tod222

Yep, good times!

From 'man perlop':

           Customary  Generic        Meaning        Interpolates
               ''       q{}          Literal             no
               ""      qq{}          Literal             yes

where {} can be any bracket pair.

   my $string1 = q<a single quote '>;
   my $string2 = qq<a double quote ">;

anyone else still having nightmares from trying to escape quotes and meta chars in a shell?

This was a major reason I downloaded Perl 1.0 off Usenet in 1987.[1]

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36657782

See also The Timeline of Perl and its Culture https://history.perl.org/PerlTimeline.html

Yes, writing shell scripts calling awk and sed was awful, just an aesthetic nightmare to work with. Properly quoting strings was always problematic, and while Usenet was available there wasn't a plethora of information like nowadays. This was a few years before Bash was released.

Through my use of Usenet I learned that a better reader program was available called 'rn', which I downloaded and built. It had an amazing handwritten install script (autoconf was years off) which could automatically configure and build rn on any *NIX system. All developed by a fellow named Larry Wall.

rn was truly a joy to use and made reading Usenet swift and efficient. It would get updated with the fixes that came across Usenet that I'd apply using the clever 'patch' program, also written by Larry Wall.

Based on my experience with his other software, when Larry Wall released Perl on Usenet I immediately downloaded, built, and started using it. As promised, for scripting things not requiring a C program, it was massive improvement. Version 2.0 came out and brought many great new capabilities.

I wasn't writing software while versions 3 and 4 came out; I started using it again after version 5 and the appearance of CPAN. Over the years I've used Perl extensively for task automation and data wrangling.

Python now dominates Perl's niche because it's easier to learn and interfaces better with C. It's also less flexible, which compared to Perl is a virtue. One of Perl's mottos is TMTOWTDI—there's more than one way to do it. But many of them are bad. Much of Perl's poor reputation ("line noise") stems from this.

But when Perl was released it was a revelation, like a drab day when the clouds suddenly part letting warm sunlight pour down on the land.

Exactly.

To recap for folks unfamiliar with the history:

Peter Thiel co-founded the electronic payments company that developed PayPal.

Musk co-founded an online bank which had massive security holes.

The two companies merged and Musk was fired before the name was changed to PayPal.

See part 1 of Common Sense Skeptic's video on YouTube: Debunking Elon Musk

Board members Henry Kissinger and William Perry unwittingly admitted they were dupes ten months prior to the first Carreyrou article in a Dec. 2014 article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker: [1]

Kissinger, who is ninety-one, told me that Holmes “has a sort of ethereal quality—that is to say, she looks like nineteen. And you say to yourself, ‘How is she ever going to run this?’ ” She does so, he said, “by intellectual dominance; she knows the subject.”

Board members are clearly charmed by Holmes. She is a careful listener, and she is unnervingly serene; employees say that they can’t remember an instance when she raised her voice. “She has sometimes been called another Steve Jobs, but I think that’s an inadequate comparison,” Perry, who knew Jobs, said. “She has a social consciousness that Steve never had. He was a genius; she’s one with a big heart.”

1: https://archive.fo/yhpXZ

Sure, it was cool to see, but it was inevitable that someone would do it. Once Dean Kamen demonstrated self-balancing wheelchairs and Segways, anyone paying attention could foresee subsequent applications such as self-landing boosters.

There are a lot of smart people in the world who, with the same backing that Musk received, could lead a company to achieve those goals. Without spreading themselves so thin that they make mistakes affecting thousands of people. Our tendency to elevate and idolize people who are aggressive and self-promoting leaves little room for those blessed by the absence of those traits.

It's ridiculous that on a day when thousands face unemployment that there are excited stories about flamethrowers being shipped.

WAVE (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool) shows numerous contrast errors[1]. (Click the contrast button on the sidebar.)

[1] http://wave.webaim.org/report#/https://news.ycombinator.com/...

I'm sorry, I think your analysis of the cause of the power disparity is wrong. It's not due to numbers.

It's because power disparity is inherent in hierarchical organizations. The CEO is just one person, but their position at the apex of the hierarchy gives them power over everyone else in the organization. Power disparity is baked into the hierarchy—it's not a hierarchy without it.

Unions are a way to balance the power of the employee group against the management hierarchy. Unfortunately unions are also subject to the corruption that accompanies power.

Some…yeah, where some is the 1.7 million cubic yards of rubble now clogging up the Thermalito Diversion Pool. [1]

When you look at photos or drone videos of the erosion near the main spillway, it's clear that an immense amount of rock has been eroded away (the color changes from brown to gray). [2]

Juan Browne discusses the type and strength of the rock in one of his excellent videos about the Oroville crisis. [3] (Note that he demonstrates the weakness of the rock where he is standing, which is across the river from the spillway and might not be the same rock.)

[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/03/spoil-sites-for-orovil...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpXtMZwpDqs

[3] https://youtu.be/ilkU_ivYTqQ?t=679

like facebook did when their cheating got out

I have no idea what this refers to. Care to elaborate?

Surely there are successful terrorist plots that have succeeded that we are unaware of.

No. Terrorists even take credit for things they had nothing to do with. The goal of a terrorist is to strike fear into the population by committing crimes in the most public way possible. Secrecy of the result doesn't serve this goal. The other reason to publicize is for recruiting purposes.

We certainly know the number of successful plots. Failed plots and fizzles, perhaps not.

The Life community goes back decades!

Some members recently have put together a distributed soup search project to catalog objects that appear naturally. While the c/10 spaceship wasn't found in the search, a number of interesting things have been discovered. For more information about the catalog effort (named "catagolue" for Game of Life), the object database, and the distributed client, see http://catagolue.appspot.com/home

With all due respect to Tim Cook and Apple, I work with a team of the best hackers on the planet. These hackers attend Defcon in Las Vegas, and they are legends in their local hacking groups, such as HackMiami. They are all prodigies, with talents that defy normal human comprehension. About 75% are social engineers. The remainder are hardcore coders. I would eat my shoe on the Neil Cavuto show if we could not break the encryption on the San Bernardino phone. This is a pure and simple fact.

[Emphasis added.]

His team will bluff its way into the phone.

(Quoted from McAfee's original op-ed referenced by the original linked article: www.businessinsider.com/john-mcafee-ill-decrypt-san-bernardino-phone-for-free-2016-2)

Right now this is just a fancy maglev.

Precisely. There are no air intakes on the nosecone. None needed, since there's no air hockey suspension.

I'm surprised more people didn't notice this. I was shocked when I saw the change.

The Best Overall Design Award was given by SpaceX to a design that's not Hyperloop as we know it—just a maglev in a tube.

There have been some comments, but I'm not sure I've seen this excellent take on the issue.

From the linked document:

So what’s the value of getting the vibration mode shapes of this little section of the Hyperloop? Simple: it makes pretty pictures you can put in your proposal.

and

Nothing in this section of the proposal has “demonstrated the capability of the Hyperloop,” nor was it intended to. This is not simply an error. This is eyewash for the rubes, the surest sign you’re dealing with a snake oil salesman.

And now the winning design from MIT drops the air hockey suspension for conventional magnetic levitation.

The purpose of Hyperloop isn't to build a fast, new LA-SF link, it's to kill the California High-Speed Rail project. It's a classic case of FUD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt

If built on the moon or Mars it wouldn't need the tube, since the winning design uses magnetic levitation.

No the article is good because it accurately describes the winning design, which drops the air hockey for a maglev. Check the MIT site for details.

Let me repeat that: the first serious proposal is no faster than a train and can't actually be used for transporting anything. Making it, as a suggestion for high speed transport, completely useless.

Yes, although this can be handwaved away by saying it's not a full-scale model and the test track is too short for higher speeds.

What I find more interesting is that the winning design isn't even true Hyperloop, as the air hockey suspension is replaced by maglev. There's no air intake on the front because magnets are used.

The winning design doesn't validate the Hyperloop concept since it replaces a critical element and becomes just a maglev in a tube with a rail. It wouldn't surprise me if the tube disappeared in the next iteration.

Yes. Furthermore, there is no air hockey.

The winning design is a maglev.

You're smearing someone while citing the notorious author that Politico dubbed a "misinformation monger."

Please stop wasting our time.

Randall Munroe explains this very nicely in his piece on Orbital Speed[1]:

But getting to space is easy. The problem is staying there.

To avoid falling back into the atmosphere, you have to go sideways really, really fast…The speed you need to stay in orbit is about 8 kilometers per second. Only a fraction of a rocket's energy is used to lift up out of the atmosphere; the vast majority of it is used to gain orbital (sideways) speed.

Highly recommended.

1: https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

A penny per character?

This is overpriced by several orders of magnitude and would instantly spark a huge user revolt.

Artificial scarcity as a business model, ugh.

It could be to Twitter what in-app purchases are to "free-to-play" games like Candy Crush -- a way to skip out of a grind.

Intentionally design your user experience to suck, but it gets better if the user pays.

I don't like your ideas.

"…corrupted is too strong a word….subsumed."

She is being extremely generous. Corrupted is exactly the right word.

The parent comment highlights the two sentences starting with "I don’t think they are evil." But I was particularly struck by the end of that paragraph:

"The people who work at Google, Facebook, etc can’t imagine how everything they make is not, like, totally awesome. If it’s not awesome for you it’s because you just don’t understand it yet and you’ll come around. They can’t imagine scenarios outside their reality and that is how they inadvertently unleash things like the algorithmic cruelty of Facebook’s yearly review (which showed me a picture I had posted after a doctor told me my husband had 6-8 weeks to live)."

Algorithmic cruelty is such a great turn of phrase.

(Edit: This is a reply to a now-deleted comment about a CA ballot question to kill the CA high speed rail project and instead fund a Hyperloop pilot.)

Hyperloop was originally intended to elicit exactly this response—replace a project based on current technology with a pie-in-the-sky research project based on an unproven tech.

There have been many pilot projects in transit tech that were never successful enough to merit subsequent wide deployment. Is anyone connected to airline finances at all concerned about Hyperloop? If Hyperloop was real then airlines would be panicking.

An analysis reported earlier here was that it will either be half as fast as proposed, or will cost more due to requiring larger diameter tubes. [1]

If you read old discussions here on HN you'll find serious questions about the design's ability to cope with both seams and thermal expansion in the tube. [2][3][4] One proposal previously discussed here replaces Musk's design with a knitted carbon fiber tube. [5] Anyone who discounts the seriousness of the thermal expansion issue would do well to read the Heat Orders FAQ from Virginia Railway Express. [6]

Hyperloop is back in the news because the pilot project is Musk's carrot dangled to the state of Texas to allow him to build showrooms, see "Tesla's Musk woos Texas lawmakers with talk of track, car plant". [7] The Hyperloop test track is about benefiting Tesla, not building out Hyperloop. It's a political bargaining chip.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7000412 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6202327 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6202966 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8773406 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6658988 [6] http://www.vre.org/feedback/frequently_asked_questions/faq_h... [7] http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/15/autos-tesla-texas-...

Yours is the first comment mentioning the TRS-80. Currently it's halfway down the page.

I find this a bit surprising as the TRS-80 had a huge impact on the PC industry. It was the first PC that was easy to buy since Radio Shack stores were widespread.

Although derided as the "Trash-80," it was enormously popular for a time: "Still forecasting 3,000 sales a year, the company sold over 10,000 TRS-80s Model Is in its first one and a half months of sales…" [1]

According to the Wiki entry, it was released with two bundles, the bare unit at $399 and $599 with monitor and tape storage unit. Adjusted for inflation, that's $1,555 and $2,334.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80#History

You must be talking about The Games People Play[1].

Long ago I bought things there such as the D&D boxed set and the Chivalry & Sorcery[2] rules. Another purchase I made there was a Magic Cube, imported from Hungary before the worldwide release as Rubik's Cube. These first cubes were heavier than the widely-released ones[3].

Great store, glad that it's still around.

[1] http://www.thegamespeopleplaycambridge.com/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chivalry_%26_Sorcery [3] http://www.rubiks.com/history

in fact, this struck me as empathetic

This really isn't empathy. Roger is not feeling his friend's pain—he's transferring his friend's situation to himself and feeling his own pain. He's crying in imagined self-pity.

Roger describes crying in self-pity or frustration many times in the document, even into adulthood. A quick word count:

     34 cried
     10 cry
     19 crying
      9 tears

Otherwise Roger's depiction of himself comes off as completely self-absorbed and often unaware or unconcerned with the feelings of others. The narcissism is overwhelming.

Given its high profile, including the linked article in the Boston Globe, this incident will likely be analyzed in the Accidents column of a forthcoming issue of Appalachia Journal. [1] I don't expect that the analysis will let this group off lightly. Both the participants and commenters here have already pointed out basic mistakes that were made by the group.

This newspaper account lacks information important to understanding the incident, such as the temperature and forecast. Additionally, snow conditions could have been reported by checking with the Forest Service, the Appalachian Mountain Club, and the Mount Washington Observatory. Analysis of this incident in Appalachia Journal will likely include such details. Winter conditions in the White Mountains are highly variable from year to year and have a tremendous impact on the outcome of backcountry trips.

One thing that hasn't been touched on either by the article or by the commenters—they were doing this as a ski trip. It doesn't say what kind of boots they had, but cross country ski boots tend to have less insulation than winter mountaineering boots (often much less). While temperatures at nearby Whitefield airport weren't bad during the daylight hours of the 16th, they went below zero (F) in the early hours of the 17th. [2] There's no way I'd want anyone in my group wearing lightly insulated cross country boots in below zero temperatures.

It is significant that the trail wasn't broken out. That it took them nine hours to go from Stillwater Junction to the closed Franconia Brook campsite indicates that snow and trail conditions were terrible.

I think that both the article and commenters here overemphasize the value of GPS. The route is not difficult to follow. Most of their second day was spent following a watershed downstream. For this you need a GPS? Warm boots are far more useful (note that the article says that a GPS failed). There is no cell reception where they were, either. When (not 'if') the electronics fail will you be able to cope?

The most important thing that this group did right was to get themselves out under their own power. People who come from urban areas have an incredible temptation to dial 9-1-1 or push a magic "rescue me" button on a PLB device. There is no fleet of helicopters standing by to come get you.

So many people come to New Hampshire to hike or enjoy the outdoors that there are numerous incidents requiring rescue. This has stressed the budgets of the state and federal agencies involved and taxed the energy of the volunteer organizations. Some of the incidents are due to ignorance, negligence, or irresponsibility. People discount the danger to which they expose their rescuers, but meanwhile most of the NH SAR community is aware that volunteer Albert Dow was killed taking part in a search. [3]

New Hampshire started the hikeSafe program [4] due to the increase in the number of search and rescue incidents. It's disappointing that this article didn't interview any SAR personnel or people with winter hiking experience to highlight this group's mistakes. Nor does it list any sources of backcounty education, such as the AMC New Hampshire Chapter's Winter Workshops. [5] It's typical for downcountry media to make heroes of participants and treat such incidents as adventures rather than discuss errors, and this article somewhat follows that pattern.

[1] http://www.outdoors.org/publications/appalachia/

[2] http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KHIE/2014/2/17/D...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Herr#Early_life

[4] http://www.hikesafe.com/

[5] http://amc-nh.org/committee/excursions/index-winterworkshop....