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Posts by matthewsnyder
How do I clone the repository with only part of the history? For example, let's say I want to download only the last 5 commits out of thousands.
Background Many Python programs now recommend installing with pipx, and there is a sense that you shouldn't install with pip anymore, you should use tools like pipx. Main Question However, what ...
Between-lines relations are not easy to look for with grep, which is a line filter. You could use a regex that spans lines, but I find this annoying because of all the flags you have to set. Grep ...
I did git fetch to quickly get latest commits. I did this instead of git pull so I could deal with merge conflicts offline. But my repository is still stuck on the old commit, and now git pull fail...
Hi and welcome to the site. :) I think the idea of a canonical like the one you linked is great. A lot of newbies have too little understanding of their topic to identify common patterns. So they ...
These questions are very helpful to the person asking, and great for driving activity. I think it is good to allow these questions to be asked and to answer them. At the same time, they are not go...
I don't actually know the answer to this, but I'll post a provisional one while we wait for someone wiser than me to chime in. I think this is a small subset of the real answer. Don't forget the...
Is software system design on topic for the software development site? For what I mean by system design, consider the "system design interview" commonly held these days when recruiting software eng...
Why does git merge take the source branch rather than the destination branch as a parameter? The most common merge case by far for me is "Okay, this branch looks good, let's merge it into branch X...
After switching to a different branch, git checkout - can move me back to the branch I came from. This is handy for times when I wonder "wait, what was that last branch again?" But this does not w...
Mathematically, the purpose of a function is to return an output. However, in a programming context functions often have side effects. It is even common to call functions for the side effects alone...
I think the main reason to do this is when the interfaces fail to account for some subtlety of the contract between caller and implementation. For example, let's pretend for a moment that your use...
Where should I ask questions about Git?
I want my CLI Python program to schedule a task, and then exit. After some times has passed (say 10 minutes) the task should execute. The task can be a Python method or a shell command, whatever i...
The assumption of 1k attempts/s is wishful thinking, as is the idea that a hacker will go on mail.google.com and try to guess your login (they would get a captcha after like 5 failed attempts). Pa...
Recently, Python updated from 3.11 to 3.12 and now all my libraries are gone. Actually they're in the old 3.11 site-packages, but now that python points to 3.12 those are not active. Every time I r...
A lot of people who maintain FOSS projects would like to get more contributions. What can the maintainer do to ensure that potential contributors are converted into actual contributors? There are...
When I run pip install foo, pip looks for foo in PyPi. I want it to look for it first in a private repo, let's say pypi.bar.com. Only if foo cannot be found in pypi.bar.com, should pip then look f...
Files with .py extension are scripts. You run them with python myscript.py. Python is an imperative language, so executing a file will run each line one by one, starting from the top, and exit whe...
It sounds like you have a Java formatter configured (by default?) and VSC is applying it to your code automatically (on save?). How code is formatted If your only gripe is these specific stylisti...
Many languages discourage global variables. Why is this?
I ran some Python code and it crashed with ModuleNotFoundError. What is the general approach for dealing with these situations?
I have a git repository with some submodules. When the submodule repos get new commits on the remote, how can I pull them all?
My take on this: Q&A sites used to fill two distinct roles, but only one of these (the more boring one that doesn't matter anyway) is usurped by LLMs. The interesting one is not yet in danger o...
In Python, multiprocessing is easy to do if you follow a "list projection" paradigm. Say you want to take a list of inputs X and apply some function f to every x_i, such that y_i = f(x_i) and the y...
