I'm surprised there is no mention of Marcellus Gilmore Edson [0]. He was a pharmacist from Montréal who patented a method to make an early version of peanut butter, more than a decade before the Kellogg's patent mentioned in the Smithsonian article.
An option for correlated kernel and userspace tracing on Linux is LTTng. [0] For a comparison of LTTng and other tracers, check out the LTTng docs. [1]
While it's true that Google and the like benefit from closed or partially closed data ecosystems and formats, as I've pointed out in another comment elsewhere in this thread [0], they've at least been pushing for the development and adoption of linked data formats like JSON-LD and vocabularies like schema.org, and they're using both of those pretty extensively in products like search and Gmail.
It's a far cry from things like Solid's vision of a fully decentralized web of linked data, but at least it's something.
I can see where you're coming from, and your point of view is certainly not baseless, but I just thought I'd point out that at least Google has pushed for the development and adoption of linked data formats like JSON-LD [0] and standardized vocabularies like schema.org [1]. They make use of it for "knowledge graph" [2] features, as well as in Gmail for what they call "actions and highlights" [3] (things like displaying flight reservation details, for instance).
You can filter these out actually. When you go on someone's profile, and then to the "repositories" tab, there is a drop-down menu that reads "Type: All" from which you can select other repository-type filters, namely forks, mirrors, and sources (the user's own repositories).
It's somewhat imperfect as not all forks or mirrors are marked as such by github (if, say, it's a fork of a repository not originally hosted on github), but it works in the vast majority of cases.
That's actually a fairly common setup, known as a LackRack [0], although this one seems to be a different size/model, but maybe that's my eyes playing tricks on me.
Edit: actually now that I look back at it I'm almost positive this is the deeper lack "coffee table".
I used to work at a consulting firm called EfficiOS[0], specialized in OS and application efficiency and performance. They maintain the LTTng[1] kernel and userspace tracers and related tools, and offer training. I'm not sure whether that responds to your specific needs, but if you get in touch they'll certainly be able to guide you.
Possibly off-topic, but the article isn't displaying[0] for me on Chromium 55.0.2883.87 (64-bit), running on Arch Linux, unless I go in the dev tools and manually remove "Fira Sans" from the font-family list in .container[1]. Not sure whether the problem is with me or the site, I'm surprised it doesn't fall-back to sans-serif before I override manually.
> but afaict it doesn't work at all for adding totally new files
You can use git add --intent-to-add on your new file (or -N for short), and then use git add -p as usual. You can then use the edit mode to remove hunks you don't want to commit just yet.
Not quite as convenient as on an already tracked file, but it's reasonably usable.
I read an article about the similarities and differences between data art and data visualisation a short while back (couple of weeks?), but I really can't seem to find it right now. Mike Bostock's visualisations, though very visually pleasing, always tend towards the functional side of the spectrum, serving a purpose of enhancing the comprehension of concepts or relationships that lie in the data, rather than being designed for purely æsthetic aspirations.
There's obviously a place for both visualisations and art, though, and the line between the two is not always clearly defined.
I find it somewhat unfortunate that a LWN subscriber link is being abused like that. I don't think such a link should be shared on a widely accessible platform like Hacker News. I find LWN articles to always be of great quality, and the subscription cost is definitely worth it if you can afford it. Also, "subscriber-only" content becomes publicly available after only a week. There is consequently no reason to share a subscriber link like this on Hacker News. The discussion could have waited a week.
He's not really actively involved, though. He's just been on a crusade lately to eradicate unwanted VCSs still used in older projects, including CVS for NetBSD and bzr for emacs. Honestly I'm glad he's doing it, I'm hoping it might make it more likely for newcomers to contribute to these projects. He has posted quite a few articles about these conversions on his blog [0], if you want to read about it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcellus_Gilmore_Edson