Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brian_K_White | Hacker News Reader

What do you imagine this proves or disproves?

How many people eat McDonalds? Or buy in to countless other things that can be trivially demonstrated to be against their own interests.

I don't know about anyone else but I never heard the critiques of systemd to be based on any doomsday predictions.

Everyone knew it would function, and that it even serves one use case better than before.

The critique was only ever that it serves one purpose better at the expense of all others, and is a downgrade in flexibility and functionality from what already existed.

View on HN

> How many people eat McDonalds?

If you’re already starting like this it’s obvious that the following text will be non-scientific non-sense.

As a reminder: There is no such thing as “healthy food” and “unhealthy food”, there is just healthy and unhealthy nutrition.

Still baffles me that people think it would actually be legal to sell actual unhealthy food, i.e. poisonous food.

Also, “organic food” is just a marketing scam. If you think your nutrition is better off if you stick to nature, you’ve missed a large part of human history where people starved to death by the thousands every year because they exclusively relied on “organic food”.

systemd runs on billions of systems worldwide and everyone who ever professionally maintained enterprise servers understand what a bad approach the crude hack that SysVInit with its collection of shell scripts was.

And yet, you’ll still find many of us that think systemd is worse, but for different reasons. (I think the food analogy was lost)

It is legal to sell unhealthy food, ie poisonous food. Sugar is a poison, drugs are poisons. You can legally sell escolar a fish that if eaten too much is poisonous.

What is poisonous food? You can sell plastic that breaks down into the environment and people are drinking it in water, eating it in fish. Is that legally sold poisonous food?

Sugar is not, in fact, a poison.

As for drugs:

> Alle Dinge sind Gift, und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis macht, dass ein Ding kein Gift ist.

  - Paracelsus, 1538

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison

Found the Hackernews who hasn't yet read Lustig's research into the hepatotoxicity of sugar. It's as bad for your liver as alcohol.

Sugar is indeed poison.

Personally, I like to add a bit more science and reasoning to my understanding rather than rely on quotes from someone in 1538.

Everything is a poison. It's simply a question of dosage.

I grokked the quote and my response is still that it’s a cute way to hand-wave away the fact that poisonous food exists.

Sugar is not poison. It can be, in certain situations, "bad for you". But sugar is found naturally in a variety of fruits and vegetables and has been a staple of the human diet for all of history and pre-history. There's no way to describe it as "poison".

The sugar being discussed is not natural sugars but refined processed sugars, that are absolutely poisons.

Booze has been a staple of diets for a long time too. Doesn’t mean it’s not poison just because society is stupid enough to embrace it.

Do you have any evidence of this or is this just your belief? I think, if it's just your belief, you should say that.

Do I have any evidence? As in have I performed studies on processed sugar and gathered evidence? No. I do not have evidence.

A quick web search will gladly provide evidence if you actually are interested.

Here’s a HN thread on an NPR article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126183

Here’s a Canadian news agency article: https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/how-toxic-is-sugar-1.1894262

If you’re just going to knock everything off as “just your belief” then no amount of evidence will convince you.

You seem to be a very confused person. I don't even know where to begin with all of this randomness.

Do you actually not understand what is wrong with McDonalds food? Or countless other similar low quality but legal products?

Do you actually not understand that terms like "healthy" and "poison" are not binary but a spectrum? And that every single thing has some aspects of both?

Do you actually not understand how a bag of sugar is not poison and legal to sell, and yet, if you ate one for dinner every night would not be good?

Do you actually not understand the point that popularity does not by itself prove or disprove anything? That great masses of people frequently voluntarily choose the inferior option for all kinds of reasons that aren't even all some form of lack of choice?

Do you actually not understand that that you are attempting to speak for "everyone who ever professionally maintained enterprise servers" TO some of them who quite robustly do not say any such thing?

Ignoring the food portion of the above:

> systemd runs on billions of systems worldwide and everyone who ever professionally maintained enterprise servers understand what a bad approach the crude hack that SysVInit with its collection of shell scripts was.

This is your opinion and not one held by all. It also ignores the various BSD system initialization scripts, which are explicitly not "SysVInit" related, and have been in use for decades.

It also ignores the diverse (if small) set of Linux init systems... 'openrc' being the one I'm most familiar with, as a Gentoo Linux user.

I'm so sad I wasn't paying attention when Debian was choosing init systems... I would have burned a TON of time getting anything they claimed in good faith was missing in 'openrc' into it, had I known that that clusterfuck was going on.

Non organic food is very obviously a poison for the vast majority of Earth's life.

See : the current apocalyptic and accelerating global biomass destruction directly caused by industrial farming.

Please explain to me how farmers who are making organic food are performing a scam.

The fact that you don’t like how organic food is marketed does not mean it is full bore a scam. It’s a real agricultural practice that exists. Organic eggs require far more freedom for chickens for example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com