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Show HN: Start every terminal session with a vivid reminder of life's value
Hi! I've been using a similar browser extension for a long time. It kept me motivated. I decided to create the same thing for the terminal where I spend a lot of time.
- zurfer 3y agoWas it a weekend project? ;) looks cool!
- cynicalsecurity 3y agoThank you, but this is way too depressing. Why start it with every terminal session? This could have been a desktop app.
- quaintdev 3y agoThere was a similar project but for new tab of browser. It had a countdown timer with seconds remaining. The problem with both approaches is our brain gets desensitized to both the approaches after some time and it has no effect on us.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tbomb 3y agoI agree, I don't need an existential crisis every time I open a terminal session
- dingnuts 3y agoI just don't need a terminal to help me get there; I'm quite good at existential dread without any assistance
- wharvle 3y agoSeriously, the point of occupying one's time with most any activity is to avoid ruminating on this stuff. As expressed in the Internet-famous comic: https://imgur.com/gallery/d9KdAvH https://imgur.com/gallery/d9KdAvH (It's the "Don't let the existential dread set in" one, to save those familiar a click) (YMMV, I suppose)
- pelagicAustral 3y agoI start every sesh with: fortune | cowsay | lolcat
- sss111 3y agofor people on a mac, run brew install fortune lolcat cowsay
- eigenket 3y agoSame, although mine has cowsay -f stegosaurus And I've been meaning to get rid of the lolcat because it's the only thing on my laptop with a Ruby dependency and I'd like to reclaim the disk space that requires.
- macNchz 3y agoWow I've had my terminals open with fortune | cowsay for years but somehow had no idea that there were different cows. Should anyone also happen to be interested in taking a quick glance at everything installed by default: cowsay -l | tail -n +2 | sed 's/ /\n/g' | xargs -i% bash -c 'echo %; fortune -s | cowsay -f %; printf "\n\n\n"' edit: I like the novelty, I'm going to try out having a random "cow" saying my fortune greeting: fortune -s | cowsay -f $(cowsay -l | tail -n +2 | sed 's/ /\n/g' | shuf | head -n 1)
- seti0Cha 3y agoIt's super easy to create your own cows. Just look at any of the files in /usr/share/cowsay. You basically just have to get an ascii picture and add a couple of tags. Mine's a hypnotoad.
- eigenket 3y agoOnce I left my laptop unlocked at university and a fellow student and friend of mine added something to my .bashrc using a custom cowsay file being piped some text he got from a bash error handling mechanism I don't recall. He already had the cow art file on his computer for some reason so I think the deed took him only a minute or so. The overall effect was that if you entered a command not recognised by the shell (like typoing dc instead of cd for example) an ascii-art version of a certain microsoft paperclip would respond "I'm sorry I don't know how to dc, would you like help with that?"
- bbor 3y agoGreat execution, great idea, not a fan of the commentary text. I think people can interpret/use a life calendar in many ways, at least some of which are a tad more hopeful! Here’s to hoping that we'll all be laughing about this post on mars in 200 years.
- dirtyhippiefree 3y agoFor those who find this depressing…there are probably five of you to the one who sees limited time as a reason to succeed…FWIW…
- chinchilla2020 3y agoDepressing: You will be logging into a terminal on a little monitor to see a little inspirational message in a monospaced font for the rest of your life, while the Sundays slowly count down. Meanwhile, healthy, successful people visit the mountain on your desktop background. Inspiring: You find a way to escape and never see the Sunday counter again.
- Ecoste 3y agoMaybe we're just bike-shedding on the Sunday quote itself but I generally don't want to be reminded that I'm staring at a terminal on a Sunday ):
- BossingAround 3y agoHonestly, the thought that looking into a monospaced font for the rest of your life is a horrible way to spend your life and that there's something inherently better to do seems like a deeply flawed thought. Of course, you can be spending time with your loved ones. Or, you could be jumping out of a plane with a parachute. But, whether you're doing an extreme sport, being with your family, or just staring into a terminal, your mind is exactly the same. If you're unhappy, you'll be be just as unhappy spending time with your family as you are spending time staring into a terminal. If your happiness depends on where your body is or who you talk to, you are bound to spend life suffering (as most people do I suppose).
- BriggyDwiggs42 3y agoWait really? “If you're unhappy, you'll be be just as unhappy spending time with your family as you are spending time staring into a terminal.” I mean, you could say this for any two things and it would be equally silly. Happiness is often the consequence of an environment.
- rpastuszak 3y agoThat's such a sweet idea. If you're looking for a weekend project idea, I recommend flipping it 180: https://days.sonnet.io https://days.sonnet.io
- addandsubtract 3y agoThis is much nicer! Added to the endless list of weekend projects.
- netule 3y agoThat was beautiful, thanks for sharing.
- 3pt14159 3y agoI did something similar that I hand wrote but it's different verses from the Bible whenever I cd into my main working location. It helps me memorize verses slowly over time and it's not too intrusive though occasionally I'll disable it before pair programming on something with a colleague since it feels inappropriate at work to force someone else to put up with it if they have qualms about it.
- ironmagma 3y agoYou can always just open a new terminal and then quickly hit ctrl-L to clear. Gives an opportunity for them to ask if they care, or to just move on otherwise.
- lakpan 3y agoAh yes, I’d love to start the day reading a fresh “Numbers 31:17” verse. For pair programming I’d just stick to “Leviticus 18:22”
- echelon_musk 3y agoYesterday I discovered fortune(1) and in turn display-dhammapada(1). I'm tempted to set up a cron job and receive daily emails. Were you just doing shuf(1) on a text file of Bible quotes?
- 3pt14159 3y agoNaw, I wanted to memorize certain ones. It's worked though. I'm pretty much there with all of the ones I picked.
- selfawareMammal 3y agoAaaah gotta love me some Corinthians 14:34-35 in the morning
- waihtis 3y agogood, do the Quran next
- 3y ago
- _false 3y agoI'm using zsh with tmux and it's a bit frustrating to have it appear on every window and every pane. At the same time if it only appears once I might miss it. Does anyone have suggestions on how to make it appear only a handful of times per day?
- accessd 3y agoYou can run it randomly with: (( RANDOM%2 == 0 )) && $HOME/last_sunday.sh Or add after the command ;sleep 1;clear to clear the screen after one second.
- o11c 3y agoThe problem with the RANDOM approach is that it scales with how many terminals you open on a given day. Compensating for that requires state. I'm too lazy to write actual code right now, but here's a sketch of a possible solution that allows bursts. This is racy but safely so. declare N, the burst size. Say, 5. declare T, the time in seconds after which a new burst can start. Say, 3600. declare S, the time in seconds after which a new occurrence is allowed within a burst. Say, 10. declare P, a unique identifier. Say, the-last-sunday. declare D, the directory to store state in. Say, /tmp/bursty-ratelimiter. mkdir -p "$D" if "$D/$P-central" exists and its timestamp is within the last "$S" seconds, exit the process without doing anything else (hmm, I suppose when opening multiple panes at the same time, this race might actually matter ... I guess you could use a lock if it matters that much) touch (create and update the timestamp of) "$D/$P-central" for I from 1 to "$N" if "$D/$P-$I" exists and its timestamp is within the last "$T" seconds, continue with the next iteration touch "$D/$P-$I" run the rest of the program under load exit the process without doing anything
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jcul 3y agoMaybe just touch a file somewhere in /tmp or /run or somewhere and do if [ -f $file ]; then touch $file ... If you never reboot could set up a cron job to delete it. Or store a counter in the file and output each time it reaches x % N. Might be susceptible to race conditions, so could wrap it in a flock or something...
- moffkalast 3y ago> Made initially with Bash, I wrote another version with Ruby language because I love Ruby and to show Ruby is not dead! :) Ruby, only 231 Sundays remain. How are you gonna spend those Sundays, Ruby?!
- cscscscscsc 3y agoGrim, but neat! You might consider leveraging an actuarial table of life expectancy by age[0], rather than hardcoding it at 80, since you're already doing the necessary age calculations. [0]: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
- safety1st 3y agoIt bears mentioning that if you're in the US, living until 80 is a pretty optimistic expectation - the average for men is 73 and the average for women is 79.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- t8sr 3y agoThe name is a missed opportunity - instead of "Last Sunday" it could be called the "Terminal Sunday".
- accessd 3y agoGot it!
- krunck 3y agoAnd of course this person or any of us could keel over tomorrow. So maybe add :"Or maybe you have no Sundays left. YMMV.'
- ssgodderidge 3y ago"You might die tomorrow. How are you making this day a great last day?
- matwood 3y agoAnd conversely, you may live so how are you at the same time making tomorrow a good day? This is the struggle of existence.
- ssgodderidge 3y agoStill thinking about this comment 48 hours later.
- atommclain 3y agoInterested to see what others display when opening a new terminal. I have a personally meaningful but somewhat embarrassing trite platitude followed by 3 random fortunes. A quote from my personal collection, a bit of advice from Kevin Kelly, and a Deep Thought by Jack Handy.
- theogravity 3y agoIs there something like this for learning words of another language?
- elzbardico 3y agoChanged the life expectancy variable to 90. A bit of optimism but also based on the fact that people on my family usually dies at really old ages.
- hayst4ck 3y agoThis chrome extension that inspired this was probably inspired by this wonderful blog post that is very much worth a read: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html
- bambax 3y agoSunday's the worst day of the week. I wouldn't mind if there were zero Sundays left.
- rngname22 3y agoSounds like you should be spending your Sundays on trying to make it so that some future Sundays aren't so bad.
- bakuninsbart 3y agoI'm surprised that there's someone out there seeing it that way, and would be interested in hearing your reasons if you don't mind. Unless I'm hungover from a Saturday evening, Sunday is the day where I can be most creative and most free.
- mkii 3y agoI'm surprised someone's surprised, it's a well-known thing: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sunday_scaries https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sunday_scaries
- tkiolp4 3y agoI don’t like Sundays either. Reasons: - I know Monday is coming, so I need to go to sleep early - The day is shorter since I wake up late because Saturday was a long nice day, and because of previous point - everything is closed. Not that I care much, but it limits the options of “what to do today” Favorite day: Saturday and then Friday
- machinerychorus 3y agoSimilar to this, I created an android wallpaper that shows what percentage of your life is already past. This helps me ensure that I'm spending my limited time in the most valuable way possible, and really helps put things in perspective. App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.machinerychorus.lifeprogresswallpaper https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.machineryc... Source code: https://github.com/ethanmdavidson/DeathProgress https://github.com/ethanmdavidson/DeathProgress
- r3trohack3r 3y agoLove this. Added it to my path under ~/.bin/mori I simplified the output a bit so it fits on 2 lines. This renderers a single progress bar the width of the terminal: https://gist.github.com/retrohacker/19978af044a080ed5677c0eadf3ce865 https://gist.github.com/retrohacker/19978af044a080ed5677c0ea... Memento mori (Latin for 'remember that you die') is an artistic or symbolic trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
- Rant423 3y agoGiven the default life expectancy of 65, I am at almost 50%. Fucking terrifying. (I moved it up to 80 years)
- Vitaly_C 3y agoSo a reminder from the terminal that I am also terminal?
- gorkempacaci 3y agoThanks but I’d rather curb the anxiety in my life, not inflame it.
- coolThingsFirst 3y agoHorrible idea, if we are anxious over the time that we have left we are wasting it in fear.