HN user
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PSA: If you are using AWS, you should be using Session Manager for remote access to your EC2 instances if possible - it is free and trivial to enable. Azure offers Azure Bastion, which is exactly what it says. Both of these can keep hostile SSH connections completely away from your servers, and also help to aggregate access logs.
I expect nushell to massively change how I work:
It's a shell that is actually built for structured data, taking lessons learned from PowerShell and others.
And let's not forget to be grateful towards for-profit companies that contribute to open source.
The main sponsor of WINE is CodeWeavers, who have been paying folks that work on WINE for a very long time, and are involved in Proton development:
They sell a supported version of WINE for Linux, macOS and ChromeOS, as well as providing engineering services to clients like Valve.
I am currently evaluating dsq and its partner desktop app DataStation. AIUI, the developer of DataStation realised that it would be useful to extract the underlying pieces into a standalone CLI, so they both support the same range of sources.
dsq CLI - https://github.com/multiprocessio/dsq DataStation desktop app - https://datastation.multiprocess.io/
Two alternative CLI tools that I looked at:
sq - https://sq.io/ octosql - https://github.com/cube2222/octosql
Honourable mentions to:
Miller - https://miller.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html Dasel - https://daseldocs.tomwright.me/
These don't use SQL.
VisiData is also amazing for data navigation, although it requires some effort to get the model:
I've been experimenting with Hatch:
The USP of Hatch is that it uses the latest generation of Python standards and tech under the covers, so you have a unified tool that's less quirky than previous ones. Poetry and pipenv predate some of the improvements in Python packaging, so had to develop some things in their own way.
The Python Packaging Authority, the team that maintain setuptools etc. for core Python.
There's a discussion here:
The maintainers of the Python packaging have just officially adopted Hatch:
Hatch aims to do what Poetry does, but is strictly compliant with Python standards.
There are a few projects that take inspiration from PowerShell, but they haven't got mass adoption. I have hopes that Nushell will be a success when it gets to 1.0:
FWIW, AWS now have an official SDK for Rust in beta:
https://aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-rust/
There are people at Microsoft working on a Rust SDK for Azure, but it's explicitly a volunteer effort with no support guarantees at the moment:
https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-rust
These days I probably would not look at any language that did not have SDKs for AWS and Azure, for similar reasons.
I use Joplin, which has a similar feature set but also mobile apps:
It supports various types of file stores for syncing between devices. I've used OneDrive and WebDAV. The project has also recently launched a cloud service for people who want to sync between devices but don't want to set up a network file store.
The wheels started to come off with .NET back when ORMs became a thing, slightly before Rails. Look up "ALT.NET" movement for the history.
TLDR: Microsoft wanted .NET developers to only use tech from Microsoft, used various tactics to achieve that, and people got the message. If you wanted to use modern tech or develop innovative stuff, .NET was not a comfortable place to be.
Microsoft have tried to move past that, but never really have. .NET has never had a healthy Open Source eco-system.
These days, I am really impressed by the MATE desktop environment:
It does the stuff that you need without excess weight, the look and feel is flexible enough that you can make it look like other systems if you prefer, and the small development team consistently put out new releases to fix and refine it without any drama.
AWS use it for their Linux cloud-based desktop service, probably for these reasons.
Ubuntu MATE is a great showcase for what can be done with MATE. It's arguably more user-friendly than the main Ubuntu, with the MATE desktop and quick-start features like a well-curated software selector.
Red Hat's business model is that they ship a defined set of components and patch those components as needed for years without breaking compatibility.
Red Hat explicitly will not ship a component unless they can build it from source and update it, and have confidence that they can continue to do so for the life of the OS version.
That's what being a responsible "enterprise" operating system vendor means.
I installed Podman 3.3.1 on a Mac yesterday from Homebrew and volume mounts were definitely an issue, but it otherwise worked as advertised on the command-line.
The bugs cited in the article are already fixed in the code, so I don't hold those against it.
I did have an issue that was my fault, encountered one genuine bug, and was disappointed to find that there's some work to be done before third-party tools can use it as a Docker replacement:
https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/11397
I agree that Podman is not yet a complete replacement for Docker on macOS, but the experiment was successful enough for me that I intend to try Podman instead of Docker on Linux servers.
"Peter Pan versioning"
This really should be the term for projects that are perpetually releasing 0.x versions.
Maintainers are free to release their software under whatever terms that they wish, but if you actively encourage people to use your software and do not want to maintain backwards compatibility, then IMO, you should be very honest about that.
No questions, but a huge "thank you". I have not been this delighted with a tool since discovering Git. Once the little initial learning is done, it's so fast, powerful and easy to hand that it already feels like an indispensible part of my toolkit, after just a few days.
The author of this has been running with it for a couple of years. Previous HN threads:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Flatpak%20%E2%80%93%20A%20Secu...
The tone and varied assortment of alleged issues makes me feel like he started by deciding that Flatpak was bad, and then found whatever he could to support his view.
"solutions journalism" is an really interesting effort to adapt journalism to current realities in a positive way.
"It investigates and explains, in a critical and clear-eyed way, examples of people working toward solutions. It focuses not just on what may be working, but how and why it appears to be working, or alternatively, why it may be stumbling. Using the best available evidence, it delves deep into the how-to’s of problem solving, often structuring stories as puzzles or mysteries that investigate questions like: What models are having success reducing the dropout rate in public schools? How do they actually work? What are they doing differently than others that’s resulting in a better outcome?"
https://medium.com/@soljourno/what-is-solutions-journalism-c...
Yes, for me the sandboxing is not the immediate benefit.
The instant value is providing channels for developers to ship apps to their users without either side having to mandate the OS that the other uses. Right now, even well-funded projects like Visual Studio Code have to pick and choose which Linux distributions and versions that they package for.
They don't provide packages to the main repositories for Linux distributions, partly because the release cycles are so wildly different. I don't want Debian stable to ship a completely new base system every few weeks, but the release cycle of my Web browser is a new version every six weeks.
In the ideal Flatpak world, I can run Solus or whatever distribution I choose, and the app developers that I rely on can not care about distribution market share, and just target Flatpak runtimes.
The challenge is going to be to ensure that Flatpak repositories and the Canonical App Store (the server end of snap) enforce good enough legal and security checks once vendors have started using them.
Joplin is everything that I want in a note-taking app, and I use it constantly. It actually does support linking between notes.
Fastmail provide email, address book, calendars, and file storage for $3 per user per month:
This is the issue:
unless there's some particular piece of software you need which isn't supported.
Lots of people need to run very specific pieces of software for their work, or their pastimes. If you want to switch to Linux, you have to look at all of the software that you use, and replace the products that don't have Linux versions. If you can't, then you can't switch.
Snap is an Ubuntu thing. It's basically a client for the Canonical app store.
Yes, restic would be my pick: easy to deploy and use, well-maintained.
If you want some assurance, CERN are deploying restic:
as soon as I stop paying, all those memories are gone, lost in time like tears in rain. Sure it is really nice and convenient software and the user experience is fantastic but if I stop paying, it's all lost.
Yes, this is why I made Open Source and open formats an absolute requirement when I started looking at journaling software. The content is irreplaceable.
After trying several things, I found that Joplin does everything that I need for journaling and note-taking. I made a point of donating to the project the equivalent of what I would have paid for a commercial offering.
I use Joplin heavily, for media queues and all of the information storage that I can. I even keep Web addresses there, rather than in the favourites of my Web browsers.
It's an Open Source note-taking app that stores Markdown and Web clips in SQLite databases, and can sync between instances using a variety of options, including generic WebDAV services. It has desktop and mobile versions, so the information is available to me everywhere. I still keep my emails on IMAP and my Website in Git, but I will draft any long text content in Joplin, and then just copy the text into the final location.
Walter Jon Williams, author of the cyberpunk classic Hardwired, also wrote two books in a setting that fuses cyberpunk and fantasy: Metropolitan and City on Fire.
Version control is one of those things where a lot of the value comes from using what other people use.
By definition, version control is for collaboration, so using a less well-known version control system impedes the regular work of your project.
There's also the issue that version control is integrated into lots of other software. Everything now supports Git and Subversion, but support for other VCSes is rarer.
This is kind of unfortunate, because it makes innovation hard. Projects like pijul exist to try to move the state of the art forward, but it's difficult to see how they will gain adoption.
Sourcehut is a really well-engineered and well-run project. The architecture is SCM-independent, so Mercurial is not disadvantaged.
The lead developer goes out of his way to support less-popular systems, such as *BSDs and Mercurial, so if you work with more niche technologies, you may find Sourcehut a good home for your projects.
Brad Smith has been with Microsoft since 1993, and is one of the lawyers that enabled the business practices that made Microsoft notorious, and the target of multiple legal actions. Microsoft only settled with the DOJ in 2002. The company pursued policies of forced upgrades to Windows 10 and aggressive use of telemetry whilst he was president.
Feel free to tell us how your professional ethics as a lawyer enabled you to make change at Microsoft before you were general counsel and president, Brad. Or after you got the top jobs.