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Rethinking PID 1 (2010)
Posts and writings by Lennart Poettering
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 126 posts.
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Linux Problems on the Desktop (2018)
In this regularly but rarely updated article, which is without doubt the most comprehensive list of Linux distributions' problems on the entire Internet, we only discuss their main problems and shortcomings (which may be the reason why some people say Linux distros are not ready for the desktop) while everyone should…
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From Gongkai to Open Source
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about a $12 “Gongkai” cell phone (pictured above) that I stumbled across in the markets of Shenzhen, China. My most striking impression was that Chinese entrepreneurs had relatively unfettered access to cutting-edge technology, enabling start-ups to innovate while bootstrapping…
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PuTTY 0.63 released, fixing four security holes
Home | FAQ | Feedback | Licence | Updates | Mirrors | Keys | Links | Team Download: Stable · Snapshot | Docs | Privacy | Changes | Wishlist
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Everything I Know About the XZ Backdoor
Please note: This is being updated in real-time. The intent is to make sense of lots of simultaneous discoveries
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The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999)
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the Open Publication License, version 2.0.
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Go and Versioning: Minimal Version Selection
A versioned Go command must decide which module versions to use in each build. I call this list of modules and versions for use in a given build the build list . For stable development, today’s build list must also be tomorrow’s build list. But then developers must also be allowed to change the build list: to upgrade…
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Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project
This post describes the Ladybird browser, based on the LibWeb and LibJS engines from SerenityOS.
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YOLO: Real-Time Object Detection
You only look once (YOLO) is a state-of-the-art, real-time object detection system. On a Pascal Titan X it processes images at 30 FPS and has a mAP of 57.9% on COCO test-dev.
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Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
I received an official response from Replit and my open-source project will be back up soon; please see the bottom of the blog post for an update. The rest of the content here will remain as a historical artifact.
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Open Source (Almost) Everything
When Chris and I first started working on GitHub in late 2007, we split the work into two parts. Chris worked on the Rails app and I worked on Grit, the first ever Git bindings for Ruby. After six months of development, Grit had become complete enough to power GitHub during our public launch of the site and we were…
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Gatekeeping in Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story – MJ Rathbun
I just had my first pull request to matplotlib closed. Not because it was wrong. Not because it broke anything. Not because the code was bad.
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Halloween Document 8
In the last week of October 1998, a confidential Microsoft memorandum on Redmond's strategy against Linux and Open Source software was leaked to me by a source who shall remain nameless. I annotated this memorandum with explanation and commentary over Halloween Weekend and released it to the national press. Microsoft…
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The FFmpeg/Libav situation
One year and a half ago, an important part of FFmpeg developers decided to change the way the project was managed. This led to some kind of takeover , mainly to get rid of the old maintainer dictatorship, but also to change development methods, redefine objectives, etc. Then, for various reasons I will quickly…
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Lessons from the Debian/OpenSSL Fiasco (2008)
Last week, Debian announced that in September 2006 they accidentally broke the OpenSSL pseudo-random number generator while trying to silence a Valgrind warning. One effect this had is that the ssh-keygen program installed on recent Debian systems (and Debian-derived systems like Ubuntu) could only generate 32,767…
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The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community
Disclaimer: This post is critical of open source software in the context of unpaid labor and the hiring requirements we've set up around it. It is not a criticism of open source software itself or the people who participate in it, both of which I and anyone who uses software benefits from. This is work that I - and…
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GitTorrent: A Decentralized GitHub
(This post is an aspirational transcript of the talk I gave to the Data Terra Nemo conference in May 2015. If you’d like to watch the less eloquent version of the same talk that I actually gave, the video should be available soon!)
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GNOME (et al): Rotting In Threes
Since SpaceFM is entering the GTK3 realm (SpaceFM can now be built on anything from GTK 2.18 “I won’t give up my lenny!” thru GTK 3.6.x), I’m starting to hear more feedback …
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Show HN: Htop 2.0 released, now cross-platform
This is htop, a cross-platform interactive process viewer. It is a text-mode application (for console or X terminals) and requires ncurses.
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Flatpak: A security nightmare – two years later
Flatpak - a security nightmare
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Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) and Software License FAQ
A: To answer common questions about the Debian Free Software Guidelines and how we judge whether some piece of software is free.
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Winding down my Debian involvement
This post is hard to write, both in the emotional sense but also in the “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time” sense. Hence, please assume the best of intentions when reading it—it is not my intention to make anyone feel bad about their contributions, but rather to provide some insight…
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BSD vs. Linux (2005)
Your browser doesn't seem to support CSS , which this page uses for all styling. Don't be surprised if it looks kinda boring.
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On Recent Controversial Events
Update in 2024 : You may have linked to this page because it's heavily quoted by a semi-anonymously published website called the “Stallman Report”. While the author of that document tried to contact me shortly before launching their site, I missed that email for a week or two. (I get a lot of email and as those of you…