tlikonen

I think Obnam's idea of deduplication is great and very interesting but I am reluctant to trust complex backup systems. I have used "rsync --link-dest" to reduce space.

With files SHA512SUMS and SHA512SUMS.sign in the current directory the verifying can be as simple as

    gpg --auto-key-retrieve SHA512SUMS.sign

The key is retrieved from user's default keyring or keyservers. The usual keyserver pool (pool.sks-keyservers.net) has the Debian CD signing key. How we can trust that the key is the right one is another matter. It is signed by many Debian developers.

My favourite change is the transition to GnuPG 2.1 as the default /usr/bin/gpg. Particularly the "trust on first use" (TOFU) trust model is a really good improvement.

And the thread you linked is itself a duplicate of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14167469

The original message has a typo in the subject. It says version "25.1" but the message author corrected it after. This is really about 25.2 release.

I use Emacs' org-mode for pretty much all my work notes. It's very structured, long and includes spreadsheets.

But usually I don't use my laptop during work. Instead I print just day's notes (schedule etc.) to a single paper sheet and keep the note paper with me. I do corrections and maybe add notes with a pen. Then later at home I modify my org-mode files to match my note paper.

Usually in Linux the system is installed on an encrypted filesystem (cryptsetup, LUKS). Only kernel and so called initrd image (early boot stuff) is outside the encryption. The disk is opened at very early stage in boot when just about the kernel is loaded. Thus, the encryption is open whenever the operating system is running. Everything is of course still transparently encrypted on disk but the "lock" is open. One must shut down the computer to close the filesystem's encryption.

PGP (now GnuPG) is used more these days than in BBS (Fidonet) years, particularly in the open source community. Software releases and packages in GNU/Linux distributions are signed by the developers. All the time. It happens automatically without end-user noticing. Is this not one definition of "working well?" Lot's of people are passively using it without knowing.

But for messaging it's indeed very marginal. In open source projects' techical mailing lists and version control systems there is pretty much message or commit signing but that's a marginal group who does that.

Character folding in searches is likely useful: simple letters like "a" also match "á", "à", "ä"; quote char " also matches “ and ” and so on.

  (setq search-default-mode #'char-fold-to-regexp)

Quote:

“we are happy to say that we will be shipping an additional small batch of the Jolla Tablet to early backers during early 2016, targeting to send invitations during January. The bad news here is that we are not able to complete the production to fulfill all contributions. In other words, all of our backers will not get a Jolla Tablet.”

(Common) Lisp is a multi-paradign language. It doesn't have any specific logic programming features, no more than any other generic language. Some lisps tend to lean towards functional paradigm. EDIT: OK, maybe Lisps' symbol type helps a bit on logic or AI but there's no built-in resolution algorithm like in Prolog.

But Prolog is really something different. I only know some basic ideas but definitely want to dig deeper in the future.

I made a single-player "squash" pong in about an hour in HTML, CSS and Javascript but that's just the paddle and bouncing. The author has a very good point that could probably be rephrased like this: Making a complete end-user program may require quite lot of studying, planning, wrong choices, rewriting, testing etc. It takes time.

That's nice. Common Lisp implementations, too, allow any characters in symbol names, even spaces and the empty string. Javascript allows wide character set too. I think it's good that languages break out of [a-zA-Z_-]. That said, I'd use pretty limited charset in internationally developed multi-OS code base. People have different keyboards, input systems, knowledge etc.