What a bunch of colonialist garbage. You're probably Israeli, right?
"Rational nations"? Get real. No nations are rational. Nations are driven by political systems that are driven by the emotions of the populations of those places. Are human emotions rational? Are human emotions more rational in Israel than they are in Ghana or North Korea?
At least with lynx/links, you don't get any javascript functionality and the experience as a whole is diminished.
With an ad blocker, you selectively block the javascript you don't like but that the operators rely on to bring in revenue, while still getting the otherwise 'full' experience.
If sourceforge went under, do you think I'd be unable to get the source to tmux?
Since obviously I'd still be able to get tmux, what value is sourceforge actually providing me? They might be providing tmux developers some value, but they aren't providing any value to me.
I value what these sites are giving me, but not enough to put up with ads. If adblock didn't exist I'd probably visit places like sf or youtube a lot less.
>FWIW this is the talk that got them (Ben Nagy and The Grugq) thrown out of Kiwicon
See, fuck this. We are all fucked if style begins to trump substance in infosec, like it has in most everything else. Fucking marketing turds. The Grugq is dropping pearls before swine.
If you need to say rude things in order to convey your message, you might take a moment to consider whether or not your message is actually worth conveying.
Whether or not a message is perceived as rude is irrelevant and a matter of selfishness. Whether or not it is true is what you should concern yourself with if you mean to get things done.
>Though I don’t consider it legally practicable, as a moral matter I’d be fine if every such man were thrown in prison for life.
I was with the author right up until this. Mr. Aaronson here declares that, were it legally practicable, he believes that THOUGHT POLICE would be a very good thing. He proposes life imprisonment for "wrong" belief, not wrong action.
At that point, I ceased to care much at all about what Scott Aaronson believes.
I think you may be interpreting his words too literally, which is funny, as this whole thing is about people misinterpreting him. I believe the quote in question was hyperbole, and the intention was (a) to lighten things up with a little chuckle, and (b) to demonstrate that he strongly disagrees with people who believe women are inferior.
If you give the author the benefit of the doubt, then I think you'll find him to be a painfully nice person, and he really doesn't deserve your (or anyone else's) anger.
Better in some ways, worse in others. If systemd were unequivocally better in all areas, nobody would be complaining. By saying what you said, you're subtly but deliberately telling every one of those people that their concerns are irrelevant and/or a result of their ignorance. This is the systemd developers' M.O. and a large part of the reason why there's so much drama over systemd.
Right, "better" is a relative term in software. I'm not disputing that there certainly are problems in systemd, but as a package I still think that systemd does more things "better" than sysvinit than it does things worse. There's certainly a lot of room for improvement - build upon it and create and advocate an init system that is better than systemd in more areas than it is worse.
> This is the systemd developers' M.O.
So far I've mostly seen "we believe this is better and we'll build it this way, like it or leave." That's certainly opinionated, but hey, they're totally entitled to have that view (why would they build it if they thought it's worse?!) My view and your view may differ, but we don't get to complain unless we provide something that we think is better and get a lot of people to agree on that.
>I'm not disputing that there certainly are problems in systemd, but as a package I still think that systemd does more things "better" than sysvinit than it does things worse.
The community seems pretty evenly split on this point, with folks like myself taking the opposite view: systemd is a regression in so many fundamental areas that its improvements in things like boot times and init script syntax just are not worth the tradeoffs that it imposes. I don't care if the frogurt is free when it's full of potassium benzoate.
Sure, if that's your view, I'm fine with that. If the people that build the distro-of-choice for me decide that frogurt is the best init system for the distro they want to build, I'll either swallow that or move on to something that uses guaranteed potassium-benzoate-free-frogurt as init, but I'm not going to tell them that they're not allowed to do this. Because they are. You don't have to like it, you don't have to eat it but they're free in their choice just as you are free to build something else.
>You don't have to like it, you don't have to eat it but they're free in their choice just as you are free to build something else.
And I'm also free to correctly identify that their poor leadership decisions are ruining a wonderful piece of software and causing the community, including Ian fucking Jackson, to abandon the group that made it possible.
>the result of the vote is a clear majority of Debian developers saying "no more politics on this init topic"
No, it's a thin majority of devs saying, "lets not make a decision of any kind, so please continue fighting these political battles amongst yourselves".
Just wait for Jessie, you'll see. Package dependencies are going to become the next huge political football.
Because minimal boot time is way more important than predictable, repeatable functionality. It's totally cool if some other daemon lies about whether or not my service is actually listening while just happily buffering into /dev/null. This is all brilliant stuff and a huge step forward over UNIX.
Yeah, but inetd was just about TCP sockets. systemd also supports unix-socket activation, which can block the client when the buffer is full, preventing data loss. I agree that TCP socket activation is iffy (though I still use inetd for non-critical stuff), but unix-socket activation seems safe to me.
What offended about his post, out of curiosity? The Rube Goldberg analogy (I found that rather apt), or the "Professor Lucifer Butts" aspect of it (which I'll also confess to finding not the least apropos nickname for a certain Red Hatted German)?
I was chiding your comment for being rude, not salacious.
The first meaning of "scabrous" in my dictionary is "having a rough surface", and that's how I meant it. There's a long tradition of using that word to describe rough-and-tumble discourse, and it seemed fitting. You didn't just smack another user, you smacked them with a pointy implement (a link to an insulting image). That's not ok on HN. Neither is smacking people without a pointy implement. And telling another user "You're a liar and a coward, and you know it" is right out—a bannable offense, although we didn't ban you for it.
I'm insisting on this more than usual, because we don't want the pugilistic approach that is popular in some related (by subject matter, at least) online communities to take root here. When commenting on HN, please eliminate incivility from what you post.
This is a well thought out and complete response, it's just unfortunate that an image illustrating an overcomplicated system to solve a simple problem has elicited this censure; instead of the comment, in response to another user throwing a personal insult against an OSS hacker, where I call this user "a coward".
Your position about the place we want HN to be is clear, but I still believe the image is not insulting or offending anybody in any way. Those who flagged it, could they have misinterpreted it as an insult to the developers? An insult to the users? An inappropriate "scabrous" picture based on the URL? Or just as an attack to a program that needs our praise?
You're right. The "liar/coward" comment was the much greater offense, but that one was flag-killed.
I realize now that I was being too cute pulling out the old "scabrous" to make what is really an obvious and mundane point, and ended up confusing things. Sorry. I get bored sometimes and throw in variations which HN moderation comments are obviously not the place for. Let me try to be clearer.
There's nothing at all wrong with that image per se. It's great. I've made more than my share of Rube Goldberg analogies and know exactly where you're coming from. Had you linked to the same image in a thoughtful comment about overcomplicated systems, with no trace of incivility, of course it would be fine. It was only a problem in this context, i.e. a drive-by potshot in an inflamed discussion on a polarized topic.
You should educate yourself about FUD, I recommend the Halloween documents, where they explain the unfeasibility of FUD tactics against an open source project, and that if someone tries to do it they won't get anywhere.
Because systemd is, although people argue this point, essentially monolithic.
Sure, in theory it's modular, but the module dependencies are so intertwined that good luck using any of the modules without the entire thing - or writing so many compatibility shims that you might as just write the module yourself. And that's even assuming a compatibility shim can be written without essentially reimplementing the entire module. It prevents incremental replacements. And it keeps expanding to pull more and more essentially unrelated functionality into itself.
It's "you're stuck with this architecture unless you redo the whole darn thing". And, again, systemd keeps getting larger and larger. As you say, it isn't that hard to replace sysvinit. But to replace systemd you need to replace / write shims for far more things. (Your window manager? I wish I was joking...)
I'm confused by the Window manager comment. As far as I understand, essentially, ConsoleKit development was stopped, and work on systemd-logind etc began as a better way forward, rather than rewriting ConsoleKit.
During this timeframe, GNOME developed integration with systemd-logind, similarly to how it developed ConsoleKit support beforehand. And in fact the ConsoleKit backend was supported for a while afterwords. But this is no longer the case as nobody was willing to support it and maintain it in upstream GNOME. So it was removed.
So I'm confused by the comment. Your insinuation seems to be this is somehow the fault of systemd for requiring a shim for things like GNOME, if you want them to work without systemd itself as PID 1. But the reality is that any software which has an API dependency that you want to replace is either going to A) need a shim or B) need a replacement that is also supported by the project. And the ship already sailed on option #2 - ConsoleKit held on until upstream decided to remove the bitrot.
I find this line of argument very weird. Indeed, this whole scenario seems to be a story of exactly how FOSS often works and how we envision it to work: people do the work, and in some cases they may compete with or achieve superiority over another project. And other people adopt that work and use it for their own work later on. And people may develop replacements that are or are-not compatible as they see fit.
It's probably very true that GNOME and systemd developers worked together to reach agreements on systemd-logind, so it could be used by both and they could understand each others needs. But why is it systemd's fault if nobody stepped up to maintain ConsoleKit, and systemd's fault if GNOME decided to remove support for something they saw as bitrot? Am I missing something extremely key here? Or do you consider this nobody's fault and just something that happened?
Stopped by Poettering, because there was corner cases where Consolekit could not reach. In essence, Perfect became the enemy of Good (tho that consolekit was ever good outside the fevered minds of some control freak in a uniform is anyones guess).
I have to assume this is Arch-specific, because I can't anything that basic as util-linux including a dependency on a specific init tool (and given there are still distros using other inits than systemd and still working fine...)
As a sysadmin and developer I don't understand this systemd-hate. If you ever have written a /etc/init.d script for a python non-daemoning script running in a virtualenv, or something to the same effect, you'd notice the improvement over SysV init scripts.
Upstart is nice too, but as a Linux desktop user I love socket activation: I can have cups, avahi and other optional/non-critical daemons "active" but not actually using any resource, until effectively used by some other process.
>If you ever have written a /etc/init.d script for a python non-daemoning script running in a virtualenv, or something to the same effect, you'd notice the improvement over SysV init scripts.
These are solved problems. You're creating a bunch of low level OS spaghetti because you don't want to have to write a shell script for your software? That is not a responsible decision-making process, that's moving the mountain to you.
Countless subtle race conditions and security issues in the shell spaghetti that makes up real-world init scripts indicate that it's not a "solved problem".
"Rational nations"? Get real. No nations are rational. Nations are driven by political systems that are driven by the emotions of the populations of those places. Are human emotions rational? Are human emotions more rational in Israel than they are in Ghana or North Korea?