 (popularmechanics.com) 824 points by fr0sty 2 days ago | 355 comments

<comment><AUTHOR> I have been here for a long time and I don't remember seeing a 1 day old post in the front page unless it has something like 700 or 900 points. Also posts without URL generally get quickly buried after they hit the front page and don't show up again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There was a post like 55 days old that somehow was on the first page.

</comment><comment><USER6> I noticed this as well.</comment>