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witten

521 karma · joined April 19, 2008

http://torsion.org/
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witten··on Why Omarchy Exists
Your bigotry is not welcome here.
witten··on Why Omarchy Exists
You may want to look up the paradox of tolerance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
witten··on Why Omarchy Exists
And in case you don't want to judge for yourself: https://drewdevault.com/weird-guys/#dhh
witten··on BorgBackup 2.0 supports Rclone – over 70 cloud providers in addition to SSH
borgmatic's "spot" check (probabilistically) protects against both of those failure modes: https://torsion.org/borgmatic/docs/how-to/deal-with-very-lar...
witten··on BorgBackup 2.0 supports Rclone – over 70 cloud providers in addition to SSH
Sure thing! If you have any feedback on how it works (or doesn't) for you, please feel free to file a ticket.
witten··on BorgBackup 2.0 supports Rclone – over 70 cloud providers in addition to SSH
You may also be interested in borgmatic's (beta) "spot" check, which compares your backup archive's files to your source files: https://torsion.org/borgmatic/docs/how-to/deal-with-very-lar...
witten··on Quadlets might make me finally stop using docker-compose
I actually had the opposite reaction to it, but I do think it's nice there are tools for every use case and preference.
witten··on Quadlets might make me finally stop using docker-compose
So is Podman, if you are to believe Red Hat's marketing on it.
witten··on Show HN: Mox - Modern full-featured low-maintenance self-hosted mail server
With component-based solutions like Mailu, the junk/non-junk categorization you do in your mail client (via folders, not flags) indeed does inform the training of the spam filter used on incoming mail.
witten··on Ask HN: How does TurboTax get away with dark patterns?
I can confirm that the online process for deleting an account still does not work! Gets into an endless loop sending repeated validation emails. (Firefox with all blockers disabled.)
witten··on Deduplicating Archiver with Compression and Encryption
Thanks for the shout out, Manu! I'll also plug an all-in one Borg + borgmatic Docker image (https://hub.docker.com/r/b3vis/borgmatic/) that I've used to backup to both BorgBase and rsync.net.
witten··on Things I Learned from Five Years in Climate Tech
A bunch of this resonates with me, having spent many years in climate tech as well. I laughed at the part about selling a pilot to a utility in three months though. That's like super lightning speed in this industry.
witten··on OpenWRT will natively support NextDNS in upcoming 19.07.0 release
That's the old way of doing things. And I've been there. Do I want Tomato Shibby.. or will this other weird ROM work better? Hmm, the home page isn't in English on this one. And this other fork was last released March 2011..

No more of that. Today, buy a router OpenWrt supports and just install the official images and get on with your life.

witten··on GitRoyalty–The First Open Source Paywall
Yup, totally understood about the second subscription. The challenge is getting that first subscription though, when a particular user hasn't yet signed up for (or even heard of) the service. At that point, it's a fair amount of friction from where I'm sitting.
witten··on GitRoyalty–The First Open Source Paywall
While this is pretty ingenious, and "solving" open source funding is a noble goal, there's a pretty practical impediment to GitRoyalty working in the real world: For new or existing projects, a big draw of open source is the on-boarding process.. You can download, install, and start playing with a library or application to see if it meets your needs with almost zero friction. And that's a big part of the selection process for any new project.

But with GitRoyalty, you can't even install the software to see if you want to use it or take a dependency on it.. without at minimum ponying up a credit card and signing up for a free trial.

My take is that this roadblock will turn away new users in sufficient numbers that it'll hurt projects with this paywall in place. Users will leave in droves for competing projects with less install friction. Not because they don't believe in paying, but because they don't know if they want to pay yet.

The projects that can afford to turn away users like this are the well-known ones with big-name maintainers, corporate sponsors, and thousands of GitHub stars. But these also happen to be the projects least in need of funding.

As difficult as it is to implement, a better place for a paywall would be after the user has installed the software, evaluated it, and decided to roll it out in production. That would bring the payment closer to the point of value, and also keep the on-boarding friction nice and low.

witten··on Number of Self-Published Titles Jumped 40% in 2018
I can see how it seems that way (that self-publishing gets authors noticed by publishers), but it's actually pretty rare that it works out that way for any given writer. As I understand it, publishers generally don't look favorably upon a self-published author.. unless we're talking pre-published Andy Weir level numbers.
witten··on We are on the cusp of a disruption in food and agricultural production
And xanthan gum, another example of this general process (perhaps without the "programming"), has been around since the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthan_gum
witten··on Simple SFTP Hosting
Also check out borgmatic for configuring Borg. Works well with rsync.net: https://torsion.org/borgmatic/
witten··on The 'microworkers' making digital life possible
Already exists for job descriptions! https://jobdescription.app

For all I know, it could exist for haircuts too.

witten··on Show HN: Saag as a Service – macronutrient-portioned Indian spinach curry
What about the high level of oxalates in spinach, the over-consumption of which can result in kidney stones[1]?

[1] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/oxalates-in-spinach-and-kid...

witten··on How to Automatically Backup a Linux VPS to a Separate Cloud Storage Service
That's true, although there are now a handful of BorgBackup remote storage vendors (rsync.net, BorgBase, etc.) that you can pay to run the server-side hosting for you. Probably not nearly as cheap as, say, S3.. but it does get closer to "just point your client here and hit go". And they offer additional sauce on top that you'd have to roll yourself with S3.. Backup activity monitoring, etc.
witten··on How to Automatically Backup a Linux VPS to a Separate Cloud Storage Service
I don't know about "should", but one way to do it is to put both the backup script and the cron job to run it into a single, separate, backup-only container. Then tell that container (via volume mounts, etc.) what volumes to backup from other containers. Example container (non-Restic) that does this: https://hub.docker.com/r/b3vis/borgmatic/
witten··on How to Automatically Backup a Linux VPS to a Separate Cloud Storage Service
You might be thinking of Borg Backup, which is written in Python: https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/
witten··on GnuCash: Open-source double-entry accounting software
Yeah, I haven't tried it with an existing importer, but I can't say I'm surprised. FWIW, it does work pretty well in combination with finance-dl (same author): https://github.com/jbms/finance-dl
witten··on GnuCash: Open-source double-entry accounting software
> It's a bit annoying that you have to configure it with Python code but once you set it up it's pleasant to use.

Not necessarily a good idea in every case, but if it's "just data" in the Python config file, you could make the Python config instead slurp in an actual data file of your desired format (YAML, TOML, whatever), and then transform it into Python data structures as needed.

witten··on GnuCash: Open-source double-entry accounting software
It's also not too difficult to throw Fava and Beancount into a Docker container and host it on a web server, if that's your thing.
witten··on GnuCash: Open-source double-entry accounting software
No. It doesn't support investment data at all.
witten··on GnuCash: Open-source double-entry accounting software
I've actually found double-entry bookkeeping really useful for personal finances. Let's say I transfer money from one financial institution to another (say, a bank to an investment firm). With double-entry, I can track and reconcile both sides ("legs") of that transfer: one positive, and one negative. And they have to match up for things to balance.
witten··on GnuCash: Open-source double-entry accounting software
Have you seen Beancount-import (https://github.com/jbms/beancount-import)? It provides a web interface just focusing on the import and transaction reconciling/categorization piece, and includes a decision-tree-based classifier that learns as you go.
witten··on Black – Uncompromising Python code formatter
You can disable string normalization with Black, and then continue using single quotes all day. But then, yeah, you give up enforced standardization on that.
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