JNRowe

A few recent discussions here¹², both with a chunk of comments.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30738185 - The jerrycan design goes back over 80 years

² https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29787251 - Wikipedia page

vim also ships with fully documented GoL implementation in $VIMRUNTIME/macros/life.

Or, perhaps it was the sweet spot. A few years earlier a 7up advert was the game¹, although to be fair it isn't that bad for a 90s platformer.

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

Your recall looks to be pretty good ;)

"At the corner is the store known as Soul Scrolls. It’s a franchise: there are Soul Scrolls in every city centre, in every suburb, or so they say. [...] Ordering prayers from Soul Scrolls is supposed to be a sign of piety and faithfulness to the regime, so of course the Commanders’ Wives do it a lot. It helps their husbands’ careers. [...] The machines talk as they print out the prayers; if you like, you can go inside and listen to them, the toneless metallic voices repeating the same thing over and over. Once the prayers have been printed out and said, the paper rolls back through another slot and is recycled into fresh paper again."

Side note: I found the quote by searching my comment history¹ and then picking up the book, because that is faster than finding the text in the book without any hints. I really can't decide if that is good thing or not. Like some super weak version of Chiang's Remem²

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25672286

² https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth...

Discussed already with a different main link¹, and to late for me to delete.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30806875

You jest, but I'm not sure that is a bad idea. bash/zsh seem happy with emojis as function/alias names, and I can input emojis easy enough. In fact some emojis are easier to type in my chosen layout than the string necessary to disambiguate completion for some commands.

Thanks for the idea, and I'll redirect co-worker scorn at U+1F984 for `git push` towards you ;)

Edit to add: Using emoji for commands/arguments is actually quite workable with global aliases or custom zle widgets in zsh, and moderately workable by using $INPUTRC to specify text replacements for readline if you're a bash user.

I'd be interested in reading about the changes as Strava expanded. I imagine they see a lot more casual recreational use as the viral growth moved beyond the club riders/runners, but I'd also expect you see performance increase as they captured more top performers too. Did the performance distribution grow evenly? Do people shift their routes towards segments with accessible leaderboards? …

On cheating: I used to moan about Strava accepting car and train journey speeds when it felt obvious how to detect some of them, but I can't even begin to imagine how to automate detection in the era of e-bikes. People must spend a lot more time flagging rides to maintain their magic internet points trophy now ;)

To further your point about trust a little: Strava-using cyclists are a very specific group of cyclists IME.

Back when I used it my commute had tens of segments with 40km/hr medallists, and a sprint segment with weekly new records in excess of 50km/hr. And, you can even catch snipers rolling on to and off a road near me to protect effort for a two kilometre junction-free sprint most weekends.

I sat here reading this thinking "that is really cool," followed immediately by "hang on a minute I'm only ~750km away." I can't work out if I'm woefully ignorant of the procedures in the UK or if I live somewhere that has no general plans.

Half an hour in to the rabbit hole my answer appears to be: perhaps learn how to use a shovel. There isn't a whole lot of useful info on the government website¹ for longer term problems², not even a calming procedure to deal with the pain from the typo emergency in the first URL.

¹ https://www.gov.uk/government/emergency-preparation-reponse-...

² https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-risk-reg...

The uncomfortable feeling of a "lifetime achievement"-style award aside, Eggert is clearly hugely deserving of the Advancement of Free Software award. Beyond GCC and tzdb work specifically mentioned in the article, a weak grep in /usr/share/doc on my system shows significant contributions to bash, coreutils, diffutils, findutils, grep, gzip, make, patch, tar, util-linux.

In the same vein, there was some discussion on the build up last year¹.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28650019

Perhaps you meant amiwm¹? awm² looks like a different thing.

amiwm is still packaged in at least Debian, and just firing it up in a Xephyr window is pretty nostalgic.

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

² https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardent_Window_Manager

Oops, I probably could've offered examples. So, when writing a mail I can choose to simply give up instead of dropping me in to a dialog for "save draft/quit?", or to drop out of an edit session in `git add --interactive`, etc. The reason it can be useful in these specific instances is that you don't need to unwind your changes if you've run filters to modify the text for example.

Might also want to note :cq[uit] to quit with an error code. This can often be useful when you're using vim as your $EDITOR and wish to tell the calling process that you want to abort.

Far from state of the art, but…

I used to have a cheap Huawei dongle connected to my desktop that I'd interact with via awful scripting against gnokii¹. If you're the type of person that likes hacking up your own solutions it can be quite fun to work with.

After a lot of trial and error^wimprovement I found it useful to use gnokii's SMS mailbox export, and run a job to iterate over the exported mailbox periodically. The simple reason being most scripting languages ship with mbox support out of the box, and there are heaps of tools for handling them from a shell script.

¹ http://gnokii.org

An LWN article on this topic was discussed a couple of weeks ago¹, with a whole heap of comments both here and on the original LWN piece.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30459634

Yeah, something like that.

However, taking "Command-line Applications"¹ as an example it lists six alternatives. I think in the version I'd like to see a good few of them would disappear. For example, I'll presume plac/fire/cement aren't in common use given that only two are packaged in Debian and the two that are don't have reverse dependencies. Cliff looks largely uninteresting too, as outside of OpenStack nothing seems to use it.

I think my ideal implementation would probe recent releases of popular packages for dependencies to see what the community has settled on or moved to. I also suspect this comment that somewhat moves the goalposts also points to the difficulties of maintaining such a document.

¹ https://docs.python-guide.org/scenarios/cli/

The itertools documentation¹ include a recipe to do just that, and links to the excellent more-itertools² package which bundles up a heap of recipes that make iterators even better. This specific case is handled by first_true² in more-itertools.

¹ https://docs.python.org/3/library/itertools.html#itertools-r...

² https://more-itertools.readthedocs.io/en/stable/api.html#mor...

I tend to drift in and out of Python, and follow the same pattern as you suggest when coming back after a couple of releases. Python's version notes are truly excellent¹.

The only thing I really wish for is an ecosystem "what's now" guide, it would list things such as where the community has moved for common libraries. Off the top of my head it would have covered things like nose to pytest and such. Obvious problem being I just can't imagine how you'd get buy-in to make such a thing work, especially without it getting overrun with grifters.

¹ https://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/index.html

Big discussion from earlier - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30608936

The biggest improvement for my stellarium usage was creating my own landscape¹, as having a quick way to see whether that early morning partial eclipse is behind those trees is really useful. Also, kinda super fun to sit in your office chair spinning around your own garden.

I actually created a bunch of landscapes for places that I have reasonable access to, so that I can choose an appropriate place for observations without having to resort to guesswork.

I'll note that you can create usable versions with the panorama function on a cheap phone and gimp.

¹ http://stellarium.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Customising...

My favourite thing about Vala is probably Genie¹. Having an alternate syntax is a great idea, and I often wonder why we don't see it more often.

I was always a little sad that Vala didn't really catch on inside Gnome(or at large), as it is a really nice language to code in and working with GObject feels very natural within it.

¹ https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Genie

Behind the scenes mailprocessing basically works by executing your Python configuration file with some injected globals to make processing easier, so you can apply any hacks you feel like to workaround breakages in the incoming mail.

In the specific case of Arabic characters in headers, you can see from the source¹ that when decoding fails an error is logged but you're still able to work on that header. How much work you're willing to put in to recover from that error by guessing charsets(perhaps via chardet²) is up to you.

The level of customisation that is possible is my favourite feature of this type of software. You can start with a config that is just a couple of lines, but it grows with you with no artificial ceiling imposed by the software author's imagination.

¹ https://github.com/mailprocessing/mailprocessing/blob/master...

² https://github.com/chardet/chardet

Iff you like Python, then mailprocessing¹ is a nice solution for this. You just write a small Python script to implement your rules:

    for mail in processor:
        if mail['X-Bugzilla-URL'].contains('zephyr-ds'):
            mail.move('Zephyr')
        elif ...

Given the layer it operates on you don't need to worry quite so much about processing errors dropping mails either.

¹ https://mailprocessing.github.io/mailprocessing/

I really love how relative this feels, as for me "creator of mc¹" feels like the thing I owe him most thanks for. For example, every now and then I work on a project that is built on the foundations from mono, but all day I work in a manner that is built around mc.

¹ https://www.midnight-commander.org

While the information in there is good, a bunch of the settings are now redundant¹. The ones that jumped out to me were esckeys, ruler and showcmd.

Not that I'm saying you can't — or shouldn't — re-set options, just that the linked documentation is a little dated. FWIW, I personally re-set a couple of default options mostly so that I have a point of reference for how an option works when I'm digging about in my config.

I'm of the opinion that the combination of recent vim and Tim Pope's sensible.vim² is The Minimal Setup™.

¹ The site says the last update was 2014, and back then $VIMRUNTIME/defaults.vim wasn't a thing for example(7.4.2111).

² https://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible

Previous discussion from earlier today¹ with a hefty bunch of comments.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30395130

> zsh comes with a function to check "rm" arguments and issue a warning if rm * is supplied.

For those of us following along at home that is the RM_STAR_SILENT option, and there is also a RM_STAR_WAIT option should you wish to just have a little wait first.

> it is simple to write "calc '3 * 4 + 5'"

You can use the GP's syntax without quoting on zsh by using the noglob builtin: `noglob calc 3 * 4 + 5`. There are a few commands I like to alias with `noglob =$cmd` for nicer interactive usage.

--

GNU coreutils' cat and GNU grep will also error out in the basic case of IO loops with `{cat,grep}: foos: input file is output file`.

I largely agree with the premise that there are a heap of problems though, and having some environments that fix the some of the problems isn't all that useful.

Last Week "Ask HN: How are you preparing for the incoming recession?"¹. Seeing the question twice in a week does make me think I should be considering this a little more ;)

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30263666

I've received two today as it happens; one with a quite conversational tone, and the other with a five-point questionnaire. I have to say I quite liked the transactional nature of the second one, it felt more real.

Both were for abnormally low level roles, so perhaps in a few months time they'll be sending me info about jobs wallpapering their warehouses.

Edit: Ick, reading the other comments the pay is higher than I realised for the roles they're suggesting. I'm feeling different an hour later.