Hacker News Reader

Comment by rgovostes | Hacker News Reader

Apple provides a man page for every system daemon. I suppose this doesn't answer too many questions though:

    NAME
      liquiddetectiond – Liquid Detection and Corrosion Mitigation Daemon

    DESCRIPTION
      liquiddetectiond runs in the background and collects liquid detection
      analytics from each USB-C port on the system.

View on HN

collects liquid detection analytics

For a company that is very careful in phrasing its public communications, that description definitely raises some red flags. If it was something more like "detects moisture and warns the user to avoid damage caused by damp USB port use" it would be perceived much better.

That's not what the daemon doing though... Firmware would be responsible for avoiding damage, this daemon is actually just collecting information about when such events happen.

The manpages of system daemons are definitely not being carefully curated in the way you are implying. They're written, often poorly and imprecisely, by engineers.

Of all the folks in denial I've come across, this one ranks highly.

I'm not sure what you're implying. But I worked at Apple and wrote manpages for various stuff I worked on. Not once did I work with someone to "carefully phrase" them as "public communications". The idea of doing that would be silly. The people at Apple that do that careful phrasing stuff (marketing, etc.) don't even know what a manpage is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com