Learn about 5 interesting Linux tools that will help break your dependence on the GUI and keep you productive on the command line.

Legendary investor, programmer, and Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham once wrote that one of the best ways to come up with ideas for your next startup is to ask what product you wish someone else would make for you. For Stepan Pachikov, founder of Evernote, that product was a way to help him remember things. Although Pachikov first began working on what ultimately became Evernote back in 2002, his fascination with human memory stems from his experiences growing up in the former Soviet Union. To Pachikov, Evernote wasn't just another app or a way to capitalize on Silicon Valley's burgeoning

Calculating the mean of a list of numbers Consider the following problem:

You have a list of floating point numbers. No nasty tricks - these
aren’t NaN or Infinity, just normal “simple” floating point numbers.

Now: Calculate the mean (average). Can you do it?

It turns out this is a hard problem. It’s hard to get it even close to right. Lets see why.

I am a bit dissatisfied with the use of the Tragedy of the commons to represent issues with free and open source software development. It is not an abstract resource that can be depleted when overused. It is not magically maintained if left alone.

It is based on the work of people, and we should not erase those people.

Unfortunately (and it is by design), most of the licences and the vocabulary around it are focused on the software’s user. After all, they work by reducing the creator’s right to empower the user.

As examples of this vocabulary, we have the distinction between “free as in beer” and “free as in speech” to show that the “free” word in “free software” has more to do with freedom and people’s rights to use, study, modify and share a program, than its actual price. Although, in practice, the overwhelming majority of FOSS will not cost you anything.

When it comes to using computers to steal money, few can come close to matching the success of Russian hacker Evgeniy Bogachev.

The $3 million bounty the FBI has offered for Bogachev’s capture is larger than any that has ever been offered for a cybercriminal—but that sum represents only a tiny fraction of the money he has stolen through his botnet GameOver ZeuS.1 At its height in 2012 and 2013, GameOver ZeuS, or GOZ, comprised between 500,000 and 1 million compromised computers all over the world that Bogachev could control remotely. For years, Bogachev used these machines to spread malware that allowed him to steal banking credentials and perpetrate online extortion.2 No one knows exactly how much money Bogachev stole from his thousands of victims using GOZ, but the FBI conservatively estimates that it was well over $100 million.

In The War of Art and Turning Pro, Steven Pressfield talks about “The Resistance” that keeps us from doing our work.

If you’re a maker and you’ve yet to read these two books, do yourself a favor and buy them today.

From Josh Mcguigan.

This is a tutorial on building your own shell using Rust, in the spirit of the build-your-own-x list. Creating a shell is a great way to understand how the shell, terminal emulator, and OS work together.

Alpine Linux-based Docker images are small, but they can still bloat up quickly. If you're concerned about image size, search for alternatives, like Minideb.

When the Docker revolution started, one argument among many in favor of using containers instead of virtual machines was their size. Container images were supposed to be small.

However, several anti-patterns quickly emerged in the early days of Docker. First, most people wanted to treat containers just like VMs, hence they wanted an SSH server in them, they wanted to run multiple processes in them and they wanted their regular Linux distributions.

This quickly ballooned the size of Docker images that could be pulled from the Docker Hub. Official Ubuntu and CentOS images used to be above 600 MB. Once dependencies and application code got added, it was not rare to see several GB Docker images around.

You will learn in this post how to:

• decompose double-seasonal time series
• detrend time series
• model and forecast double-seasonal time series with trend
• use two types of simple regression trees
• set important hyperparameters related to regression tree

For the longest time I did not know what everything meant in htop.

I thought that load average 1.0 on my two core machine means that the CPU usage is at 50%. That's not quite right. And also, why does it say 1.0?

I decided to look everything up and document it here.

They also say that the best way to learn something is to try to teach it.