skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You say nothing beats shell scripting for:

- Filesystem operations. How many times have we seen programs using "ls * .foo" when they needed to use "find -name '*.foo'" to avoid command-line length limits? I answered this very question on StackOverflow this week. How many seemingly-capable software shops will churn out shell scripts which misbehave when a path has a space or other "weird" character in it? Even Apple fell prey to that one, about ten years ago, and destroyed some users' data.

- Stringing together commands. This encourages abominations like "cat myfile | grep foo | awk '...'". Just use awk if you're into that, but the shell has a knack for "tricking" people into spawning extra processes that are not really needed (indeed this is one of the most frequent performance sinks in shell scripts). And what about error handling for the several subprocesses? It's usually ignored for N-1 of them.

- Keeping track of backgrounded commands (using multiple threads without even thinking about it). Yes, you can use multiple cores without thinking--that can be cool. But what if you want to do N units of work on many fewer than N cores? You ought to use a pool, but there's no such thing in Bash. Maybe you're clever and use "xargs -P" for this, but most people don't.

- Turning arbitrary programs into "daemons". I use start-stop-daemon for that (it's included in Debian, and I easily wrote a workalike in Python when I had to use a system that didn't support it natively).

Just about the only thing here that shell scripts are really good for is doing things "without even thinking about it." Once when I was asked why shell scripting was not a good idea for production programs, I reviewed a smallish sample Bash script that had been deployed. I found a dozen latent bugs, 50% of which would have never have happened with Python (or Go, or...).
Betty:srcs lelf$ perl -E 'say "out"; say STDERR "err";' &> out && cat out
err
out
Betty:srcs lelf$
GNU bash, version 3.2.48(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin12)
Indeed, which does not recognize aliases and functions, so `command -v` seems better:

command -v llh >/dev/null 2>&1 ; echo $?
0 # good
usr/bin/which llh >/dev/null 2>&1 ; echo $?
1 # good

however (zsh) shell internal which does:

which llh ; echo $?
llh='ls -lh'
/usr/bin/ls
0 #good

(I'm not sure however when ZSH chooses to use its internal function or the one from $PATH)
BYO3?
Are you serious with your first paragraph? I don't even know how to respond.
The issue of malicious hackers is not separate from the issue of warrant compliance. Whatever system you use to comply with warrants is a system that can and will be attacked. This was widely discussed in the 90s during the push for key escrow and key recovery systems.

Secret sharing makes sense, but not in the context of a system like Lavabit. Where secret sharing makes sense is in identity based encryption, which is similar to Lavabit in that keys are generated by a trusted authority, but is different in that the authority does not store keys or decrypt messages. Threshold IBE is useful in settings where there are multiple key generation authorities, which must jointly compute secret keys from their shares of the master secret.

Finally, I would not rely on anyone to shut their service down in the name of fighting an overly broad warrant. First, whether or not a warrant is too broad is a matter of opinion, and the service operator's opinion may differ from my own. Second and more disturbing, there is no guarantee that the service operator can legally shut the service down when such a warrant is received. As I said elsewhere, Lavabit's users are lucky that the founder was willing to take a stand like this; it is not something I would expect.
Devil's advocate: if you're a businessman and you have to pay U$15 per hour to fast food workers, perhaps you might instead run a software business where you can outsource the bulk of the work to programmers living abroad, who demand about the same wage but bring more revenue?
Here is the original link:
http://blog.safariflow.com/2013/02/22/go-as-an-alternative-t...
I think the article is a bit unfair. I've been playing around with a leap for a few days and am suitably impressed.

What works very well with the device is coarse movements, especially relative hand movements. What doesn't work so well is finer gestures (1/100th of a millimeter motions of all 10 fingers? ha).

This app is a perfect example:
https://airspace.leapmotion.com/apps/cyber-science-motion

You can use your hands, kept flat, to spin around / zoom a 3-D rendering of a human skull. You can also point at specific elements on the skull. Both of these coarse gestures work great, and the experience is incredible.

However, the app also unfortunately has a "click" gesture to pick apart elements of the skull - you click by spreading out your thumb and then folding it back in. Works terribly, as this fine gesture is detected maybe 50% of the time. It should've simply been left out.

I showed this app to my dad, who's a doctor, and he was blown away. He was visibly excited about the potential for a device he can use to spin around CT and MRI scans in the operating room without having to touch a mouse/joystick - currently he has a person doing this for him to keep things sterile, and this can sometimes be frustrating.

The leap, at least in its current incarnation, reminds me a lot of Google glass. Both Google/LEAP and their proponents say the devices are going to change the world. Maybe, maybe not. Neither device works perfectly like what you see in the heavily edited demo videos. But both can be invaluable in certain specialized fields, today, as long as folks are realistic about what can be done with them.
"Levison", perhaps at this point keeping himself public keeps him safe(r).
I think they land things like Dragon, they have a concept Red Dragon capsule design.

But they would probably need to look at having some rockets on Mars, otherwise what happens if someone needs to return to Earth. Also they could reuse the capsules too.
The combination of being able to freely modify network requests before resending them and being able to execute javascript exactly where you want it seems perfect for debugging other people's websites with less friction. Or figuring out exploits, depending on your point of view. The former is going to save me a lot of pain - I've been running Aurora for a year or two now and it's been good to me, but I've slacked on following new features.
I'd rather be stuck in my seat for 35 minutes than to travel to an airport, go through security, check-in, waiting and boarding, fly for 90 minutes and then apply all the logistics in the other end. Your point is valid, but I would contend that the total package is still superior.
Node was created to not handle error conditions? How is that defensible in a HTTP server?
Not only comforting, the seemingly "rare" cases actually happen all the time and the advantages of being able to stop, go out, help the person etc. are effectively used all the time.

Designing mass transportation while ignoring such aspects is like programming without handling the limit cases "it works for N between 2 and 100 but not for 0, 1 and MAX_INT, even if these are allowed inputs." It's bad, very bad for the user, only an "astronaut developer" can love such a solution.

The first time a kid dies because it got sick the first minute of a 30-minute ride, the project is dead for good. Imagine the press, imagine the public response.

I can imagine entering the capsule to reach the international space station, preparing a whole year before. I can't imagine doing the same preparations for the ride between SF and LA. Give me the real train, thank you.
So beyond the ironic comment mentioned before with the Golang Hello world tutorial using Chinese, what is the real reason behind the Chinese following behind Go?

It seems like this site confirm there must be a pretty dedicated Golang following, but I cannot figure out for the life of me why. Does anyone actually know?
The hardware works. It's mostly lacking in the software side, which I presume will get better over time with 3rd party apps in the Leap App Store, and also when existing applications start implementing the functionality.
I missed the soylent 'debacle', what went wrong?
What do you mean "on the same order"? Similar amounts of discussion? Yes, there are government level grants and programmes to increase the numbers of women in the construction industry or men in nursing. Similar amounts of funding? I don't know. That's an interesting question. There is a huge amount of data around, and it'd be really interesting to see someone slurp it up and do some processing.
Actually you can, rather expensive though.
They quote three papers that supposedly make the mistake of using Shannon entropy to reason about secrets. They all seem to relate to the same algorithm, so it sounds to me (and our local crypto guy) more likely that there's one particular field that is making this mistake, but it's not a common mistake in crypto.

In my understanding Shannon entropy is not very useful for crypto reasoning for more trivial reasons. A password that has a half chance of being "foo", and half chance of being completely random has good Shannon entropy, but it's clearly not a good password.
If you are a Python developer, have a look at this video http://pyvideo.org/video/1780/transforming-code-into-beautif...

Also, you can check the Google Python Style Guide:

http://code.google.com/p/soc/wiki/PythonStyleGuide

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pyguide.ht...
Getting started with SVG – Replacing bitmaps with vectors
If all you do is browse the web, a touchpad is often all you need.

For text editing / word processing, a good keyboard is often all what's needed, and the use of mouse is often discouraged by gurus.

I still can easily imagine using the Leap Motion device while editing images and especially 3D models. Even more I can imagine using it in games, especially games written with this device in mind.

I don't own the device but I tried it. What's great is that you don't need to wave your hands in the air, Minority report-style; moving your fingers us enough. I wish it was built into a keyboard; it would replace a touchpad / trackpoint easily, adding much more capabilities.

BTW does anyone here remember how clumsy were mice on PCs in, say, 1992?
The article is full of cant in more ways than one, and more about social norms when entering a new field than the proposal itself. This is obvious from the kind of nitpicking that goes on (no references! 4.37 m/s^2 is the maximum motion sickness possible because an accredited expert proposed it; I've never seen 4.9 m/s^2, but it's surely a barf comet!). Despite the author's high opinion of his own knowledge, the criticism amounts almost entirely to basic arithmetic and comparisons to existing systems that are built on rather different principles. The really interesting, constructive questions: does this low-pressure air cushion thing really work? what are some factors that we need to explore to determine its true efficiency? etc. are of no interest to this kind of expert, who is more interested in tribally defending his own turf (see the unnecessary name calling) than in figuring out new ground.

In all fairness, I would give much more slack to an engineer talking about his field. But, as the author himself points out, almost all civil engineering technology is from the 19th and early 20th century. He seems to think that, in between, his colleagues have been perfecting the fine forms of the art and polishing its many facets. Except feats that were once fairly common, such as building the Hoover Dam under budget and two years ahead of schedule [1], are in the realm of the mythical these days.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_dam
If you like gesture devices, you may find the MYO interesting as well:
https://www.thalmic.com/myo/
I think ceol covered this pretty well below (above?) I think the mistake you made was assuming I somehow meant all users would be of this type. My point was that if your position in the marketplace you're going to attract a higher % of these folks than a regular email service - not that the only user he ever would have would be this type.
Actually perhaps the leap could be placed on the front of the Oculus Rift. The only time you'd be doing detailed things with your fingers is when you're looking at them right? So at those time the leap would have a view of your hands.

Then the kinnect (I guess one on each wall) would monitor larger movements.
Leadership for the Real World
the part where a guy who has no idea what he's doing got an absurdly positive response for a product that's nothing new at best & dangerous at worst
I think the parent is talking about the massive hype[1] generated around Soylent, which is i) weird ii) not in any way original and iii) sub-optimally marketed with some probably illegal claims.

[1] It's really impressive how they managed to create such interest around a product idea, with people describing it as innovative and disruptive, when you've been able to walk into any drugstore and buy identical (but better researched and quality assured) products off the shelf.
nobody uses linux for much other than servers to an excellent approximation. i shouldn't need sources for this... how many work places use linux workstations that you have ever seen? or homes? and aren't most pre-installed linux boxes nuked to have windows put on them?
Great work :) I also miss that feature. It's been good to see the steady work on the developer tools.

I still spend the majority of my time in firebug/chrome/ie8/safari though... but it seems the time will come soon when I will switch.
You don't really get a choice about lock in, however you do get to choose if you want your actions, searches, communications and location harvested to build an advertising profile or not.
I've never heard of that term, good explanation.
> I wish it was built into a keyboard

This may very well happen if the Leap takes off. They already have distribution deals with HP and Asus; the next logical step would be building it into the laptop. Should be quite possible since the device is small and relatively cheap.
Maybe a good analogy is if you take a "giant" rainbow table, you can usually compress the unencrypted side of the table to something quite a bit smaller than you'd think.

Maybe another way to phrase it is something like encrypting plain text english is now mathematically proven to be not as secure as encrypting a zip (or other format) compressed version of the same english text. (edited to add that its early in the morning and the specific example of a zip file is a great known plaintext attack 0x04034b50 and all that, but "compressing in general" is a good idea. The mistake I made was like calling all photocopiers, "Xerox machines", or all nose tissues "Kleenex").

Crypto is very well taught for algorithms, classes of algos, history, couple other things, but the classes of apps of crypto technology is (intentionally?) very poorly documented and taught. Something that screws up screws up digital sigs probably has little to do with the issues in encryption or authentication or whatever. Its an area ripe for someone to write a book, or a startup to do "something" probably something educational.
I know what attracts me about other people, and by analogy I can also imagine (somewhat) how gay people feel. I find it harder to imagine why I'd rather have a vagina and boobs than a penis. Seems fair to ask people who feel like that if they can express it somehow.
And if it is more, for example wanting to dress like a woman, there has to be some kind of reason? You can't claim that female behavior (let's say wearing pink high heel boots and mini skirts as an extreme example) is merely a cultural construct but at the same time claim it does not have a reason.

I don't know if the transgender thing is just about wanting different sexual appendices or also about living the gender stereotypes.
For me, Go has the least "What the hell does this code do?" and "Why isn't this code working?" of any language I've ever used.

I'd say Go isn't an impressive programming language, but a very impressive software engineering language.
Backscatter? Don't you mean just the ambient radio waves?

Not quite sure I understand the backscatter concept... but here's an analogy I hope you can help me with.

Imagine you and I are sat next to a round pool of water. In the middle is bird that's swimming around, flapping it's wings, disturbing the water. We both observe very similar ripples in the water. However, if I place a very thin sheet of plastic in the water, a baffle, the pattern that you observe is now different! (It's thin so it doesn't cause it's own ripples).

If I take this baffle in and out of the water in a discernible pattern, I could send you a message. The hard part is for you to decode when my baffle is in or out of the water. You don't just notice one or two ripples are affected, but over a few you can tell when the baffle has been placed and removed.

What I don't quite understand is how you can tell. In the analogy, you can make assumptions about the normal type of pattern, but realistically, how does it work?
I like the flow of the app, its really easy to know what you need to do.

It would be really useful, if I could add downloads from my phone (maybe a native app) which integrates with Save functionality.
Well, think about how little spotlight Thorium have when it comes down to it. Only recently have there started to be momentum to get this field to a point where we can say whether it possible or not.

I would assume there are thousands of other areas like this where some "better" version never sees the light of day.
Things you'd think obvious (and which for the more part are also beneficial to men attendees but are traditionally rarely provided): unisex toilets or toilets as accessible & common for women as for men, safe-looking access to/from the venue, trained harassment officer, private spaces, no assumption of childlessness (children not being accepted should be made very clear from the outset, not an issue once the attendee reaches the venue or something which must be hunted for) and children accommodations if they are allowed (including parenting areas e.g. a place for feeding and changing children), clear guidelines for both speakers and attendees (regarding behavior and content), ...

Nothing mind-blowing yet things outreach, advocacy and mentorship groups have to repeat time and again.
Predictive Learning by Cherkassky
Not necessarily. I suppose the hello world tutorial shows hello world in Chinese mostly to show Unicode. And as for this link, this is just an external link (http://blog.safariflow.com/2013/02/22/go-as-an-alternative-t...) that someone posted on a forum. Things like these happen on every forum in every country.
Maybe it's like hellbans: everybody can see the submission is dead except the submitter. HN, where you're always the last to know ^^
It sounds to me that you have discovered an important and often underestimated property of disruptive ideas. How did an 18 year old change the way we communicate online forever? How could a clerk at the patent office usher in the era of 20th century physics?

It's possible and maybe even easier to have truly breakthrough ideas if you're coming from a different field. You can always catch up on all the knowledge required to execute your idea later.

And yes, often you'll find out that your idea wasn't so great. But at least you didn't dismiss it as out of hand because you didn't come across it in your years of experience in the field.
Vitriol is right. Starting your piece with:

Thus we get Hyperloop, a loopy intercity rail transit idea proposed by Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk, an entrepreneur who hopes to make a living some day building cars.

... was just an immature and catty way to begin a (what he hoped would be) substantive attack on the Hyperloop.

The article finds some questionable issues in the initial proposal, but its unfortunate that Levy writes as though Musk is a jackass for even putting the idea out there.
> Node was created to not handle error conditions? How is that defensible in a HTTP server?

It depends on what you expect, giving the programming language, runtime, and the philosophy of those who developer the former, latter, or both. Erlang is famous for the "let it crash" tenet [0], and I doubt you get something most programmers are comfortable with. However, I doubt most programmers I know (I will not assume about others) can scale to WhatsApp, which more or less runs a REST API on Erlang to great scale. [1]

This is not to say the two things are perfectly related, but there are different methods and philosophies around error handling and conditions. Some are comfortable with Node, others are not.

[0] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LetItCrash

[1] http://blog.whatsapp.com/index.php/2012/01/1-million-is-so-2...
When they say the same number of zeros and ones at maximum enthropy that's not actually true. The obvious case being a single bit file or even just an odd number of bits. Instead there is no bias in the file so each bit could just as likely be 1 or 0 which prevents efective compression.
He's also gone into great detail on his blog about how unsuccessful that has been and if he worked on the port himself (outside company volunteered to work on it) he wouldn't have been able to go fulltime like iOS allowed.
> For one, yeah, "what if" we had these kind of views for the streets of London in 1900? I doubt many would care, same as not many care for 1900 music, 1900 books, 1900 photographs and such. Some scholars maybe.

You haven't seen the many-thousands upvoted threads of mashups of various locations in WWII and modern day? Or the sourcebooks that designers use for all the costume drama on TV and in movies?

EDIT: Here's an example Imgur thread. (http://imgur.com/a/2rNrn)
A single bit file has either one 0 or one 1, or am I missing something?
The BND in Pullach would also be nice :)
We must've read different articles. I read a rant about why people like Elon Musk should never be followed and ideas like the Hyperloop should never be pursued. So that's what I respond to.

His verifiable criticisms of the Hyperloop, they're probably true, good chance that people would get seasick in it, and that the capsules are too small and that corrections for this might make the project financially infeasible.

Not sure how that's relevant though.
He does in his podcast and on Twitter
Can you suggest some of the ways that you think designers might be able to misuse it?
Kotlin M6 is here
Fedora Linux Set to Build Agile Core
If the year was 1896, I probably would be happy. Brakes were far less functional and reliable in the first 20 years of the automobile's history.
Become an early adopter for life
A brief history of Apple's iWatch - Anil Dash
Sorry, he asked where they were, and went on as if they didn't exist. I showed him that they do, with trivial research.

As for your points:

1) on the same order - what does this mean? How do you measure. Pure dollars? Some ratio related to size of the industry? Number of opportunities? I don't know the answers to any of these questions, but please, expand on your notion of differing scales. You are making the assertion, you need to show evidence, not just some conjecture.

2) Sure, I didn't know about those outside of "tech" grants either, yet I had the not-at-all-interesting insight to google. 14.8s later I was able to be informed. Choosing not to do so is wanton ignorance.

As for condescending: I don't cater to people who chose to be uniformed. That is not something I am willing to be polite about under any circumstance - it is 2013, google is everywhere, and holding an opinion that contradicts facts, or stating a "fact" that is simply false are mere agenda building disingenuities.
How long till it has adverts seen as every listen will cost google something.

I'd rather pay
If you read the original blog post on http://blog.safariflow.com/2013/02/22/go-as-an-alternative-t..., one of the commentators actually attempted the comparison between node.js and go, and his results for node.js was significantly faster.