Sounds like a good time to finally set up my bouncer. If only there were one that had good Emacs compatibility.

update-motd seems like it could be useful if it only ever showed important messages (“Please update the xeyes package immediately to avoid the EYEFORK vulnerability, see http://forkbleed.panic for more information”). Showing clickbait will quickly make people immune to reading motd, missing the real messages.

As a long-time Emacs and Magit user, I don’t use Magit to navigate the commit history, I just use git log on the command line (or git log --stat or git log -p or git flog, where 'flog' is aliased to 'log --all --decorate=short --pretty=oneline --graph'). For a single file, I tend to just git log [-p] -- src/thefile.c. I’ve tried the magit log, but I’m just more used to the shell for that.

• Graphical Linear Algebra, by Pawel Sobocinski. With online textbooks, I normally get distracted and then forget about them, but I love the writing style here – this one has me hooked.
• Sin egen herre, by Tore Rem – a biography of author Jens Bjørneboe. Didn’t really know the author before, don’t really feel like reading more of his stuff after getting to know about his life, but it is fascinating how many weird beliefs it is possible to acquire while still being seemingly quite smart.
• Worm, by Wildbow. Addictive fun.

These vary pretty heavily in quality. Many seem to be missing proper quoting. Use with caution.

• Syncthing
• nginx httpd (just static home page)
• Subsonic
• weechat!
• backups of all the other machines (home-grown script using btrfs+LUKS with snapshots; one big usb disk at home and one at my parents house rotating; has so far saved us from deleting family photos many times)

I used to have Owncloud, but got sick of having to (re-)configure the same stuff every update, and Syncthing covered my file syncing needs, while I mostly use git+emacs org-mode for my calendar (and bbdb with Syncthing for contacts).

For websites: Firefox Sync :-) Everything that isn’t a website or is important enough to have more than 3 copies (laptop, workstation, phone) lives in a keepass file, hosted on a nextcloud instance.

An easier way to do this, for Emacs users, is to run “M-x grep” (or my preference “M-x rgrep”) and when it prompts for the query string use “C-x 8 Enter” to bring up the insert-char character prompt, where you can type (and tab complete) the Unicode name or hex code. Hit enter when you’re done and it will insert the character into the grep query string and you can continue typing the rest of the query string.

EDIT: I misunderstood, I thought the goal was to do something like “grep λ myfiles”.

One way to use Emacs to achieve a similar thing to what OP is actually doing is to use “M-x insert-char” (or “C-x 8 Enter”) and then use tab completion to show a list of matching Unicode names and symbols. It supports wildcard matching using *, so you can do something like “*Lambda” - Tab to bring up a list of character names with “lambda” in them. Then, when the character is inserted, use M-x describe-char to view a lot of information about it (character class, category, bidi, code point, its code in the current encoding, etc.)

Pretty neat. The other nearly-universal technique is to attach gdb to the process, and repeatedly stop ask for a backtrace. Works with many interpreted languages like Python or Perl, SQL, C, etc. If you collect 5-10 samples, that’s enough to start with.

And strace is a quick way to see if it’s blocked on a system call or e.g. repeatedly opening the same file.

If you like this kind of thing: http://yourcalendricalfallacyis.com/

More tips:

• If you have lots of data, mawk is often much faster than the other awks (as long as you can live without gnu extensions).
• Another nice tool that I use a lot with csv/tsv’s: http://visidata.org/
• And learn how to do <() style redirection, e.g.

    $ clean () { sed 's/^[0-9]*//' "$@" | LC_ALL=C sort -u; }
    $ comm -12 <(clean file1) <(clean file2)
    # finds common entries in file1 and file2 after removing some cruft from both

In haskell, we cannot say that a Person has a name and a PetAnimal has a name

I haven’t actually tried it, but I thought this was possible already in ghc 8:

• https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/glasgow_exts.html#extension-DuplicateRecordFields
• https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/glasgow_exts.html#extension-OverloadedLabels

I’ve found annoyances with Haskell, but maybe I have no sense of aesthetics or something because the records never bugged me. I much prefer Haskell records to C++ fields, where I have to deal with public/private/protected/const/static/immutable-unless-there’s-a-bug etc.

I love jq but I find its syntax impossible to understand. Every time I use it I look up examples for even basic things. Maybe it makes more sense if you know javascript? I’m not saying I could design something better, just that I’ve struggled with it far more than I expected.

The template type differences stuff looks great; those pages upon pages of template errors that you can get for a simple typo are so overwhelming.

That’s a pretty neat use-case :-)

w-shingling is a fun algorithm to implement, I did this when learning OCaml and had use for a find-similar-docs thing at work (shameless plug).

Reposing my comment here for more engaging feedback: “One idea I’ve had for a while has been smart contextual notifications that take into account what you are doing and remind you if/when the work you do is somewhat related or at least when you’re procrastinating or resting. For example, you go to Amazon and a notification says “ah, you wanted to check this thing out a week ago remember?”. Or “oh you’re on Facebook, how about you answer that email…”. It’d need quite a bit of autonomy and AI of course, but that’s the gist of it.”

At least Mac has the ‘Later’ button! In Ubuntu there is no way to force close a desktop notification. You just need to wait for it to go away. It’s infuriating.

+1 on syncthing, it’s great. Just wish it had something like Syncthing Lite for iPhone (we gave up on fsync()).

I haven’t found anything I’m very happy with for browsing photos though. We have a home server that acts as the “archive” for photos that are edited/processed, some terabytes since my gf’s a photographer. Photos are nicely organised by date and “job name”/event (thanks to rapid-photo-downloader). I could have a web server that allows access, but it’d have to have download buttons in all the right places and search by exif info, dates, names. And preferably the browsing should be fast even if we’re not at home (though it’s OK if full downloads aren’t so fast). What we really wanted was just to be able to quickly browse the folders as if the files were local. But doing that over the network (with thumbnails) is so slow. I ended making a cron job on the server to generate thumbnails in a parallel hierarchy, then the laptops sync that, so there’s a browsable thumbnail folder (taking about 10G now :-S) and a simple right-click menu option in Thunar to grab the real file(s) from a thumbnail. It actually works quite well (and offline browsing of the archive is nice), but feels like a big hack …

Anyone else got similar situations with better solutions?

Laziness is neat. But just not worth it. It makes debugging harder and makes reasoning about code harder. It was the one change in python 2->3 that I truly hate. I wish there was an eager-evaluating Haskell. At least in Haskell, due to monadic io, laziness is at least tolerable and not leaving you with tricky bugs (as trying to consume an iterator in python twice).

Wow, I considered myself a bash advanced user, but you always learn something new with one of these posts!

In this case, I found a new substitution command, !$. I’d been using !!:2 for some time but never thought of $ as a “last item” replacement. Nice!