joepvd

I agree with you. One notable difference between a bug and a feature is who will pay for development/testing/support time.

I have been told to be very careful when interpreting this kind of number. There is political pressure to keep these numbers low, so only if it is really unavoidable, you'll be counted.

I am speculating here, but maybe, if a woman's spouse happens to be working, the woman will not be counted. Or who could be counted as having an early pension? Who is registered to receive benefits from the state under which conditions? Does voluntary work make one disappear from these lists?

Or... Mounting root as btfs. :)

I am not sure I am agreeing with you here...

I mean, take, for example, learning computer related stuff. Learning six languages at the same time, togther with operating systems, shells, databases, network protocols, frameworks, all at the same time. For me, that does not work. It is better to find some area to grow in, and to stick to that area for a while. Pretend the rest of all-the-things-to-learn does not exist. Only after becoming fluent, it pays to take on a different thing.

I guess the same goes for relationships; with significant others as well as with employers.

I got the metaphor differently: People have natural shields to ward off thoughts about other possible (employment) futures. Actually considering someplace else means that some holes have been punched in this shield.

Not necessarily. The solution could well be to actually hand over the maintainer job. Grant someone commit rights, clearly say so as such, and off you go :)

There was this interesting thread a while ago of someone deciding to give commit rights to anyone who made a pull request. As I remember it, it works out well for the author: Less maintainer time, and the quality of the PRs improved immediately. Unfortunately, I have not been able to dig up the thread.

Good answer to an excellent question. But I do not agree.

POSIX is the whole of a lot of utilities. Most of these utilities I never use, and there is a lot of utilities not part of POSIX that I would consider part of the "command line experience" (editor, tmux, some home grown tools, a REPL or debugger, ...), ssh, ...

Sometimes I refer to shell programs, or shell environments. This adapts to all that I actually use quite flexibly. Both to the tools, and with a special attention to the glue: the POSIX, Ba-, Da-, Z sh.

Interchageably, I also happen to use TTY (pronounced as Tee Tee Why ;) ), terminal, and Console .

I am not particularly happy with any of these, and also do not have a strong preference. I would like to be more consistent in my wording, so opiniated replies are most welcome :)

Thanks for the link to the Google Bash Style Guide. A good read.

Really awesome to read such a nice writeup of an error. It got me tangentially thinking about why we do not read stuff like:

When the patient was brought in, he was barely breathing. Due to the spots on his face, we assumed it was X. Then we made an incision in his pelvis to fix Y. Suddenly, he died. Gosh, we really should have kept an eye on the meter in the corner!

I understand things like litigation, but it makes me wonder to what extent we are being limited in medical achievements. From my outsider point of view, it seems that post mortems (ha!) are not used as much in the medical field other than for insurance / legal reasons.

The problem here, is that when one wants to understand how scientific progress is made, the particular perspoectives of the subjects (a.k.a. current implicit and explicit understandings of scientists) is the matter for research.

Postmodernism has its place, also in 'real' science.

I guess any philosopher of science systematically call into question objectivity, and in recent times will have to come to terms with "situated knowledge" one way or the other. If feminism is defined with these terms, why would e.g. Latour not qualify as feminist?

> temporarily change your mindset from "engineer building software" to "writer building documentation"

Excellent suggestion. But also here, focus on a tool and/or workflow is warranted. Meandering the field is very productive; it has its time and place. But it is not a panacea for a deep dive. Sustained focus remains necessary.

Writing documentation can be a rewarding, productive, and, yes, even noble method for taking a deep dive.

As I am not the first one to shamelessly self plug: I made ngetopt.awk[0] an argument parser for GNU awk that handles long options as well.

I've been using it quite a bit, to transform a three-liner awk program into a full fledged command in little effort. Very nice to share with colleagues.

[0]: https://github.com/joepvd/ngetopt.awk

Yes. But it is reassuring when a dependency facilitates a relatively painless deep dive into its guts.

Not sure if and how one could know this beforehand, except for taking advise from random strangers in places like this.

Please note that the article make the required time dependent on the field, whereas GP talks about persons.

Here a discussion of three months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10064657

Thanks for the write-up, this is really helpful to get the big picture. Looking forward to your next posts.

Alwayhs thought this was a nice depiction, I am guessing it comes from the same time: http://40.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0e8cy88A01qzcdwho1_1280.j...

Correlation != causation. Is screen time per se that would create some issues with kids, or is it the lack of real communication between parent and kid?

I love to sit down and actively watch (i.e. point, name, discuss) a show with my 3 y/o son. When not excessive, I feel this is good for both of us.

How about the "show not tell"-principle on the landing page? Got tired of reading "science humor" without anything to trick me into considering an absurd result?

Thanks for writing your experiences down so precise and readable. While reading, I had to think multiple times abouts the movie The Five Constraints[0], where a profound link is made between restrictions and a boost in creativity and new thoughts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Obstructions

Nice! I am using some of the funny characters!

Some remarks:

I doubt if it is needed to launch a sub-process for each markup directive. This is fine for small output, but will slow down processing of larger chunks of text. I would be interested in a bash solution based on associative arrays.

As an example, one might want to look at the zsh implementation of the colors script in the main distribution[0], which makes colors available as an associative array:

    # Set once in shell init script:
    autoload -U colors && colors
    # And use it anywhere:
    print $fg[blue]hello colorful world!$fg[reset]

[0]: http://sourceforge.net/p/zsh/code/ci/master/tree/Functions/M...

Observing that the two (wonderful!) recitations as of yet are affiliated with perl, I am wondering what's up with the rest...

The other posts by this author also look very promising. Thorough, not afraid of theoretical backgrounds, and very insightful.

Will be revisiting this site when I can spend some time without interruption.

Possibly, the better understanding of the problem domain would make a rewrite from scratch better than the existing stuff. That the improvements have little to do with the language in which the newly conceived solution was implemented.

Thanks for your suggestions, roel_v and a_e_k! Will play around with DrawIt, looks fun!

Absolutely fricking cool. Would need to learn some extra text editor tricks, however, to make it a smooth experience...

Looks awesome, but you might want to say this explicitly on the landing page.

I also came here to the comments to ask why I would want to hand over account information on an unrelated service.

Not in the languages that I am familiar with. the big question is, whether it is before or after The Comma. The Comma does not need more qualifiers than that.