Another one: depending on the language, 0 is either singular or plural. In French it's singular and it's always fun to see the denial in the eyes of my French colleagues when I tell them that 0 is plural in English.
Readit Newsagateau commented on Falsehoods programmers believe about languages (localization) lexiconista.com/falsehood... · Posted by u/zdw
agateau commented on Ask HN: Where are the good Markdown to PDF tools (that meet these requirements)? · Posted by u/SamCoding
> I have a very long regular expression (email validation of course) that doesn't fit on one line but no solutions I have found properly break the lines on page overflow.
Have you considered manually splitting the regular expression into multiple lines in the source document, using something like the `VERBOSE` mode from Python re module [1]?
[1]: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/regex.html#using-re-verbose
agateau commented on Show HN: Scooter – Interactive find and replace in the terminal github.com/thomasschafer/... · Posted by u/tomschafer
Looks handy!
agateau commented on DB48X: High Performance Scientific Calculator, Reinvented 48calc.org/... · Posted by u/qwezxcrty
The 48G was a really good calculator, but only after loading additional software. The HP50g that came much later is better in every respect, except possibly for the smaller "ENTER" key (and people used to 48G will have to change some habits and possibly redefine some keys…).
Incidentally, many young people (yes, I know how that sounds) do not know how useful a good engineering calculator can be and do not want to learn how to use one. They are missing out. Yes, there is a steep learning curve, but the rewards are significant if you do any amount of calculation in your hobby or work. No, this is not replaced by typing "python" (or "bc", or anything else, really) at your command prompt.
Also incidentally, the development of good engineering calculators pretty much died. HP Prime is largely a school-pleasing toy, HP would down their calculator division a long time ago, and nobody else produces anything good. It's kind of like with gyms: what you get is what the market wants, and since the market doesn't know much, you get gyms full of useless exercise machines, because that's what people think a good gym should have. Similarly with calculators: you get stupid "modern" graphing calculators which are useless for actual work (it takes forever to use them to calculate useful things, and graphing is much better done on a computer), but they look great and sell well.
I admire the project, although I would probably have taken a different path (emulation) to get the biggest effect with the smallest possible effort :-)
I wish there was a good HP50G emulator for iOS — there used to be one, but it was abandoned (contact me if you want to develop it and would like to get the source code, it was under the GPL and I got it from the author).
I loved my HP 48G when I was in school (even if it was much slower than the Ti 81 it replaced when it came to graphing). I regret throwing it away because of the nostalgia, but I don't feel a need for using it these days.
As such I am genuinely curious about what rewards you get from using an engineering calculator in your work. That's an honest question: I would really like to have an excuse to get my hands on a 48G again!
Deleted Comment
agateau commented on Freenginx: Core Nginx developer announces fork mailman.nginx.org/piperma... · Posted by u/bkallus
gintonx
Sounds like an character from the Asterix comic book :)
agateau commented on Mozilla's new Firefox Linux package for Ubuntu and Debian derivatives blog.mozilla.org/en/produ... · Posted by u/mfsch
I expect this would still be a problem for this .deb. The package manger is doing the updating which is what causes the problem for Firefox.
The restart notice provides a way for Firefox to signal to the user that the binary on disk doesn't match the binary running. Without the warning Firefox used to randomly crash when creating new processes. The warning allows the user to perform an orderly restart (not great but neither are crashes).
As the parent states the tar.gz will avoid the problem as it uses Mozilla's update process that is used across platform. A minimum set of steps to use the tar.gz are
* Extract tar.gz to somewhere like /opt/firefox/
* Set the permissions so that the user or a group can read, write and execute /opt/firefox/
* Create or copy a Firefox.desktop file [1] and place it in the correct folder [2] so it shows up in your launcher
[1] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/de... [2] https://specifications.freedesktop.org/menu-spec/latest/ar01...
Shameless plug: I wrote a tiny script to install Firefox from their tar.gz, without requiring root access: https://github.com/agateau/tmfi.
agateau commented on The Awk book’s 60-line version of Make benhoyt.com/writings/awk-... · Posted by u/nalgeon
I'm a big awk fan but I'm not sold on this. The awk program is not very readable- I think that's fine for a dense one-liner, I'm not really sure it carries over to a 60 line script. I think for something like this I'd prefer a bash script, maybe with awk invoked somewhere, that would be much easier to understand at a glance.
Is there something in the awk script that makes it advantageous over a shell script?
Edit: I hadn't read the author's conclusion yet when I posted, he agrees
I consider AWK amazing, but I think it should remain where it excels: for exploratory data analysis and for one-liner data extraction scriptsI would find it easier to read with more sensible, non-abreviated variable names.