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From novice to master, and back again (2013)

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Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#81

Post by hinkley »

davegauer wrote: post #67
alex_smart wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that using dd is a character flaw.

To expand on this, people needlessly cargo-cult arcane dd commands, but on many (most?) systems, "cp foo.iso /dev/sdb" will do the same thing, but with possibly even better performance!

That’s a restore not a backup. I’m not actually defending dd. It’s bonkers how long it was considered acceptable to offer that as a solution for anything except zeroing out a disk. I shed a single proverbial tear and contemplated the sad state of technology every time I used it, and felt dirty for having done so.

It is The Worst.

It’s just the most egregious example. The difference in excess argument processing between commands is rather broad example. Is the last arg special or the first one? Grep and tar are in the majority, but cp works differently. They only make sense if you think of the power user.

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#82

Post by Banana699 »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #23
shadow28 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's like regex" could be another punchline for the joke

My biggest problem with regex is each language/program/whatever has their own take on it. You don't have to learn it over and over, you have to learn multiple slightly different versions of it over and over.

I don't mind the slightly different versions, that's what documentation and SO is for. I mind the language being a garbage kludge of organically-grown syntax and semantics, with not the slightest hint of a single principle or a unifying idea. And I mind that the vast majority of interfaces to it from a general purpose PL is fucking around with strings like a caveman, instead of a typed, IDE-assisted, first-class representation as a full-blown language construct or mix of constructs

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#83

Post by joemi »

avg_dev wrote: post #30
jpitz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1168/

I’ve never understood that one. I realize it’s just a joke, but xvf/cfv (extract/compress, view, uh,. Ok I did have to look up f, which I think is file) and the z for gzip is one of the few commands I have no trouble remembering.

Even easier: tar --help

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#84

Post by hinkley »

I write this shit down so I don’t have to remember it, thanks.

Back in the age of modems, when PPP was still the new hotness, I was proud of myself for memorizing the IP addresses for a few of the services I used regularly. Two or three times I got to punk my friends when the DNS servers got messed up, and they’re sitting with me in the computer lab wondering what else we could do to pass the time when they looked over and noticed that I’m happily typing away in the very thing they couldn’t get into because The Internet Is Down. No man, it’s just DNS.

Older, sadder but wiser me knows that I still could have done that joke if I had written the numbers on a scrap of paper. I could have had twenty instead of five.

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#85

Post by layer8 »

elteto wrote: post #72
icambron wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the `ln` command a lot. I use the `man ln` command _almost_ as much.

What finally got the `ln` argument order engraved in my mind was learning that you can skip the destination argument: ln -s /foo/bar/baz will create a soft link in the CWD named baz, pointing to /foo/bar/baz. So you see, if you know that you can always skip the destination, then, logically, the source must be the first one!

> logically, the source must be the first one!

You mean the target, but that isn’t a logically necessary consequence at all. Conceivably, `ln` could support the following two syntaxes:

  ln [options] target
  ln [options] link_name target
The way I remember the correct parameter order is that I remember it’s the non-intuitive one.

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#86

Post by hinkley »

404mm wrote: post #68
Underphil wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse : You Google a question and realise you yourself asked it many moons ago and it never got answered.

Worst: you find your own answer that says: “Nvm, fixed the issue.”

That’s just karma. I have tried not to do that to myself because so many others have done it to me. Still, sometimes the answer I left is too vague to be practical.

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#87

Post by dogline »

dmd wrote: post #52

Twice in the last decade I've been completely stuck on something, googled extensively, finally found the answer ... which I wrote, on Usenet, 25 years ago.

From a comment I saved several days ago:

> we don't have to figure it out - we just need to remember what we did

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32318185

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#88

Post by endofreach »

falcor84 wrote: post #73
eurasiantiger wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but ”computers work by ones and zeroes” is one of my pet peeves. It is true in the sense that 1 and 0 are common representations for true and false in computer science, but really, it is false and almost certainly establishes magical thinking in the layperson. Modern computers run on electricity, and in electrical circuits such as computers, true/false is represented as a transistor semiconductor being in a co…

> 1 and 0 are common representations for true and false in computer science Long before standing for true or false, 1 and 0 have stood for the presence or absence of something arbitrary, so I don't see any issue here.

Turing, u here?

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#89

Post by hinkley »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #70
alpaca128 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of how after learning how CPUs, memory, operating systems etc work I thought "wow, it really is all ones and zeroes". A simple phrase but it became more meaningful with deeper understanding.

Sorry, but ”computers work by ones and zeroes” is one of my pet peeves. It is true in the sense that 1 and 0 are common representations for true and false in computer science, but really, it is false and almost certainly establishes magical thinking in the layperson. Modern computers run on electricity, and in electrical circuits such as computers, true/false is represented as a transistor semiconductor being in a co…

I recall trying to explain how hard drives worked to a guy who didn’t believe me, it was weird because he had aspirations of being a hacker some day. He got really mad “math is math” style when we explained they are analog rounded to binary and that’s why disk erasers exist and take so long (and this was before they got really paranoid).

Then people kept wandering up and agreeing with me and by the end it was practically an intervention.

Re: From novice to master, and back again (2013)

#90

Post by feoren »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #70
alpaca128 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of how after learning how CPUs, memory, operating systems etc work I thought "wow, it really is all ones and zeroes". A simple phrase but it became more meaningful with deeper understanding.

Sorry, but ”computers work by ones and zeroes” is one of my pet peeves. It is true in the sense that 1 and 0 are common representations for true and false in computer science, but really, it is false and almost certainly establishes magical thinking in the layperson. Modern computers run on electricity, and in electrical circuits such as computers, true/false is represented as a transistor semiconductor being in a co…

You contradict yourself here.

> (A) Modern computers run on electricity [not ones and zeroes]

> (B) one could build a computer out almost anything that lends itself to both being on and off

You got it right in B, which is exactly the point when people say computers are just 1s and 0s. Computers are a mathematical concept, not just some electrical device, as you seem to claim in A. The fact that you can build a computer out of water or air pressure or Minecraft Redstone is exactly the point people are making when they say they're built up from 1s and 0s (not electricity, not silicon and copper, not Redstone).

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