6 ms·

The Unix Pipe Card Game

257 points by kykeonaut 8mo ago

psarna 8mo ago
related: https://printed.games/gates/ https://printed.games/gates/
seeknotfind 8mo ago
I bought several of these and give them as gifts. Unix Pipe, Expansion Pack, and PUNK0 are my favorites.
sfblah 8mo ago
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).
- kykeonaut 8mo ago
  https://openbsd.amsterdam/cards.html https://openbsd.amsterdam/cards.html
snarf21 8mo ago
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.
slybot 8mo ago
Earlier discussion on this; 2024 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41047110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41047110 (41 comments) 2022 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33222687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33222687 (59 comments)
SamBam 8mo ago
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.
- d-us-vb 8mo ago
  As a young Linux user I always hated the experimentation aspect because usually it meant just straight up getting the command wrong 5 times before trying to read the man page, thinking I understood what the man page meant, trying again another 5 times and then giving up. This idea of experimenting and getting instant feedback is just survivorship bias for a certain type of person, not “the way we ought to teach Unix shell” This view is corroborated by the research summarized and presented in the programmer’s brain by Felienne Hermans.
  - nomadygnt 8mo ago
    Maybe I am wrong about this but I think a lot of recent research has shown that trial and error is a great way to learn almost everything. Even just making an educated guess, even if it is completely wrong, before learning something makes it much more likely that you remember and understand the thing that you learn. It’s a painful and time-consuming way to learn. But very effective. Maybe Linux commands is a little different but I kinda doubt it. Errors and feedback are the way to learn, as long as you can endure the pain of getting to the correct result.
    - JamesTRexx 8mo ago
      Trial and error was the root of what became my IT career. I became curious about what each executable did from DOS and with that did my first tweaking of autoexec.bat and config.sys to maximise memory. Years later I was the only one who could investigate network (and some other) problems in Windows via the command line while I was the junior of the team. Ended up being the driver of several new ways of working for the department and company.
      - raddan 8mo ago
        Ditto. I found that people whose attitude was “let’s just try it” tended to be a lot more capable and effective. Nevertheless the prevailing wisdom when I was in IT was that if you had a problem that didn’t have an obvious solution, you had to purchase the solution.
rbanffy 8mo ago
Still sold out?
behnamoh 8mo ago
I wish pipes would transfer more than just text to avoid re-parsing.
- matt_kantor 8mo ago
  To be fair they really transfer bytes, which can be any data format you want.
- allegretto 8mo ago
  Could I introduce you to https://www.nushell.sh/ https://www.nushell.sh/, kind sir? Started using it last year and being able to type ‘ls | sort-by modified -r | take 5’ feels liberating.
  - zahlman 8mo ago
    Disappointing that Debian seems completely uninterested in this :(
- somat 8mo ago
  Pipes don't transfer text, they transfer a unformatted byte stream. The commands however do expect a particular format. There is going to be serialization/parsing regardless of the format the command expects. Even if it is an internal object format as found in powershell commands.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
xandrius 8mo ago
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.
- jackdoe 8mo ago
  Unix Pipes is a "play once" game, just so you can try some ideas, then try them out on the computer. I used to randomly set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon Shell to cmd.exe on my daughter's laptop so she can run programs from there, e.g. go the discord directory and start discord from there. Then I made unix pipes just to help her with https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/ https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/ and so we can discuss how do you make "programs that do not know how they will be used", e.g. the programmer of "sort" does not know how it will be used, and you can create ridiculous pipe chains with the cards, just for fun. Of course I made other random tasks, e.g. we take a random book and we start "catting" and "grepping" it Most of the games i made on https://punkx.org https://punkx.org are like that, i am just trying to teach her something and i need a bit of physical help to "get out of the computer" The only real card game is http://punkx.org/punk0 http://punkx.org/punk0 which is like uno with state and I play it often with friends, and https://punkx.org/overflow/ https://punkx.org/overflow/ which is super intense depending who you play with.
LollipopYakuza 8mo ago
"Teaching kids"? Well as a professional in IT I wished I knew how to answer all this!
GNOMES 8mo ago
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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
- racl101 8mo ago
  It's amazing how these ideas conceived almost 50 years ago still are helpful for new computer users today. Just goes to show how well planned it was.
  - huflungdung 8mo ago
    [dead]
- Dilettante_ 8mo ago
  Nit: You can get a link to a specific time in the video by clicking the "share" button and ticking "start at": https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?&t=296 https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?&t=296
- cube00 8mo ago
  Great video, when I first watched it, it switched my thinking from "why is *nix so hard to use" to understanding they were really trying to build with the user in mind and to learn more about the "*nix way" to work with it, not against it.
giancarlostoro 8mo ago
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.
- cube00 8mo ago
  I felt a lot better after seeing even the all knowing LLMs couldn't explain how a set of files were getting labelled automatically with a label that didn't match the parent directory.
- dvratil 8mo ago
  Well, there's a SELinux coloring book - you need to start with SELinux while they are still young! https://people.redhat.com/duffy/selinux/selinux-coloring-book_A4-Stapled.pdf https://people.redhat.com/duffy/selinux/selinux-coloring-boo...
j2kun 8mo ago
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? :(
- jackdoe 8mo ago
  :) I actually printed a lot so the price is cheap, and I could sell for 5$ then I sold them until I recoup the printing cost and donated the rest to schools. I am thinking of doing a reprint, but tbh shipping is so expensive now, and I there is also USA's tariffs and etc.
  - lrvick 8mo ago
    I would pay triple to not have to worry about how to print and box these all neatly as you did. Please take my money for this and all your other games.
maximgeorge 8mo ago
[dead]
Contax 8mo ago
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.
huflungdung 8mo ago
[dead]
xn--yt9h 8mo ago
Can highly recommend buying from this guy; there was a holdup on my order once so he reached out personally to make sure it was okay and he also gifted me with another set. Worth supporting even if it's just an untouched collectible!
gorpomon 8mo ago
These are very very cool! I am sad they're sold out, but thankful they can be printed.
hagbard_c 8mo ago
I already foresee the quibbling on the answer to all the print the nth line questions: do empty lines count? In *nix-land they certainly do, in player-land they might, then again they might not. When little Johnny gives teacher his 2000 line essay consisting of 1998 empty lines flanked by My 2000 line essay and That's all Folks! teacher will give Johnny a 1 or an F (depending on locality, might even be E where silly rabbits banned 'F' scores). But teacher, I played this here game of cards where empty lines did count won't be accepted as valid reasoning.
Western0 8mo ago
The instructions are definitely too brief. They should include all man (in troff ;) ).
MomsAVoxell 8mo ago
I am critical of the typography of these card games. I think the information density problem has not been solved and there is a great opportunity for innovation in the card-game realm vis a vis deeply abstract connotations around which a game system is formed. That said, I do love to have a bunch of these card sets in a box, out, up in the cabin, for those mountain-side retreats where really, there's nothing actually else to do while the winds howl outside, than to stoke the fire, turn up the lantern, and try to read the freickin' instructions on the very short-sightedly designed, imho, type-set of these card games ..

257 points by kykeonaut 8mo ago

psarna 8mo ago

related: https://printed.games/gates/ https://printed.games/gates/

seeknotfind 8mo ago

I bought several of these and give them as gifts. Unix Pipe, Expansion Pack, and PUNK0 are my favorites.

sfblah 8mo ago

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).

kykeonaut 8mo ago
https://openbsd.amsterdam/cards.html https://openbsd.amsterdam/cards.html

snarf21 8mo ago

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.

slybot 8mo ago

Earlier discussion on this; 2024 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41047110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41047110 (41 comments) 2022 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33222687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33222687 (59 comments)

SamBam 8mo ago

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.

d-us-vb 8mo ago
As a young Linux user I always hated the experimentation aspect because usually it meant just straight up getting the command wrong 5 times before trying to read the man page, thinking I understood what the man page meant, trying again another 5 times and then giving up. This idea of experimenting and getting instant feedback is just survivorship bias for a certain type of person, not “the way we ought to teach Unix shell” This view is corroborated by the research summarized and presented in the programmer’s brain by Felienne Hermans.
- nomadygnt 8mo ago
  Maybe I am wrong about this but I think a lot of recent research has shown that trial and error is a great way to learn almost everything. Even just making an educated guess, even if it is completely wrong, before learning something makes it much more likely that you remember and understand the thing that you learn. It’s a painful and time-consuming way to learn. But very effective. Maybe Linux commands is a little different but I kinda doubt it. Errors and feedback are the way to learn, as long as you can endure the pain of getting to the correct result.
  - JamesTRexx 8mo ago
    Trial and error was the root of what became my IT career. I became curious about what each executable did from DOS and with that did my first tweaking of autoexec.bat and config.sys to maximise memory. Years later I was the only one who could investigate network (and some other) problems in Windows via the command line while I was the junior of the team. Ended up being the driver of several new ways of working for the department and company.
    - raddan 8mo ago
      Ditto. I found that people whose attitude was “let’s just try it” tended to be a lot more capable and effective. Nevertheless the prevailing wisdom when I was in IT was that if you had a problem that didn’t have an obvious solution, you had to purchase the solution.

rbanffy 8mo ago

Still sold out?

behnamoh 8mo ago

I wish pipes would transfer more than just text to avoid re-parsing.

matt_kantor 8mo ago
To be fair they really transfer bytes, which can be any data format you want.
allegretto 8mo ago
Could I introduce you to https://www.nushell.sh/ https://www.nushell.sh/, kind sir? Started using it last year and being able to type ‘ls | sort-by modified -r | take 5’ feels liberating.
- zahlman 8mo ago
  Disappointing that Debian seems completely uninterested in this :(
somat 8mo ago
Pipes don't transfer text, they transfer a unformatted byte stream. The commands however do expect a particular format. There is going to be serialization/parsing regardless of the format the command expects. Even if it is an internal object format as found in powershell commands.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]

xandrius 8mo ago

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.

jackdoe 8mo ago
Unix Pipes is a "play once" game, just so you can try some ideas, then try them out on the computer. I used to randomly set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon Shell to cmd.exe on my daughter's laptop so she can run programs from there, e.g. go the discord directory and start discord from there. Then I made unix pipes just to help her with https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/ https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/ and so we can discuss how do you make "programs that do not know how they will be used", e.g. the programmer of "sort" does not know how it will be used, and you can create ridiculous pipe chains with the cards, just for fun. Of course I made other random tasks, e.g. we take a random book and we start "catting" and "grepping" it Most of the games i made on https://punkx.org https://punkx.org are like that, i am just trying to teach her something and i need a bit of physical help to "get out of the computer" The only real card game is http://punkx.org/punk0 http://punkx.org/punk0 which is like uno with state and I play it often with friends, and https://punkx.org/overflow/ https://punkx.org/overflow/ which is super intense depending who you play with.

LollipopYakuza 8mo ago

"Teaching kids"? Well as a professional in IT I wished I knew how to answer all this!

GNOMES 8mo ago

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0

racl101 8mo ago
It's amazing how these ideas conceived almost 50 years ago still are helpful for new computer users today. Just goes to show how well planned it was.
- huflungdung 8mo ago
  [dead]
Dilettante_ 8mo ago
Nit: You can get a link to a specific time in the video by clicking the "share" button and ticking "start at": https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?&t=296 https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?&t=296
cube00 8mo ago
Great video, when I first watched it, it switched my thinking from "why is *nix so hard to use" to understanding they were really trying to build with the user in mind and to learn more about the "*nix way" to work with it, not against it.

giancarlostoro 8mo ago

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.

cube00 8mo ago
I felt a lot better after seeing even the all knowing LLMs couldn't explain how a set of files were getting labelled automatically with a label that didn't match the parent directory.
dvratil 8mo ago
Well, there's a SELinux coloring book - you need to start with SELinux while they are still young! https://people.redhat.com/duffy/selinux/selinux-coloring-book_A4-Stapled.pdf https://people.redhat.com/duffy/selinux/selinux-coloring-boo...

j2kun 8mo ago

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? :(

jackdoe 8mo ago
:) I actually printed a lot so the price is cheap, and I could sell for 5$ then I sold them until I recoup the printing cost and donated the rest to schools. I am thinking of doing a reprint, but tbh shipping is so expensive now, and I there is also USA's tariffs and etc.
- lrvick 8mo ago
  I would pay triple to not have to worry about how to print and box these all neatly as you did. Please take my money for this and all your other games.

maximgeorge 8mo ago

[dead]

Contax 8mo ago

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.

huflungdung 8mo ago

[dead]

xn--yt9h 8mo ago

Can highly recommend buying from this guy; there was a holdup on my order once so he reached out personally to make sure it was okay and he also gifted me with another set. Worth supporting even if it's just an untouched collectible!

gorpomon 8mo ago

These are very very cool! I am sad they're sold out, but thankful they can be printed.

hagbard_c 8mo ago

I already foresee the quibbling on the answer to all the print the nth line questions: do empty lines count? In *nix-land they certainly do, in player-land they might, then again they might not. When little Johnny gives teacher his 2000 line essay consisting of 1998 empty lines flanked by My 2000 line essay and That's all Folks! teacher will give Johnny a 1 or an F (depending on locality, might even be E where silly rabbits banned 'F' scores). But teacher, I played this here game of cards where empty lines did count won't be accepted as valid reasoning.

Western0 8mo ago

The instructions are definitely too brief. They should include all man (in troff ;) ).

MomsAVoxell 8mo ago

I am critical of the typography of these card games. I think the information density problem has not been solved and there is a great opportunity for innovation in the card-game realm vis a vis deeply abstract connotations around which a game system is formed. That said, I do love to have a bunch of these card sets in a box, out, up in the cabin, for those mountain-side retreats where really, there's nothing actually else to do while the winds howl outside, than to stoke the fire, turn up the lantern, and try to read the freickin' instructions on the very short-sightedly designed, imho, type-set of these card games ..