This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

I'm curious on how to get started in self hosting. I have computer experience, being an Android Developer, but I hardly have experience in Linux and backend/networking work.

I've been wanting to start up a Plex/Jellyfin server for a while, and I have an old system sitting around with a Ryzen 1700 with a graphics card in there as well that's been begging for attention, and maybe I can throw on a Minecraft server in there as well. Since I travel a bunch, it would be nice too to be able to access my media for when I'm traveling, or to let my parents or friends access some shows if they so desire!

What I'm worried about is exposing my network to the internet basically. I used to run a Minecraft server with port forwarding and such on a personal computer but now I'm realizing that that's probably a bit unsafe lol.

Basically, are there any guides that I can look at, or any of your own experiences that could potentially help me or anyone who's interested?

I'm looking at starting to do a PC build and I'm a bit lost on which way to go CPU wise.

Proposed use case: linux, some gaming (usually older games), possibly trying to learn home lab/self hosting types of things probably in a VM but nothing really heavy. I do want to run Starfield when it comes out and maybe be able to try VR some time in the future.

I'd like to have a bit of a future proof system while getting value for my money, as in I'd like to spend less but I will spend more if it matters. This is where I'm sort of getting lost.

I tend to lean towards Intel because VM's and multitasking should work better (I think) but people seem to believe that AMD is better bang for the buck?

I feel like I'm likely not going to swap CPU's, but RAM, GPU, and storage are easy to swap so I'm not to worried.

I know medium has an RSS feed that can be accessed by adding /feed/ before the username/publication name but it's truncated if the publication has a paywall. I've been looking for a way to get the full-text feed but could not find a solution, it looks like it adds a parameter to the link in the rss feed, similar to ?source=rss-d00bc5bb7954------2 but I can't figure out how to remove it. any ideas ?

I have a server running Unraid at home. I have ~20 docker containers running at the moment with almost all of them only available within my local network. I just stood up an instance of Seafile on the server to act as a google drive replacement. Still in the early test phase before I commit to throwing important stuff on there. I have my domain proxied through Cloudflare so none of my local ports are exposed to the internet. Seafille has complicated passwords set for admin and user accounts (generated with Bitwarden, hot damn I love that app). I also enabled 2FA on each account. I know that I can further clamp it down using some of Cloudflare's extra access controls but in my admittedly limited experience, those all cause issues getting an app to authenticate with the service. Web apps don't have this issue of course.

So am I ok with this setup? I can encrypt the data before uploading easily as it's a built in feature of Seafile. Or would it be better to just run with local only and run a VPN to access when I'm outside?

I figure just about any effort along these lines I trust more than Google with my data. But I may be overconfident in that perhaps. I'm still learning the ropes with Linux and self-hosting in general.

I mean this in the sense of "I find a file on a website that I want to have download directly to my laptop without having to download to my phone and then transfer from my phone to my laptop?"

Something I can use in the case "ope that's an interesting file that I'll forget about before I'm at my laptop"

General Programming Q&A thread! Ask any questions about programming, answer the questions of other users, or post suggestions for future threads.

Don't forget to format your code using the triple backticks or tildes:

Here is my schema:

```sql
CREATE TABLE article_to_warehouse (
  article_id   INTEGER
, warehouse_id INTEGER
)
;
```

How do I add a `UNIQUE` constraint?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

I know the basics commands, command substitution, redirection, pipelines, and I know about .bashrc, .vimrc etc. but I feel like I still don't know a lot and I feel a bit lost as to where to learn more. I know I'm being a bit vague, but that's on purpose, I don't really know what's possible. feel free to suggest any book or resource that you think would help me learn more about linux (I also haven't been keeping up with it lately, so any new stuff like what's NixOS would help)

Many of you are probably familiar with Show HNs from HackerNews. Perhaps we are not yet big enough to share those as regular top-level posts, and it is also hard to distinguish between plain self-promotions — it might thus suit us better to have these in a more controlled way.

If you are interested in sharing your project, please send a top-level comment as a reply. Probably sticking to HN’s relevant ruling will be a good starting point, paraphrasing the especially important parts:

[Show ~] is for something you've made that other people can play with. [Tildes] users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread. The project must be something you've worked on personally and which you're around to discuss.

A [Show ~] needn't be complicated or look slick. The community is comfortable with work that's at an early stage.

Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally without barriers such as signups or emails. You'll get more feedback that way.

If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do a [Show ~]

:wave: everyone, I've been thinking about where to put non-technical blog posts and what to call them since, so far, I have bookmark/, cheatsheet/, howto/, note/, snippet/ and tutorial/ folders already[1].

I think those cover most of the things I like writing about and I intend to share, but I also enjoy poetry, analyzing movies, political commentary and writing an essay here and there.

Following from that, I kept essay/, poem/ and commentary/ around for whenever I felt like sharing some of my non-technical writings, but I don't like those folders :smile:. They seem way too granular, more akin to tags than categories, both of which are contained in each file's metadata.

Tags, however, don't feel like a "pillar"/category of a Zettelkasten/ramblings/thoughts crate. They're empty at the moment and in draft/, so it's the perfect chance to do some re-structuring and avoid the issues I faced when I ditched blog/category and chose the current structure.

In case you're asking yourself why I didn't put everything in the same folder, as they reflect categories and each .md file has category metadata already, it's because the drafts in draft/ became unmanageable (+120). So, in an effort to give myself an easier way to navigate and edit, I decided /folders were going to reflect the categories that existed. I'm aware it can be that after note #50 or something I have the same problem, and thus it wouldn't have made a difference whether notes were together with tutorials or not. I've decided to deal with that problem when it arises :)

I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts! Would you keep essay/, poem/ and commentary/ or merge them into something else? note/ are short and wouldn't feel right for longer ramblings. I am not a big fan of writings/ as everything is a "writing", prose/ also doesn't quite fit and so far the only one I've sort of liked is reflection/ since essays, poems, and comments on happenings are the result of reflecting.

/rant over, I know, I'm overthinking it. Let those not guilty throw the first stone :)

[1] I've removed quite a bit of the irrelevant stuff but kept what I believe is relevant, but feel free to ask away in case something necessary is missing.

.
├── bookmark/
│   └── sample.md
├── cheatsheet/
│   ├── sample.md
│   └── sample.md-data
├── commentary/
├── draft/
│   ├── bookmark/
│   │   └── sample.md
│   ├── cheatsheet/
│   │   └── sample.md
│   └── ...
├── essay/
├── extra/
│   ├── archive/
│   ├── blob/
│   └── robots.txt
├── howto/
│   └── sample.md
├── note/
│   └── sample.md
├── poem
├── private/
│   └── sample.md
├── snippet/
│   └── sample.md
└── tutorial/
    ├── sample.md
    └── sample.md-data/
        ├── sample.png
        └── ...

So I have an old MacBook Pro (mid-2014) Core i5 which I've just installed Ubuntu 22.04.2 on. Most things are working fine but the screen randomly flickers and then goes black and then after varying lengths of time will pop back on again. I've been googling around and found lots of instances of similar graphics glitches but can't quite find a solution.

Any suggestions?

As a not quite "old man" I was wondering how many former BBS sysops are here?

In the early-mid 90s, I used to run a single line PCBoard powered hobby BBS and dabble in making PPEs (PCBoards programming language for plug ins/mods). I also help friends set up SpitFire, Searchlight, Synchronet, WWIV and Aftershock (total PITAs from what I remember)--basically anything free, crackable or unlimited trial.

Since I was the only sysop that ran PCBoard I was invited to become an officer in our local User Group to run their whopping 3 line BBS and give classes (that was quite the technological achievement back then). That is something I truly do miss. I was, by far, the youngest member of the User Group (your average member probably had grandkids my age) but it was a meritocracy.

People seemed eager to learn and share information as they found it. Before computers, 3d cards and the internet was ubiquitous, you were automatically accepted into a knowing crowd if you put in the effort/time to join a BBS, forum or (early) MMO. Exclusion brought inclusion, if that makes sense. If you torched your reputation by acting like a jackass it was difficult to move on like a locust to another area.

So many stories. So many high jinks that would be deemed illegal today, lol.

Everything that is old, is new again.

I'm getting a lot of BBS vibes in the aftermath of Rexxit. The slower pace of Tildes reminds me so much of the BBS forums (while I know Tildes isn't new, it is growing in popularity in the aftermath.) Even the Fediverse harkens back to the days of early BBS synch nets.

Now if only I could find a modern remake of Tradwars 2002.

General Programming Q&A thread! Ask any questions about programming, answer the questions of other users, or post suggestions for future threads.

Don't forget to format your code using the triple backticks or tildes:

Here is my schema:

```sql
CREATE TABLE article_to_warehouse (
  article_id   INTEGER
, warehouse_id INTEGER
)
;
```

How do I add a `UNIQUE` constraint?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

Where do you find volunteers to help with open source projects? Such as:

• https://www.codeshelter.co
• https://hacktoberfest.com
• https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com

For example, with KeenWrite, I'm looking for help help with a specific feature that could be applicable to a wide audience (i.e., academia and technical writers). The lion's share of the effort for cross-references would be an extension or change to the flexmark-java library: parsing a de facto standard cross-reference syntax, rather than direct changes to my text editor.

I've been experimenting with Ubuntu and Mint on VirtualBox for a few days, and I fail to see the utility for less tech savvy people such as myself. I have experience in HTML and CSS as well as dabbling in Codecademy for recreation, but higher level computing is new to me. I don't know how to navigate a terminal nor how to stop Windows from crashing, but I'm open to learn.

I had to use the Arch Linux live boot usb today and I was pleasantly surprised to hear a short beepy music play when it got booted. It felt quite welcoming!

In my particular case, it served quite useful too as my laptop currently does not have an internal display, and nothing shows up on the external HDMI monitor until after the OS boots up, so it was quite reassuring as well.

I have now configured my GRUB to play a small sound as well (since I have multiple bootloaders installed).

How To

1. You need to edit the config file /etc/default/grub.
2. If you simply un-comment the line starting with GRUB_INIT_TUNE, it will enable the default tune which is a single and very short "beep" sound.
3. Or, you can edit that line to have it how you want. Some suggestions: https://jdnash.com/api-makers/grub_init_tune-necropolis/
4. Then update the grub config (requires root): grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

And you're done.

Relevant Arch Wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB/Tips_and_tricks#Play_a_tune

I'm familiar with how the ranking algorithms work on a high level. What I'm curious about is to how those algorithms are actually applied.

How do these platforms actually apply the ranking algorithms so that the user sees the threads appropriately ordered? My knowledge is limited to PHP and MySQL, so I'm looking at it through the lense of those systems. I've thought of a few possible ways, but all of them seem pretty resource intensive.

1. Maintain a table of threads with all relevant information required to calculate ranking, as well as ranking itself. A server side script executing on a routine basis every X minutes (cron job?) updates the rankings on all the threads, so they can be easily ordered. However, people most likely don't care about threads >Y days old, so those can be excluded or automatically deranked somehow.

2. Maintain a table of threads with all relevant information required to calculate ranking. When a user visits, the last X threads (again, users probably don't care about really old stuff) are pulled out of the database and ran through a ranking and sorting algorithm, reordered and displayed to the user. This seems the most resource intensive?

I am by no means a professional developer, but I've been dabbling recently and the concept of how these large quantities of data are ranked both perplexes and interests me.

I have a little web app running on Deno Deploy and I want to see how it handles people connecting from multiple regions. There's a BroadcastChannel class that lets you send messages to any servers running in other regions, but to test it, I need to make connections in multiple regions, so there's more than one server running.

What are good ways to test this, either interactively or by writing tests? Maybe use a VPN? What's your favorite?

Previously I used to have this in my .vimrc:

if !exists('g:lasttab')
  let g:lasttab = 1
endif
nmap <C-Tab> :exe "tabn ".g:lasttab<CR>
au TabLeave * let g:lasttab = tabpagenr()

Courtesy of: https://stackoverflow.com/a/2120168

But while going through the help docs today, I stumbled across this mapping and am glad to find that this now exists by default. When it got added, however, I don't know.