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joepvd

208 karma · joined June 10, 2014

http://joepvd.github.io/ https://github.com/joepvd
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joepvd··on Fascination of Awk
awk is amazing. One pattern I often use is:

$ query_something | awk 'generate commands' | sh

For larger programs, I wrote and use ngetopt.awk: https://github.com/joepvd/ngetopt.awk. This is a loadable library for gawk that lets you add option parsing for programs.

joepvd··on Ask HN: Where are the GUI libraries that aren't bloated?
I have had fun with zenity[1] (for use bash scripts) and zenity-inspired libraries like dlgs[2] (if golang is your thing).

[1]: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man1/zenity.1.htm...

[2]: https://github.com/gen2brain/dlgs

joepvd··on Missing data hinder replication of artificial intelligence studies
To try out a procedure on one dataset amounts to a data point. You need to process a bunch of datasets to establish the performance of the procedure under study.

I though ML folks would have the statistical background to know you cannot infer a true statement from a single occurrence?

joepvd··on On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
> Just see who the US president is.

Think it is time to update Godwin's Law.

joepvd··on Ask HN: Do you keep a developer diary?
Yeah makes sense

Maybe an extra advantage is that you are not tempted to rewrite everything all the time, as I am doing with my attempt of topicaly organized notes.

Append-only might really be helpful. Experiment starts now :)

joepvd··on Ask HN: Do you keep a developer diary?
Is there a reason why you made the structure of the notes depend on time? Aren't notes that are about the same topic getting very far apart from each other?

I think searching works well when you are as month or maybe three into the project. How does this work like after five years?

joepvd··on Ask HN: Do you keep a developer diary?
There are different targets for notes in VCS and personal notes. In VerySpecificBug759 you do not want to read about how to get the code to build at all. The context of discovery has a lot of (necessary!) detours, cul-de-sacs, and mis-interpretations.

The context of discovery is often not relevant for the context of fix.

joepvd··on Ask HN: Leaving the DC Metro Area, should I move to a tech hub?
Sounds like you have the possibility to get yourself a new project and have freedom of movement.

Given this liberty, you have two choices: 1. Find/create the most awesome project. Don't care about where. 2. Go to the best town, travel, or whatever, and fix your employment there. Look into remote work.

This is one of the rare moments in life where you are free to choose. Do so wisely.

joepvd··on Buku v3.0 – Command Line Bookmark Manager
Just skimmed through the README, and I stored it in my list of well-documented projects. Well done!
joepvd··on The Benefits of Solitude
That is an awesome video. Thanks for sharing!
joepvd··on 2038: Only 21 years away
You have a reference for HTTPS problems with skewed client time?
joepvd··on The no excuses culture
> Blank is talking about acknowledging and dealing with risks early.

True that. He also mentioned firing people for not complying with his new rules several times. And also that he did. Those seem like the more substantive acts of his reign, as communicated in this post.

joepvd··on Mdoc(7) – semantic markup language for formatting manual pages
Whoah. Would love to see that tag feature ported to envs I have made myself familiar.
joepvd··on Mathematics for Computer Science [pdf]
It really is a shame that this is a rational solution.

University text books should be material to get back to later in life, when confronted with a related problem. Part of university education should be a complete book shelf of well-understood books.

This just exemplifies the new nature of university education: An ephemeral experience where the most durable result is debt /cynisism.

joepvd··on Why Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Poor?
Let's reword your statement:

> Because the average employee does not take an active enough role in management decisions.

Think on the politics that are closer most people in their day-to-day lives, at the workplace, active engagement with general policy is disencouraged and might be dangerous. Meaning, most people refrain from engagement with "management material." Being trained like this, it naturally extends to governmental politics.

joepvd··on The Awk Programming Language (1988) [pdf]
> beyond what the tool was intended for

Not sure what that would mean. I think the tool was designed to be a user's programming language. I liken to think that `awk` was the Excel + VBScript of its days.

joepvd··on The Awk Programming Language (1988) [pdf]
Some points:

* Cannot have an array as an input to a function

* Cannot return an array from a function

* Meta-programming or pointers are only (barely) available in gawk

* There is an `@include` statement for `gawk` that is not part of POSIX, and there is no name spacing involved.

* Functions names can only exist in the global name space

There are some reasons somebody felt an urge to create perl... Still loving awk, and using it every day for text processing jobs.

joepvd··on The Awk Programming Language (1988) [pdf]
I love awk for text processing purposes. When analyzing log files, I often drop down into awk-mode to check the exceptional constellation that is currently under investigation. Very powerful to be able to say after three minutes: This happens in 0.5% of the cases.

Bought this book 2nd hand online. This book on one day costs $150, and on the next $2. The first bit has been an awesome read, never got to read much more. Tend to read much more from $READER. Sure this PDF will get me going again!

joepvd··on Is Europe Disintegrating?
Resident of Berlin here. Cannot dismiss this statement completely. At the height of the crisis in Spain, there was a noticable influx of Spanish people in a first-move-then-job situation. Most of them did not speak German, quite some also had troubles with English, despite education.

The Spanish presence is less visible now, I am guessing because some left, and the others got better integrated. Would not be surpised if some of the PhDs are prepping a few dozen of meals each evening...

Will ask my spanish friends soon.

joepvd··on Ask HN: What “old” programming languages will you still be using in 2017?
The resource that has been instrumental for me to move up from beginner-that-generally-can-work-out-things-with-a-lot-of-random-tries, to someone who often has things right on the first try, and if not, have a clue of what is going on , has been the following book:

Classic Shell Scripting Arnold Robbins, Nelson H.F. Beebe

Recommend it to anyone with a basic understanding and a will to learn more. It also really doubles as a rich information resource. Cannot recommend it enough if books are your thing.

joepvd··on Why does software development take so long?
It does not happen that often that one hears: "I don't like the looks of the building when it rains. Replace the facade, pretty please!"
joepvd··on Ask HN: What do you use for Log Management?
Ha! No, I did not. I will, thanks for posting!
joepvd··on Ask HN: What do you use for Log Management?
Using Papertrail as well, but I really miss my terminal and awk, grep and less here. Or even regex search. I know I can download the archives, and I do that, but that puts the output of all in one file. Saving different topics in different files just makes sense, IMHO...

Still getting used to the ways of the cloud, I suppose...

joepvd··on SVG has more potential
> a malicious svg witch

You got me interested there ;)

joepvd··on An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’
To speak with Debord: Punk has been subsumed within spectacular society.

Interestingly, Debord seemed to have proposed a life style of Derive, aimless wandering, following one's desires. To me, this resembles the mind set that he tries to attack. Both tell individuals "You are a snowflake! Follow your inner desires!"

Maybe the more during counter life style against the fads and suppressions of the spectacle society, is a devotion to objectivity and naked facts.

joepvd··on A beginners guide to thinking in SQL
Fully agree.

Why is it, that SQL generally is so poorly commented? Almost every time I see an SQL script, I cringe for the poor formatting. It's generally not like the writers of these scripts are poor at formatting other code...

joepvd··on Tell HN: New features and a moderator
I wish you a nice and well deserved holiday, @dang! And good luck + fun, @sctb!
joepvd··on Ask HN: What to do after failing final interviews twice?
The question is how you interpret the decision of the other party not to move forward. Call it a failure on your side, and it will be a failure. There really is some deeper truth to the remarks in the other comments to frame it as a learning moment, and to gain experience. By framing these random facts in another way, you can come out without a scratch on your soul, and this tiny bit of extra wisdom that will make you understand that (a) this random outcome of the process is nothing personal, and (b) you will be able to approach the random processes a bit better next time.
joepvd··on Bpkg: package manager for bash
You are so right. Which exactly points at the problem:

Multiple OS package managers (choose one), and for each language/framework/... that you use, one extra. Which includes headaches for how to handle overlaps between the two. One ought to take into consideration how others are handling these issues, just to ensure you're not alone.

I do not have concrete answers, but I firmly believe that it is possible to reduce the mental and practical efforts required for package and dependency management by somehow abstracting and disciplining the current solutions.

In this context, Guile and NIX are often named. Their stated goals, however, are generally about reproducibility of builds. Could anyone point me to discussions/documentation that specifically addresses the wildfire of dependency- and package management?

joepvd··on Security researcher gets threats over Amazon review
Would the rep who claims to be in fear of losing her/his job be employed from that cottage industry? That would make the claim sound a bit more plausible, assuming, of course malice in the review-for-discount corps.
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