Getting Answers Online

First of all, sorry for the general lack of updates. I’ve pretty much be coding all the time lately. It’s fun, but it feels like I haven’t slept in two weeks.

At any rate, a short story: I was trying to find out how to do some sort of redirection with stdin so I could accept non-echoed input, like what SSH does with password fields. I spent about ten minutes googling, but without knowing the proper search terms, I wasn’t finding a solution. I decided to check out #c on irc.freenode.net, figuring that someone there could tell me the information. After being told to “rtfm” and that i was “dumber than a donut”, someone finally said to “apropos password”. Why didn’t anyone just tell me that there’s a library function called getpass()? I will never understand the personality of “asshole geek”. Why not just share the information? It wastes less of your time, and less time of the person seeking the information.

Bah. Stupid programmer losers. ;o)

Hey Jude” from 1967-1970 by The Beatles


Comments

2 responses to “Getting Answers Online”

  1. It turns out that free information has a cost – the more people who know something, the less valuable it is. These “asshole geeks” are just trying to preserve their market value, a quantity steadily eroding as younger and younger folks become geekier and geekier (a trend that I believe may result in the human race consisting entirely of people who can solve the Halting Problem just by staring at a Turing machine with their impressive brains, but who cannot reproduce due to their antisocial nature, and die out).

  2. Programmer losers indeed!

    Heh, my solution (since I hadn’t heard of getpass()) probably would have been to use the curses library–I’d have had a pretty good idea how to proceed, but it would’ve required lots of looking things up and probably two or three function calls on each side of the actual call to get the input. Nice to know there’s a massively better way if one’s not thinking about writing a text-based game.

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