mroll

very cool that you are writing tcl :)

if you haven't found it already, the tclers wiki is a font of wisdom about the language and so many other cool topics. https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/

This looks awesome. I’ve known for a while that I will eventually have to support organizations and teams for https://canopycharts.com and have been dreading writing all that code myself.

Seems like I might not have to :)

> the original engineer of Google's search engine

you mean Larry Page?

Yep. I use a dedicated paper notebook for journaling. Once or twice a month I spend like 30 minutes or an hour writing down what’s been going on, what’s on my mind, what I’m working towards. Usually I do this while watching some low effort tv show.

I love this. Have had the idea myself, but am not committed enough to make it really work. Have been hoping someone makes it happen.

I think if done right it has the potential to unlock a lot of economic value in the form of small software businesses.

You won’t get AirBnB or Tesla from this, but you would get plenty of businesses that could do more than a million ARR with a really small team.

Haha of course this already exists! Thanks a lot for the pointer, I will for sure start playing with it this week :)

Oh wow this is great. I’ve been wanting an org mode integration with GitHub for a while, and this tool might make it easy enough for me to hack together this weekend.

Basically I want to be able to pull up a buffer with a list of issues assigned to me and copy them into my org mode todo list

Hah, yeah. I used spacemacs for 2 years from summer 2018 until about two weeks ago. And you're right! It does incredible things for discoverability with the built in hydra integration.

I switched to Doom Emacs about two weeks ago because it's built to be more performant and the configuration is meant to be a thinner layer.

Even with spacemacs layers, one has to go hunting on the googles and spend a bunch of time tweaking things if the layer doesn't set things up perfectly out of the box. And it rarely does.

Overall, I think spacemacs and doom emacs are amazing. Huge steps up from the base install. I just think there is a long way to go still.

I don't think Emacs is suitable for mass usage. I think it's suitable for power users who are willing to invest time into learning to use a powerful tool. And I also think more people are becoming power users. With a well-crafted tool, you don't have to be a hacker to be a power user. I think the Superhuman email company is an interesting bet on this trend.

My guess is there are really good abstractions that can be built on top of elisp that let people configure emacs to be a powerful tool that fits their workflow like a glove, and doesn't require them to learn elisp or package internals.

Emacs.

I'm responding to the prompt in the OP, not the title.

> What's a piece of software you find essential that you wish you could replace or rewrite?

Emacs is the most essential piece of software in my workflow. It's probably not the worst, but it's the one where I see the most room for improvement. I lean heavily on org-mode for tracking what I'm working on, it's like my command center. I keep two emacs frames open at all times, one dedicated to org-mode.

Supported by an assortment of magical packages like helm, projectile and magit, I write code and anything else more efficiently than any other editor I've used. I was a vim user for ~5 years, and now use evil mode for modal editing in emacs.

So yeah, my opinion is that emacs is the best editor out there. But honestly it takes too much time to configure and maintain. I spend that time, because I don't feel like taking the productivity hit that I would by switching to another editor, but I wish I didn't have to.

I have a vision for a SaaS app that hosts my emacs config and provides me a nice graphical, discoverable interface for managing my configuration. It would have simple, intuitive flows for setting up the essential packages. Like maybe I could scroll through a list of the most popular packages (helm, projectile, hydra, magit, etc), and click to install.

The current state of the art in managing emacs config is googling the name of the package you are trying to configure, and trying to find someone's blog or github from which to copy/paste code from. There has to be a better way.

Is checklist software something people pay for? I recently wrote https://checkfox.app as a toy, inspired by Atul Gawandes “Checklist Manifesto”. I’d love to know if there’s a market for this sort of thing.

I wrote a little web app for making and using checklists. https://checkfox.app/

Hah! Thanks

The first book is actually called “The World of Null-A”. I picked it up at a local used book store last year and enjoyed it. Haven’t read any more of the trilogy yet.

Hey Ivan, this looks great! What are the privacy implications for my data that I want to label with your tool? I’m assuming I upload it to your servers?

I also did not find org-roam super easy to set up, but after a second try I have it running and am enjoying it.

Edit: I tried it a month ago - before installation was more than just (load)'ing the file. Now there are nicely documented use-package instructions and a layer for spacemacs

Yeah, I agree that is something that pretty much is not considered in the public conversation. But it seems like at least having the ability to control CO2 levels is much better than we are now.

Fun read. Also reminds me that I wish I knew of a better password management strategy. I’m currently using an rsa encrypted text file on my laptop

I wish I could see the API docs w/out signing up. Like what endpoints are available, etc.

The last point about players in their thirties appearing in more professional matches needs more clarity. It’s not that “older players are dominating the sport.” It’s that “the two best players of all time happen to be over thirty.” This is not evidence that older players have gained an edge in professional tennis.

emacs org mode. with a heavy customization inspired by bernt hansen (http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html).

Ask the question “How can I make the company better right now?”

Maybe there is some documentation that needs to be written, or some small bug you ran across the other day, etc

Any programmers here use pomodoro? I expect 25 minute interruptions would do more harm than good for my focus when writing code, especially the continuous expectation that I will be interrupted. I don’t have a pressing interest in finding productivity tips, just curious to hear about programmers who have tried this technique

This article makes it seem like the problem that separates BQP and PH is one the classical computers literally cannot solve, given any amount of time. I don't believe that is actually what's going on. If it were the case, this result would have falsified the Church Turing Thesis, and there would be a lot more hype around this.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Do you have a wide range of applications that you need this pre-cut wood for? Or is it one thing? I'm curious

> ...terms and conditions people did not read or understand.

The article acts like this is unprecedented. No one reads terms and conditions. It's not as if people fork over intimate details of their personal lives to Facebook with the defense that "oh the terms and conditions say they can't use this in a way I don't like"

People fork over intimate details of their personal life to companies like fb because they haven't thought about it very hard

Scott has poured many more than one thousand words into the cause of educating people about quantum computing. The point here is that this journalist didn't do his due diligence. Reading the tag line on Scotts blog would have made him question one of the core assumptions he made in his piece.

For what it's worth, here's my take: turning off social media is far and away more "zen" than having it, no matter how infrequently you use it. Being unplugged from that culture has helped me spend more time thinking about and doing things that have lasting impact on my life. Like learning and building. In my experience, caring about staying up to date on pop culture keeps people from actually doing things they say they want to do.

What is the problem your friends have with you not being on Big Social Media? Is it that they want to be able to message you over those platforms? Or do they want you to see things they post? Or something else?

> ...and we have no way of turning it off (temporarily) that we can't just switch right back on...

i solved this problem by convincing myself that i don't actually want to turn it back on