skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So true. In my 20s I did drugs and played in bands. In my 40s I build startups and run marathons. There's nothing like "the countdown" to kick your motivation into gear.
So if I travel to Italy, France and then Germany, I have to learn three different languages, just so that I can find my way around? What if I want to see all the 40+ countries in Europe?

In many northern European countries (and now even in Central/Eastern Europe), most people speaking at least basic English is the norm, not the exception.

For the record, I am US-based, but I speak 4 European languages (some better than others), and I always try to use them where applicable.
It does exist - I implemented it several months ago and demoed it for a local meetup for fun:

https://github.com/thoughtpolice/afl/commit/e54c0237e934d734...

There was seemingly no interest at all in upstreaming this when I asked the afl-dev mailing list. My hope was that along with afl-clang-fast it could, in time, completely subsume the hacky `afl-gcc` and `afl-clang` scripts, making afl much faster, more robust and more portable out of the box (I initially tested on POWER8 machines). This component is under GPLv3, so it might possibly be due to licensing concerns. My other changes were accepted upstream (posted at a similar time), so that's just a speculative guess.

People are seemingly interested in this and I've seen this question pop up a few times since authoring the code originally. Perhaps it is worth maintaining a fork or patchset for wider availability... The above code works, but is less efficient than `afl-clang-fast` and strictly proof of concept. Neither of those are insurmountable. In fact because this code works on GIMPLE very directly, I see no reason why it couldn't work for things like gccgo or gcj, or even GNU Ada or FORTRAN, I suppose, with some tweaks.

Interestingly, a team at Oracle seems to have (at a similar, or later time) reinvented this same thing when they attempted to fuzz the Linux kernel with afl. But that source code doesn't exist publicly, it seems. Mine may not have even been suitable for them, even if they knew of it beforehand.
The Anatomy of a Killer Startup Name [Infographic]
You invented a lot of what I'm using this very instant to compose this message.

I yearn to do great works of engineering and art, which I consider what you have done.

How do you come up with ideas?
Radiation is very different from radioactivity.

It's sort of like the idea that a microwave can be dangerous running exposed, but it's fine the moment the magnetron stops.

If you have a rapidly decaying isotope, it will produce lots of radiation. However, most of that radiation will be harmless.

Some ionizing radiation will be able to change the atoms that make up surrounding materials, but most of that will remain harmless, and very little will become radioactive.
someone might actually be able to make this work

start a consulting firm that gives city councils advice on how to attract tech companies and try to become the next silicon valley

after typing that out, im still not sure if im being satirical or not
Americans are generally well liked, even though American foreign policies are not always popular.
Norwegian is probably one of the easiest languages to learn for an English speaker, the grammars are very similar. You can almost get away with just learning a set of new words and use English grammar. But almost everyone speaks English, so my English speaking friends have had a bit of a problem learning Norwegian, because you don't really need it.
> It's also declarative, BTW, which is a big improvement over Ant.

It's an improvement over pretty much anything else except for maybe cargo and whatever that haskell build tool is (name escapes me right now). Builds are not iterative/procedural tasks in my mental model, I simply have a list of inputs and desired outputs, so I agree that the declarative model of Maven is awesome.

I absolutely hate dealing with MSBuild files, Rakefiles, grunt/gulp/whatever because they all focus on a chain of tasks in a specific order. Why should I have to tell my build system how to do its job, I told you what I want done, just do it!

> Maybe somebody should re-skin maven with a yaml based front end to attract the hipsters?

A YAML to pom.xml converter would probably be a rather simple solution to this. Honestly, I wouldn't mind it either, there's a lot of noise in pom.xml that I could do without even as someone who likes Maven.
I don't think "pop culture" approaches are the best way to do most things (though "every once in a while" something good does happen).

The real question is "does a hack reset 'normal'?" For most people it tends to, and this makes it very difficult for them to think about the actual issues.

A quote I made up some years ago is "Better and Perfect are the enemies of What-Is-Actually-Needed". The big sin so many people commit in computing is not really paying attention to "What-Is-Actually-Needed"! And not going below that.
Do checksums actually need to be in the filesystem, though? It does seem like an important feature, but couldn't they be done at a higher level, like the way Spotlight indexing works on the Mac today?
I wrote about this back in 2013 (and made it to the front page of HN): "Scammed By Amazon’s 'A-to-Z Guarantee'"

https://medium.com/this-happened-to-me/scammed-by-amazons-a-...

tl;dr I sold my old cell phone on Amazon and the buyer claimed it was stolen. Amazon refunded him in full and took the money out of my bank account.

I also sold a computer on Amazon around the same time and the buyer tried to do the same thing. That one I caught and argued successfully for, but it was still a pain to go back and forth.

I had another laptop I wanted to sell online, but because of these two experiences I was really gun-shy. I ended up stuffing it in a cabinet for over a year and eventually sold it to a friend for significantly less than I would have sold it for online--but at least I knew I wouldn't get scammed.

I've had better luck with the Amazon trade-in program, especially since they sometimes do incentives. I've traded in two Kindles and ended up getting a new Paperwhite for only about $40-50 after all the incentives from both old Kindles were in my account.
I'm one of those guys with an install.sh file that I got from my mentor. I just run it on every new install. Last time being when I installed Ubuntu 16.04.
I would be very surprised if Amazon actually mixed up merchandise from several sellers to the point that they don't know where the items originated.

It's one thing to ship from the closest warehouse and credit the sale to whichever seller offered the price chosen by the customer. It's a totally different thing to not know where the item came from at all.
What is "getting ghosted"?
You're doing it wrong.

Exercise can certainly be tiring, if you're training for performance, or rehabilitating an injury. But, a basic yoga class, a few laps of the pool, or walk around the block isn't going to noticeably tire an otherwise healthy adult.

Time-consuming? That's likely short-sighted when you account for reduced longevity, time spent ill, etc. A few hours a week isn't that much time in the overall scheme of things.

And exercise should almost never be painful. The only exceptions would be rehab or training for a specific event.
I've been given an actual IQ test during an interview process in the U.S.
Exercise can take so many different forms, and too many people only think of it as running or going to the gym. Going for a walk or hike with friends on a regular basis is an excellent form of exercise while also using that time as a social activity. The same can apply to many other activities—a good form of exercise and a social opportunity.
I've read "Deep Work" a month ago and by now it's single highest ROI on a HN-recommended book I've ever gotten. Not joking.

I know three weeks is not enough for the habit to make itself permanent, but those last three weeks were for me one of the most productive periods in the last several years. Something must have clicked for me in that book.

In particular, I finally stopped being afraid of the calendar - I now follow the idea of "scheduling every minute of your life", but treating that schedule only as a guideline - i.e. tasks you pre-plan to be doing, but can rearrange at any moment if you see the need. And at least for the last three weeks, that process alone pretty much single-handedly solved most of my procrastination issues :).

(Time to go off HN, btw., my break slot is coming to an end ;).)

The second point that helped me tremendously was on cutting out distractions. After reading the book I've made a resolution to unsubscribe from every newsletter that comes across my mailbox and to turn off any but most important push notifications. With my daily load of e-mail coming down from a hundred to just a few, I feel much less distracted and pretty much got over compulsive checking of the mailbox.

I've also went ahead and read Cal's other book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work". I also recommend it strongly, it has some really good (and come to think of it, obvious) points about approach to work life.
Or nextdoor. Which reminds me, I want to get more of my neighbors to join that.
Thorium and Uranium waste profiles are pretty similar with respect to the shorter-half-life stuff (fission fragments unstable against beta-minus decay because they've got too many neutrons for their own good).
A tin can wouldn't be the best choice, but almost any cylinder would work. I've seen crystal sets using Oatmeal boxes, water bottles, etc. I've built them using wood 2" square and about 6" long. Some wire, a crystal or other diode, and a capacitor and you can get any of the clear channel stations.

(Capacitor can be made out of foil and paper, crystal out of the graphite from a pencil and a razor blade. The radio pioneers were pretty inventive. Google early crystal radio receivers.)

"..any fault would be with the poor receiver .." is correct, but if you took the time to build your own crystal set, definitely go see the ham next door, he most likely has the parts in his component stash to add some better RF selection/rejection to your radio.

Just like most of you like to tinker with code, we like to tinker with radios.
Is this site supposed to be satire? I genuinely can't tell.
Can't they blacklist shipping addresses and/or credit cards? These people open new accounts for a reason; I'd think Amazon could connect and analyze data to discover and mark/blacklist scammers.
Highly recommended by me too. You can add a .laptop.local file for extending their script to install/update other dependancies.
Fort Collins and Colorado Springs are both part of a much larger tech corridor across Colorado; however, Denver is a distinct self-sufficient subset.
Model S floats well enough to turn it into a boat
I think all languages today annoy me -- just put me down as a grump. They seem to be at a very weak level of discourse for the 21st century. (But a few are fun when looked at from the perspectives of the past e.g. Erlang ...)
By sending a message?

box getThinkingOut

Sorry, could not hold it :)
When I get on an exercise kick and do it every day (intense 15 minutes and warm down), after about two weeks, my life gets very smooth. It's fascinating.
Loved this quote from Sacca:

"The minute you’re labeled a billionaire in this country everyone takes everything you say as bible. It’s like you can do no wrong."
stream-to-mongo-db allows you to stream objects directly into a MongoDB databases, using a read stream (an a S3 file, local file, a Web API or even another MongoDB database). The best thing about this package is it allows you to control the size of the batch before issuing a write to mongo
I've received several emails recently discussing a court order or some such, with a zip file attached containing a lone *.doc.js file. Of course I've never tried running it, but I do wonder if it's the same sort of thing.

Further, my university (University of Calgary) was recently hit by ransomware, and I have heard that some Calgary companies have also been hit by ransomware in the last 4-6 weeks. If the attack is this prevalent, and arguably this easy for non-expert users to accidentally execute over a whole network, I think we need to seriously consider how we train our users and what kinds of default permissions we allow.
I have to agree here about motivation being an important factor. When I injured myself running, I tried experimenting with a few other types of cardio (cycling, swimming, rowing, stairmaster, etc.) but they were all miserable experiences compared to running. It was beyond frustrating and the only thing that kept me going was the anticipation of running again.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, several of my coworkers lift weights exclusively and can't believe I prefer running. It bores them out of their minds.

I have to wonder if many people don't exercise because they find it boring and unsatisfying, not because it's difficult.
I don't think the GP is bemoaning how "natural" the process seems, but how inefficient it is. It's pretty much the best we've got currently, given the choices we've made (including those broadly detailed in The Fine Article). That said, there's an aesthetic level at which you kinda have to look at the thermal efficiency of a nuclear power plant — which is, AFAIK, like 30-some percent — and wish we could somehow do better, given all the infrastructure and risk involved.
No. If you have a database of old buyers you can see who's bought from you in the past, but otherwise you only have a name and address.
It was a stealthy feature addition that went totally unannounced, but as of 10.11, Time Machine stores file checksums in the backup. See 'tmutil verifyChecksums'.
I'm Robin, the creator of ViziCities. Feel free to ask me any questions about the 3D geospatial framework, UrbanSim or anything else :)
maybe look outside of NY, perhaps..PA?
Price of LEDs falling so fast it’s profitable to farm in a New Jersey nightclub
Free file sharing with QR codes and crypto hardware (HSM)
> Poland would be by now a footnote in European history, and thy seem to manage...

As much as I love Poland I would not consider them a candidate for the 'most prosperous' country in Europe, and I think that you'd agree with me given your choice of words.
Me too. But if he doesn't answer it he may mean how languages don't have a well designed meta protocol. See the one they built for CLOS in that good book.
That writing was even worse than the OP!
Hi Alan,

You've been a long-time proponent for creating educational software (e.g squeak etoys) helping teach kids how to program and have been fairly critical of the iPad in the past. What are your thoughts on Apple's new iPad Swift playground (http://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/) in teaching kids how to learn how to program in Swift?

Do you think UI aesthetics are important in software for kids?
" My interaction has been primarily limited to in-house patent attorneys, and they don't seem to work appreciably harder or be more stressed out."

This is definitely true, but that is precisely the difference between biglaw and in-house.

biglaw has worse-than-startup hours.

in-house is basically 9-5.

(though i've been called at 1am on my wedding anniversary before, it is basically the only thing that happened in 10 years)

There is a significant paycut associated with in-house as a result, of course.
I think that's pretty much standard practice. I'm not sure about Atom but Ace leverage's workers for linting, intellesense and things like that.
Trusted buyers. Amazon can have options for sellers to only sell to buyers that have bought from Amazon X amount of times or X years.
You're never going to get a 100% guarantee. You can take steps to help, though. If it's above a couple hundred dollars then require a signature, which gets rid of most issues. If you have a history of selling, and have a signature, there's a chance they'll side with you.

eBay is slightly better for one-off sales: you can refuse returns (if specified in the listing), and cancel sales by buyers without verified paypal accounts or no feedback. Plus they have a sellers guarantee, although I don't know how often they'll actually stick up for the seller.
I meant Hungary and Poland. Czechoslovakia was 1968, long after the missile crisis.

> 1. Either way, the original argument was that some Soviet actions were reactions to actions of US (nukes in Cuba etc). No one says that Soviets were saints.

Agree. Only, however dumb or not - I can't say, US decision to move nukes to Europe was most likely a reaction to something as well. That "something" might very well have been USSR aggressively expanding into Europe.

> 2. To simple people without guns in Iraq, Lybia and Syria the clumsiness of US may be a weak consolation.

Totally agree, only your original post was a bit hyperbolic as well as made it seem like US was doing this with evil intents (no doubt some US citizens, also in the Military complex are evil but I don't approve of the whole nation being more evil than others.)

> But, what amazes me, is that actions of US, brutal, barbarian bombings, regime changes, plunging countries and millions of people into chaos, are not condemned at all!

Don't know where you have been, around here they are condemned a lot for all kinds of good reasons, just like e.g. Israel, mentioned upthread. And just like Israel they get a lot of additional hate from what seems to be uncritical underdog-supporters.

I don't say any of them don't deserve critic; I just say we shouldn't judge them without taking into account the whole situation.

PS: Same happens with Microsoft, and as someone who has disliked MS strongly for most of my career I appreciate that I can like them now, it gives me hope that I am not a totally hopeless fanboy in other situations either.
I personally vouch that this isn't fake. (But anyone familiar with Alan's work could tell that just from reading his comments here—who could possibly fake these?)

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940227 and marked it off-topic.
Most people underestimate just how insanely efficient steam really is. There aren't (m)any better ways of moving heat around and converting it into electricity, even after 2000 years.
Though the pill may be able to simulate the effects of physical exercise, I don't think a pill will supplement the psychological gains from exercise.

Doing something challenging and feeling accomplished, the mental strength you develop from a rigorous training regime can't easily be replicated by a pill... yet
In this kind of cases you can send an emails to the mods hn@ycombinator.com . Most of the times dang replies very soon. (And if the story is a fake, they'd usually remove it from the front page.)
I see, is there anything you see today that you like? (Coq, Idris maybe?)
In some way, I felt the same some time ago, so I created http://preciousdigest.com to filter relevant tweets in my timeline.
Pure functional programming doesn't require any special memory management beyond the stack, if it avoids any data representations that use reference semantics and have indefinite lifetimes. Lazy evaluation and higher order functions with environment are pretty much out. But even C can be functional:

int (*pg)(int) = f();
int x = h() + 2*z;
int w = pg(y);
/* ... etc */

Here, we just introduce new variables instead of assigning new ones, don't malloc anything and indirect only by means of dumb function pointers carrying no environments.

There could be some higher level (though nonetheless quite primitive) assignment-free language for specifying tasks for the 1000 cores of this chip, instead of programming them in assembler.
You might not like it but abs are made in the kitchen. No amount of exercises can balance out a bad diet in the mid and long term.
once you have to install a GPU device driver, CUDA, tensorflow itself, related python packages like numpy, and you have choices of native installer, Linux packages, pip, conda, there's potential to find yourself in dependency hell, all of those layers are evolving rapidly.

I found these helpful (on AWS)

- http://ramhiser.com/2016/01/05/installing-tensorflow-on-an-a...

- http://tleyden.github.io/blog/2015/11/22/cuda-7-dot-5-on-aws...

of course you don't need to install CUDA just to learn, can run tensorflow on CPU only, but part of the point of the graph paradigm is to design a computation and offload it to GPU.
Hi Alan, this is a bit of a long shot, but I'd like to try anyway. I've been following CDG from early on, and am really interested in the exploratory research that's going on in there.
I'm a 20 year old computer science student looking for an internship, would it at all be possible to pursue an internship at CDG? My primary selling point is that, given the right environment, I have a lot of motivation.

I understand this is not the right place to discuss these matters, but I know it's highly likely that this message will be read here, I am happy to take this topic elsewhere.
The emergence of coding is interesting and an active field of study but still not entirely found a consensus yet.

One of the most interesting ideas is of an 'RNA World' [1]. Many of the oldest, first, most essential protein-like machines in your body aren't actually 'proteins' at all, but are RNA molecules that are enhanced structurally and otherwise by some protein helpers (ribosomes are the prime example).

RNA has a lot more reactivity than DNA, so it can be an enzyme in a way DNA cannot. It's also more flexible (RNA is a single flexible cooked-noodle-strand, rather than DNA's double solid uncooked-noodle double strand). So RNA can fold in cool ways to make really crappy enzymes - but functional none-the-less. Proteins are way more versatile as enzymes, but way worse at encoding information (precisely because they become structurally 'stuck').

So you have the thought that everything started off with a dual-use molecule - RNA. And that RNA was used as a bootstrap to build enzymes that made two different kind of molecules - one for long-term information storage: DNA, and another for building better enzymes: proteins. It's an elegant idea.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world_hypothesis
I'm not a fan of running either, but I love to play soccer.
1. After Engelbart's group disbanded it seemed like he ended up in the wilderness for a long time, and focused his attention on management. I'll project onto him and would guess that he felt more constrained by his social or economic context than he was by technology, that he envisioned possibilities that were unattainable for reasons that weren't technical. I'm curious if you do or have felt the same way, and if have any intuitions about how to approach those problems.

2. What are your opinions on Worse Is Better (https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html)? It seems to me like you pursue the diamond-like jewel, but maybe that's not how you see it. (Just noticed you answered this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940276)

3. I've found the Situated Learning perspective interesting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_learning). At least I think about it when I feel grumpy about all the young kids and Node.js, and I genuinely like that they are excited about what they are doing, but it seems like they are on a mission to rediscover EVERYTHING, one technology and one long discussion at a time. But they are a community of learning, and maybe everyone (or every community) does have to do that if they are to apply creativity and take ownership over the next step. Is there a better way?
Right (as I've read). E.g. The Secret History of Silicon Valley - a video and blog post series by Steve Blank - gives good though long info on how SV evolved over decades.
Wikipedia has:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union#Khrushchev_era

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Soviet_Union_(1...
Whenever I sell any of my electronics now, I do it via Craigslist or specialty forums - Hardforum and Anandtech have pretty large For Sale/Trade communities and they all use Heatware for feedback.