[HN Gopher] The Unix Pipe Card Game
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The Unix Pipe Card Game
Author : Shugyousha
Score : 249 points
Date : 2024-07-23 15:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (punkx.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (punkx.org)
| Neywiny wrote:
| inb4 uuoc award givers. Having the cat at the front simplifies
| adding to the front of the pipeline.
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| I make those decks (https://punkx.org/) to help me teach my
| daughter, and so far they seem very effective, especially the
| unix pipes one and the 4917 machine code https://punkx.org/4917/
| and the pointers deck https://punkx.org/c-pointer-game/ , from
| the python deck I use only 10 cards or so
|
| btw, you might also like https://punkx.org/overflow/ which is a
| buffer overflow riscv assembly board game, or depending on your
| kid's level you can also play snakes and ladders with gotos
| https://punkx.org/overflow/build/snakes-and-ladders.pdf
|
| Also if you have kids, I would recommend you print
| https://punkx.org/panic/ which has amazing pranks that fit in one
| poker card (e.g. randomly hitting backspace or space every 30
| seconds, or pressing W randomly if minecraft is open)
|
| I am donating a lot of the decks to teachers and schools, so if
| you are interested send me an email.
|
| PS: I am in London for 1 more week, so if you order decks now the
| shipping will be delayed, but I will make sure I add 1-2 extra
| decks in the package because of it.
|
| PPS: the unix pipes expansion deck is all about process
| substitution, but I don't think its useful for kids, though I
| think it contains nice puzzles
| jjice wrote:
| So cool! I'm ordering a few of these after rework tonight.
|
| Out of curiosity, how do you handle printing? DIY? POD? Order
| in bulk and ship yourself? I'm always so interested in how
| people handle physical product sales at a small scale.
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| I print with local print shop http://www.hrspeelkaarten.nl/
| and https://www.printenbind.nl/ and I print a lot so the
| price gets to 3-4$ (like 800 decks or so) and then I ship
| myself.
|
| TBH physical products are amazing, I want to make more. Its
| such an amazing feeling once the product is "done", you can
| just start working on the next one, in contrast with software
| which is always in your head..
| pvg wrote:
| There was also a Show HN thread a couple of years ago, for
| people who are into the whole reading old comments thing:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33222687
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Show HN: The Unix Pipe Card Game - teach kids basic Unix
| commands_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33222687 -
| Oct 2022 (59 comments)
| liendolucas wrote:
| KUDOS for the creativity of coming up with something like this!
| vesinisa wrote:
| This is really cool!
|
| One thing I noticed: in the game there are tasks like print the
| second line and print the seventh line. But both of those lines
| are empty. So technically e.g. a non-matching grep is a correct
| solution. :)
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| yep :)
| koolba wrote:
| What age and how much terminal familiarity did you start
| playing?
| Daegalus wrote:
| I ordered 1 of all your available decks a few months ago, my
| daughters are too young for them still, but I think they are
| great, and I can't wait to bust these out in 8+ years
| elchief wrote:
| $19 shipping (Canada) is a little outrageous
|
| anybody in Greater Vancouver wanna do a bulk order w me?
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| Sorry :( I use PostNL, and its actually even more expensive, on
| most non EU shipping I lose
|
| but each deck has pdfs you can just print them with your local
| printing shop, if you don't print the box it should be cheaper
|
| you can also just print them on a4 paper and cut it with
| scissors, its not the end of the world, it is even helpful to
| explain to someone with pen and paper as well.
|
| in this case: https://punkx.org/unix-pipe-game/unix-pipe-
| box.pdf this is the box and https://punkx.org/unix-pipe-
| game/unix-pipe-cards.pdf are the cards
| przemub wrote:
| Come on, you can print it yourself if you want and it's clear
| that at this price and shipping from Europe he earns close to
| zero on these.
| floodle wrote:
| It's a wild idea to take a completely digital asset, print it
| in Europe on to paper, and then put it on a ship and slowly
| transport it to Canada.
| ktallett wrote:
| 12 Euros is a fairly standard price for tracked postage across
| continents.
| Suppafly wrote:
| Not the same, but I mailed a sweatshirt to a relative in
| Sweden from the US and it was like $36 and if I wanted it
| tracked the whole way it would have been something like $55.
| Granted this was USPS and maybe shopping it around would have
| been cheaper, but I had no idea that international shipping
| was so expensive considering you can buy stuff from china and
| shipping is basically free.
| g4zj wrote:
| Are kids these days actually able to grasp things like this? I
| don't have kids and am never around them, so please take this
| question as genuine and in good faith.
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| I think it depends a lot on the kid and the parent, I am
| teaching my daughter since she was 10, and I try to spend time
| every day doing something, you can see our progress here:
| https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...
|
| It is difficult because I have to compete with snapchat and
| google/meta for her attention, and school is quite exhausting.
| Snapchat has this super annoying 'streaks' and the more friends
| you have the more streaks you have to keep alive, so you have
| to send like 400 messages per day.. its non stop. I teach her
| that there are 100_000 developers and psychologists and product
| owners and etc, that they go to work every single day thinking
| how to extract the most value out of her attention, and she has
| to constantly be aware of what is the "algorithm" making her
| do.
|
| Unix Pipes she got quite quickly, but doesn't use often, but
| the idea of one program reading another program's output she
| got. Also grasping the command line was not that difficult. But
| I used quite some tricks to help. For example her windows PC I
| change the shell from explorer to cmd.exe, so it boots in cmd,
| so she has to navigate and also fix it. I also make scavenger
| hunts on her filesystem so she has to look for a file using dir
| and cd and etc, also https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/ I
| bribed her with robux for passing each level of the bandit game
|
| I want to teach her how computers work and how to make them do
| what she wants. From what is a register, to an instruction, to
| a program to a process. Kihon no Kihon as they say. But in the
| process I also teach her how to break things down and how to
| think and most importantly how to learn. I teach her about the
| heart of things, so there is no mystery between the keyboard
| press and the letter appearing on the screen, or how chatgpt
| predicts the next word (I am working on a RNN board game with 3
| neurons and you have to teach it to count
| https://punkx.org/move-37/rnn.pdf [work in progress])
|
| So in the end I am not sure if it matters what you teach your
| children :)
| CBarkleyU wrote:
| Not sure about kids, but I've seen university students that
| literally did not know how to use a non iOS computing device.
| Colleagues had to start explaining what a file is, a folder,
| etc etc, in their courses.
|
| Honestly I don't find that too bad. My guess is that computers
| will go the same way cars did: Most people will only know the
| very basics that are needed to operate the thing. Any deeper
| knowledge will be left to enthusiasts and professionals. Thus
| computers, while getting more complicated internally, will have
| fewer and fewer modi of usages.
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| > what a file is
|
| What is a file, what is a program, how programs run and how
| programs communicate, is not understood by most people
| (including most CS students).
|
| > Honestly I don't find that too bad.
|
| I understand what you mean, it is the same with most
| technology, users just use it, as your example of cars, or
| even furniture, or forks and spoons, or language, I am not
| even sure it is related to complexity.
|
| But I disagree on what it means to use a computer, because
| unlike other machines, it does what you make of it (now even
| more, with llama 3.1 out), I think to use a computer means to
| program it. Somehow in the last 30-40 years, user interfaces
| gave up on their users. You dont own your programs, your
| files or in many cases even your computer, it doesnt start
| the programs you want(iphone for example), and you cant debug
| other programs (e.g. in case of macos you cant gdb -p into
| signed programs unless you disable the system's integrity
| protection).
|
| Somehow we managed to squeeze all the fun out of it. As John
| Carmack says: the distance between what it is, and what it
| could be, is the opportunity, and I am sure people can have
| way more fun programming :)
|
| This commodore 64 user guide:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9WnHuGjZ38 is my
| inspiration.
| qingcharles wrote:
| The first class of my CS degree was "How to use Microsoft
| Word" and some of the other students had a really, really
| hard time figuring this out. Including the guy next to me
| who kept telling me he had a job lined up already to write
| software for nuclear reactors in Pascal.
| defrost wrote:
| This aligns with reality.
|
| To be fair to the other guy, early versions of MS Word
| sucked when it came to LaTeX representations of integrals
| and nuclear decay chain notations.
|
| Perhaps more recent versions do better.
| jtsuken wrote:
| There was a post on HN some time ago about a candidate
| for a senior IT role, who wrote code in MS Word.
|
| I can't find it right now. Maybe I should try Bing search
| pmontra wrote:
| Great fun with the autocorrected Unicode double quotes.
|
| A customer of mine got bitten on a preproduction server
| because of a copy and paste from some blog, where ASCII "
| were converted to Unicode (slanted) "
| nilamo wrote:
| Why would using a fancy editor be in any way relevant to
| writing code? That CS class should be dropped from the
| curriculum, imo, until such time as bolding a register
| has some sort of meaning, or perhaps viewing an sql table
| via "print preview".
| pmontra wrote:
| A good developer I've been working with years ago told me "I
| really don't know how networking works [and SQL] but... I
| studied Graphic Design, not CS. While I was studying that I
| realized that I liked programming more than design so I
| started doing it and never got a formal education about
| computer stuff." He was really good at Node and he ended up
| being the lead developer of the company he was working for. I
| know good developers coming from all sort of backgrounds,
| from Philosophy to Agrarian science (if that's the right
| English term for that.)
| oliwarner wrote:
| Great until you play a minimal game with somebody who grew up on
| awk, perl, etc
| grayfaced wrote:
| Yea that's the fault of the scoring method (Count pipes).
| Character count would be better... either that or play within
| the spirit of the game and learn the tools for their intended
| purpose. I use a lot of awk/sed for quick one-time processing
| and I use a similar mental model for how I do most of my
| processing. Build a input stream, use sed to structure the data
| into records, use awk to process records, massage the output
| (e.g. sort/uniq). In many cases I could use sed or awk to
| replace eachother but that makes it take longer to visualize
| and also harder to re-use.
| Suppafly wrote:
| > In many cases I could use sed or awk to replace each other
|
| I always felt that way too. I don't do a ton of command line
| processing of stuff now, but got pretty proficient with them
| back in day specifically for a unix class in college. A lot
| of the seemingly simple command line tools have overlapping
| feature sets or can be coerced into doing extra stuff.
| baudaux wrote:
| I definitely need to fix pipes in https://exaequos.com in order
| to play !!
| michaelmior wrote:
| I'm curious how the "largest pipe chain" format works when the
| rules state that the first player to complete the task wins the
| round.
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| we played it until we ran out of cards
| contravariant wrote:
| You're going to run out of coins I think.
| EmilyHughes wrote:
| yeah kids are gonna love this
| ShayNehmad wrote:
| Love the fact that I can print these. That's really great.
| Thanks! I'm debating if to print it in the office printer right
| now...
| quiteunfunny wrote:
| can you pull a dirty pipe move?
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