SomethingOrNot

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Xkb gives me eight different layers just on the shift keys (not the control keys etc.). Just takes a ton of time to learn because Xkb is borderline arcane (:)) and because you have to do everything manually if you want something beyond “swap control and Caps Lock”.

If time is money I wouldn’t be surprised if I could have saved a lot of money by just buying a mechanical keyboard with good on-board firmware and programming. At least I have a hard time imagining that the programming would be harder than on X.

I haven’t tried both. Nor am I a keyboard hardware enthusiast. I have just spent some time modifying my keyboard through software (Linux X Server).

I don’t get the apparent fascination that (mech) keyboard enthusiasts have with small keyboards. I can understand moving or removing the keypad since it displaces the mouse (then again, “don’t use the mouse!”), but beyond that I don’t see the appeal except for the aesthetics.

I think the happy hacking keyboard has the missing keys on the FN layer. Hopefully the FN key is programmable, or else you are stuck with whatever the manufacturer wants the FN key to mean. (Pet peeve of mine: cheap keyboards now seem to come with those dang FN keys which can’t be reprogrammed like the regular keys and are just for garbage multimedia functionality.) With a regular boring full-sized keyboard I can program/re-purpose whatever the key is on the equivalent position to the FN key, or choose another key entirely. Right now I can access all F1–F36 keys by using a series of modifier keys right in reach of the glorious Home Row (prostrates). That’s just by modifying my standard keyboard in X. And of course I can access F1–F12 without using modifier keys since I have an (almost) full-sized keyboard. That way I get the best of both worlds: I can use modifier keys to access every key from near the home row, or just one-key while using a fidget spinner with the free hand.

US, that country that has blessed the rest of the world with cybersecurity.

Many HN readers seem to be perpetually surrounded by non-talented engineers and all other sorts of mediocre people.

https://xkcd.com/610/

Child’s play. True capitalists (1) hire wage labor to do the actual work, and (2) enlist the aid of the state to do all R&D and later use any technology that comes out of the research (socialize the costs (risks), privatize the profits).

You have to be damn naive to think that economics is not political.

> Gigerenzer is undoubtedly correct that Bayesian reasoning is something that can be learned by many people, and yet all that Kahnemann needs for the implications of his statement that "the human mind is not Bayesian at all" to be relevant in behavioural economics terms is for some portion of the population to reach systematically different conclusions from the correct Bayesian one using an inferior heuristic. (A point Gigerenzer essentially demonstrates by citing a study which show how outcomes improved after gynecologists already motivated to make correct predictions were taught Bayesian reasoning). Perhaps it's sloppy wording on the part of Kahnemann that Gigerenzer is taking exception to, but the core claim is not that humans cannot learn statistics, but that at a population level, some humans will continue to rely on less accurate heuristics which deviate from those predicted by rational expectations models in a systematic [and predictable] manner which are not simply eliminated over time due to financial incentives to be correct.

Indeed, the possible result that only some people are irrational would be very good for the paternalistic policy makers. In fact it would be better than the result that all people are irrational; if all people are irrational, what gives some irrational people the right to guide other irrational people’s lives.

Economists are always oh-so-sorry to inform us that some people just can’t run their own lives without the help of the “free” market or the government. So very sorry. Happily they know some technocrats that will bravely shoulder the burden of being Bayesians.

> Moreover, I’ve always found it strange how people like to put things neatly into boxes or associate with a single label. …

> Before jumping in, I should clarify that these views are my own and don’t necessarily represent the views of Toptal.

Indeed.

CDL sounds great. Writers won’t stop writing in any case. And if they did, well, there are already too many books to read in a lifetime.

It’s only natural that authors/writers use their skills and connection to publish moralizing defenses of current copyright laws. It’s in their own interest. It’s also easy to see through.

I would fail that interrogation. :-)

Both terminals, shells and Emacs suffer from the problem that you have to configure them out of their ancient defaults.

One of the dead ends of Unix UX are all the terse DSLs. I feel that terse languages like Vi’s command language [1] get confused with interactivity. It sure can be terse, but having dozens of tiny languages with little coherence is not interactive; it’s just confusing and error-prone.

One of these languages is the history expansion in Bash. At first I was taken by all the `!!^1` weirdness. But (of course) it’s better—and actually interactive—to use keybindings like `up` (previous command). Thankfully Fish had the good sense to not implement history expansion.

[1] I use Emacs+Evil so I like Vi(m) myself.

The author is an MS student in statistics. Seems that Unix is well-represented in STEM university fields.

Old-timey Unix (as opposed to things like Plan 9) won. When does widespread ’70s/’80s computing stop being impressive? You say “unknown” as if we were talking about some research software, or some old and largely forgotten software. Unix shell programming doesn’t have hipster cred.

Essentially selecting and operating on text in the same buffer. Saw it in Russ Cox’s demonstration of Acme.

I generalized interactivity to the Unix that most people seem familiar with.

“The interactive nature of the shell” isn’t that impressive in this day and age. Certainly not shells like Bash (Fish is probably better, but then again that’s very cutting edge shell (“for the ’90s”)).

Irrespective of the shell this just boils down to executing code, editing text, executing code, repeat. I suspect people started doing that once they got updating displays, if not sooner.

The Wright brothers lived at the same time that Kafka and Weber were writing about bureaucracies. It was the time of positivism; the belief that social sciences could usher in scientific societies led by technocrats. Bourgeois professionals of the less progressive inclination thought that people could be managed in a mechanical fashion (now only certain kinds of less socially aware engineers dare to admit to their self-serving professional biases in public).

I don’t think the turn of the 20th century was more egalitarian in the sense that you speak of.

One interactive feature I like about Bash though (or shell or whatever) is C-x C-e to edit the current line in a text editor (FC). Great when I know how to transform some text in the editor easily but not on the command line.

> In the talk, he gives several demonstrations a key aspect of why unix pipelines are so practically useful: you build them interactively.

The standard Unix interface might have been interactive in the ’70s, back when hardware and peripherals were horribly non-interactive. But I don’t know why so many so-called millenial programmers (people my age) get excited about the alleged interactivity of the Unix that most people are familiar with. It doesn’t even have the cutting edge ’90s interactivity of Plan 9, what with mouse(!) selection of arbitrary text that can be piped to commands and so on. And every time someone comes up with a Unix-hosted tool that uses some kind of fold-up menu that informs you about what key combination you can type next (you know, like what all GUI programs have with Alt+x and the file|edit|view|… toolbar), people hail it as some kind of UX innovation.

Seems like a book specifically about text processing for the purpose of writing/formatting/typesetting documents.

I haven’t coded Perl beyond one-liners. What attracts me to it are its regular expressions. So much of Unix scripting seems to involve regexps. So I figure Perl+utilities is the better option compared to utilities+Bash.

I wouldn’t wanna use it for more than short scripts. Perl 6 might be fun, but it doesn’t seem to have a large enough community.

I meant more the post-communism part.

He’s an MS student. He’s just documenting and sharing his journey. As blogs do.

https://www.xkcd.com/1053/

I’m not terribly experienced with Unix tools but I reckon that it might be best to just use Perl instead. Then you just have to worry about PCRE instead of PCRE in addition to old-style regexps.

Then again, Perl is even scarier.

> I am starting to realize that the Unix command-line toolbox can fix absolutely any problem related to text wrangling.

How many problems related to text wrangling arise simply by working with Unix tools?

“This philosophical framework will help you solve problems internal to philosophy.”

Is this supposed to make sense?

Remember back in <good old days> when people were authentic and real and not opportunistic fakers?

Load up the resentful pioneer module, Billy.

Can they be wholly blamed? Managers and other people who have more power than young developers want developers to be replaceable cogs.