programming & computer tips

• skip paywalls with archive.today (works for Financial Times, Washington Post, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Medium, The Times, The Atlantic, Fortune, Bloomberg)
• free access to academic papers: Sci-Hub
• free access to books: Library Genesis
• a simple website to compare AWS instance prices
• download videos from YouTube: SaveFrom
• to copy text from (or translate) a password-protected .pdf file, send it from your GMail account or upload it to Google Drive

new Mac setup

• block ads immediately after getting a new computer: uBlock Origin (for Chrome, Firefox), AdGuard (for Safari)
• essential Mac software: VLC (open-source universal media player), Transmission (open-source Torrent client), The Unarchiver (decompress any file)

Python setup

use mambaforge instead of conda for Python development (it's way faster)

curl --ssl-reqd -sLo mambaforge.sh "https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge/releases/latest/download/Mambaforge-$(uname)-$(uname -m).sh"
bash mambaforge.sh -b -p "$(pwd)/lib/mambaforge" && rm mambaforge.sh
lib/mambaforge/bin/mamba init $(basename $SHELL) && lib/mambaforge/bin/conda config --set auto_activate_base false && exec $SHELL --login

create a new env called dev NOTE: don’t install packages into the base environment because it cannot be deleted if you mess up

mamba create -n dev && mamba activate dev
mamba install --yes -c pytorch -c nvidia -c conda-forge -c defaults \
  pandas numpyro jupyterlab tqdm matplotlib numba pyarrow \
  ipywidgets boto3 lxml beautifulsoup4 flask scikit-learn scipy \
  sympy dash psycopg2 sqlalchemy bokeh seaborn statsmodels altair \
  xarray arviz corner einops requests pytorch torchvision \
  torchaudio torchtext torchdata spacy ipympl \
  pytorch-cuda=12.1         # optional, only of you want CUDA / GPU support in PyTorch
jupyter labextension disable '@jupyterlab/apputils-extension:announcements'    # disable spam

Python debugging

import code; code.interact(local=locals())

Thanks Andrej Karpathy!

Linux cheatsheet

• to make git tree draw a condensed tree of commits, add this to your ~/.gitconfig under the [alias] section:

  tree = log --graph --all --format=format:'%C(bold blue)%h%C(reset)%C(dim white) %ar%C(auto)%d %s%C(dim white) %an%C(reset)'
  

• copy folders with rsync -aP --info=progress2 <src> <dst> - supports local and remote paths user@host:path (everything that is accessible via ssh) and handles folders in a smart way

• generate new ssh key, save it to ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_server (private key) and ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_server.pub (public key)

  $ ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "<COMMENT>"
  

  add the public key (cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_server.pub) to .ssh/authorized_keys on the server, then edit ~/.ssh/config:

  Host $SERVER
      HostName $SERVER_IP
      User $USERNAME
      IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_server
      IdentitiesOnly yes
  

  generally each server / service (e.g. GitHub) should have its own private key