liw

I disagree. They're a warning and an error message, and should go to stderr.

It may _also_ be useful to show them on the terminal, in case the user would like to see them now, and has redirected stderr somewhere other than the terminal. In that case a program might show them on /dev/tty as well.

Error and warning messages are not status or progress messages, at least not in the context of this discussions, which is that a long-running computation should indicate to the user that it's doing something.

Stderr should only get error messages, and, arguably, warning messages. It shouldn't get status and progress messages. Those should go to /dev/tty, and the program should be gracefully quiet if run without a terminal, e.g., from cron.

It still seems to be OK to bring Note 7s on airplanes. Not bottles of water, though, that's too dangerous.

Yes, absolutely. I, for example, am one, though I admit I was born only after humanity has visited the Moon. Still, more than 16 years ago.

Aliases are per shell process. You need to reload your .bashrc (or whatever file you define aliases in) in every shell. Shell scripts are instantly available in all shell instances. Also, shell scripts can be invoked by shell scripts, which aliases can't.

Making static websites for over a decade, now.

(Can make user-editable wikis as well.)

The Economist is following mainstream journalism in general, then.

Does pointing that out advance the discussion in a useful way? Does it help having a constructive debate? Does it make anyone's day or life better? Are you just posting in the hope of getting some upvotes for making a funny, snarky short comment? Is your comment actually relevant to the discussion? Does the fact that you ask that question indicate that you already know the answer?

Babies need to be taught how to use the nipple. Not intuitive.

You run it in such a way that the paths are identical. For example, by using the -r option.

$ mkdir foo

$ echo foo > foo/bar

$ cp -a foo foo2

$ summain -r foo > foo.summain

$ summain -r foo2 > foo2.summain

$ diff foo*.summain

Since I develop backup software, this is a problem I needed to solve (e.g., for verifying that restore works). So I wrote a tool: http://liw.fi/summain/

It produces output that is meant to be usefully diffable.

The difference between free software and open source isn't copyleft. Both free software and open source embrace copyleft.

From your writing I deduce you are of the opinion that open source is more or less equivalent to permissive licensing, i.e., using BSD-style licenses.

The actual difference between the two is that open source values the productivity benefits that come from sharing, whereas free software is primarily about protecting the freedom of people.

Mocking should be done carefully, and one should avoid mocking things one doesn't understand.

I've followed, and sometimes participated in, variations of this discussion since 1989. I wrote up an article about this topic on the Yakking blog, recently: http://yakking.branchable.com/posts/comparative-freeness/

It's not a useful discussion that will ever go well, so I'm not surprised it's a big subthread on HN.

The Unix command /bin/true (do nothing, exit with code zero) can be implemented as an empty file. When it's run, the kernel doesn't recognize it as binary code, so it gives it to /bin/sh to run.

There's at least two bugs in a zero-byte implementation of /bin/true: it's too slow and it uses too much memory.

I have been keeping a journal in a private ikiwiki instance for several years now. Basically, I set up an ikiwiki blog that generates a static website, served by Apache over localhost. Files are in markdown, and kept in git. I do searches via "git grep". The static site is for easier browsing.

I've added things like "topics" (sub-blogs based on links to a topic page) and "people" (ditto). A topic is a page and automatically shows (via ikiwiki inline) all the blog posts that link to the topic page. A person is also represented by a page, and similarly lists linking blog posts. Topics are usually using a meta link directive in ikiwiki, whereas people use a person/lastname.firstname link to achieve the same.

I wrote a little tool to make admining topic and person pages easier, and to easily add new blog posts and attach images or other files to the blog post. http://git.liw.fi/cgi-bin/cgit/cgit.cgi/jt/ has the code; I should probably write this up some day.

I've published some of my journal, related to one of my hobby projects. http://liw.fi/obnam/journal-dump/ if you're curious, though from server access logs I know nobody is.

I keep my journal private mostly so I can be more honest when I write. If I need to, I can be rude and impolite and use quite dirty language, which I wouldn't if I was writing in public. Also, some topics are private and nothing good will come from disclosing them.

That seems like a very old version to review.

I don't recognise the Nautilus I use from the screenshot or the description. For example, I have a completely different sidebar and I have no problem having multiple tabs in a window.

http://ikiwiki.info/ supports comments.

There are several variants of "static website":

* Site is generated by its author, and won't change until author changes and re-generates it.

* Site generates content when something changes (e.g., new comment), not on each page view. (Cf. ikiwiki in cgi mode.)

I doubt joeyh wants to add tools to moreutils that already exist as separate projects of their own.

Here's another tiny browser: http://www.netsurf-browser.org/

At a previous job, we built and installed and ran a system test with that faster than Firefox unpacked the source tarball. OTOH, it's quite limited, and Javascript support isn't really there yet.

It tells you that your file is corrupted. You can then restore from backups, re-download, or take some other corrective action, such as delete the file, reboot the machine, re-install the operating system, or play Quake 2 to test your RAM and graphics.

Never underestimate the value of a reason to play Quake 2.

SSH is originally from Finland. Unlike GPG, it's not an implementation of a pre-existing spec, so it might make a somewhat better example.

The BSD license allows the software to be made non-free. The GPL doesn't. To me, this means the GPL wins on freedom.

Not everyone agrees. Hence, subjective interpretation. Saying otherwise is just trolling.

As a Debian developer I was greatly surprised when I read on Ars Technica that Debian had chosen to support snaps.

If landlords and letting agents and real-estate agents do this, should not tenants do it too? Could we have a service where a tenant gets a "creepiness report" on a potential landlord/agent?

Actually, probably better not. Escalating mutual destruction scenarios are not a useful long-term strategy.

Come to think of it, a variant of it is still packaged in Debian, package is called "arc".

Incidentally, for anyone choosing a name, the namecheck program from the Debian devscripts package is handy for checking if a particular name is already in use. Not perfect, but handy anyway.

Not only that, there's a historical program called Arc that is also a file archiver/compressor. It led to PKZIP.