Most People Wouldn't Say That Stack Overflow Is In Any Way Obscure, But Then Again Most People Don't

Most people wouldn't say that Stack Overflow is in any way obscure, but then again most people don't really go below the surface of simply asking and maybe answering. Most people have no idea that, for example, Stack Overflow has it's own chat server which, although it hasn't been updated in years, is quite possibly the best system of it's type that I've ever used. In fact, there are actually two different servers, one for Stack Overflow and one for the rest of the Stack Exchange Network.

But that's how I got my start to being online. Way back when I didn't even have any social media, I made a Stack Overflow account to ask a terrible (now deleted (not by me (pretty sure it got roomba'd))) question about some especially tricky programming question that I couldn't solve after days of searching. As I used the site more, I began learning more about how it functions and the systems that underpin it, and eventually found my way to meta and then to chat, where I found a very friendly room of people who were the first real software engineers I got to know.

The only problem is that the userbase on stack overflow skews pretty old, especially compared to me at the time, and I think I picked up a lot of my internet-speak from them. Even now, when talking to closer to me in age, I frequently get called out for sounding old or being a boomer, which I think is on account of the dialect of internet I first picked up.

Also, feel like I gotta throw this in, but I know stack overflow gets a lot of shit thrown at it for being hard to approach and for being rude/unwelcoming/mean/heavy handed etc etc I'm sure you've heard the refrain. But as someone who's gotten to know how all these systems work, I promise it isn't all that scary once you understand how to approach it. Anyways, I'm getting off topic, but maybe I'll post about how to be a new user on stack overflow one of these days :P

What was your obscure chatroom/forum that you used before social media? Don’t say Gaia Online or Club Penguin. I’m talking obscure.

I did a little looking into this because I love a good edit war and I found this patently insane event. The "City Hall Riot" in 1992 in which the cops held a literal RIOT in front of City Hall, sponsored by the police union. Here's a contemporaneous New York Times article, but tl;dr the cops smashed cars, attacked journalists, and chanted racist slurs about the (black) mayor. What prompted this? Must've been something terrible like... a mere proposal to create the CCRB (Civilian Complaint Review Board), a body to provide some external oversight into the police department.

So... yeah. fuck cops. NYPD in particular.

Just learned that the NYPD apparently edited their own fucking Wikipedia page to make themselves look better 😀

ACAB 🐷🖕🥰

I think that it’s difficult for anyone who wasn’t of age in 2001 to fully appreciate just how fucking bonkers American culture went in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. I don’t even mean the wave of hate crimes and military invasions; I mean things like, overnight, American TV shows went from depicting torture as a great evil to depicting it as a Good and Necessary Thing to Defend the Homeland; cafeterias in government buildings in Washington DC started listing french fries as “freedom fries” after Jacques Chirac opposed the invasion of Iraq; there was an NHL hockey game in 2002 where the guy who was to sing the Canadian anthem had his car set on fire by a frenzied mob chanting “USA! USA! USA!”; Evanescence had to add aggressive male rapping as a backup vocal to “Wake Me Up Inside” because her label was concerned that the culture had become too feminised; there was a government “terror alert” system that, every few days, would issue vague threats and warnings about formerly innocuous behaviours; Donald Rumsfeld briefly became a sex symbol; they postponed the release of Spider-Man for reshoots to incorporate more patriotic imagery; and all of this is barely scratching the surface.

If I remember correctly, you mentioned using Vim as your day-to-day text editor. I'm also a fan of Vim and I've finally started to customize it to make it my primary Python editor; any particular plugins you'd suggest, or tips and tricks that you can offer?

Alright you asked for it this is going to be long.

vim and its friends are very handy, there's a lot you can do to make it more livable from the get go without any plugins at all.

My neovim config is here, it's a little out of date but if you want to reference what plugins and so on I have, here

GitHub

rc/vimrc at master · KaliumPuceon/rc

config files. Contribute to KaliumPuceon/rc development by creating an account on GitHub.

Enable the mouse! It's really handy to be able to click between tabs, around a file, resize splits, etc. when you want to. In your config file put:

set mouse=a

Presumably you already have your movement in vim pretty down pat, but it's worthwhile to go over a movement hint list like this one from Bart Kummel to see if there's any you missed, using G and gg to move to the top and bottom of a file is super handy. Knowing that u and C-r will undo and redo is also good.

Learn how vim's integral split and tab features work. You can :sp and :vs to split horizontally and vertically, and C-w+<direction> to move between splits, alternatively use your mouse. To create a new tab, you can :tabedit &lt;filename> or :tabnew <filename> to open or create a new file in a tab, and then use gt and gT to move through tabs (go tTab) quickly, or again, your mouse. With mouse enabled you can even drag to rearrange tabs and resize splits, way easier than memorizing the commands. More detail on tabs here and splits here.

Learn to use ctags in vim. At the top of your current programming project, run ctags -R . to build a ctags database for the project. Then, in the file, you can use C-] to jump to the definition of any function or variable, and C-t to move back up the stack of tags you've followed. You can even C-w+} to preview the definition in a split. There's way more features, you can learn them here.

Get familiar with visual mode, which will let you select a chunk of text and then cut, paste, find/replace, etc. it. Press in Normal mode to enter Visual mode, and then move around like normal, selecting text. You can then d to delete and cut to clipboard, y to copy to clipboard, or you can apply a find/replace on the selection. Of course, if you've enabled your mouse you can also just click and drag to select.

Learn your regexes, they're an unbelievably fast way to find and edit files. You can do /<regex> to immediately search for the next instance of <regex> and then move to the next and previous match with n and N. Your regex can just be the exact thing, but if you get a handle on basic regex features like word boundaries, repeats, and sets, you can construct very fast and effective searches.

With regexes you can also do find/replace, using :s/find/replace to immediately fire that off on the line you're on, or to affect the entire selection in a visual block. Very useful for renaming functions and variables.

Learn tmux, which isn't a vim thing, but is a general purpose terminal multiplexer. With a tmux session you can spawn multiple terminals in one window, each running their own shell, in separate tabs and splits, and you can background an entire session without closing it. Very useful if you want to create a self-contained programming environment, at work I have a separate tmux session for each bug I'm working on which may have a debugger, several code windows, multiple file explorers, etc. I won't cover tmux in detail here, but I wrote about it for some undergrads once and you can find my notes on that in section two of this document. If you're configuring tmux, hit me up, but my config is not suitable for general consumption.

That's about all the vim techniques I use on a daily basis at work, there's way more depth you can get into to go even faster but with those you can do all the things a conventional editor's Edit menu would do without ever leaving your keyboard. Less commonly used features includes the macro system, folds, and using the built-in file browser. I barely touch these.

Plugins:

I don't use a ton of plugins, I stick to a relatively vanilla vim experience because it means that you wont' be so lost when you sit down at someone else's config. I recommend mostly adding rather than changing, although I absolutely do have things like remapping my leader key to ,

I also don't have a ton of my plugins setup because this is a new computer, so I won't have demo photos.

I use neovim, which is a vim fork that focuses on being more modern, having saner defaults, and expanding the programming interface to languages other than vimscript. This is nice, because it means you can write plugins in a modern language like python, rust, or C++. For all intents and purposes to the average end user it is indistinguishable from vim, but the plugins I use might sometimes be nvim specific and I'll try to call out vim equivalents if I remember.

Tim Pope is the most influential vimscript programmer of the generation, having written everything from git managers to plugin installers to the de facto standard aftermarket vim default configuration. Flip through his repos and see if anything strikes your fancy. Many people like vim-surround which enables modern-editor style automatic insertion of matching braces, apostrophes, angle brackets, etc.

Neovim Completion Manager, an autocomplete tool built for Neovim. Combine it with Jedi to do intelligent python completion, pyclang for C/++ completion. The vim equivalents would be YouCompleteMe or Deoplete which is apparently now ddc. I've no preference, having used both a little, but YouCompleteMe is more popular.

Ale by w0rp, a linter that will mark out syntax errors. Nonessential, but a handy little thing, saves a lot of time, gives you relevant compiler errors right where they are.

ctrlp, a clone of sublimetext's infamous ctrl-p fuzzy search, a good way to quickly switch files in vim. Vaguely mash out something that looks like the file you want to open, and ctrlp will usually find it.

IndentLine, especially good for Python, shows vertical lines and leading spaces at your indent levels like you'd find in modern graphical editors.

That's about everything I use regularly, you can really go deep in on customizing vim into your perfect IDE, but I like to keep it light.

People make fun of 9/11 now not because 3000 people dying in a terrorist attack is funny, but because the utter fucking self-righteousness and sentimentality with which Americans treat it and have used it endlessly to justify mass violence and misery on a scale that dwarfs 9/11 ever since makes its anniversary worthy of derision.

I would like to take my dash and print it out like a newspaper. I want to thumb through its pages. I want to sit on a bench in the park and just read my dash, without having to stare at my tiny phone with the brightness at ten million on the shitty app to look at each post one by one and scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll. I want to hold it in my hands. That would be nice :)