Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

punkx.org

51–60 of 62 posts

Re: Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

#51
post #43
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See https://medium.com/alex-couch-s-portfolio/type-hierarchy-and... for some of them. The “blurry eye test” mentioned there is related to the typographical term of color (see https://bigelowandholmes.typepad.com/bigelow-holmes/2015/04/... and https://practicaltypography.com/color.html ) which is affected, among other things, by the actual shape of the glyphs. Font contrast has little to do, if anything at all, with a…

To be fair, though, the first comment that referred to contrast was clearly talking only about color, and had nothing to do with "topography contrast." The original comment was > Designers love grey on grey. I’ll take comic sans any day. These are two orthogonal features. It's like saying "fashion today is really into high waists, but I'll take denim any day."

They're orthogonal in the space of pixels on the page, and maybe not even, if the font includes some gradients or dithering, but they fit into different wholes, with some dependence.

Denim has a design style to it that goes beyond the material, as does comic sans. Like, you could put "comic sans" as part of a dalle prompt, and it would do more than pick a font

Re: Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah! I didnt mean to show it off, just my desk is a mess.. Yea its a cyberdeck I am building with hardwired Atreus directly connected to pi zero gpios and using libuinput to make a software keyboard, which works amazing btw. I am making it to init directly into getty without login (with busybox init), so it boots directly in usable /bin/bash in only 2-3 seconds, and all the available programs are simple python program…

>And I am trying to make it like a 'scavenger hunt' experience for my daughter, I will put special codes in various places in the programs or on the file system with different difficulty, and I can challenge her to find them. This is brilliant. I really admire the lengths you go to so that your kids can be engaged. Sounds like this has the potential to be quite fun and exciting.

I really enjoy finding new ways to introduce her into how computers think, in the same time, I have to constantly level up my game, as I am competing with tiktok, instagram, youtube, netflix.. etc. So I have to come up with new incentives, and more and more interesting projects, e.g. I printed a tshirt with some of her code, or made a huge poster with one of the turtle images she made (https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...), or sometimes its pure bribery, like buying robux.

When I was her age, I spent hours just reading random man pages, pretty much because cartoon network was showing the same episode of dexter's laboratory for the 25th time.

The kids her age are growing in a strange era, programs will control their life, wether they want it or not, so it will be great if they can debug :)

Re: Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

#53
post #46

There's a typo on the instructions page. The example has 'rises' but the rest of the explanation uses 'raises' I love this as a concept, though. I think if I were to expand this I'd maybe have pre-defined strings for the greps, cards with results on, number pre-selected etc. This makes it more of a 'find the card' or 'matching' game than a problem solving game, but it would make it more kids-card-gamey

Oh! Because of the slow and costly printing process I read it like 50 times, and yet..

Its amazing how your brain just sees what it wants to see.

Re: Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

#54
In the example.jpg image, we can see an example with sort -R "to shuffle the input (random sort)."

But sort -R does not randomise input if one is using NetBSD.

https://man.netbsd.org/sort.1

A POSIX-like sort has no -R option. See, .e.g, Plan9 sort or early versions of FreeBSD or OpenBSD. Early Linux did not have this non-POSIX option either. For example, look at Debian, RedHat, SuSE and other distributions in the mid-2000's. HP-UX, Minix, BusyBox, and so on have no -R option.

A different approach to teaching "basic" UNIX commands would be to focus on the portability and "lowest common denominator" and ignore non-ubiquitous options like -R. Ask the student what sequences of commands, i.e., scripts, will work on all UNIX/UNIX-like OS regardless of the age of system. From that "basic" foundation, one can then learn how the programs have evolved to become larger and more complicated (a side lesson about bloat) and all the OS-specific differences between them.

Re: Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

#55

In the example.jpg image, we can see an example with sort -R "to shuffle the input (random sort)." But sort -R does not randomise input if one is using NetBSD. https://man.netbsd.org/sort.1 A POSIX-like sort has no -R option. See, .e.g, Plan9 sort or early versions of FreeBSD or OpenBSD. Early Linux did not have this non-POSIX option either. For example, look at Debian, RedHat, SuSE and other distributions in the mid…

Is `shuf` a basic command on *BSD (or Unix)?

Re: Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

#56
post #55

In the example.jpg image, we can see an example with sort -R "to shuffle the input (random sort)." But sort -R does not randomise input if one is using NetBSD. https://man.netbsd.org/sort.1 A POSIX-like sort has no -R option. See, .e.g, Plan9 sort or early versions of FreeBSD or OpenBSD. Early Linux did not have this non-POSIX option either. For example, look at Debian, RedHat, SuSE and other distributions in the mid…

Is `shuf` a basic command on *BSD (or Unix)?

https://man.netbsd.org/shuffle.1

https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=shuffle

Re: Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

#57
I was able to complete everything that does not involve Random. I am working on a solution as a wrapper for the sort function, that involves the last digit of the seconds clock.

The amount of shells that run in the browser, amazing, the number of new shells that run well in the browser - amazing.

Re: Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

#58
post #2

Is the creator thinking of doing another printing? If not can someone recommend a service that will print a high quality card deck given the PDF?

I print with some professional card printing companies, the pricing goes something like 10 decks, 500$, 50 decks 800$, 100 decks 1200$, and 300 decks 1500$ and then it continues to drop Since I printed only 50, I think the price is too high, so I would rather to give them for free than to charge unreasonable price. If you are willing to pay the shipping cost send me an email to b0000@fastmail.com, I still have few le…

For those kind of costs, I'd print 300 for $1500. That's just $5 a piece. Sell them for $10, and you can afford to give away half of them.

I think this project would make a great Kickstarter. I don't think it would be hard to get 300 people interested in backing this. Shipping is probably going to be the biggest issue; find people on other continents to help you distribute it there. That can save a lot of money.

Re: Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

#59
post #20
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please no. Doh’t feed bad typography to kids. (When I was a kid, I had access to good design examples. I hated fonts “for kids”. Also, because the essence of play is simulation, and childish fonts ruin the game)

While I wouldn’t advocate for Comic Sans, monospace isn’t exactly good typography either.

But appropriate for a game about shell commands.

Re: Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game – teach kids basic Unix commands

#60
I reformatted and uploaded the game to a US-based print on demand game publisher. If you can't print your own and need a copy before the author has them back in stock or don't want to ship from the UK, here you go:

https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/the-unix-pipe-card-game

Full disclosure, I will make about a dollar from each purchase.

Post reply on HN