alt Hacker NewsThe Unix Pipe Card Game
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This gets shared a ton, but the old Bell Labs video from 4:56 to 10:52 is still the best way I have seen pipes explained:
Interesting concept but in the current format it feels like a game to bring out exactly once with a very specific group (or perhaps an unexpecting child), play for 10-15min, smile to oneself and then put the deck where these sorts of games go die. If it is attempted to bring it out again with the same group, I'd expect a response similar to "Again? Didn't we play it already?" with some disappointment.
At least it was just $5 but I think it's 1000% more fun to actually use a unix terminal with some sort capture the flag kind of game.
Love this. I once (2017 I think) made a card game based around MS-DOS with elements of Crazy Eights which I called Crazy DOS (shortened C:DOS) but got zero attention so I moved on. I might try this one, I love this kind of stuff.
We need one for SELinux for adults, it'll lowkey force people who haven't taken the time to learn SELinux to learn it and be fully capable of using it without fear.
Earlier discussion on this;
2024 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41047110 (41 comments)
2022 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33222687 (59 comments)
I bought several of these and give them as gifts. Unix Pipe, Expansion Pack, and PUNK0 are my favorites.
I wish pipes would transfer more than just text to avoid re-parsing.
I used to work with a guy in the data group at MapQuest a long long time ago and the stuff he could very quickly do with nothing but awk and sed was insanely impressive.
I saw that huge box of decks they printed for this, and I though, oh dear, how are they going to sell that many copies? :(
What a good idea. I couldn't see on the site if there's an online version (especially relevant since it appears to be sold out in physical form).
"Teaching kids"? Well as a professional in IT I wished I knew how to answer all this!
related: https://printed.games/gates/
Still sold out?
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As a science teacher and former software dev, I find this totally cute, and I understand exactly why the creator chose to make it a physical card game.
That said, I do think the translation into a physical card game means that kids aren't getting the experimentation and near-instant feedback that they'd be getting if they were doing this digitally.
In order for a kid to "win," they either have to already know, or explicitly be told using words, what all of the commands do. Then they have to hear the parent analyze their solution, and tell them where they went wrong. Picture, however, a different game, played online: A kid has no idea what "sort" does, but when they link the "sort" command to a blob of text, all the lines are sorted in order. Now no one has told them what this command does, but they've discovered it. By playing the role of a scientist discovering these commands, they might actually gain an intuitive understanding of them.
I'm thinking of the board game "robot turtle," where kids needed to create a "program" of commands to move a turtle to a goal. When they did that, they had near-instantaneous feedback: the parent moved the turtle. If the kid mixed up their left with the robot's left, the failure was obvious. But if the game has been re-made so that there was no board, and the parent and kid just needed to talk about whether the turtle would actually end up seven paces forward and three paces to the left -- i.e. doing it all verbally -- it wouldn't have been nearly as powerful.
So I'm not raining on this, I can see this as very cool. But I am having a hard time imagining it's the best way to learn to pipe together commands.