JNRowe

Discussed over the past couple of days¹. And even with the less inflammatory title from LWN, it went… er, well.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36630032

Sadly, that doesn't look like it will work. The '.backup' command needs a filename and won't accept '-' or even '/dev/stdout', at least in the version available on Debian it will simply error out with "missing FILENAME argument on .backup".

As noted '.dump' will work in your pipeline, but with the caveats I and others noted elsewhere.

That is great. I could see a lot it was in the wayback machine, but I have no idea what the pipeline for that is. Poking around from your link was informative, thanks!

I sincerely applaud everything ending up on IA. However, if you're searching for specific instructions brickinstructions is excellent as it is far more navigable. For a random example see Starguider¹. I wonder if someone has already scraped that site for IA, beyond simply praying to the Wayback Machine.

¹ https://lego.brickinstructions.com/m/lego_instructions/set/6...

The '.backup' command also carries across the metadata too, so you don't lose things like 'application_id'¹.

I mention this as I once wasted a bunch of time trying to get a backup created from a '.dump | sqlite3' pipe to work before taking a proper look at the application code, and finally saw that it silently ignored databases without the correct 'application_id' or 'user_version'.

¹ https://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_application_id

Lots of comments from gyfcat's own notice a few days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36557287

Full agreement about it depending on the podcast, finding a player where speed is feed specific was a huge improvement for me. There are a few podcasts I listen to where the accent and cadence makes me feel genuinely angry if I have to listen to them at 1x, yet they become interesting enough to subscribe to when they're up around 2.25x.

It makes me wonder how much of a pattern there would be based purely on the listener's birth location and general regional cadence. I know I have a tendency to speak too quickly for some people in my native English, and also in languages I've learned later in life. Perhaps there are people who'd like a 0.4x button for interacting with me ;)

It is the support for narrator.device that amuses me. One of the most futuristic feeling things an early Amiga was capable of doing being attached to GPT. It would mimic an actual 80s tv/movie impression of the future of computer interaction.

Discussed at length a few days ago¹. IMO, some interesting thoughts to be found if you're willing to fish through the predictable flotsam and jetsam.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36430105

If you're installing a distro package or one of the builds mentioned in the link, I encourage you to try building it yourself. The build system is really well thought through, and unusually for a fancy art-ified Makefile it correctly handles the things you'd want as a distro packager too.

There were some interesting comments in a submission earlier this week - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36420460

Joey Hess' excellent moreutils¹ comes with vipe which is a generalised solution for these types of tasks. It allows you to run whatever $EDITOR you've configured mid-pipe, making it possible to work your changes up in an interactive editor session. Useful for those of us not smart enough to write up our changes as a series of -c arguments ;)

(It fixes the vim issue by virtue of using a temporary file to do the magic)

¹ https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/

The official release notes garnered a great number of comments last month¹, including loads of informative stuff directly from upstream dev waddlesplash.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34109349

Discussion of a Mastadon thread on crows from a couple of weeks ago led to heaps of interesting comments¹. Far outside my wheelhouse, so I've no idea of the links between the authors and their lists.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34139048

The documentary is available on iPlayer¹; You may need to be in the UK or have an IP that at least looks that way to see it :/

It immediately made me think of Channel 4's alternative Christmas message from 2020². While the technique is obviously different between the two, the step change in quality feels immense to me. Channel 4's was a few minute long heavily staged piece that didn't hold up to close scrutiny in my eyes, and the BBC's far more convincing example is applied to — I'll trust — somewhat organic recordings of multiple people.

Edit to add: I attempt to draw the connection here because we're talking about relatively cheap broadcast television and not $500,000,000 movies.

¹ https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001f7t5/hong-kongs-fi...

² https://www.channel4.com/press/news/deepfake-queen-deliver-c...

Many years ago there was confcache¹, that for a time was integrated in to portage via a FEATURES flag for Gentoo users. It wasn't particularly useful in the general case, and never really worked that well in practice. I don't recall the idea really taking off anywhere else, and I can't remember when it finally disappeared in Gentoo either(but it was a looooong time ago).

It was strictly a cache, it didn't run parallel checks or make any other attempts to improve the run time.

¹ The only source I've found right now is https://github.com/fxttr/confcache

A bazillion comments from a discussion a few days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33658541

A lot of comments from a couple of days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33348716

I can't quite put my finger on what felt wrong to me. I think it was partly the verbosity, but in the end I talked myself in to being annoyed at having to get to the end which was never going to help.

As for Nutshell, it looks like exactly the type of story I'd love to enjoy. I'm going to pick it up, then move on to kevmarsden and teh_klev's tips if it pans out.

Thanks peeps!

Graham Greene's wikipedia article is a wonderful rabbit hole of weirdness and apparent coincidence¹. Famous spies, well-known con artists, involvement in huge moments in history, etc.

¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Greene

Lacking the shame to avoid asking for recommendations from time to time¹.

Imagining you're the type of person that really wanted to like Machines Like Me for its concept but found the exposition truly painful, are other McEwan books worth a read? Basically was Machines Like Me an outlier or standard McEwan?

[Edit: Worded harshly, but without too much malintent; books are art, and appreciation is personal.]

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22418898

There is some reasoning in the syndication section¹. While we may not agree with it, Manton has clearly put some thought in to Atom for this use case.

I'm personally a little unconvinced by jsonfeed too which is mentioned in later chapters, but I have to say I'd go all in on it iff it allowed us to free ourselves of RSS.

¹ https://book.micro.blog/syndication/

Ooops, thanks!

People looking to break out some nostalgia for the original while they wait can use the excellent engine rewrite reminiscence¹.

The author also has a really cool JS implementation for the cutscenes² linked at the bottom of the main page.

¹ http://cyxdown.free.fr/reminiscence/

² https://cyxx.github.io/dpoly_js/

A discussion¹ of an earlier related post² from the same author brings up a lot of the — sometimes subtle — problems with relying on here documents/strings in shell scripts.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845232

² https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ProcessSubstit...

I've spent a little time wondering if it is acceptable to push emacs as a runtime lately. For example, I've convinced a few co-workers to use magit, and they're comfortable with it when using a shell wrapper to start emacs and call magit-status.

Honestly, I'm kinda convinced that if there was a more locked down "kiosk mode" that didn't let you use the other functionality it could be a good runtime for generic apps.

I've attended a few Haskell conferences over the years and the make up tends to be fairly evenly split between PL researchers, defence, aerospace, and finance. I recall the food stop after an event at Imperial where our table was twenty-ish people from Airbus, Barclays, Lockheed, QinetiQ, and Thales.

If you're looking to work in Haskell there are some avenues to hunt down. Same caveats as with Standard Chartered and Meta mentioned in the article, there is Haskell but it is scuttling around in the corners not flowing from everywhere.

The announcement mentioned in the article was discussed here¹, along with some interesting user perspective².

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31151591

² https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31156298

I'm one of those weird users who works in both, and I've also never really understood the need to pick a side. I initially used emacs for years, and now I've used both for years. I also don't pick a side in the tea and coffee debate, sometimes I want rooibos and others espresso.

Admittedly, my emacs usage at this point is largely to treat it as a collection of distinct apps; fire up in nov-mode¹ mode to read books, fire up in magit-status² to mangle git repository, etc. It really feels like there are a collection of best of breed apps that just happen to built on emacs as a toolkit, most of which are fully functional without buying in to emacs for life(not that I'm saying there is anything wrong with that).

The only time I really use emacs as an actual editing tool is when I'm working on documentation, and that is largely because I like being able to see inline screenshots in that instance. That could equally flip again should I see some feature I want.

¹ https://github.com/wasamasa/nov.el

² https://magit.vc/

Lots of commentary from a couple of days ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31200989