Let's Encrypt appears to issue a certificate for a domain that doesn't exist - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/beast_fighter/status/834190510642384897 <comment><USER2> Head of Let's Encrypt here. Our team is looking into this and so far we don't see any evidence of mis-issuance in our logs. It looks like the domain in question, 'apple-id-2.com', was registered and DNS resolved for it successfully at time of issuance. Here is the valid authorization record including the resolved IP addresses for 'apple-id-2.com':

[https://acme-v01.api.letsencrypt.org/acme/authz/uZGv2KXUJ6Hl...](https://acme-v01.api.letsencrypt.org/acme/authz/uZGv2KXUJ6HlvUOSem8bikLUKfXdHdyEfWmHSgPH2CQ)

We can't be sure why the reporter was unable to find a WHOIS record, we can only confirm that validation properly succeeded at time of issuance.

Update: Squarespace has confirmed that they did register the domain and then released it after getting a certificate from us.

<comment><USER3> Since there are a myriad of registrars that can register .com , and it was apparently registered and domain-validated successfully at the time of cert issuance. Is there any way that LE can obtain from Verisign a historical copy of the whois record as it appeared for the domain _at the time it was issued_ , while the domain was live? I'm hoping that verisign keeps such historical records for expired or deleted domains.

edit: In addition to all of the data currently captured via the ACME client challenge/response, would it not be a good idea for LetsEncrypt to store a copy of the 'whois' record for a domain at the time a new cert is issued? In a worst case scenario for a .com domain, all of the registrant details can be opaque and hidden behind a privacy proxy, but it _will_ have at least one functioning authoritative nameserver, and the hostname and IP address of that authoritative nameserver can be stored forever.

This could help to track down future abuse in the event that large numbers of suspiciously named domains can all be correlated to a set of common authoritative nameservers.

<comment><USER4> _but it will have at least one functioning authoritative nameserver, and the hostname and IP address of that authoritative nameserver can be stored forever._

The authoritative nameserver could have been ns1.apple-id-2.com with an IP of 184.108.40.206, which would not provide any more information than is already present.

<comment><USER3> Yes, that's true, it's entirely possible to host the start of authority (SOA) authoritative DNS for a domain on the same IP that is also an httpd or hosting a myriad of other services. But if that information was captured at least it would be known that was the configuration at the time the cert was issued.

edit: there are a number of shady black market things that use very short TTLs and "fast flux DNS" for phishing and scam traffic relay/proxy purposes. In the event that a large number of spurious domains were registered and part of a larger botnet, it's valuable data to know that fast flux is indeed in use, or rule it out.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=fast+flux+dns+malware&ie=utf...](https://www.google.com/search?q=fast+flux+dns+malware&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if maybe someone had that domain and then deleted it. Dynadot(and probably others) for example lets you delete domains for a partial refund within a certain limited amount of time - which I think is a neat feature.

I know there are historical whois sites, but as far as I know unless someone in the past checked for the domain with their service, they'd have no record of it otherwise. So maybe that would explain how it has a cert for a domain that currently does not exist and appears to never been registered.

<comment><USER3> What is unusual is that if someone had it and then deleted it, it doesn't still show up in the whois records in a 30, 60 or 90 day redemption period. From dealing with a few .net domains that recently expired and went into redemption, it takes a long time for a defunct domain to actually disappear and become re-registerable again by another totally different purchaser.

<comment><USER5> Redemption period I know of for when domains expire. But if you do the grace deletion it's pretty much instantly. I was debating on a domain once with myself, deleted it and then a day or so later registered it again. Usually you can delete within the first 118 hours on certain tlds.

[https://www.dynadot.com/domain/grace_deletion.html](https://www.dynadot.com/domain/grace_deletion.html) has some info about it. I'm only familiar with Dynadot because I use them, but other providers that offer this should have similar information and times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Summary:

* Domain apple-id-2.com is not currently registered

* Domain apple-id-2.com has (apparently) never been registered

* LetsEncrypt, on 2017-01-03, issued a valid certificate for apple-id-2.com

Since we can't know how validation was successfully performed, all we can do is speculate. Someone from LetsEncrypt will have to investigate and let us know. Fortunately, they should have very detailed audit logs for exactly this purpose.

<comment><USER7> Note: the domain does exist right now. It was registered today, in response to this event: [https://twitter.com/jgowdy/status/834524394575720448](https://twitter.com/jgowdy/status/834524394575720448)

<comment><USER8> Good to hear. The registrar is godaddy though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A certificate for apple-id-1.com was acquired on the same day:

[https://crt.sh/?id=72482400](https://crt.sh/?id=72482400)

There's some evidence that apple-id-1.com existed back then:

[https://www.thedailywhois.com/2017-01-03/apple- id-1.com](https://www.thedailywhois.com/2017-01-03/apple-id-1.com)

</comment><comment><USER10> Since let's encrypt gives a certificate to anyone who can make DNS temporarily resolve to them, it seems like the most plausible answer is that someone managed to send spoofed DNS responses to let's encrypt.

<comment> dane-pgp If the CA system is only as secure as the DNS, that means we really need to increase DNSSEC deployment, and maybe LE should make DNSSEC mandatory for domains they issue certificates to in this way.

<comment><USER11> What attack vector would DNSSEC be protecting against?

<comment> dane-pgp The attack vector DNSSEC would protect against is DNS spoofing by an active MitM.

That sort of attack might only be possible for nation state adversaries (or maybe it's not that hard to intercept LE's DNS requests) but I suppose that for many nation states it would be cheaper just to force a CA operating in their country to issue them a fraudulent certificate if they wanted to spoof a specific domain.

<comment><USER11> It seems like if our attack vector is "a nation state willing and able to subvert companies operating in their country", DNSSEC and the existing x509 CAs are both equally threatened, with the downside that Chrome/Firefox can't delist a TLD when somebody discovers the malicious usage

<comment> dane-pgp Yes, I was indirectly making the point that against such an adversary both systems are equally threatened (although there may be malicious actors less capable than a nation state that can spoof a DNS response).

One difference you didn't mention, though, is that with DNSSEC the domain owner can choose which TLD they register under, whereas it is less common for a site to specify which CAs are allowed to issue certificates for it (especially in a way that works if the browser hasn't visited that site yet).

<comment><USER12> The mechanism by which sites (well, domains) can specify which CA may issue is named CAA, it's part of DNS and is an IETF standard.

However, the current Baseline Requirements for trusted CAs don't actually require them to check CAA unless their declared policies say that they check. Let's Encrypt's policies say so, as do Symantec's but many others do not.

Gerv (of Mozilla) is trying to get this changed, either by industry agreement in the BRs, or de facto by changing the Mozilla root programme rules if the CAs try to block changing this in the BRs or keep stalling too long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To summarize, it looks like a misreporting from whois rather than a LE bug or malfeasance.

</comment><comment> X-Istence Domain tasting? Get a cert for it, then it expires?

<comment><USER14> I've been wondering how that could be done in a practical way. You'd have to register domains that people are likely to register in the next 90 days. You could probably just resell the domains if you were able to predict that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As someone who doesn't know much about the inner workings of the whole TLS stack, why is this surprising? I know in the past I've self-signed certificates for domains that only existed on my LAN. Why couldn't that be the case here? Why shouldn't a central signing authority issue certificates for people's intranets?

<comment><USER16> The answer is the same as the reason x509 "works" at all. The CAs don't issue invalid certs because if they did, they wouldn't be trusted anymore.

In terms of technical limitations, nothing stops any CA from issuing any cert they want. It's the business consequences that stop them from doing so.

If Let's Encrypt wants to keep themselves on the trusted-root-CA list of Windows, Chrome, MacOS, et. al., they need to keep their noses clean.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Twitter currently says: "Sorry, that page doesn't exist!" if you follow the link.

</comment><comment><USER18> My guess is they had a localised DNS resolution failure for the domain and some how hit a web server, or something else, that ticked all the boxes and granted the certificate. A long shot, though.

<comment><USER9> If it's possible to tick all the boxes by accident, then the process is utterly broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks like it was registered quite recently.

;; ANSWER SECTION: apple-id-2.com. 500 IN A 184.108.40.206

Creation Date: 2017-02-22T21:57:50Z

The cert was issued in January parsed.validity.start 2017-01-03T22:17:00Z

Not totally surprising as I have never seen Let's Encrypt do anything that could be remotely considered diligence in not doing shady stuff.

<comment><USER20> > Not totally surprising as I have never seen Let's Encrypt do anything that > could be remotely considered diligence in not doing shady stuff.

Mind elaborating? I'm not familiar enough to know what shady stuff they've done, and I'm a happy user of LE so far. Would love to know more.

<comment><USER12> People's general thrust has been that Let's Encrypt's approach means anybody who can control an FQDN can get a certificate for that FQDN and they don't like that.

One group object that DV (Domain Validated) certificates which only validate control over the FQDN just shouldn't exist at all. They believe you should need to prove a "real world" identity to someone or else not be able to have a certificate. Obviously that would put HTTPS back to pretty rare, because proving real world identity costs money and requires some effort, whereas DV has been completely automated.

Another group are fine with DV, except that they have an objection to nebulously defined "obviously bad" FQDNs. They argue (and they're not entirely wrong) that humans try to parse the FQDN for sense, and it leads them astray. They see microsoft-helpline in the FQDN and conclude it's a Microsoft helpline, or they see mybank-login-page and figure it's the log in page for their bank...

Changing either of these things would be a radical policy alteration for the Web PKI. In the anti-DV group that might actually be seen as a good thing, a handful of CAs literally don't offer DV, their businesses could actually grow if DV were abolished.

Right now, the Baseline Requirements which control how a public CA should behave to stay trusted in the Web PKI, say the CA must have a "High risk" list which protects some FQDN from being issued without human oversight. Let's Encrypt do operate such a list and since they have no human oversight if you hit the list you just can't get a certificate - about once a month somebody asks on their public forum about such a name, e.g. aa.edu ran into this, so did some outfit with the same initials as Deutsche Bank. However the BRs don't specify what must be on the list at all.

I don't happen to think any of this is "shady" on the part of Let's Encrypt, but some people do.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I do industrial espionage? - <AUTHOR> Hi all..
I'm an engineer for a large software company.
Lately I was promoted to "not a developer neither a team lead".
They hired someone else to lead the team I'm in. Someone that is clearly lagging behind me in technical aspects.
Now, what is really bothering me is that my lead and the people on top of her are keeping me at the shadows. They don't invite me on meetings. The fuckers don't even eat with me.
So, What about trying to win this game with the help of technology?
What about setting up a spy mic on all of the conferences room sending all the sound via gsm, wifi or something else?
I'm probably not going to be one step ahead but the game is going to be more balanced.
What do you guys think about it? Anyone did this?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Take a step back, man. This is a very dark, negative path you're contemplating. It doesn't make you a bad person to have these kinds of thoughts (it's part of our neurobiology, basically). But please don't act on them.

Rather, accept the fact that you're basically being blackballed (look up the term if you're not familiar with it), and that these are the preliminary signs that you're about to be fired.

Whether you deserve it (or even partially deserve it) or not doesn't matter (very much) at this stage. These things happen. What does matter is that you accept the rejection _gracefully_ rather than look for ways to fight against it. Which (if they're of the form you're contemplating) might very well backfire.

</comment><comment><USER3> While this is indeed the most rational and emotionally intelligent course of action in the wake of your recent professional disappointment, have you accounted for the possibility that you're too stupid to pull it off?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. I always compare the size of the challenge with my own capabilities. This is one of the methods that lead me to take action or not.

<comment><USER4> Um, I'm pretty sure that rtl49 was being sarcastic when saying, "While this is indeed the most rational and emotionally intelligent course of action in the wake of your recent professional disappointment..."

That is: It is most emphatically _not_ either a rational nor an emotionally intelligent course of action.

<comment><AUTHOR> Then. the rest of the setence, doesn't makes much sense to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You're going to bug your workplace? Are you _trying_ to get fired? Why not just quit?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes.

No, I'm trying to get intel on my bosses, and in the company future course of action.

I don't like to quit things.

<comment><USER4> If you get caught, you're fired. You also are unemployable, and for good reason.

And that good reason should tell you, _don 't do it_. Instead, knock off the Machiavellian spy games, and try to change whatever inside you makes you think this is even a remotely acceptable course of action.

Even if you wind up losing this job, don't do it. There are other jobs. But what you're proposing is a career-destroying move.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sure, why not; it's not like it's illegal and unethical or anything. Go nuts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha. I like your style.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Have they taken your stapler yet?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. But isn't a stapler.</comment></comment>


A New Internet Domain: Extortion Or Free Speech? - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2015/04/07/397886748/a-new-internet-domain-extortion-or-free-speech <comment><USER2> The reporting on the new .sucks domain has been terrible, so here's what's going on.

The new gTLD Program from ICANN did more than just instantiate new domains. It created new processes and most importantly the Trademark Clearinghouse(TMCH).

The TMCH is a database of validated trademarks from around the world. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_Clearinghouse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_Clearinghouse)

Along with the TMCH ICANN also created the Domain Protected Marks List(DPML). When registries open up a new gTLD for registrations they must start with a sunrise period. During this sunrise period a registry can allow trademark holders whose trademark is registered in the TMCH early access to their trademark.gTLD. This special sunrise price is set by the registry and can basically be anything. Initially .sucks was talking about charging $25,000, but they lowered it to $2,500.

After the sunrise period anyone can register a .sucks domain on a first-come, first-serve basis. The important thing to remember is that after the sunrise period the price discrimination goes away and both trademark holders and the general public pay the same amount for domain names.

I'm a grad student at UC Berkeley who researches this stuff so AMA. I also wrote the Wikipedia page for the Trademark Clearinghouse so I can vouch for its correctness.

<comment><USER3> Are you sure? My understanding is that the $2,500 price tag is not just during the sunrise period, that is the fee for TMCH-listed domains. I was told by my registrar to budget $2,500 annually for each TMCH-listed domain, into perpetuity. (We declined.)

If a domain is not TMCH-listed, it will be $250 after the domain launches-- unless you can prove you're an unaffiliated individual, and then you can access a special $10 registration. But for that price you can't run your own website--instead the domain must redirect to a web forum that the registrar will run (and no doubt put ads on).

It looks a lot like a shakedown to me...

edit: speling

<comment><USER2> I stand somewhat corrected. It looks like Vox Populi has created a class they're calling "Sunrise Premium Names" and will price discriminate even after the sunrise period ends.

[http://domainincite.com/18246-halt-perverted-sucks- shakedown...](http://domainincite.com/18246-halt-perverted-sucks-shakedown- now-demands-ipc) "Sunrise Premium names will always cost $2,500, even after sunrise, when registered by the trademark owner."

This is basically without precedent, so it will be interesting to see how this shakes out.

<comment><USER3> There's an argument to be made that the purpose of trademark protection is to protect against confusion, not against criticism.

It's hard to imagine that many consumers would confuse a website called ford.sucks for the real actual Ford Motor Company. If it goes to litigation, I could see a U.S. federal judge deciding that the entire .sucks TLD is basically immune to the consumer confusion argument, with possibly a few exceptions for vacuum cleaner companies, sump pump manufacturers, and others who might "professionally suck."

Personally I think it's foolish to try to preemptively register every nasty domain name. It's a big language out there, and crowdsourcing seems to work really well when it comes to insults.

But, a lot of companies are super sensitive to criticism, and Vox Populi is obviously trying to profit off of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't really see how {company-name}.sucks is any worse than {company- name}sucks.com. Do firms really go around registering every combination of bad words with their brand name, with every standard TLD? Can't imagine they do...

<comment><USER5> Yes.

Not everyone does this of course, but anecdotally, some big companies have companies that scour the web looking for negative feedback. This dept often doesn't have the power to fix anything, so they'll buy up domains and give out freebies.

<comment><USER6> So, every time ICANN wants more money they can just roll out a new TLD that has a negative connotation?

There was a big uproar in the mainstream press when Taylor Swift bought up a bunch of explicit domains that could be used to deface her online presence... ICANN could just open up more explicit TLD's and she'll have to buy more and more.

Or what about companies buying up entire TLD's without intent to be a registrar -- like Google's $25 Million purchase of .app.

In short order all the "good" TLD's will be squatted on and we'll be in the same exact boat we are now with .com,.net, etc.

<comment><USER3> Yes, these have been some of the arguments against the creation of all the new TLDs all along.

It's important to note that ICANN does not set the pricing for each TLD. The pricing is set by the registrar who wins the right to control that TLD.

ICANN does get revenue from each TLD registrar, but I think it's the same for each TLD. I don't think ICANN gets a direct cut of each GoDaddy sale, for example, but GoDaddy pays ICANN a fee to be able to sell domains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can we either get rid of TLDs or make them as arbitrary as the rest of the URL already?

Is there a good reason why I shouldn't be able to go to some registry site and just buy ycombinator.clownpenis.fart if I want to, other than possibly being sued by ycombinator and/or NBC?

<comment><USER8> I would argue that limiting the number of TLDs helped provide a measure of authority to those TLDs.

I'm not saying that TLDs having a measure of authority was good, safe, or barely anything more than barely useful, but at least you could teach grandma to make sure she was on facebook.com instead of facebook.click

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it won't be long before someone gets sued over a .sucks or .porn style domain. Then we'll see what happens in court. Due to the nature of the internet it'll be a debate fought multiple times internationally as well, eg. the USA has completely different slander laws to the UK.

The extortion angle is particularly interesting, because $2500 isn't exactly small money to prevent your personal name being registered on a .sucks domain. I think it would be wise for any of these new tld providers to offer free takedowns of malicious sites in order to avoid lawsuits. Extortion isn't a minor crime - it'll get you serious time in jail.

</comment><comment><USER10> For a select few, this will be an awesome branding opportunity (hoover.sucks, dyson.sucks).

Ultimately, this is not a matter of free speech, which has always been a negative right: if you're not facing criminal charges or government harassment, your free speech rights are intact.

Rather, this racket highlights why the web deserves a decentralized naming protocol, rather than an institution that combines the worst elements of arbitrary federal beauracracy and predatory, rent-seeking capitalism.

<comment><USER11> how do you do decentralized naming properly? bitcoin-like mechanism (where if you use more computing power, you get to own more names - on the average anyway)?

<comment><USER12> There's already namecoin: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin)

<comment><USER11> as i said:

> where if you use more computing power, you get to own more names

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >Independent activists who want to use the suffix and pledge to blog can pay as little as $10 a year.

>But if a person wants to preemptively block their name, that will cost $200 a year.

So you can buy a domain name on which to be critical about yourself for $10 per year, or fork out $200 to prevent others from doing so?

Do I _have_ to be critical of myself in that case? Or could I have borgia.sucks and have it listing my accomplishments and how great a person I am?

</comment><comment><USER14> IMHO, if I were a large company, and someone tried to use my mark in such a way, I would simply sue them for trademark infringement. The registrar in this case... it's worked in suits against google in terms of advertising, and I'm pretty sure it would hold up here.

In this case, I'm pretty sure a corporation protecting its' mark would win, and that it'd likely cost more than $2500. But for a corporation with a dedicated team of lawyers on-staff not a big deal.

<comment><USER15> It's not considered trademark infringement if you use it to criticize the company and you don't profit off of confusion with their mark. See paypalsucks.com which has won lawsuits against PayPal.

If it's <company>.app or something then you're right. But 'sucks' is a unique case with precedent.

<comment><USER16> > It's not considered trademark infringement if you use it to criticize the > company and you don't profit off of confusion with their mark.

That's true of US law, in part because of the interaction of the US's unusually strong free-speech protections with trademark law.

US law is not the only law which provides trademark rights which might be infringed by the use of gTLD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Side note. johnberardsucks.com is avail.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not extortion. Free speech. Freedom of speech means the freedom to criticize. As long as hate sites make clear that they are not affiliated with the thing they criticize, let them say what they want. If it's false information, sue them for libel. If it's true, get your shit together.

<comment><AUTHOR> the extortion part is heightened by the registrar for .sucks where it is asking organizations who own the trademark to pay 2500/yr to get a domain name

<comment><USER9> The possible upside is that if it's trademarked, no-one else should be to register the domain name either. However, that all depends on the rigourousness of the registrar...

<comment><USER19> Except that's not the case. The .sucks registrar is selling the trdemark- related domain for $10/y to someone who wants to criticize $Trademark, while it would cost $TrademarkCompany $2500/y.

You can buy $yourname.sucks for $200/y, but someone who wants to criticize you can buy it for $10/y.

Tiered pricing that charges more to people who aren't looking to disparage themselves is predatory.

<comment><USER20> That's hilarious. How did that get past the ICANN process?

<comment><USER21> ICANN has a process?

No, really, they're just making stuff up as they go along. The idea of this kind of "extortion" has been around for decades, since the early rounds of DNS root name expansion.

<comment><USER22> Sure they have a process! You pay them the $185k application fee, and you get your TLD. That's a process, right?

/s

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The price is the sticking point for me... 2.5k is taking the piss!

</comment><comment><USER24> edit: FYI, title got changed from "ycombinator.sucks - A New Internet Domain: Extortion Or Free Speech? (npr.org)" which is why I used the website name down here.

ycomibinator.sucks?

Maybe this is not such a bad idea. It can be a nice simple "living document" of criticisms to yCombinator.

Often times, creators of products and services often look towards negative feedback to see how they can make their product/service better.

<comment><USER8> Then perhaps it's more prudent to provide a service that collects negative feedback en masse as opposed to a targeted hit against one entity.</comment></comment>


Show HN: CinemaBuff - Actor graphs using IMDB ratings - <AUTHOR> http://www.cinemabuff.net/

<comment><USER2> Shameless Plug: If you enjoy CinemaBuff, you might also want to check out my startup's movie section: [http://iknow.io/browse/movies-1/](http://iknow.io/browse/movies-1/)

We offer fairly advanced movie data analysis capabilities, using data from Freebase, Rotten Tomatoes and The-numbers.com.

You can do stuff like this: [http://iknow.io/insight/christopher-nolans- movies-are-gettin...](http://iknow.io/insight/christopher-nolans-movies-are- getting-longer-and-longer-415/)

And a lot more. We'd love feedback on how we can improve if you have any, thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Very awesome

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Clicking around a bit I think the only conclusion I draw is that variability from one movie to the next is much greater than any overall trend of an actor's career.

<comment><USER4> My favorite so far is Samuel L. Jackson

Highest rated film: Pulp Fiction (1994) - 9.0 Lowest rated film: Hail Caesar (1994)- 2.9

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool. I did a similar thing a while back using the IMDB data files. It has a few views.

Director ranking [http://godsofluxury.com:5001/](http://godsofluxury.com:5001/)

Director detail [http://godsofluxury.com:5001/person/263239](http://godsofluxury.com:5001/person/263239) [http://godsofluxury.com:5001/person/56779](http://godsofluxury.com:5001/person/56779)

TV show by seasons [http://godsofluxury.com:5001/tvshow/191909](http://godsofluxury.com:5001/tvshow/191909)

Hopefully that can give you some inspiration.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I was planning to add very similar pages to those once I've cleaned up my data. How did you do the popularity rankings, or were those somehow included in IMDB's data dump and I overlooked?

<comment><AUTHOR> Or is that just a total # of votes for each movie combined?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is cool. I was hoping to write something to look at movies differently (just something to get me working on something). I didn't even know IMDB let you get data.

I don't know if it's possible but can you break games, shows, movies, etc out? Video games got shown next to movies (and probably shows). I would like to know if some actor does great on tv but flops games/movies etc. That and the random kept giving me foreign actors. I suppose that means it really is random...would be cool to see random by language or something.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah absolutely, I initially want to start it small and slowly expand it to encompass a lot of those things with a variety of features.

When I initially had the random actor, a vast majority of the time I would land up on someone who only had 1 movie, so basically a dot on the graph, so I restricted the eligibility of the random page for the actor to have at least 3 films under their belt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The thing with literal data, is that you don't get a comprehensive look on their "best" work. For example, Tom Hanks. As a cinema buff, an actor's work isn't rated based on his highest and lowest rating. [http://i.imgur.com/MnVFiWF.png?1](http://i.imgur.com/MnVFiWF.png?1)

I wouldn't show the highest and lowest rated film, but rank on awards and successful ($) hits. Also, showing an "average" is good, but can really hinder a true value.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice man I like the idea, its loading a bit slow for me just now but I recon that's cause its reached front page.

I'm working on something using IMDB information as well right now, hope you done mind If I share it. It's getting an overhaul right now and more features are being implemented as we speak.

[http://filmfortonight.com/](http://filmfortonight.com/)

<comment><USER9> My wife and I constantly have this problem. Glad someone's trying to solve it. I wasn't able to make use of the site on my mobile device though.

<comment><USER8> Yeah I'm sorry about that once the main website is finished a mobile app will be getting build. Sorry :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice, simple and fun.

There's a bug in an error message in the 'Compare' feature. If it can't find one of the two actors, it always says it can't find the first one.

e.g. [http://www.cinemabuff.net/comparison/?q1=Sam+Rockwell&q2=Jon...](http://www.cinemabuff.net/comparison/?q1=Sam+Rockwell&q2=Jony+Depp)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, will fix it tonight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nicholas Cage has a shockingly even range...

</comment><comment><USER12> Fun. Fell a little flat when I found movies like "Craptastic" for Clint Eastwood, which he wasn't really involved with. Does the data dump have categories so you can restrict the list more appropriately?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's now fixed.

<comment><USER12> Awesome, much better!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Application Error An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why is it that some movies are missing from the results? For example, when I searched "Daniel Day-Lewis", the movie "The Last of The Mohicans" was missing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure, I'll look into it. I know I excluded many of the "Behind the Scenes" and "Making of" movies, but I'm not sure why legit ones are missing, thank you for reporting that specific example so I trace the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon)

</comment><comment><USER16> Didn't RottenTomatoes have this kind of feature back in the days? I remember being bit annoyed when they removed it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Neat! Where did you get the data?

<comment><AUTHOR> IMDb has a data dump: [http://www.imdb.com/interfaces](http://www.imdb.com/interfaces)

It's kinda a mess to parse through it and get the data in though.

<comment><USER18> That data dump is a mess! I used it for my soundtrack project: [http://thesoundtrackdb.com](http://thesoundtrackdb.com)

<comment><USER19> Cool project! By the way, small correction: It should be _courtesy_ , not _couretsy_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Every actor I search for right now returns a "Not Found" message.

<comment><AUTHOR> It should be working again in a minute or two, sorry for the inconvenience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Really nice idea mate, well done.</comment>


News developers should know about database managers - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/software/112800/database-round

<comment><USER2> Unencumbered by useful content. "Although DBMS is an old technology, it's also a fresh one". What?

<comment><USER3> Like Algebra or Set Theory. Old technology indeed...

Oh that's right, you don't need silly things like Algebra or Calculus when you go NoSQL.

<http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hause011/code/SQLexample.txt> -

"solid provable framework"

but I digress....</comment></comment>


Simple budget planner - my weekend startup - <AUTHOR> http://monthlybudget.info I needed a simple budget planner, hated Excel charts, so it does everything i need. Hopefully for someone else too. <comment><USER2> I actually don't see a point:

1) why should i publish my financial data? 2) how can i be sure, that it does not leak?

</comment><comment><USER3> Why dont you make it a real startup?</comment>


Getting Real Value Out of An Engineering Education - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/cea10d1e3c41 <comment><USER2> It's really hard for me to take this article seriously when it opens with the claim that engineering classes are about memorization. That couldn't be further from my experience.

I did undergrad and grad degrees in EE/CS, and with _very_ few exceptions none of the classes I took rewarded rote memorization. Quite the opposite: they were all about learning the fundamentals of the material and then applying those fundamentals to more difficult problems.

In fact, I went out of my way to avoid classes that boiled down to memorization: I wanted to take too many good classes to bother with crappy ones. Perhaps I took it too far: in freshman chemistry they gave us a quiz early in the semester where we were expected to reproduce the first 60 or 80 elements from the periodic table. I computed that the quiz was only worth about 1% of my grade for the term and didn't even show up for class that day.

<comment><USER3> I think instead of knowledge memorization (like the periodic table), the author is refering to algotithm memorization, where the exam is testing your ability to reproduce the process of solving the problem. There is some validity to this in that it is possible to do well on an exam by reproducing the process without understanding the materials. Good examiners can write questions and grade in ways that support deeper understanding than algorithm memorization.

On the other hand however, education is about the process of learning. The advanced techniques used in engineering aren't immedieatly understood by many (any?) students. So the first steps in learning these techniques is mimicing existing work. Not alltogether different than actual engineering practice.

Aside: I do think time spent on student teams is very complementary to taught engineering programs, and spent 5 of 7 years in university doing Solar Car racing.

<comment><USER4> > the author is refering to algotithm memorization, where the exam is testing > your ability to reproduce the process of solving the problem.

and none of the higher-level courses I took in math or CS rewarded that either

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Working on a car in a shop is about engineering about as much as driving a car to work is about piloting an F1 race car.

</comment><comment><USER6> UoW has an atrocious ranking for engineering so I'm not surprised.

<comment><USER7> "Atrocious ranking", according to whom?</comment></comment>


The Toughest Test in Cycling - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/cyclings-bradley-wiggins-to-make-attempt-at-one-hour-record-1429114606?mod=WSJ_hp_RightTopStories

<comment><USER2> Right at the beginning of my obsession with cycling, I read about this record and it's most fascinating challenger: Graeme Obree.

Nicknamed "The Flying Scotsman", he made his own bicycles out of washing machine parts and invented a few new riding positions before being banned by the UCI.

Pretty interesting cat. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/sportscotland/asportingnation/...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/sportscotland/asportingnation/article/0037/index.shtml)

<comment><USER3> > he made his own bicycles out of washing machine parts

Wasn't it just the bottom bracket that he reused from a washing machine?

<comment><USER2> Nice:

'Obree himself said: "My biggest regret of my career is mentioning to a journalist that there was a bit from a washing machine in my bike.

"Now forever I will be remembered as the washing machine guy."'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The fastest bikes in the world aren't uprights, they're recumbents with streamlined fairings. The world-record holder is this one (although for a distance of 200 meters rather than a time of 1 hour): [http://www.gizmag.com/human-powered-speed- record-2013/29103/](http://www.gizmag.com/human-powered-speed- record-2013/29103/)

The UCI bans recumbents in all racing competitions however: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recumbent_bicycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recumbent_bicycle)

<comment><USER5> I suppose that really depends on what your definition of "fastest bike" is.

Recumbents have gotten to 80mph - maybe topping out at 100mph.

Eric Barone took his mountain bike to 130 by riding down a mountain.

Matt Hoffman got a bit faster than that by jumping out of an airplane with his.

François Gissy got a bit faster than that by strapping a few rockets on – 207mph.

The UCI didn't bother to recognize this records either.

<comment><USER6> i applaud you for your open mindedness.

as a lover of bikes, and of recumbents, i kind of get annoyed at the very predictable 'recumbents are the fastest most aerodynamic bikes' thing that you get alot from folks.

there might be many reasons the uci banned recumbents. but there is one primary reason recumbents never have and never will sell well; they are invisible in urban riding environment due to low seat height.

that and their problems with long chains, heavier weights, and poor climbing are all very good reasons to accept the generic superiority of the 20th century generic bicycle.

some things are so perfect, they cannot really be improved upon.

<comment><USER7> If that's the case then why don't we see more faired uprights? It should be possible to greatly improve aerodynamics without much harm to weight or safety. I think it's because most R&D is spent on bikes at the top end of the market, where most customers are pros or want the same bikes as the pros. Even partial fairings could make a big difference, but we don't see them because they're banned by the UCI.

<comment><USER8> Generally, adding fairings and other modifications to improve aerodynamics also increases the side-on area susceptible to crosswinds.

For uprights the rider is seated such that the centre or mass is relatively high compared to the faired/aerodynamic frame/wheels. If the bike has fairings or wheels covers that increase the side-on profile then a strong wind gust can push the bike out from under the rider. For this reason front wheel disks are banned from time trials and triathlons. There is too much risk that a crosswind gust can destablise the bike and rider.

For recumbents the rider's mass sits much lower to the ground, more centrally within this faired frame/wheels, so they are inherently more stable to the effect of crosswinds.

While I don't agree with all the UCI rulings, some of them regarding aerodynamic modifications are made with safety in mind. For example, triathlon style aerobars are banned from the peleton. This is primarily because the rider has less control over the steering and braking performance while in the aero position.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's the short video of Merckx's record breaking attempt: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqjEvDlFqdM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqjEvDlFqdM)

</comment><comment><USER10> For me, any record will need Fabian Cancellara's participation to be legit.

<comment><USER11> Wiggo's not legit? Big Swiss, especially a couple seasons back, seemed well designed for this record but he's not the time trialist he used to be. Wiggo won the world championship last year over a fiendish Tony Martin. Wiggins will set the record and then in a year or a few Martin, on a track bike fitted with a 58x11, will crush it.</comment></comment>


Systemd: The Biggest Myths - <AUTHOR> http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths <comment><USER2> Will they have the same attitude as the ConsoleKit/PolicyKit/_Kit people have when someone says, "I need to do something different, but this service is preventing me from doing it?" As an example, I want to set up my system so that one user can play audio even when a different user is "active," yet after hours reading through bug reports about that and mailing list archives, all I could find where these responses:

* "Not our fault, it's that other service."

* "We are never going to support that. You don't want it anyway."

* "Well that will be fixed with systemd"

* "You can add the user to the audio group, but that's wrong and you should not do it. You should instead do that thing that the other guys are telling you not to do and that they will never support."

* "This will be fixed with systemd!"

So, I guess now the question is, when someone comes along and says, "I need to do X, I used to be able to do X before systemd was in use and now systemd is stopping me, how can I fixed that?" will systemd maintainers respond with things like the above? Will there be useful and thorough documentation, so that users can fix things without having to bug the maintainers?

</comment><comment><USER3> > systemd being Linux-only is not nice to the BSDs.

>Completely wrong. The BSD folks are pretty much uninterested in systemd. If systemd was portable, this would change nothing, they still wouldn't adopt it

systemd is not portable, it wasn't made to be portable, it relies on far too many linuxisms. Therefore the BSD's don't care about it. It is not 'the BSD's don't care about it so we didn't make it portable.'

<comment><USER4> I disagree, I think that Lennart is right. Nobody really cares if systemd is not portable. Upstart was not portable to BSDs, and nobody cared. The traditional sysvinit system was, AFAIK, not portable until the debian/freebsd people bothered about it. Heck, the init scripts in Linux used to be not portable even between different Linux distros.

launchd (OS X) and SMF (solaris) weren't portable, either.

By the way, when was the last time a BSD operating system cared about making their init system portable to Linux?

I'm not sure why systemd not being portable to other operating systems is suddenly a big deal.

<comment><USER5> You can write software ignoring how it will be started and you (or others) can write init scripts for various traditional systems. This is way harder if you use systemd; suddenly you _need_ to care about the init system, and you might sacrifice init independence for pragmatic reasons (I want to support systemd, but I don't want to write this yet-another-abstract-wrapper-layer so that someone else _might_ use it with other type of init system).

<comment><USER6> You always had to care about the init-system: There are some differences between e.g. debian and redhat (start-stop-daemon only on debian, tools for creating the symlinks to install a service), then there's upstart with a different shell-script-esque syntax.

To support systemd, the number of configs you provide will go from maybe 4 to 5, not from 1 to 2! And, looking at the examples provided by ArchLinux, the systemd services look as if they are a lot less boiler-plate than the typical debian init-script.

<https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd/Services> (e.g. dropbear is very simple)

<comment> X-Istence No, generally you didn't have to care about the init-system unless you wanted to provide an init script. But it didn't matter how your daemon was/is started. With systemd that is no longer the case, you can use certain systemd only features thereby locking out people that want to use your service/daemon without systemd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Benefits to me as a desktop and laptop user of systemd.

1) Speed does matter. Fast boots are good. 2) The new journal is just better. Finding something in the logs is easier. 3) Service files are easier to write than init scripts and one can have more confidence they will work as intended as you need write very little configuration oneself. 4) Knowledge of dependencies means I never have to worry about starting dbus before gdm. It just does what is necessary to do the correct thing.

I personally want all of those things. I am really happy they came to Arch and Fedora. They both feel much more modern for it. Working on systems that use older init systems now feels archaic.

Let's move with the times. I remember the same set of complaints when we got NetworkManager. I remember the same complaints with PulseAudio.

Guess what? I now have systems with excellent networking and excellent sound.

<comment><USER8> >I remember the same complaints with PulseAudio.

And this is perfectly the reason number two why i won't switch to systemd (reason number one is there is no need for it). PulseAudio does not work. It sucks. The irc channel is full of clueless (but trying to be helpfull) people. And nobody cares. I want my Alsa back. But now it's too late, i hope systemd will either be better (doubt it) or never be this popular.

And, I cannot lie, I don't want it because I don't want another dbus. freedesktop, stop turning my linux into a single user os. Next thing is they want to abolish x11. Sure it's about time for x12, but wayland? I just don't understand the community that surrounds Linux anymore.

<comment><USER9> PulseAudio works perfectly fine for me. It did have issues in the beginning, but for many years I didn't have a problem. You said elsewhere that you had issues, but that you still have issues I can see. Others, could be, no idea.

But I don't have any issues. I don't have high CPU usage. It just plain works since various years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Given the title, I'll allow that most of these points are defensive and brusque. Unfortunately, this tends to be par for the course for the developer, and I think that turns people off.

Fundamentally, systemd tried solving too many problems at once, in a ways that inadvertently annoyed people. It replaced so much of the core infrastructure that upgrading systems resulted in an admin experience that feels alien. Giving people new tools to deal with things like binary logging != instantly changing every admin's CLI muscle memory.

I'm not saying that systemd doesn't solve valid problems (the issues it addresses are truly quite important) - it just goes about it in a dramatically jarring way.

<comment><USER11> > most of these points are defensive and brusque

I prefer reading "This is wrong, because ..." over "This is right, but ...", since it's more honest.

<comment><USER12> The myths are a mix of those that are correct but often misunderstood and those who just are plain wrong. Those which are plain wrong cannot be responded to with "This is right, but ...".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't want systemd because I don't trust Lennart Poettering to be able to write reliable code.

<comment><USER5> Downvoting this post is unwarranted. Everything that Lennart Poettering has ever done was an unreliable clusterfuck[1] astray from the Unix philosphy. There's nothing that he has ever done that is considered "good" by a majority of Unix-derivative users.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0>

<comment><USER11> > <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0>

Poettering has clearly the better arguments than this reactionary Draxinger die-hard.

<comment><USER14> Poettering gets things wrong more than once, and Draxinger could have stomped him, if he were a little bit more informed on the details.

<comment><USER15> Can you chime in and inform us where is Lennart wrong and how? I (and probably many others) would LOVE that.

<comment><USER8> I'm not going to watch this cringeworthy thing again, but i can remember than he insisted that dbus was useful and that we need a gnome session in our login manager. That would be enough to proof the point.

<comment><USER15> And the point is that the arguments he made about why dbus is useful (a lightweight IPC mechanism with use cases not covered by UNIX sockets or TCP sockets, doing much more) and why do we need a gnome session on the gdm (to get i18n, network and accessibility features you need most if not all of the session) are well reasoned and make sense to us out of the loop.

Could you provide the counterarguments?

<comment><USER8> Yes. dbus effectively breaks network transparency of x11 apps and turns Linux into a Desktop-Single-User OS. While I'm not regually writing desktop applications i have never ever missed dbus. And ipc mechanisms have a tendency to become unpleasant (Corba, SOAP).

I don't have a gnome session in my login manager because I don't need i18n for the words "login" and "password". (although that would be totally possible without a whole gnome session). I don't have a braille line so i can't say anything about accessibility, but that _should_ be (in a ideal unix world) a single printf to /dev/braille. Also the feedback is audible and visual, this seems to be no issue to me.

<comment><USER9> Accessibility is actually a requirement in many countries (per law). Obviously not everyone needs it, but just that you do not need it doesn't negate that others do.

Edit: Plus saying X breaks Y so X is not needed is not a good argument. Because you have not addressed if X is needed or not, only said that Y breaks.

<comment><USER8> I have no idear how "accessibility" is defined. I'd say getty is quite accessible, but well, I don't know, I never relied on it. But yet, that is no excuse to start a hole desktop. Just like a program can use gtk (theoretically) without a gnome desktop it should be able to do the same with for a braille display.

I think I can safely say that if X breaks Y, and I need Y than X sucks. Especially if it worked before X came. X made things worse.

/edit: I think that's why Poettering is hated so much. There was community on the Nixes, with their own ecosystem and their own way to do stuff. It's wasn't always beautiful or nice, but their had their way to solve stuff so it would a kind of blend in with the rest. And then Poettering wants to turn it into MacOS X or Windows and adds stuff new users probably appreciate, but the old users never misses. There is a cultural shock. And then it breaks backwards compatibility. It shouldn't suprise anybody that this product should rather be superb and not just medicore to accepted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The intensity of people's hate for this guy is mind-boggling. Most of the stuff he made is really nice, proven by the fact that it's being used widely without issues.

Even without such an impressive track-record, people should at least give him the benefit of the doubt.

Even a cursory look into systemd design debunks most of the "criticism" people have against it.

<comment><USER2> "Most of the stuff he made is really nice, proven by the fact that it's being used widely without issues."

Without issues? PulseAudio is _loaded_ with issues. The only time PA works correctly is when you are doing things the way Lennart thinks you should do them -- which is basically the way desktop Windows and Mac OS X users are expected to do things. Another way to put things is this: Lennart's software designs _dictate_ how users should use their computer, to the exclusion of all other use-cases. Doing something cool or unusual with PulseAudio is like pulling teeth.

<comment><USER17> Pulse Audio is not perfect but what before was. People were bitching about PA and wanted OSS back. I seriously doubt that many of those actually do anything reasonable with audio.

<comment><USER2> The thing is, I am not any better off today than I was when I was using ALSA. None of the problems I had with ALSA were solved by PA; ConsoleKit/PolicyKit came closer to solving those problems, and even then, new problems were introduced. The excruciating transition to PA put a bad taste in everyone's mouth, and now we are all sitting here asking ourselves, "Why did we even bother?"

So in a sense, you are right: PA is not perfect, and neither were ALSA, OSS, and other earlier approaches. That is not the issue; the issue is, is PA actually better? Are we actually able to do things now that we were having trouble with before? From where I sit, PA makes it easier to use things like D-BUS and various "Kit" systems to duplicate the desktop user paradigm you see in Windows or Mac OS X, and nothing more (and that does nothing for me, but certainly gets in my way when I try to do things like multiseat setups).

<comment><USER18> Yep, we are better off now.

I remember trying to get bluetooth audio working in the alsa-only days. Or network sound with esd/ssh. Or figuring out how to route audio nicely apps. Or saving my laptop battery. Or many other features that were simply damn difficult to pull off.

People don't seem to remember how crappy the audio situation used to be, for users and for ISVs. I respect Lennart and the current PA maintainers a lot for tackling the problem head on – even if they didn't or couldn't do it perfectly – instead of just complaining about the sad state of Linux audio, especially in the face of all the criticism they got over it.

<comment><USER13> Pulseaudio plus blueman does solve the bluetooth problem quite nicely. It's the main reason why I use pulseaudio.

In exchange for that I put up with confusing audio dialog boxes, high audio latency, high cpu usage when playing audio, skips and crackles when playing games, arcane commands to enable loopback, and the occasional necessary restart of the pulseaudio daemon when sound stops altogether. I guess that's a reasonable trade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > 13\. Myth: systemd being Linux-only is not nice to the BSDs.

> Completely wrong. The BSD folks are pretty much uninterested in systemd. If > systemd was portable, this would change nothing, they still wouldn't adopt > it.

> 15\. Myth: systemd could be ported to other kernels if its maintainers just > wanted to.

> That is simply not true. Porting systemd to other kernel is not feasible. We > just use too many Linux-specific interfaces.

So what happens to software written for Linux that can be (and currently is) ported to BSD when it starts to require systemd?

<comment><USER18> If it starts to rely on systemd, the question you should be asking, is: why does this program want to depend on systemd?

It's to interact with the lower plumbing - ie. set up hostname, locale, timedate, multi-seat etc.

If these interfaces are missing, the software should still work minus a few missing features. Applications could still #ifdef all they want to make things work on BSDs, no change there either.

Or the BSDs could make their own implementation of the plumbing interfaces. Lennart even provided a handy chart: [http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/InterfacePo...](http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/InterfacePortabilityAndStabilityChart)

Honestly, it's about time we standardize and stop wasting time on these low- level things. I'd rather work on software higher up in the stack, than wasting my time working around trivial differences between the Linux distros (bonus points if they get adopted on other the BSDs too). But that's just me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> 3\. I don't understand the desire to trim seconds off of boot-up time (even assuming that systemd does this; it didn't for me). The goal should be to restart less often, not to restart more quickly.

5\. The systemd documentation is indeed very good, and that's probably one of the biggest drivers behind its adoption. However, it is _also_ difficult. A big part of the pushback from people over systemd is that it _also_ replaced syslog, and did so with its own custom binary log format. To quote from a forum thread I started shortly after updating my old system to systemd, "Getting smbd/nmbd to work again was a real adventure. Like other users reported, it would just silently fail when starting it from systemd. No error message when issuing the start command, and only a vague "failed" in status. I ended up having to track down Lennart's blog post on "systemd for administrators" to figure out how in blazes to extract anything useful from that cussed binary log system he invented. My first half-dozen or so attempts to get anything useful out of the log journal got exactly zero results; I finally got lucky on another approach..." (I ended up abandoning that distribution altogether after that and a number of other frustrations, and the response from the forums.)

13\. The problem for BSDs isn't so much that systemd is or isn't portable to them; it's that some upstream software is beginning to _require_ systemd, making that software difficult (or impossible) to port to BSD.

14\. It seems weird to me to hear someone else decide for other people what is or isn't a "negligible" amount of work.

15\. So ... systemd is in fact Linux-only by design. How does that jive with 13 again?

19\. systemd may not "force" you to do anything, up until your distribution adopts it, pushes it as an update, and then you find yourself spending hours trying to figure out how to troubleshoot a problem that didn't exist before the update. Then it certainly _is_ forcing you to do something.

Here's the problem in a nut shell as I see it: if systemd had been the default in Linux for the last ten years, probably the tool chain around it would be mature enough to meet everyone's needs, we would all be accustomed to the specific commands needed to control and interact with and debug systemd stuff, and if someone came along and proposed replacing everything with a syslog daemon and a pile of init scripts, there'd be rage and outcry. That is to say, I don't see anything _inherently_ bad about systemd.

But, what _is_ enormously frustrating is to have something that works, and be well adapted to it, so that if something breaks I know exactly where to look, and then have all of that be replaced by a foreign system that breaks old things in new ways and requires hours spent trying to figure out what the hell happened.

If the replacement system offers serious benefits over the old system, that offsets the pain slightly. In this case, I've yet to see what the actual benefits are; I have no idea what problems systemd is attempting to solve which are so severe, so immediate, so intractable that they require a jarring change to some of the fundamental parts of the operating system.

<comment><USER21> Regarding your last point, the main thing that systemd excels at is managing the mishmash of power events, other ACPI events, service management and integration with DBus (which everything seems to require these days).

However, I run Linux in three locations and here's where systemd fits for me:

1\. Servers. No use whatsoever. There are two power states: off and on. None of this is really an improvement over SVR4 init. It's just another damn tool to learn.

2\. Desktops: No use whatsoever. I run mine like servers simply because if I need remote access, trusting stuff like WOL and ACPI is just silly on Linux.

3\. Laptops: No use whatsoever. This is simply down to the fact that the power management on Linux i.e. hibernate/sleep support is a bag of shit. I run mine as power states off and on, much as 1 and 2.

Regarding boot speed - my laptop boots in about 14 seconds (SSD). Who cares about making it faster?

I find that a shell script is far more useful i.e. it doesn't enforce constraints on you which have to then be added as features to systemd. Plus shell scripts are generic tools i.e. learning how to write them will be of more use globally than learning systemd guts.

So basically, screw it.

The problem that this outlines is that Linux's power management, event and ACPI state management is crappy. We don't need another layer of crap over the top of it to make it work properly.

<comment><USER12> To me systemd looks mainly useful for servers. Some of the nice server features:

1\. It is way easier to write a systemd unit for an in house application than it is to write a correct sysvinit script.

2\. Everything runs in a cgroup making it easier to add resource limits and see which process is started by which service.

3\. Easy to check which daemons are running and not.

4\. Reduced startup time for containers.

<comment><USER22> > 3\. Easy to check which daemons are running and not.

How? This is one of the things that have really annoyed me as all the systemd services have gone from service --status-all.

<comment><USER23> htop?

I'm not linux admin anymore, but I when I was, I used various service status software thingies only to find out whether the system thinks the service is running, because they tend to be wrong, and just annoy you (not starting crashed server because it "is already running" or something similar). I think debian doesn't even track service states, but I'm not sure.

Of course, with systemd it will be even more fun.

<comment><USER9> systemd tracks service status way more reliably than sysvinit. It also stops services more reliably. This due to the usage of cgroups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24>
        6. Myth: systemd is not modular.

        Not true at all. At compile time you have a number of  ...

So it's only modular at compile time. This seems like a negative to me.

<comment><USER9> You can also disable various things during runtime. A->B does not imply B->A.

<comment><USER24> It's not assumption by implication, it's due to omission. I cannot assume a feature exists in your software, you must tell me it exists. As a contrived example, why would I expect your To Do List app to manage recipes?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Most "arguments" I read are are either ad-hominem or ad-pulseaudionem attacks.

<comment><USER8> I don't see a single ad-hominem.

And ad-pulseaudionem is just like a ad-networkmanagerem or a ad-dbusiem: If your software design sucks and it does not work good enough that you don't have to care about this you will be told it sucks. And to me it seems that systemd is written in the spirit of dbus and nm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This article from last August hits the nail on the head with regard to systemd:

<http://www.pappp.net/?p=969>

"I'm not sure that this is a bad design, but it is most definitely not UNIX or anything like it."

<comment><USER9> The blogpost already addresses everything that above article gets wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Myth 31: "I heard it was written by web developers."

<comment><USER27> No, that's Gnome-shell.</comment></comment>


An Always Sharp Pencil: Uni Kuru Toga - <AUTHOR> http://davesmechanicalpencils.blogspot.com/2008/04/uni-kuru-toga.html <comment><AUTHOR> The more interesting part about this article is the conclusion at the end:

        You know, to some extent it almost doesn't matter
        how  well this pencil works or not, it's the thought
        that counts. These sorts of ideas and innovations are
        occurring in Japan, not elsewhere. Just look at that
        booklet! This is clearly the product of a design team
        and company that really think about their product and
        their market, see a future, try something new, move
        forward, and not just think, "Oh, it's a pencil, we'll
        always sell them, but there's nothing much ever going
        to happen with pencils! They're a cash-cow, just milk
        them."

</comment><comment><USER2> Well, it's a nice engineering trick, but it seems kind of like featuritis --- doing something neat because you can. For me, in fact, pencil bluntness is a feature, not a defect. Thicker lines disguise the fact that my kanji handwriting isn't very aesthetical. Thinner lines bring out its ugliness and lack of balance into sharp relief.

I wonder if this is a problem for any native writers as well. (On the other hand, the ones who want to show off their nice handwriting will probably be attracted to this pencil. Then those of us who use blunt/uneven pencils will be automatically assumed to be ugly-handwriters.)</comment>


Radioactive Boyscout (David Hahn: Oct 30, 1976 – Sep 27, 2016) - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn <comment><USER2> I read the book "The Radioactive Boy Scout" not too long ago. Ultimately, it is tragic that a child and later teen with so much curiosity and interest in science was not able to get the guidance he needed to channel his drive into a more rewarding and productive life. I suspect many HN readers will see a lot of themselves in David, as did I, and wish things could have turned out differently.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> slashdot discussion: [https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/11/14/0039257/radioac...](https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/11/14/0039257/radioactive- boy-scout-reportedly-passes-away-at-age-39)</comment>


Ask HN: Use Vim? What Feature "sold"you? - <AUTHOR> There's been a lot of buzz lately about Vim and with projects like Janus, getting started has never really been easier.  However, when a newcomer does research on how to get going with Vim, there's a ton of duplicate information, but not a lot (at least that I've found) on what features really finally convinced users to deal with the learning curve and really dig into Vim. I find it hard to believe that using h j k l to navigate is really Vim's strong selling point and yet it's what we hear about most often.<p>The only consistent answer I've heard is that ci is a lifesaver. While that's true, I'd also be interested in hearing about what tools and tricks you've picked up that made you say, "Ok, Vim is my editor!" <comment><USER5> After some practice with Vim I started to _think_ about editing in terms of Vim's commands. That made me very effective. And it's not only about h j k l. It gives you many small tools that you can combine. The basics are actions and movements. Let me give you a few basic examples.

Some movements are:

\- h, j, k, l,

\- f <char> \- the given character,

\- w / b - beginning of the next / previous word,

\- 0 / $ - beginning / end of the line.

Some actions:

\- d - <USER2>

\- dd - delete whole line

\- y - yank (copy to the Vim's clipboard)

\- p - <USER3>

\- c - <USER4>

\- <n> G - go to the n-th line.

Their combinations could be:

\- d f . - delete from the cursor to the first period

\- d w - delete the current word

\- c w - change the current word

\- d 0 - delete to the beginning of the current line

\- dd 10 G p - delete the current line (that also puts it in the Vim's clipboard), move to the 10th line and paste the deleted one there.

Of course it gives you much more: searching, replacing, scripting, plug-ins, syntax highlight, auto-completion, browsing etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough--but that's more of a "cheat sheet" than anything else, you know? Learning the commands and committing them to muscle memory is part of the learning process for any app. Vim is known to be generally difficult (or at least time consuming) to learn because you have to first digest what the commands are before you can work on getting them into muscle memory.

The question is: what features did you find that decided it was worth it to switch? If not for the feature itself, then how does the paradigm of its usage help you?

For example, ci{ is often cited by developers is awesome. It's so much faster than highlighting text within curly braces and changing it so while it's a pretty simple thing, Vim's implementation makes it a breeze to use.

</comment></comment><comment> g-wizz I use to wonder the same thing myself before I started using Vim.

Now I'm not a Vim expert but if I had to sum up the benefits, I would say that it allows you to keep your hands on the keyboard _and_ your fingers on the home row the entire time when programming. It's a subtle usability benefit that means that I can use more of my cognitive resources on the programming logic when I don't have to take my eyes off the screen to find the mouse, reach for the mouse, bring my eyes back to the screen, use the mouse and place my hands back on the keyboard. This is a bigger distraction than it sounds.

I know most editors have keyboard shortcuts but for me the user experience is just not the same as Vim's and I didn't fully appreciate this until I was reasonably proficient at using it.

Edit: formatting

</comment><comment><USER6> My answer is probably not the best answer here but a friend uses Vim and I was introduced that way. I'm sure if I didn't know anyone using Vim, the chances of me picking it up and trying to dive head first on my own into how Vim works would be slim, albeit not impossible.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't know that this answer is in the spirit of the question you're asking, but I think anyone who does software development for a living needs to know at least the basics of vi(m).

If it hasn't happened yet, some day you're going to find yourself logged in to an unfamiliar Unix-y system's console and need to edit some files. You may not be able to start X and get to your favorite GUI editor. Emacs may not be installed and you may not have the authority or time to get it installed. (Side question: Do any Linux distros install Emacs out of the box?) But vi(m)? Yes, it will almost certainly be installed, and you're going to want to know how to use it then.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's a fair response; but there's a difference between "knowing the basics" to get something done vs. using it as your daily editor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> First off I am a VIM noob. What makes me say I want to edit a file in VIM rather than something else? It would have to be the search, modify, save routine. As an example: opening an ini to change a specific value, so much easier and faster in VIM than any other editor I have tried. Another is the ability to use cut, copy, paste with multiple registers.

</comment><comment><USER9> I use Vi because it decreases the learning curve for new languages. No new IDE; no new set of emacs key-chords and mode-tricks. I can edit very efficiently in Vi, and all of my editing tricks/habbits apply to all languages.

Technically I use Vim, but a lot of Vim features violate my "no language specific features" rule. So I usually restrict myself to Vi features.

</comment><comment><USER10> My favorite feature is that it's around $60 dollars cheaper than Textmate.

<comment><USER11> And still actively developed! But don't tell anyone...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been using Vim for a long time, maybe since version 3 or 4, because what sold me was multiple windows, either into the same file, or each window displaying different files.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't use vim, I use fuv - <http://secretgeek.net/fuv_intro.asp>

<comment><USER14> _TAKE THE FUV CHALLENGE. Use fuv as your only text editor for 1 year.

Then you will be ready for emacs._

WTF? What is it, an emacs for low self esteem people? "Hey I am not smart enough to take on emacs directly, let me try something which is named like it came out of the mouth of a six year old."

<comment><USER13> It's a parody of vim, pretending to be more hardcore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can edit without using the mouse.

You have no idea how painful it is, having to use the mouse while editing text.

</comment><comment><USER16> The first real command I learned was how to find and replace in a file:

:%s/oldWord/newWord/g

Since then I haven't looked back.</comment>


What gig workers can learn from romance writers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180119-what-gig-workers-can-learn-from-romance-writers <comment><USER2> > _Three practices set romance writers up for success: they welcome newcomers, > they share competitive information and they ask advice from newbies._

That last one is interesting. People entering a field do so for a reason. It might just be to do a job and get paid, but it could also be because no one is making what they want. Newbies unconsciously represent gaps in the market where someone with better execution could make a killing.

Brb, got to dive beginner programming forums and look at the types of projects that are so pressing that someone is willing to learn how to program.

<comment><USER3> Wow, great idea!

In relation to HN, there is also the noob-submissions section: [https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories](https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How much of the genre's success can we attribute to an inclusive culture? I would guess it may have helped level out the income curve - a $10,000 median annual income is higher than I would have guessed for a saturated, hit-based industry.

But in terms of aggregate genre growth, I think the Kindle and iBooks/Audible helped much more. Seeing the three-fold increase in romance author income coupled with the halving of other authors' income from 2008 to 2014 suggests that readers really altered their preferences to avoid being seen with a physical romance novel.

It feels like a similar phenomenon occurred with scifi/fantasy, judging by the audible best seller list.

[https://www.audible.com/adblbestsellers](https://www.audible.com/adblbestsellers)

<comment><USER5> > readers really altered their preferences to avoid being seen with a physical > romance novel.

I'd be cautious about coming to this conclusion so definitively. The vast majority of romance readers are women, many in a cultural milieu that differs from yours. Reading romances is not universally looked down upon — several of the highly educated women in my family do so unabashedly, for example, as do I.

E-reading is also cheaper and consumes less space than physical books. The number of niches and options therein exploded with self-publishing. I suspect that those factors are more important than avoiding the potential embarrassment of someone seeing you reading Danielle Steele. But I wouldn't put high certainty on my guess either :P

<comment><USER6> Overall agree... even with Danielle Steele comment... but what about paranormal reindeer shifter novels? Or erotic menage a trois set in Victorian England? There are plenty of "simply sweet" books you wouldn't mind being asked about on the train, but there's a wide swathe of books you might not want to explain!

E-books solve a real "fat-tail" problem in romance at the same time that they allow discretion in public places. These days only Amazon knows you've got a thing for hot billionaire Navy SEALs who turn into otters at night. A physical bookstore would not be able to stock all Chuck Tingle's novels and turn a profit, and people in towns too highbrow to stock romances wouldn't be able to buy them without mail-order. (In some towns it can actually be really hard to find romance novels for sale on paper, and there's a huge bias toward the NYTimes bestsellers.)

<comment><USER7>
      Or erotic menage a trois set in Victorian England?

Ha! A former colleague who was a Tech Writer later followed her dream and became a published author specializing in Victorian era historical romances.

She was particularly thrilled at her first contract because she most loved to travel to London, and now she could write off the travel costs on her taxes as research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how much of a writer's success is balanced between being a good writer, and a good marketer. How much give is there? If your prose is excellent but you're bad at getting your book in front of eyeballs, you'll almost certainly fail - but how bad can you be as an author, while still making money by being a better salesperson?

<comment><USER9> Having a good headshot probably helps, too. I guess it would count as a key component of one's marketing package. I'm reminded of this Adam Gopnik article on a discovered Shakespeare portrait:

 _And that Shakespeare was good-looking as a young man, before he lost his hair and puffed out from home-cooking, seems at least likely, on the fixed general principle that writers who become very celebrated in their youth, as he did, are, to a first approximation, almost always good-looking. Byron and Shelley, Mailer and Updike and Salinger, Fitzgerald, Dickens, Tennyson, Lowell, Ted Hughes—all celebrated in their youth, all not just O.K.-looking but an oil painting, each and every one. There are many good funny-looking writers, but it's hard to think of good funny-looking writers who get famous young. Funny-looking writers, at least funny-looking male writers, get famous late—Samuel Johnson and Sinclair Lewis and John Milton and Philip Larkin all come instantly to mind—or else they don't get famous. They get read, but they don't get celebrated._

[https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/adam-gopnik- look...](https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/adam-gopnik-look-here- upon-this-picture)

<comment><USER10> Thomas Pynchon is a counter-example. "V." was published when he was 26 and was nominated for the National Book Award. Here is his "headshot": [http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2013/08/23/23-thom...](http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2013/08/23/23-thomas- pynchon.w245.h368.jpg)

Of course, he was already becoming famously reclusive by this time so maybe he's exempt from this rule.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps that's even why he opted for the reclusive strategy.

Anyway, I love that headshot.

<comment><USER11> No kidding! I've found my new avatar...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The GIG economy is growing bigger and bigger by the day. Here in Los Angeles it is thriving and companies like Fiverr are beginning centralize and localize events that support GIG workers and the economy. [https://latechnews.org/los- angeles-gig-economy/](https://latechnews.org/los-angeles-gig-economy/)

<comment><USER8> Is this the same Fiverr that supported the GIG (who's paying you to yell at me) workers by telling them to sacrifice their health to work?

[https://twitter.com/b_cavello/status/839876313473150976/](https://twitter.com/b_cavello/status/839876313473150976/)

> _Here in Los Angeles it is thriving_

It's thriving, huh? How about the workers themselves? Are they thriving, too? Or just the economy?

<comment><USER13> That ad is targeting the people who _hire_ people on Fiverr. There are almost no Fiverr gig workers in San Francisco.

<comment><USER8> None of the "you" pronouns there seem to be aimed at Fiverr consumers.

<comment><USER13> They are. I've seen this bus stop ad. They are targeting SF entrepreneurs who need help with video production / logos / design / etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>