/dev/chat

7:49 AM

@FaheemMitha Yes. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it though.

8:05 AM

@terdon Thanks. And for some reason everyone feels is necessary to add that. It seems double negatives have a bad rep or something.

@NathanOsman I'm sure it was. Was there any particular reason for doing that, though?

@FaheemMitha Yes, I was just reading through the ELU transcript. The term "double negative" is usually used to refer to things that aren't considered "proper English", like I ain't never been etc.

@terdon Ah, you saw my exchanges there, then.

Mitch has a point about those being two clauses, but I'd still call that a double negative myself since the two are clearly connected. Both curiousdanii and sumelic are linguists as I recall though, so I'm sure they know what they're saying.

Is "double negative" a well-defined term or not? I was getting contradictory opinions there.

@terdon Hmm. I forget what everyone said. I remember Mitch said it wasn't, but they didn't seem willing to back it up.

It's most commonly used to talk about the ones that invert the meaning

It's well-defined in the "more than one form of negation in a sentence" sense, though

8:09 AM

The WP entry is a bit loose. I agree with mitch about that. As mitch says, the two negatives would need to be part of the same semantic "unit".

@FaheemMitha Probably not, no. Or, rather, it will be understood to mean things like I ain't never by laymen but it doesn't seem to be a thing in linguistics.

@terdon Yes, that was my impression too.

I guess I should learn some linguistics term for this kind of thing.

@MichaelHomer But the negations would need to be related, as mitch pointed out.

For example:

> I didn't go brush my hair and I didn't go for a walk.

Two negations. Clearly not a double negative.

It's certainly a "thing" in linguistics, but it doesn't necessarily have the same meaning to them as the common usage. It's the normal way of describing, say, Afrikaans.

@MichaelHomer No, that's negative concord, apparently.

That's a different thing

8:13 AM

Yes, I was just going to say that negative concord appears to be the term used.

microsyntax.sites.yale.edu/negative-concord has the example:

> I ain't never been drunk.

@MichaelHomer As I understand it, that's the feature of the language itself. It's something languages may or may not have.

That's what many people associate with the term double negative.

Or so it appears. I don't myself.

Some languages have, specifically, double negation (rather than single or multiple)

Oh? For example?

Afrikaans, like I said

8:16 AM

You didn't say it has double but not single oir multiple. That's interesting.

I wonder if Dutch is the same way. I'd expect so.

@MichaelHomer Example?

BTW, have either of you guys ever watched University Challenge?

The standard negation construct is bracketed. Like French, sort of

@MichaelHomer French has multiple though. As does Spanish, there isn't a limit in either.

"Ek kan nie praat nie", "I cannot speak"

OK, yes, like Romance languages then.

8:18 AM

@MichaelHomer Is that Afrikaans?

I have seen University Challenge, yes

Means something like "I can not verb not" right?

Yeah

"I ain't never been drunk." isn't standard English, though.

praat? Speak?

@FaheemMitha So?

8:19 AM

Just saying.

Yes, speak

It depends. It is very, very common usage. That's the only real standard you can have.

@MichaelHomer ha! Cool :)

There is also a material difference between "haven't never been" and "haven't not been"

Indeed.

Are you South African @MichaelHomer? For some reason, I thought you were a kiwi.

So lumping them both together as "double negative" isn't very informative, however accurate

No

8:23 AM

Just curious as to why you'd speak Afrikaans, it's not a very popular 2nd language.

Must be a very interesting one though, what with its various influences.

I don't, really. A very little bit

A long time ago I learned some. It's not especially useful to me

Yeah, not a language you're likely to use very often.

I do have a whole degree in Spanish, which it's probably even less likely that I encounter anyone who speaks, so I may just make poor linguistic choices

@terdon Yes, we've had that conversation before.

@MichaelHomer That's a very useful language in some parts of the world.

@FaheemMitha But the nearest Spanish-speaking country is quarter of the planet away from here, so.

8:37 AM

@MichaelHomer Bueno, tampoco tanto. Hay montón de gente que habla Español.

@MichaelHomer Yes, I see that. Have you always lived in the Antipodes?

Yes

Ah, then admittedly the Spanish choice is perhaps not optimal. Though I'm not sure what would be a better choice. Are there many different languages spoken where you are?

Spanish is one of the more widely spoken languages on the planet. So, not an intrinsically bad choice.

Europe, North America, South America. Hard to do better, really.

Everybody speaks English here, there's no day-to-day practical value in anything

@MichaelHomer Yes, that was my impression. It's like the US. With less Spanish.

Recently I've run into at least one American who was in India learning Farsi. There's no accounting for tastes.

8:42 AM

@FaheemMitha Um, I guess

Americans mostly speak English. With exceptions, obviously. I also talked to another American lady who was learning Urdu.

Neither Farsi nor Urdu are particularly widely spoken internationally. Though since Urdu is basically (to a first approximation) Hindi in a different script, it's pragmatically the better choice.

(But I'm rambling...)

The only place I've ever had cause to use any Spanish has been California

Any and all languages are useful. Learning a language is never a waste. Each one you speak affects the way you think and enhances your ability to communicate.

Obviously Māori is the second-most-common language here, but it's not day-to-day necessary. I would like to know more, though

@terdon From a practical viewpoint, some languages are more useful than others.

But yes, it's better than sitting on the couch and watching TV.

For example, if you don't know English, your top priority should be to learn it.

And I'm not particularly a fan of English, it's the only language I know.

And for better or worse, it's the dominant language internationally. Particularly in science/technology. And on the net.

@MichaelHomer Māori is the native language, right? But I don't see why that is obvious. But I suppose New Zealand hasn't murdered all its natives, as has happened in other places.

8:52 AM

Yes

There would need to be a lot of immigrants from the same place to displace it, whose children and grandchildren kept the language up

At the last census: English, Māori, Samoan, none, Hindi, Northern Chinese

@MichaelHomer Are there are a lot of Indians in NZ? Relatively speaking?

@FaheemMitha Since I have the census tables open... in 2013 India was the third-most-common place of birth for immigrants

@MichaelHomer The first being... China?

But NZ is a small place, so I imagine they must have tight immigration controls.

I'm sure there are lots of people who would like to move there.

England (21.5%), then China (8.9%), then India (6.7%)

There are lots of non-immigrant Chinese- and Indian-descended people, too. But those numbers would be in different tables.

9:08 AM

@MichaelHomer Oh. Huh. Didn't expect England. As opposed to the UK? England isn't a country.

About 25% of the population was born overseas

Scotland is 10th

I think after WW2 a lot of people from the UK moved to AU, and possibly NZ.

But I didn't realise they were still moving.

@MichaelHomer Interesting. Is the population climbing fast?

... India, Australia, South Africa, Fiji, Samoa, Philippines, Korea, Scotland

Sounds like quite a mix.

A lot of those people have been here a long time. I don't know what the rates are currently

9:10 AM

Ok.

How are things in NZ these days?

69,000 migrants last year

That sounds like a lot.

No, 69,000 net. 125,000 total, 30,000 of whom were returning locals

I don't follow.

What is the 125k figure?

Total arriving permanent migrants in the last year

Coming from Australia, UK, India, China, in that order

Australia is probably mostly returning citizens though

Oh, and things are ok

9:17 AM

@MichaelHomer permanent migrants means immigration, right?

About 4.7 million total residents

Yes

@MichaelHomer You mean NZ people moved to AU, and back again? Sounds busy.

@FaheemMitha It is pretty common.

No visas either direction

9:34 AM

@MichaelHomer Oh, I see.

I'd like to visit some time.

@MichaelHomer Do you happen to know anyone running an Airbnb or similar in NZ?

@FaheemMitha I don't. I know people have used them when visiting the university, so there must be plenty around

@MichaelHomer Yes, I expect there must be. It's booming here too.

It is a nice place. Most of the things tourists seem to come to do I don't really care for, to be honest, but they seem to like them.

@MichaelHomer What is a nice place? NZ?

@FaheemMitha Yes.

9:41 AM

Personally I don't get the tourist thing. I like to have a reason to go somewhere.

Jumping off a bridge?

@MichaelHomer huh?

We have lots of that around and people seem to come specifically for it

@MichaelHomer Lots of what? Bridges?

Bungee jumping

9:44 AM

I've seen NZ in the LOTR movies. It certainly looks very scenic.

@MichaelHomer Ugh.

Scenic and unspoilt. How proactive is NZ about not trashing the ecology?

Not very

Oh, that's too bad. In a place that small, it's important. Otherwise you end up like the US. Or India, even.

It's quite big, just sparsely-populated

Relatively

100K square miles. Not small, I guess.

AU is surprisingly big. But I suppose much of it is inhabitable.

It was all inhabited...

9:57 AM

@MichaelHomer What, AU?

Yes

Sorry, I meant to write "uninhabitable".

@MichaelHomer I didn't know that. What happened?

Climate change?

Colonisation

Or human depredations?

@MichaelHomer You mean the colonists destroyed the land? Or just killed people?

Some of both, I guess.

List of massacres of Indigenous Australians

10:01 AM

Yeah. Australian treatment of the aborigine population has been atrocious.

For example:

Groups of Indigenous Australians were massacred on many occasions between the start of the European colonisation of Australia in 1788 and the 1920s. These massacres formed a significant element of the frontier wars. The following list tallies a few of the better documented massacres of Aboriginal Australians, which took place mainly during the colonial period. == Some frontier collisions and massacres on record == === 1780s === 1789 Epidemics of disease were seen killing fifty percent or more of several tribes neighbouring the Sydney settlement. It has not been determined if the initial infection...

So the interior was once inhabited? I see. I didn't know that.

@terdon About par for the course, I'd say. At least they left some of them alive.

In the US, the native population is not really part of the country. They're totally marginalized. No participation in any way.

Not many. And those that were left were disenfranchised, and generally treated like shit. They only got the vote recently, for example.

@terdon I see. You're talking about AU, right?

In the 60s, apparently.

Yes

@FaheemMitha Yes

I was surprised to discover that there are quite a lot of natives in the US. They're basically invisible.

10:06 AM

Stolen Generations

The Stolen Generations (also known as Stolen Children) were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments. The removals of those referred to as "half-caste" children were conducted in the period between approximately 1905 and 1969, although in some places mixed-race children were still being taken into the 1970s. Documentary evidence, such as newspaper articles and reports to parliamentary committees, suggest a range...

11:40 AM

hello

Can someone help me with a bash problem?

11:50 AM

@IsabelCariod It's probably best to post a question on the site.

Then, if necessary, we can discuss it here

I have json in this form

{"go":
{"player":"Helop"},"user"{"id":1}
}

And I want to get player with jq

jq '.player'

But I receive null

Ask a question. But you'll need to include rather more context than that. Right now, I've no idea what you're asking. Of course, I don't know much about scripting.

What is jq, for example?

I try to do a post with curl and handle response json with jq

curl --data "data" api.url.com/?api_key=my_key | jq '.player'

According to the description of jq on Debian, "jq is like sed for JSON data".

@IsabelCariod Seriously, ask this as a question on the site: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/ask

12:00 PM

But don't assume people know what jq is. Context, please.

stedolan.github.io/jq/tutorial

it's to parse json

so hard for a linux chat?

Yes, I saw that.

@IsabelCariod Ask a question on the site. That's what it's there for.

@IsabelCariod No, the answer is trivial, but that's how the site works.

@IsabelCariod posting a question is good because: i) it often helps you understand your problem better since you have to explain it in a more formal way. I have often started asking a question only to find that the act of writing it out clearly has shown me the answer.

ii) Questions on the site will help other users. If we just solve everything in chat, the site becomes useless. If we help you now, we'll have to repeat the effort for the next person with the same problem.

ok

I have another question about terminal

When I do a post with curl in bash I get some statistics in terminal
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 1255 0 1222 100 33 124 3 0:00:11 0:00:09 0:00:02 374

Can I stop that monitor?

12:17 PM

@IsabelCariod Ask questions on the site...

I found here unix.stackexchange.com/a/84822

@IsabelCariod Nice! That's another reason we encourage people to use the Q&As rather than chat for questions — often the question has already been answered.

1:15 PM

@StephenKitt Hah. That's called helping people towards an epiphany. :-)

BTW, congratulations on 30+ K.

@FaheemMitha thanks!

I need to downvote something to get to 36k exactly ;-)

@StephenKitt Why would you want to get to 36 K exactly?

So, I have a question. Have you found this site educational?

@FaheemMitha just for the fun of it, "36,001" makes it oddly tempting to get "36,000" exactly...

@FaheemMitha yes, in a variety of ways

more strict scripting skills thanks to Gilles and Stéphane

better explaining skills

and discovering a few interesting tools

@StephenKitt You should try for a palindrome.

@StephenKitt That's good.

It's good writing practice, I suppose.

@FaheemMitha ah yes that would be an interesting challenge

@FaheemMitha indeed

1:28 PM

Could I persuade you to post an answer to the "getting to know you" question? It's seen little activity in recent months.

If you don't know what that is, I could post a link. Well, dinner time...

@FaheemMitha heh, I keep meaning to do that and stuff gets in the way!

Bon appétit, enjoy your dinner!

@StephenKitt Ah, you know what it is, then. Post an abbreviated version. Expand it whenever. You could start with being a DD.

@StephenKitt Thanks.

7:53 PM

@casey I don't remember exactly (I only keep logs for a year) but the uptime of my home PC up to half an hour ago must have been at least 400 days

that was before the power failed for the whole neighborhood :(

look on the bright side, there's probably some kernel bug that I'm now no longer vulnerable to

er, what's my home ssh passphrase again?

I should put my ssh keys on a keyring with a password I use more often

Peter Tòmas Scott

The security features listed on the Debian wiki aren't complete at present and they are not properly colour coded. wiki.debian.org/Security/Features

What does 'yes, package list' mean?

@PeterTòmasScott I suspect that this is copied from a place where “package list” links to the packages that have that feature

Peter Tòmas Scott

@Gilles That makes sense. Guess I need to try and find the list.

8:30 PM

ok, that's a really weird one

why do my text consoles think I'm holding the Enter key down?

X has no problem

8:48 PM

mystery solved

it was literally a PEBKAC

for some reason I had a second keyboard plugged in, which I'd shoved under the desk but not unplugged, and something had fallen onto the enter key

so PEBKAD, not PEBKAC

Stephen Harris

11:20 PM

Hmm, is it bad that I think "that was a good day at work" when I achieve 200 points?