Are you new to this site? I ask because your comment is entirely against the decorum we try to maintain here. This is a place for meaningful discussion (on topics pertaining to engineering and science in particular), it is not like Reddit where we hurl insults on one another in some apparent attempt to ratio people we disagree with.
Meaningful discussion. Bike shedding, mostly. And illiterates hiding behind llm-generated content. I’m new to this site, sure. Stop impeding my „freedom of speech”.
I'm sorry but what?! 'Socializing with people you know IRL' is almost exclusively what I've seen Discord used for, and almost solely what I personally use it for. There are vastly more Discord servers set up among IRL friend groups (or among classmates, as another popular use case) than there are Discord servers for fandoms of people who have never met IRL.
Yeah ... I don't think there's any overlap between "users largely unfamiliar with terminals" who want something easy to use, and 'Linux users who are sufficiently technical that they would even hear about this repo'.
Here's a scenario. You're running a cluster, and your users are biologists producing large datasets. They need to run some very specific command line software to assemble genomes. They need to edit SLURM scripts over SSH. This is all far outside their comfort zone. You need to point them at a text editor, which one do you choose?
I've met biologists who enjoy the challenge of vim, but they are rare. nano does the job, but it's fugly. micro is a bit better, and my current recommendation. They are not perfect experiences out of the box. If Microsoft can make that out of the box experience better, something they are very good at, then more power to them. If you don't like Microsoft, make something similar.
> You're running a cluster, and your users are biologists producing large datasets. They need to run some very specific command line software to assemble genomes. They need to edit SLURM scripts over SSH. This is all far outside their comfort zone. You need to point them at a text editor, which one do you choose?
Wrongly phrased scenario. If you are running this cluster for the biologists, you should build a front end for them to "edit SLURM scripts", or you may find yourself looking for a new job.
> A Bioinformatics Engineer develops software, algorithms, and databases to analyze biological data.
You're an engineer, so why don't you engineer a solution?
The title is a bit confusing depending how you read it. Edit isn't "for" Linux any more than PowerShell was made for Linux to displace bash, zsh, fish, and so on. Both are just also available with binaries "for" Linux.
The previous HN posts which linked to the blog post explaining the tool's background and reason for existing on Windows cover it all a lot better than a random title pointing to the repo.
PowerShell lends itself really well to writing cross-platform shell scripts that run the same everywhere you can boot up PowerShell 7+. It's origins in .NET scripting mean that some higher-level idioms were already common in PowerShell script writing even before cross-platform existed, for instance using `$pathINeed = Join-Path $basePath ../sub-folder-name` will handle path separators smartly rather than just trying to string math it.
It's object-oriented approach is nice to work with and provides some nice tools that contrast well with the Unix "everything is text" tooling approach. Anything with a JSON output, for instance, is really lovely to work with `ConvertFrom-Json` as PowerShell objects. (Similar to what you can do with `jq`, but "shell native".) Similarly with `ConvertTo-Json` for anything that takes JSON input, you can build complex PowerShell object structures and then easily pass them as JSON. (I also sometimes use `ConvertTo-Json` for REPL debugging.)
It's also nice that shell script parameter/argument parsing is standardized in PowerShell. I think it makes it easier to start new scripts from scratch. There's a lot of bashisms you can copy and paste to start a bash script, but PowerShell gives you a lot of power out of the box including auto-shorthands and basic usage documentation "for free" with its built-in parameter binding support.
I dunno, I spent a lot of years (in high school at least) using Linux but being pretty overwhelmed by using something like vim (and having nobody around to point me to nano).
EDIT.COM, on the other hand... nice and straightforward in my book
There's no shortage of less technical people using nano for editing on Linux servers. Something even more approachable than that would have a user base.
Especially noting it's a single binary that's just 222kb on x86_64— that's an excellent candidate to become an "installed by default" thing on base systems. Vim and emacs are both far too large for that, and even vim-tiny is 1.3MB, while being considerably more hostile to a non-technical user than even vim is.
I can definitely see msedit having a useful place.
I'm a novice in this area so sorry if this is a dumb question, but what is the difference in principle between a 'non-reasoning agent' and just a set of automated processes akin to a giant script?
Example: instead of telling your agent: “Open Google Calendar, create a new event, invite Mark, set it for 3 PM,” you say: “Set up a meeting with Mark tomorrow before 3 PM, but only if he has questions about the report I sent him.” This requires Generative AI combined with planning algorithms.
- Decide what to do next
Example: a user asks your chatbot a question it doesn’t know the answer to and instead of immediately escalating to support, the agent decides: Should I ask a follow-up question? Search internal docs? Try the web? Or escalate now? This step needs decision-making capabilities via reinforcement learning.
- Handle unexpected scenarios
Example: an agent tries to schedule a meeting but one person’s calendar is blocked. Instead of failing, it checks for nearby open slots, suggests rescheduling, or asks if another participant can attend on their behalf. True agents need reasoning or probabilistic thinking to deal with uncertainty. This might involve Bayesian networks, graph-based logic, or LLMs.
- Learn and adapt based on context
Example: you create a sales assistant agent that helps write outreach emails. At first, it uses a generic template. But over time, it notices that short, casual messages get better response rates, so it starts writing shorter emails, adjusting tone, and even choosing subject lines that worked best before. This is where machine learning, especially deep learning, comes in.
Pardon my dumb query, as I'm a tech novice, but aren't QR just encodings of data? And the max amount of data a QR can encode is like 3kb, which would roughly correspond to 3000 or so plaintext characters. So the achievement here is that this Doom-like game can be run from an executable roughly of that size?
QR codes have various encoding modes: numeric, alphanumeric, 8 bit and kanji. The most common is alphanumeric encoding and the densest is 8 bit encoding which just stores binary data.
The QR code standards seem to be a little ambiguous on the meaning and purpose of the 8 bit encoding. I got the impression they added it to support alternative character encodings. Still, it's a mode that "represents an 8-bit byte value directly".
> The default interpretation for QR Code is ECI 000020 representing the JIS8 and Shift JIS character sets.
> 8.3.4 8-bit Byte Mode
> The 8-bit byte mode handles the 8-bit Latin/Kana character set in accordance with JIS X 0201 (character values 00HEX to FFHEX).
> In this mode data is encoded at a density of 8 bits/character.
> 8.4.4 8-bit Byte Mode
> In this mode, one 8 bit codeword directly represents the JIS8 character value of the input data character as shown in Table 6, i.e. a density of 8 bits/character.
> In ECIs other than the default ECI, it represents an 8-bit byte value
directly.
In any case, it is possible to use QR codes to store arbitrary binary data. The qrencode tool can do this natively. Decoder support is more tricky, they tend to assume all QR codes contain text. I had to send patches to zbar to help it decode QR codes with binary data in them because it was passing the data through iconv and mangling the output. I also had to add options to the zbar tools to make them decode exactly one QR code
I just wanted to print out 4096 bit RSA secret keys as QR codes. People started QR encoding video games pretty soon after. It's awesome.
Same in terms of quelling anxiety, but I think the commenter was referencing the fact that, in contrast to the original post mentioning 'cozy' games, this commenter is talking about a highly 'un-cozy' game.
I know next to nothing about physics, but isn't the "It just so happens" part of what you said potentially misleading? Isn't it that light is massless, so that directly implies that it would travel at the maximum speed?
It's a distinction with no difference. Only massless particles can move at the "maximum speed", in our Universe these are photons and gluons. And maybe gravitons, if they exist.
Similarly, massless particles can't move below the "maximum speed", as they'll have no energy or momentum and won't be able to interact with anything.
Why would the absence of mass force something to travel at the maximum speed? I could understand it being able to travel at that speed; why would it always do so though?
Theoretically, a massless particle can move slower than light. But then it'll have zero energy and momentum, so it won't be able to interact with anything.
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