I think the quality of a language for shell scripting is often secondary. What’s of greater significance is where it is at. I.e., does it have it already installed? The answer with Linux and Bash is almost always “yes”. Not so with ruby.
The moment you start asking the user to install things, you’ve opened up the possibility for writing a program rather than a shell script. The lifecycle of a piece of software is almost always one of growing responsibility. This cycle is devastating when it happens to shell scripts. What was once a simple script slowly becomes creaking mass of untestable, poorly understood code playing in the traffic of swimming environments (which grep you got, buddy?).
I guess I’m saying that once you open up the possibility of writing a program, you generally take that option and are usually happier for it. In the “write a program” world, ruby is still good, but it becomes a far harder question to answer whether ruby is still the right choice. There are a lot of languages with a lot of features engineers like.
Notably Diamine’s Registrar Ink and Rohrer & Klingner’s Eisen-Gallus-Tinte inks are relatively easy brands of iron gall ink to acquire and the modern formulas are less harsh and useable in fountain pens.
They’re nice in that they’re naturally waterproof inks. They’re a bit on the dry side though in terms of flow.
I’m not really excited about this; Meta has no strong incentive to be a long term good neighbor in the fediverse, but plenty of incentive to engage in poor behavior. No matter how sincere or well meaning leadership is now, a quarterly loss or stagnant profit will eventually push them to turn to some market capture or embrace, extend, extinguish behavior.
I’m not the only one who feels this way. A number of instances are prepping to partially or fully block Threads from the get-go.
Even without Meta, I’m not excited for another 1M+ instance. My experience is that the larger an instance is, the worse it is. Less community, worse moderation, more bad actors hiding in plain sight. You just can’t toss people into a generalist million people scrum and expect them to form a digital community.
If you’re on mastodon.social, you’re not experiencing the best of the fediverse IMO. Find a small instance of your interest (<500 people) and interact with the local timeline. People on my instance recognize me, make in jokes, I chat with the admin and mods, it’s like actual digital neighborhood. It’s really the closest we’ve gotten back to forums and I don’t think dumping a bucket of FAANG-style corporate water on it is the answer.
You have to have been raised pretty sweetly to not have known this kind of racketeering was a 'thing' for a very long time. Pressure to hire cops is rampant. 'rent-a-cop' is not aimed at the fact that security companies apply aggressive mimicry to their people, but that these people are themselves often off-duty cops. Security companies are strongly "encouraged" to hire off-duty cops, and find themselves left out to dry or otherwise 'convinced' if they try to resist.
Before you add 'Why don't [you|they] do...' responses, recognize for a moment that the police in the U.S. are largely out of control, have undue control of local government and politics, and have an ideology that enforces self-righteousness and an 'enemy at the gates' siege mentality, and oh yeah, are able to apply violence at a level unmatched in society. These are not polite people, and the way one 'deals' with them has far more in common with radical militias rather than state bureaucrats. If you haven't encountered that, you're just lucky enough to have never threatened their interests.
I write shell-scripts when the current tools solve the problem easily. I distribute shell scripts to colleagues (never customers) only when I absolutely do not want to install extra software on their system.
I avoid awk and perl because if I'm going to introduce a second language to a tool, I'm not going to pick the niche ones everyone only learns opportunistically if at all. At that point I'd rather pick something my colleagues are deeply familiar with.
And on a small level, writing these little binaries that truly do one thing and do it well and that I understand intimately is a private joy.
> Our concern would be that a professional educator would not only work for the district, but the district would also be their landlord
Employer:
* we don't want to wages in an amount to let the worker afford healthcare on his own, so we'll just tie the worker's health-insurance to his job.
* We don't want to pay wages in an amount that would let the worker afford housing on his own, so we'll tie the worker's housing to his job.
* Next step: We don't want to pay wages in an amount to let the worker afford necessities on his own, so we'll create a company store where he'll be able to buy things with our new innovative wage/credit scheme that will tie necessities to his job.
The implementation of this idea is terrible, one that will hold a further Damocles sword over the laborers, and if widely implemented, will absolutely be used against workers in future labor-disputes. We already have the history to show that. Your employer should not control your access to life-necessities.
> Folks recommend the really cheap platinum preppy pens, but be warned they are super scratchy.
The reason people recommend the platinum is that its cheap and its cap system is especially good for avoiding dry-out. To me, the platinum preppy feels like a rounded pencil. I think its a good pen, but my reservation is that the plastic is a bit brittle on the preppy. I'd personally probably go with the Pilot Kakuno, or the more expensive Platinum prefonte, or if you're really worried about costs, the interesting and fraught world of Chinese fountain pens
> I would go a size up from what you normally prefer wrt to nib (if you are new, try M as F and EF are extremely scratchy IMHO).
This is a feature of all the Japanese pens - they tend to have a finer grind. The European and other pens (e.g., Lamy) are about what you expect.
> Finally, I don't love the metropolitan. Feels great in the hand but I always find myself reaching for the smooth writing I get from my Eco.
The Metropolitan is a love-or-hate pen for some people, due to hand feel. I personally like it. If you can hold one, that'd be best. I think a couple of things make the Metro a better beginning pen than the Eco, if you like how it feels in your hand. It's cheaper; its got a metal body and cap (can be banged around), its got better QC (The first Eco I was given had the infamous 'barrel crack'. The second just flat didn't write. I'm a bit miffed at the brand), It can take cartridges or its included converter-sac, and it is by far one of the easiest pens to tear down and clean. The Eco can be taken apart with its special wrench too, but people commonly crack it in the process.
I just wish pilot sold the nibs separately for repair, like Lamy does, of TWSBI does with their more expensive pens.
For the crowd around here: I'd also say that one of the joys of a fountain pen is that you can tune, smooth, and even grind your own nibs if you're that adventurous.
Commenting with the others: I'm a left-handed writer and an avid fountain pen user. It isn't so bad.
The best thing I can say is: try to learn to write under the line (under-hand) as opposed to hookwriting or sidewriting. Those make things pretty tough. If not, there are things you can try: Prefer extra-fine (EF) or fine (F) nibbed pens. Private Reserve and Noodler's make some fast-drying ink. This combo will often allow the ink to dry faster than your hand can get to it.
It’s just Whataboutism. What the DNC did or did not do is entirely irrelevant to the case, because the DNC is not who was standing before the grand jury.
“You could pin this on a large percentage of politicians”. Yes, please. It will in fact be good for the country. I don’t care what party they come from.
At a previous company I had a chance to sit down and talk with python developers across a number of groups, and a fun question was asked: Imagine Python 4 is another large breaking change on the scale of 2 to 3. What feature makes it worth it to you?
The most common and enthusiastic answer was: Packaging and distribution.
I think to say that "large numbers of python developers think packaging is bad and should be fixed" undersells the current sentiment. I think there are large numbers of python developers with boots on the ground who are _utterly sick to death_ of the problem and willing to accept drastic measures resulting inconsiderable suffering if just means it means the issue goes away. People are in other words, getting rather desperate and discontent.
Upstream needs to do a little soul searching and come to an understanding that whatever ideological rock they're chained to that is preventing some solution from emerging has a high chance of not being moored in the needs of reality.
> EU is frozen and claim so many people will die in Europe due to high energy prices.
This complaint is one that (jokingly) makes me ask if you're new around here. the Economist is almost pathologically pessimist. I sometimes think they should call themselves _The Cassandra_, as they are constantly forecasting doom over every scenario.
I enjoy how they summarize background information and the candor of their analysis, but when it gets time to make long-term predictions I tune them out because they're about 0-50 on the number of times I should have been walking knee deep through rivers of bodies and economic collapse.
Pair it with the fact that by-and-by, apartments are extremely expensive, and in short supply, so that service jobs are often not near where people are forced to live, and that you have to pair the cost of a car with the cost of gas, and rent. Public transit is a joke, a hollow underfunded mess in most cities.
It is absolutely brutal out there, and the response is inhumane.
I don't want to discredit the experience of grad students. I've known more than a few Grad students (anecdote warning), and they are also stuck in a special kind of hell. As the article mentions, they often can't seek other employment, so they're stuck with what the university pays. But even if they could, they can't - universities may stipulate that they expect X number of hours a week, but that's a joke. Every task given over to graduate students comes with piles of mandatory overtime under crap conditions that are unpaid.
The university may talk about 'valuable experience that will pay dividends' (conveniently not paid out by the university), but grad students often deal with losing proof of that experience when their work or ideas appear under the byline of their advisor. What do you do? Your relationship with your advisor is crucial to graduating.
Suffer all that, and _maybe_ you'll get your PhD. I've met a couple of phD students who dropped out simply because their advisors were intolerable, or really disinterested in any part of the advising process except squeezing work from their student workers.
Looking from the outside in, there's a weird sorta hazing elitist mindset going on. Professors say, "My PhD program sucked, so now I'm going to make it suck for you. Can't hack it? Well, you probably don't 'belong'".
Every COVID story here is an interesting little glimpse into how a seemingly normal forum has their latent political views exploited into adopting a conspiracy theory, re: anti-vaccine rhetoric. It becomes a little more extreme every day.
This study has nothing to do with the vaccine, and yet this is what HN clamors for. I wonder how many people here understand what kind of ride they're being taken for.
The anti-work philosophy is not anti-labor. I think anyone of sense can acknowledge that energy needs to be put into the system in order to produce the necessities of life. Rather, the ideology is about allowing people to focus on the kinds of labor which brings value and meaning the community and the ones doing it. It's about eliminating 'bullshit' work, work which does not generate anything other than inane products, stock values and tools to do more of the same. Much of the work around the software industry focuses on this kind of 'bullshit' work.
Possibilities: Inexperienced young people are made to commit hard and fast to a career path. Once locked in, this choice (in the US at least) often comes with a large financial burden and time. Support is not there to pivot. Immediately after you leave (trade, academic institutions), the culture sets to weighing you down with more debt. By the time you extract yourself from that, it's still hard to pivot because now you're dealing with Ageism and sunk cost (will you recover this productivity and still put enough away to retire?). Even if you decide to bridge that gap, society provides you with absolutely no safety net. The punishment from making the wrong choice as a young dumb kid are harsh.
The "Endless possibilities" is part of the depressing trap. They're _there_, but they're so far out of reach and dangerous that unless you happen to live a charmed life with a deep-pocketed safety net, the risk-reward just doesn't make sense. This is why many in the US want tax-sponsored education and single-payer healthcare, so they can make these pivots and find happiness without having to retire at 80.
On being forced: There is really no sane way to disengage with exchanging labor. Say that I want to drop out and entirely disconnect myself. Say I fully agree to reject the products of society, be alone even unto death, and be self-sufficient. I can't buy a piece of land and sit on it. Eventually the Tax Man will come for me, and if I don't pay, he will take my land, with violence if need be. I cannot go hide in the woods. That land is the property of another or of the government - I will be chased by law enforcement and federal agents. I can't even just ghost through cities who are growing increasingly hostile to homeless populations. The system is powered by violence and coercion, and your only choice is to exchange labor for money. This could be a fair exchange if it lived up to promises. There is a rate where exchanging freedoms for perks makes sense. but a lot of people play entirely by the rules, do everything right, and still end up miserable, trapped and broken.
So yeah, it's forced. If you can't sit back and live on generational wealth or rent on your assets, every job you've ever taken has implicit threat of force behind it. You can make bad-faith arguments about the existence of choice, but choice is an illusion unless the choices presented have a reality where taking that choice makes sense. Cake or Death - what kind of sane person chooses death over cake?
I don't think anti-work is a pit of hopelessness. It's actually far more idealistic in its view that _the pieces are there_ and there are alternatives. Whether you believe that or not is really up you. That this briefly made it on to Hackernews surprised me - Hackernews continues to largely reflect the California Ideology, something that doesn't tend to breed a lot of solidarity outside of its own professions.
Not at all surprised. This is pretty much the fate of all "minimalistic" devices like this (the freewrite comes to mind as well). Minimal just means that they reserve the right to put necessary features behind subscription walls.
What this also means long term is that any openness of the device is under a Damocles sword and will be actively expanded except where GPL demands it. The benefit of openness does not appear directly in a spreadsheet like a subscription service does, and if people start trying to supercede the subscription service, they will attack it.
Worse, many firms are put off by juniors for entirely preventable reasons. In their minds, juniors are undesirable because the moment they are trained up, they tend to jump ship for senior positions elsewhere. Why train your competition, right?
The reason they jump ship is because the firm refuses to re-evaluate them for what they are worth, and keeps them on work meant to free up the company's existing senior staff (i.e., dead-end grunt-work that results in burnout). If you, as a junior developer, want to be re-valued, you need to jump ship.
This creates a feedback loop. Companies view juniors as a cheaper developer you _might_ get 2 years of low-cost work out of (after training) before they'll leave, creating a self fulfilling prophecy.
I've watched (and experienced) this loop multiple times. It's utterly baffling how firms would rather go through the cost and drain of finding and replacing talent rather than re-evaluate and pay their existing, proven talent what they are worth on the open market.
Workers would rather not move around. Workers would rather have a stable position in a job they like, in a community where they can purchase a home and build lives and/or families. Once you get past 35, playing the required musical-chairs needed to advance your career is a real drag. It does not need to be this way.
The moment you start asking the user to install things, you’ve opened up the possibility for writing a program rather than a shell script. The lifecycle of a piece of software is almost always one of growing responsibility. This cycle is devastating when it happens to shell scripts. What was once a simple script slowly becomes creaking mass of untestable, poorly understood code playing in the traffic of swimming environments (which grep you got, buddy?).
I guess I’m saying that once you open up the possibility of writing a program, you generally take that option and are usually happier for it. In the “write a program” world, ruby is still good, but it becomes a far harder question to answer whether ruby is still the right choice. There are a lot of languages with a lot of features engineers like.