I have found this to be a semi controversial topic. Its almost becoming a required point for getting a new job to have open source work that you can show. Some people just enjoy working on programming side projects and others don't want to do any more after they leave the office.

Whats your opinion on this? Do you work on any side projects? Do you think its reasonable for interviewers to look for open source work when hiring?

I'd gladly pay a reasonable price for professional packages/support for programs like Emacs/Melpa, Debian, and Xfce. As a user, I empathize with the complaints by developers that are constantly overworked. Even if this doesn't generate enough money to pay for everything, it might be enough to hire someone to handle the issues and communities, something that clearly drains their efforts, especially because programmers tend to prefer technical challenges rather than dealing with people.

I understand that many projects accept donations, but I think providing an actual reward (even if its something minimal, like an updated package instead of having to build it from source) might be a good way to get resources and avoid developer burndown.

There seems to be a trend lately of people switching over to BSD operating systems. Having read some blog posts on the matter and now given the recent system-d controversy, I'm genuinely curious to give FreeBSD or OpenBSD a go as my main OS.

For those who have switched over to BSD, what are some problems you've encountered and/or what are some things you miss?

I have been looking for some software where I can brain dump all the things I need to remember on a constant basis so I can easily find it again in the future. A personal wiki basically. I am wondering what any of you tilderians are using?

The things I am looking for:

Absolute requirements:

• Open Source: I want to be in control of the data myself, and I want to be able to hack on it myself as the need arises.
• Self Hostable: Goes hand-in-hand with with open sourceness, I want the data to live on the server in my apartment, under my own control.
• An API of some sort so I can programmatically add/read/modify data.

Nice to haves:

• Revision history of some sort.
• Common/simple data format for easy backup and longevity.
• Web interface, with mobile compatibility.
• Lightweight as possible, so I can run it on a low powered server.

Does anything know anything like that?

Options I have heard of:

• TiddlyWiki
• DokuWiki
• MediaWiki
• ZIM
• Emacs with Org Mode

Here is a previous discussion on the topic @ Lobste.rs

A few weeks ago I posted a project I was working on to read news from the command line. I incorporated the suggestions given in that thread (license, requirements.txt, etc), incorporated suggestions I've received elsewhere, and added a few features.

Here's the updated link: News Desk

Any feedback would be much appreciated!

Edit: And a specific point for feedback. I store the user's API key in ~/.nd_config/key which I think is a step up from requiring the user to set their key as an environment variable (which is how I had it originally). Still though, is there some way I can not store the key in plaintext and still have it in a format that is readable by the computer and can be used to verify API access?

So I tried to install sway on my desktop today. This required a lot of fiddling, as I had to pull in bleeding-edge dependencies for the Wayland libraries, and had to build the compositor framework wlroots. Finally however, I had everything compiled and ready to go and....

Proprietary Nvidia drivers are not supported. Use Nouveau.

I had completely forgotten that sway requires open-source Nvidia drivers. So - has anyone had experience using Nouveau? How usable is it from day-to-day? How noticeable is the performance hit when switching from proprietary drivers?

I've only been seriously programming for about a year now (and mostly in R), but I've been digging into Python for the past few months. Mostly I use pandas/numpy/scipy/scikit-learn, etc. for data analysis and some ML stuff, but in an effort to expand my skills I've also been playing around trying to build a few projects.

It's not much, but I built this: News Desk

Feedback is welcome. One bug that I'm aware of is that when you refresh the program, the url_list isn't cleared and the URLs from the refreshed articles are just appended to the list. So even though only 20 articles will show, you can select, for example, article 35.