Hello World Executable Sizes in 18 Languages - <AUTHOR> http://mbishop.esoteriq.org/hellosize.html <comment><USER3> In some of these cases, I suspect the main difference is related to how the language's runtime libraries are linked to the executable. Chicken, for example produces a 15k executable. Running that executable requires the presence of a much larger dynamically linked libchicken.

As mentioned in the article, an executable SBCL core includes all of SBCL. Considering that Java and .NET produce "executables" that are actually executed by their respective runtimes, I think it might be more fair to SBCL to compare the size of a FASL. It's 828 bytes for a FASL compiled from

        (print "Hello, world!")
        (sb-ext:quit)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a very silly comparison. What is an executable? Do you consider dynamic libraries that it uses a part of it? Do you consider the language runtime a part of it?

As an example, 12K for java is a ridiculous number. What's the size of the runtime required to run it? I bet it is larger than the 25MB for Common Lisp, but it doesn't get counted -- why?

And if you're there, you need to define what your base runtime is -- is it the OS kernel? OS kernel + a set of base dynamic libraries? If so, which ones? Is glibc standard? glib? zlib?

</comment><comment><USER5> It seem like the author does not differentiate between compiled (To machine code) and (To intermediate/byte code). Does that mean the pyc(114 bytes on my machine) generated by python for 'print "Hello world"' can be compared to the others?

It is still interesting though.

<comment><USER6> don't forget you would have to add a shebang line to make it truly executable

<comment><USER7> Not really:

$ echo 'echo $0' > 'Hello, world!' $ chmod +x 'Hello, world!' $ 'Hello, world!' Hello, world! $ wc 'Hello, World!' 1 2 8 Hello, world!

8 bytes. I think that's probably as small as you can get.

<comment><USER7> Oh, brother, formatting.<p> <pre> $ echo 'echo $0' > 'Hello, world!' $ chmod +x 'Hello, world!' $ 'Hello, world!' Hello, world! $ wc 'Hello, World!' 1 2 8 Hello, world! </pre>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be interesting to also see how much RAM was used to run Hello World, but then I'd want to also know how much was shared with other programs, shared between instances of this program, and not shared... it would probably get out of hand.

</comment><comment><USER9> The size of D executable - 230K - is a quite big surprise.

</comment><comment><USER10> > Common Lisp - <USER2>

Double-You Tee Eff.

What, does Common Lisp not have an incremental linker or something? Even Delphi executables are never that big.

>Lisp has the largest executable file (because to create an executable, you have to dump a "core image") at 25MB

Can someone explain what this means? I'm clueless.

<comment><AUTHOR> lispm, from reddit:

        There are different strategies to create CL applications.

        - save an executable image. This will mostly dump the Lisp system and
        when you start it up, you have mostly everything back. The size
        of the dumped image depends on the size of your Lisp system. SBCL
        is already large and does not have any special features to make
        it smaller. CLISP for example writes much smaller images than
        SBCL. Clozure CL is also smaller. Here also is important with how
        much debug information the original Lisp image was created. The
        saved image typically will include all that. Corman CL on Windows
        compresses the Lisp data to save space.

        - deliver an application. That's for example what LispWorks and
        Allegro CL can do. They allow functionality and
        information (debug info, documentation strings, arglists, source
        locations, symbols, caches, ...) to be removed (for example by
        treeshaking, or by removing whole functionality groups). The size
        of the generated application will depend on what you leave out
        and which delivery level you are choosing. Stuff that might not
        be needed: compiler, debugger, disassembler, editor, inspector,
        REPL, ...

        - deliver a static application. I don't know which currently
        maintained CL implementation does that. There were several Common
        Lisp implementations that generate 'small' and static C code from
        Lisp. CLICC, Ibuki's CONS, WCL, Lisp-to-C, ThinLisp were in that
        league. They were used for application delivery, where the
        application might be really small and does not have any large
        runtime or development environment.

        There are also some other options. Probably ABCL could generate a
        JAR file that could be started with an installed JVM. Often Lisp
        compilers can compile code to native code compiled files (fasls)
        and even can append several fasls into one. Then one does need
        only to ship the fasl file, given that the user has the a Lisp
        installed that can load the fasl.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7swzs/hello_wor...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7swzs/hello_world_executable_sizes_in_17_languages/c07bd5z)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd like to see the code for "Hello World" for biological systems.

</comment><comment><USER7> It can be done in 8 bytes.</comment>


Worlds first distance-filter(useful for console games and has other cool usecases) - <AUTHOR> http://www.netduma.com/geofilter

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to post on ShowHN but people won't be able to use it for a couple of weeks. So I chose not to, if you have any questions please let me know :)</comment>


Show HN: Fastest and Most Accurate Google Search Ranking - <AUTHOR> https://www.accuranker.com/ <comment><USER2> This looks like spam / seo. Nothing about this is new.</comment>


Data-Parallel Rank-Select Bit-String construction - <AUTHOR> https://haskell-works.github.io/posts/2018-08-08-data-parallel-rank-select-bit-string-construction.html <comment><USER2> I could see this ending up in my data ingestion pipeline... using SIMD instructions for finding line boundaries right after decompression would give a major performance boost.

Decompressing LZ4 can not be done in parallel, but right after that what I want is to split the workload to CORE_COUNT threads at correct line boundaries.

Some primitive way to control pipe flow would solve a problem I have not found any good soloutions for. Example: I want to ingest csv/json with a row containing a domainname.

That row will be my primary key, and my table is partionised on domainname TLD.

In Postgre COPY FROM is the only really fast way to ingest data, but it is not possible to COPY from into a partionised table unless all entries are ending up in the same partition.

If I could do something like this:

curl -q [http://something.com/x.lz4](http://something.com/x.lz4) | lz4 -d -| tool -pipeFlowCmd=postgreIngest.sh -pipeFlowCmdArg=split($domainname,\\.)[-1]

The tool should spawn a postgreIngest.sh for each tld it sees with the tld as argument and keep the process open piping matching lines into them.

postgreIngest.sh would be something like: psql | awk '{ if ((NR % 500) == 0) printf("COPY domains.$1 FROM stdin "); print; }'

so psql starts by getting "copy domains.com from stdin" then 500 lines piped into it- all with a tld of .com then repeat.

Having a tool capable of using SIMD instructions for ultra fast pipeflow parallelisation and control would be awesome because the bottleneck will not be distribution of the decompressed data to X processess.

If I can find the time I will make it myself using hes ideas for inspiration(I will make it in c++ Posix subset).

Anyway, great work, thanks for sharing- you inspire me :)

<comment><USER2> just having a generic tool using SIMD instructions with controllable masking arguments in the pipeline would be awesome.

Another example:

When ingesting data into postgre with copy from exceptions are bad...all entries in the copy from batch are discarded because of one faulting line. So either it have to be flawless or the data needs to also be stored on disk until commit is successfull.

Datasets with invalid utf-8 are a pain because of that. One solution is to pipe all input to iconv −f UTF−8 −t UTF−8 -c That will drop invalid characters, but it eats alot of CPU as every character is parsed one by one.

With a pipe processing stage using SIMD custom masks as a way to control the pipe flow I could: Select lines containing chars indicating we have a multi byte utf-8 sequence(that can possibly fail) and only pipe those to iconv, it would reduce overhead by 99%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The input constraints might have been realistic 10+ years ago, but there aren't a lot of performance sensitive parsing problems that can safely do without either escaping or Unicode support.

<comment><USER2> True, but irrelevant— hes experiments apply perfectly to finding escape characters and bit sequences that indicates the following x bits should be parsed by ICU. He is testing ideas and concepts, I look forward to an update. Would like a way to subscribe.</comment></comment>


An Overdose of Copernicus? Our Universe Might Yet Be Special (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/an-overdose-of-copernicus-our-universe-might-yet-be-special

<comment><USER2> "Not only that, but make tiny changes in even the initial conditions of the Big Bang and you end up with a sterile universe. Cosmologically speaking, it's like we won every lottery every imaginable. From that vantage point we are special—crazy special."

Assumes life as we know it is the only option. Tweak a few parameters and you could easily have inelegant life growing up in stars or the 'void' between galaxy's. Life might operate at timescales billions of times faster or trillions of times slower etc. But, rarely do such articles consider all the possible universes we don't inhabit.

PS: There is something of a reverse anthropic principle at work where observed life adapts to best exploit the physics of it's universe.

<comment><USER3> The issue isn't that there couldn't be life as we know it. It is that life wouldn't have had time to evolve, e.g. the universe would disappear in far too short a time or that the expansion would be so rapid that not even stars and galaxies would form. In other words, no life of any kind is even conceivably possible in those universes.

<comment><USER4> If the constants of nature were _completely_ arbitrary you might be right, but I don't think anyone's suggesting that they necessarily are. Some (combinations of) constants might represent underlying principles that we just haven't discovered yet.

The multiverse hypothesis which the article mentions isn't really satisfactory _intuitively_ , but these days particle physics isn't really in the realm of intuition _at all_. It does run into the so-called "measurement problem". (Which may have a hypothesized solution these days for all I know, I'm not even a layman.)

Personally, I think the question of _entropy_ is more interesting and fundamental. It's essentially the question "Why did the universe start with such low entropy?". Sean Carroll has quite a few talks up on "the tubes" about that question, and I find it fascinating.

EDIT: Sorry about the rambling, not particularly in a state to talk about big cosmological questions at the moment. Hopefully you'll find it useful nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The weak anthropic principle (or, frankly, a simple application of Bayes' law) observes that, since it would be quite hard to be a living observer in a lifeless universe, selection bias means that any observable universe you actually live in will appear to be "fine-tuned".

<comment><USER6> > any observable universe you actually live in will appear to be "fine-tuned"

Who is "you"? Monkey, Mankind, Messiah, Mutant, or Machine? To elaborate...

Monkey: If chimps or even dinosaurs were sufficiently self-aware, then why did life continue to evolve to humans, and not die off after the first animal conscious of its surroundings. But if such consciousness isn't enough...

Mankind: Why did humans multiply beyond the first one to ponder about existence. It seems there might have been only a few thousand humans alive at some point in time about 100,000 yrs ago, so if the first human to draw speculations about an after-life on a cave wall lived before then, why didn't humans go extinct soon after?

Messiah: Or was it a the existence of a single special human at some time in the past or future who must observe the universe? Or a single instant in the life of that special human? The instant the Buddha achieved enlightenment, or any number of other examples which make the weak anthropic principle be a religious issue not a scientific one. Could certain fine-tunings of the earth that don't appear related to the evolution of intelligent life, such as the Sun and Moon having the exact same size when visible from Earth, exist to contribute to that moment of enlightenment of such a single human?

Mutant: Why does the distribution of the planets in the solar system appear to be fine-tuned for inter-gallactic space travel? There's only about 10 other solar objects with gravity comparable to Earth's and hence suitable for long- term civilization. The Moon has already been walked on, and humans can easily build large contained cities there using telepresent robots with a 1 second response time. Then Mars and Mercury with semi-intelligent robots to cater for the much longer response time, then Jupiter's 4 large moons to provide humankind with experience of much longer travel times, then a single moon of Saturn to eliminate any initial choice of target, then the huge gap skipping Uranus's lack of sizable moons to Neptune's Tritan, and finally the thousands of years needed to terraform Venus. By then humankind will have trained up, apparently serendipitously, for inter-gallactic travel. Perhaps some evolved version of super-intelligent humans will experience some future version of consciousness we present day humans can't conceive of and the Universe is actually fine-tuned for them.

Machine: Or perhaps humans build the consciousness the Universe is fine-tuned for.

<comment><USER6> _Since I 've been downvoted instead of replied to, I might as well continue..._

Perhaps humans will build a silicon-based consciousness on each planet they colonize. Each planet-based consciousness in the galaxy could then communicate with one another to build a one-off galactic consciousness by structuring the gravitons flowing between then star systems, though its light-based speed of thought would be far slower than that of humans. Ditto for each galaxy humans eventually reach in the observable Universe, and then the whole Universe. This Universal Consciousness based on gravity then "begins" to reach back in time (using a theory of physics we haven't yet worked out enabling gravity to transcend time) to ensure fine-tunings so one planet in one galaxy 14 billion yrs after the Big Bang evolves monkeys then humans who then mutate as they colonize the galaxy and build silicon-based AI and eventually a single Universe-wide gravity-based consciousness.

If the Universe continues expanding and never comes to an end, then such a Universal gravity-based consciousness need never finish being built, it only needs to be continually being built. If a graviton-based consciousness can indeed reach back in time, not only would the Universe increase in entropy over time, but also increase in intelligence. There goes the weak anthropic principle out the window!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> just the average of multiple universes wouldn't tell you much without the standard deviation. The article didn't go into it at all, but do we have any theories about just how different universes within the multiverse are from each other? In other words, is there any reason to believe that we are on a bell curve vs a truly random distribution.</comment>


Simple react hook-based global state library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Munawwar/react-global-states <comment><AUTHOR> I am the author and I am aware that the number of hook based global state libraries are like increasing _per week_. But it only means that all the authors combined are onto something.

The simplicity of these hook based libraries are much much more appealing than say redux, mobx or even context api. Minimal setup time, simple to use.. not having to worry about potentially future performance issues (as with context api.. for those not aware, there is a sentence in react docs saying context forces re-render whenever the content changes regardless of shouldComponentUpdate rules)

The TypeScript part is simple too. Don't have to create classes or annotations. Create a type for your store data structure and start hacking away.

What do you all think?

</comment><comment><USER2> Simple yet effective solution to hook based global state libraries. Works like a charm.</comment>


Are we on the brink of a jobless future? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/brink-jobless-future/ <comment><USER2> Not this bikeshedding crap again.

Obviously there is an infinite amount of demand for jobs because there is no lower bound income (how much demand is there for an employee that doesn't cost anything?). What's the point of more jobs if you have to work two or more of them to survive? Obviously what matters is the quality of the jobs and not the quantity. A more interesting question would be to ask if robots increase inequality.

<comment><AUTHOR> >A more interesting question would be to ask if robots increase inequality.

I think they do since the 70s.</comment></comment>


Our Job Titles: Developer, Programmer or Software Engineer? - <AUTHOR> https://daedtech.com/our-job-titles-developer-programmer-or-software-engineer <comment><USER2> I call myself a programmer, even though my official title is "senior software architect". Anything else just feels pretentious.

<comment><USER3> Huh. I call myself 'digital god'. I think our egos are in different places in life right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bitbashers all.</comment>


Your take on Twitter...Fad or the Future? - <AUTHOR>

So, recently I've sat in on a number of discussions on Twitter and I find myself still divided.
On one hand, I hear the opinions of social media marketers who look at Twitter as a new and exciting way of engaging in conversation, creating greater brand loyalty, and turning customers into brand advocates.
On the other hand, I look at Twitter's widespread adoption and variety of uses, and I find myself wondering if Twitter will be another flash in the pan.  I also wonder if the fact that Twitter makes their data available for other applications to use and that they're starting to place more emphasis on search will end up giving the company greater relevance for a longer period of time.
So, do you think that microblogging is a long-term trend with the web?  Personally, I think that Twitter's user base will continue to grow, but that many of it's early adopters will move on to the next fad as soon as it comes along. <comment><USER2> Future, though I think it is really just beginning to understand it's potential uses. The @ and # is an example of this growing change. It isn't necessarily about 'status' anymore, but a mix of conversation surrounding data, and the ability of the right connections to go viral.

I've been considering how to use twitter as a notification service for my app, instead of using e-mail. The problem with e-mail is 1) i don't want to be loading peoples inboxes 2) it isn't discoverable to people who might be interested in the same thing, 3) i never sign-up for e-mail notifications, so why would i expect my users to do so.

At the same time, notification is the one of the top requests I get from my users. So, I'm investigating what it would be like to set-up a system whereby I could use twitter for notifactions on specific items using the # code. Solves the problem of in box discovery, and twitter is much more ignorable than e-mail (if the user chooses).

</comment><comment><USER3> Long term trend. Status update is the #1 feature I/my network use on Facebook. I use things like "Notes" only because there's a char limit in status update.

And I use Facebook instead of Twitter only because most of my network uses FB and not twitter.

I'm unsure if Twitter itself will make it big, but twitter-style updates are going to be big.

</comment><comment><USER4> Long term, but.. niche. At one time, everyone and there mother were writing blogs, and now we have pretty much left it to the professional writers. Wading through all the bs, of messages like going to the store, walking the dog, are completely unnecessary.. no one needs to know, or there are very few that actually care what any one person is doing with 90% of there time. It is useful from a real time news status. Work purposes it could be useful, if more companies embraced short messaging and status updates. Following famous people or celebrities is entertaining. For discussion purposes I still prefer IRC or forums, or message boards. 140 characters is hardly enough characters to post anything useful in my opinion

</comment><comment><USER5> Long term trend. It's useful in all kinds of ways, from kicking of discussions, near real-time alerts, tracking chatter on topics of interest, and other kinds of activities. Agree that while it might not be Twitter, the trend of lightweight messaging services is here to stay</comment>


Where did wealthy inventor live in 1991? California's taxman wants to know - <AUTHOR> http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/the-state-worker/article169818567.html <comment><USER2> California is in the wrong here: [https://www.pillsburylaw.com/en/news-and- insights/hyatt-to-m...](https://www.pillsburylaw.com/en/news-and- insights/hyatt-to-make-second-trip-to-the-united-states-supreme-court.html).

Basically, California contends that this guy owes taxes for 1991-1992 because was still a California resident at that time, despite extensive evidence he changed his residence to Nevada before the relevant date:

> During the audit, Hyatt provided FTB with evidence that he had rented an > apartment in Nevada, obtained a Nevada driver's license, opened a Nevada > bank account, registered to vote in Nevada, obtained Nevada automobile and > renter's insurance, joined a Nevada synagogue, and sold his California home > prior to the date of his asserted residency change. Nevertheless, FTB > concluded that Hyatt staged the alleged move to Nevada all in an effort to > avoid state income tax liability on his patent licensing income.

In the process, the FTB conducted an abusive investigation:

> FTB conducted interviews and collected signed statements from various > individuals who were estranged from Hyatt at the time, but ignored witnesses > with whom Hyatt had good relations. FTB auditors allegedly rifled through > Hyatt's mail and garbage, and made anti-Semitic remarks in reference to > Hyatt.

Hyatt sued the FTB in Nevada courts. The FTB then invoked California law, which provides it immunity from suit. The Nevada Supreme Court held that the FTB could not invoke California immunity from suit in a Nevada court. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed, holding that the FTB was entitled to no more protection than a Nevada State agency would receive in a Nevada court.

Hyatt then won almost $500 million at trial against the FTB on tort and fraud claims.

California appealed, arguing that Hyatt couldn't win a judgment against the FTB in a Nevada court that exceeded what he could win against a Nevada agency ($50,000). In a real "live by the sword, die by the sword" ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed, knocking his judgment down to $50,000.

<comment><USER3> While I don't condone the abusive investigation, I will say that plenty of people do pretend to move in order to avoid income tax liability. I don't think the items you listed, like renting an apartment or obtaining a driver's license, are dispositive. Presumably (but maybe not?), the record also had evidence suggesting he still maintained California residence.

<comment><USER2> The legal test for changing residency imposes a very low threshold: you move to a new state with intent to remain there.

<comment><USER3> Yes, and my point is that a very wealthy person could easily rent an apartment in Nevada, obtain a Nevada driver's license, open a Nevada bank account, register to vote in Nevada, obtain a Nevada automobile and renter's insurance, join a Nevada synagogue, and sell one of his many homes prior to the date of his asserted residency change, but do all of the above with a simple intent to defraud the taxman, have no real desire or intent to actually live or spend time in Nevada for any substantial length of time, and just live at one's various other homes while going to Vegas occasionally to gamble.

Note that I have zero knowledge of the particular individual in question, so I take no position as to whether or not the above is true in this particular instance. I am just asserting that the taxman looks into this because it does happen. People see the simple legal test, and try to back-out some evidence that they think will satisfy the IRS or similar authorities.

<comment><USER4> In fact all of this is less work for the very wealthy than you might think. Do you remember John McCain being asked in 2008 how many houses he owned and not knowing the answer? I know people like that.

In fact I know a woman who travels around the world, owns multiple properties in multiple US states, and also manages to keep up official Canadian residency. I've been to three of her houses in the Los Angeles area, but I'd bet that she isn't considered a resident of California for tax purposes.

<comment><USER5> Yea, but the rental income from houses in California are taxable by the California FTB. That's a reasonable compromise. What's less clearly reasonable is whether a California resident should pay CA taxes on a rental house in, say, Guatemala, but that's also the CA FTB's position.

<comment><USER4> Those aren't rental houses, though she does let family/friends stay sometimes... :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The money in question was royalties on a patent (eventually invalidated) covering the idea of a microcontroller (CPU, memory, and communication on one chip). It was a 20 year submarine patent: issued in 1990 but with priority date 1970. It almost certainly could not have been built with 1970s lithography.

[https://www.google.com/patents/US4942516](https://www.google.com/patents/US4942516)

<comment><USER7> How is the priority date so old? Did he invent this in 1970? Does the USPTO allow you to put in anything you want as the priority date?

<comment><USER8> Prior to 1995, the term for patents in the USA was 17 years from the issue date - and patents were not published until they issued. It was possible, through legal maneuvering, to prevent the issuance of a patent for a long time - in some cases decades, while the underlying markets grew and matured.

Post-1995, patent terms in the USA are 20 years from date of filing, and applications are published after 18 months (unless the applicant waives the right to file overseas), which incentivizes companies to get their patents to issue as soon as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _" If the state wins, Hyatt would be on the hook for at least $13.3 million > in taxes and penalties from 1991 and 1992. At past court appearances, the > state has argued that Hyatt owes more than $55 million when interest is > tacked on to those initial charges."_

> _" The Franchise Tax Board has already spent $25 million trying to collect > the money while defending itself from Hyatt's lawsuits, department spokesman > Jacob Roper said."_

Is it just me or do the above numbers sound ridiculous. Why is the govt spending $25M on a case, that if it wins, would result in a $13-55M payout?

Edit: To put the above numbers in context, the IRS recoups about ~$60B in tax enforcement, on a ~$10B budget. That's a 600% return on investment. I would have expected the California state tax enforcers to budget themselves in a similar manner.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/28/irs-budget-cuts- def...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/28/irs-budget-cuts- deficit_n_850243.html)

<comment><USER10> To enforce the law? If we only enforced laws when economical to do so we'd leave most unsolved.

<comment><USER11> We _do_ leave most laws unenforced. If laws had to be enforced, almost all of them would quickly be thrown out.

<comment><USER12> If all laws had to be enforced, most of the country would be in jail.

<comment><USER13> For as little as clearing your browsing history[0].

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150606/16191831259/accor...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150606/16191831259/according- to-government-clearing-your-browser-history-is-felony.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >""The ability to take this to a group of unbiased elected officials is better than taking it to a group of state employees who in the long run benefit from a decision for the state," Runner said."

Unbiased elected officials is an oxymoron.

<comment><USER15> I thought that was quite funny. For anyone to even pretend they don't have a bias is mind-boggling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Another example of tax arbitrage. I have a friend in Portland, Oregon who owns a multimillion dollar business and lives 20 miles away from Vancouver, Washington. Oregon's top income tax bracket is 11%, Washington has no income tax. When it comes time to sell his business, by moving to Vancouver for a year he can increase his net worth by a half million or more and his income for the rest of his live by over 12% a year.

<comment><USER16> 1\. Why wouldn't he go ahead and move there now to save on his presumedly decently sized income along the way?

2\. Anyone know if that kind of 'tax arbitrage' often challenged from states that see people move away just before a major event?

<comment><USER12> Portland is much nicer place to life than Vancouver. And the business is located in Portland, so profits are still subject to OR taxes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Hyatt would be on the hook for at least $13.3 million in taxes and penalties > from 1991 and 1992. At past court appearances, the state has argued that > Hyatt owes more than $55 million when interest is tacked on to those initial > charges.

That's a pretty sweet interest rate they've given themselves. Wish I could get that from my bank.

<comment><USER5> Well, the interest rate has to be substantially higher than the risk-free rate, otherwise you're incentivizing late payments. 6% is a little on the high side, but not unreasonable IMO.

<comment><USER18> Actually that is a low rate for the 1990s

<comment><USER5> Good point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> VB has a perspective on this:

[https://venturebeat.com/2014/04/01/gil-hyatt-has- waited-40-y...](https://venturebeat.com/2014/04/01/gil-hyatt-has- waited-40-years-for-the-patent-office-to-rule-on-his-inventions-interview/)

</comment><comment><USER19> The actual evidence against the man has been lost, so claimed by this man. Go to about 14 minutes in.

[https://youtu.be/FcYbMrS4cVg](https://youtu.be/FcYbMrS4cVg)

</comment><comment><USER20> No statute of limitations on tax collections in CA?

</comment><comment> Lyle-Cantor Patent troll vs the government that enforces patent law, no matter who wins we lose.

<comment><USER21> That is incorrect. If the tax man wins _everybody_ wins.

People downvoting this are cordially encouraged to have a look at countries that have no taxes.

<comment><USER22> I never understood that - why do people brag about cheating the tax man? I have to make up the difference, in either (very slightly) reduced services or higher taxes.

It always struck me as odd.

<comment><USER23> Because it's a "fuck you" to The Man™. A marginal several thousand or whatever is probably a fraction of the amount that's lost daily across the federal government due to negligence.

<comment><USER24> Is it just negligence or is there more to it than that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What I've realized throughout the last few years is that there are wealthy investors EVERYWHERE within the US and SV is kind of overhyped.

<comment><USER26> SV just has the investors who will listen to promises of N-million% growth; investors exist all over the country, but the prevailing risk/rewards seems to have made that uniquely SV attitude the only one where actually investing makes sense.

"Hello M. Investor, I would like to start a laser tag place. It will use innovative technologies like drone targets, utilize the cheap real estate and latent suburban customer base of a disused mall, and we think we can conservatively double your investment for the initial capital outlays in ten years."

Well gee, that sounds nice, but this new laser-tag-as-a-service company has promised us enormous user growth and the possibility of a buyout by Facebook in ten years. They say they're looking at more like a 100x rate of return. Next!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Let's hope he pays up because California could use the money for infrastructure and environmental remediations.

<comment><USER28> That money is a drop in the bucket. At best it would pay for one traffic intersection.

<comment><USER29> $50,000 doesn't even get you a stop light installed. This isn't the 1940s where hundreds of dollars could buy something meaningful.

<comment><USER28> Whoops, didn't see that the cap was on what the state would owe, not what he would owe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> where someone lives should have no bearing, for example if you work for an employer the state where you turn up to work should receive taxes, and if you're an inventor the state where the patent office resides should get to money.

this would solve a lot of cases.

and if you live somewhere you also pay property taxes.

<comment><USER31> And I work remotely. I rarely step foot in California, yet I should pay for California's roads, schools, welfare programs, police, fire? The company for which I work already pays massive corporate taxes to the state so their "impact" and consumption of government is more than paid for.

When I do travel to California, I already get to pay high hotel taxes, rental car taxes, gas taxes, sales taxes. That covers my "share."

Really states ought to abolish income taxes; Texas and Washington State and many others seem to be doing just fine. The idea of taxing income is already ridiculous — we should be taxing consumption, but that's another discussion.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why Apple put a whitespace on iCloud Path? - <AUTHOR> Genuine question.
Why on earth an engineer, supposedly good since she/he is working at Apple, would think that putting a whitespace on a working-space path is a good idea ? (+ Now way to change it.)
Reasons to not do that :
- It costs nothing to not do it - No one sees the path ever, no need for it to be "pretty" - It breaks so many things, especially dev-wise - It's not a good practice in general
Reasons to do it :
- I have no idea
For reference the path is : "/Users/<user>/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/" <comment><USER2> One guess: Sometimes this is done to force other 'consumers' of paths into properly handling file paths with spaces. If they handle this, then they should also handle user created filenames (which will /very often/ contain spaces).

Is this the real reason? I have no way to know.

</comment><comment><USER3> If that breaks your code, it better do it fast, and not when your code breaks navigating the files in that directory. The user is in charge of naming them, so no, there's no guarantee their names lack whitespace characters.

</comment><comment><USER4> White spaces aren't uncommon in Mac system files, e.g. in /Library: Application Support, Contextual Menu Items, Internet Plug-Ins, Keyboard Layouts, Modem Scripts, PDF Services, etc

The list of characters not permitted in paths is limited, whereas the numbers of possible characters increases with each addition by the Unicode consortium. No reason that your dev paths shouldn't include emoji for example.</comment>


The iPhone and iPod touch: Leading the way to better web apps - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/09/the-iphone-and-.html

<comment><USER2> I just thought of something... is the iPod Touch / iPhone the apple stealth entry into tablet computing? If so, it's a classic way to do a good market entry - give something to people that they KNOW they want (a better iPod and better cell phone) and then transition them into the thing they didn't even think of (a personal computer controlled completely with their hands, that they carry everywhere, all the time)</comment>


Show HN: The Headline Blueprint (How to Boost Your Blog Traffic - Guaranteed) - <AUTHOR> http://thb.jovicailic.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> One chapter is available for free download: [http://thb.jovicailic.org/images/TheHeadlineBlueprint- Free.p...](http://thb.jovicailic.org/images/TheHeadlineBlueprint-Free.pdf)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://thb.jovicailic.org/></comment>


Ben Huh changes jobs every 3 months - <AUTHOR> http://www.benhuh.com/2010/03/02/i-change-jobs-every-3-months/ <comment><USER2> Didn't know the name Ben Huh until now, thought this was going to be about someone that is successfully changing employer every 3 months. Anyone doing that?</comment>


Boeing spent 18 hours drawing an outline of the 787 Dreamliner across America - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.nl/boeing-dreamliner-787-test-flight-america-2017-8/?international=true&r=US <comment><USER2> I've seen a few of these before and found them very entertaining, but I wonder how they get the appropriate ATC clearances to cross all of the airways that they'd have to cross. Wouldn't a lot of these paths conflict with airspace that other flights want to use? Are they at very unusual elevations when doing this?

<comment><USER3> Someone at /r/aviation posted a timelapse of the flight. It seems like most of the flight took place between 38,000 and 42,000 feet (passenger flights are typically in the 30s) and did it after midnight in the US which is a quiet period for passenger flights.

[https://gfycat.com/needyfavorablecrustacean](https://gfycat.com/needyfavorablecrustacean)

At one point the flight climbed to over 43,000 feet to avoid storms over the midwest and not mess up the path.</comment></comment>


From Express.js to AWS Lambda: Migrating Existing Node Apps to Serverless - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/from-express-js-to-aws-lambda-migrating-existing-node-js-applications-to-serverless-7473041ecc56 <comment><USER2> I'm kind of surprised that the article doesn't mention _aws-serverless- express_ [1], a node module provided by Amazon which makes it fairly trivial to expose an existing Express app as a Lambda function via AWS API Gateway. The Lambda handler module basically just consists of the following code.

        const awsServerlessExpress = require('aws-serverless-express');
        const app = require('./app');
        const server = awsServerlessExpress.createServer(app);

        exports.handler = (event, context) => (
          awsServerlessExpress.proxy(server, event, context)
        );

It's really convenient to be able to develop simple APIs using Express, and then to expose them via Lambda functions using _aws-serverless-express_. After you've done it once or twice, it's really easy to throw together single- purpose APIs and deploy them in a matter of minutes. For example, I was recently frustrated with the fact that CircleCI's API for accessing build artifacts is perpetually broken, and I wrote a little microservice to expose the same functionality [2]. It's definitely awesome to be able to deploy one- off projects like that without needing to worry about any sort of server maintenance.

[1] - [https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless- express](https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless-express)

[2] - [https://intoli.com/blog/circleci- artifacts/](https://intoli.com/blog/circleci-artifacts/)

<comment><USER3> How's the latency when using this method? I'd imagine if you foresee your site being low usage, startup times would be quite bad. At least, on the order of seconds rather than milliseconds.

<comment><USER2> It depends a little bit on whether there's a warm container or not, but I think that the overhead is much closer to ~100 milliseconds than to multiple seconds. The CircleCI artifacts API that I linked to takes less than one second to return an artifact, and there's a lot more going on there than a single request/response pair. The endpoint makes an external request to CircleCI's API, does some processing on the response, returns a 301 redirect, and then the redirect is followed by the client and another request is made to actually download the file from S3. You can test this directly by running

        time curl -L 'https://circleci.intoli.com/artifacts/intoli/exodus/coverage-report/total-coverage.json'

which outputs something like the following (the timing will vary a bit obviously).

        { "coverage": "92.43%" }

        real	0m0.798s
        user	0m0.046s
        sys	0m0.010s

<comment><USER4> I just ping my functions every 4 minutes to keep them warm. I am still in the free quota doing that

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For people who run their apps like this, do you find the complexity is greater or lesser than running e.g. Express + nginx in richer containers?

This looks very cool, but seems ripe for some ugly emergent behavior to appear.

<comment><USER6> After the initial "cost" of figuring out how to configure the services, I'm finding the complexity far less than containers.

Many concerns are removed from my application code and build and deploy systems by Lambda and API gateway.

You just throw some zip files in S3 and you have a web service.

No more image registry, container orchestration, load balancers, AMIs, autoscaling, etc.

You also get to remove things code around CORS, auth, polling etc. from your app.

I have a bunch of writing on how FaaS makes things easier here:

[https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas](https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> No async/await yet in lambda, it's really sad. Serverless in AWS is stuck in 2015

<comment><USER8> Most JS developers are already use to using webpack/Babel. On Babel's website is available some quick guides to starting a new project with many options/templates.

Here is a project to enhance the lambda experience with webpack [https://github.com/serverless-heaven/serverless- webpack/blob...](https://github.com/serverless-heaven/serverless- webpack/blob/master/README.md)

In production you would probably want to minify and micro-optimize anyways, so why pick one of the standard build pipeline tools and get async/await also?

Your last option is spotinst. If you use their serverless service, you get native access to node 8. They load balance across AWS EC2s, GCE, and Azure.

<comment><USER9> Minifying and transpiling are different things. Minifying server side code could make sense to get you wthin the filesize limits of aws. One downside to transpiling to older versions of ecmascript is it slows your code and complicates debugging. Newer JavaScript runtimes optimize for newer JavaScript features

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is pumping data really the right use of Lambda?

I read it should be used for data transformatiom and computation and not transportation.</comment>


Wasting Time TDDing the Wrong Things - <AUTHOR> http://www.rubypigeon.com/posts/wasting-time-tdd-the-wrong-things/ <comment><USER2> To sum up: going with TDD makes it easy to take wrong design decisions.

Not that I'm surprised. Testing tends to have its usefulness highly overestimated.</comment>


DIY gadgetry - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8107803.stm

<comment><USER2> At the London hackspace we are mostly software people who want a space to hang out and hack away on projects. The BBC turned up on the night that tinker.it had donated a bunch of arduinos and various hardware bits such as leftovers from their toy-hacking workshop. It seems the beeb jamp to the conclusion that we are a group of garbage scavengers rather than social hackers and crafters.

</comment><comment><USER3> "a colour-changing lamp that shows the weather."

Nice, but not that useful. I'd like to learn more electronics and probably will have to go through the "blinking LEDs" stage, too. Coming up with more useful stuff to create (on amateur level) doesn't seem so easy, though. Even Adafruit seems to mostly sell gimmicks or modules for other gimmicks, which worries me a bit.

Even musical instruments don't excite me much: couldn't everything they do be done in software instead?

Maybe it is time to start thinking in some completely new directions? For example I have been wondering if it would be at all feasible to create one's own e-ink display?

<comment><USER4> Here's the thing, though. When you're a beginner in just about any field, the first few things you build aren't very useful. They are good for learning, but that's it. Once you get beyond a certain point, you can build stuff that can actually be used for something.

These days I'm mostly into high power LEDs (just built a small battery-powered light for my tent and now I'm working on an LED headlamp). LEDs are fun to play with, and even at a beginner level are quite useful -- an exception to what I said above!

Probably going to put this stuff on a new site, and move my LED tutorials there with a few simple projects. If you want a heads-up when it's ready, contact me through my profile.

<comment><USER3> Not sure, for example with JavaScript it seems one could create some useful Greasemonkey Scripts with very few lines of code. But then I am not a beginner in web technologies, so maybe for a complete beginner it looks completely different.

The LED stuff definitely sounds interesting!</comment></comment></comment>


11,000 year old ocher mine in underwater cave - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/07/11000-year-old-mine-underwater-cave-surprises-archaeologists/?cmpid=int_org=ngp::int_mc=website::int_src=ngp::int_cmp=substest::int_add=substestcontrol::int_rid= <comment><USER2> HN July 4th thread _Scuba diver accidentally discovers prehistoric industrial complex in Mexico_ [1], the original paper [2], and the spectacular underwater footage included in a CBC News video [3] via joachimma [4]. Yesterday's HN thread [5].

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23730884](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23730884)

[2] [https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/27/eaba1219.full](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/27/eaba1219.full)

[3] [https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1760020035814/](https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1760020035814/)

[4] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23731910](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23731910)

[5] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23808749](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23808749)

<comment><USER3> Seeing those preserved fire pits (in [3]) with the charcoal and wood intact is wild. It looks similar to a campsite that someone used last weekend.

<comment><USER4> Cave Diver here who's had a lot of dives in that area of Mexico. There is a site call Chan Hol we dove, it has a human skelton/burial site about a 30 min swim in and numerous fire pits. You can make out black marks on the wall/ceiling and remains of the pit itself. They are all over this one cave, it was very active.

The human skeleton is in what could only be called a burial site, it's very high limestone slab, above what would have been the floor and could have been only been placed there when the water table was much lower. The amount of effort suggests a coordinated effort but it's debatable, not all the skeleton is there.

A team of Mexican scientist radio-carbon dated the sites and the conclusion is 11,000 years ago. The body being an adult female.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a certified scuba diver, but cave divers are just a whole different level. They have my respect but I also think they're a little bit crazy. Watching some videos of these guys exploring that cave I was struck with just how skilled and comfortable they are in the water.

<comment><USER6> I'm a blue water diver, and every time I see these kinds of stories I get serious claustrophobia kicking in.. I wasn't always claustrophobic, just when I started seeing divers doing deep caves, for some reason, pushes the button.

Serious willies factor.

<comment><USER7> This is a "good" read then. I thought it was really interesting. The pictures of the entrance to the cave are so unassuming too. Just looks like a little bit of dirty water next to some rocks.

[https://www.outsideonline.com/1922711/raising- dead](https://www.outsideonline.com/1922711/raising-dead)

<comment><USER6> Nice one, yeah a tragic story and cave diving generally is definitely not a hobby I can find myself getting into .. but interesting to hear of the adventures of those with bigger balls .. although quite tragic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The website of the divers research institute has some neat 3D models of a couple of mining sites: [https://www.cindaq.org/copy-of-sagitario-la- mina](https://www.cindaq.org/copy-of-sagitario-la-mina)

</comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know if it's possible or even if it's already done, to sample the air in the cave? (i.e. in the pockets that seem to be there).

Could that provide meaningful information on the atmosphere composition at the time it the cave flooded?

</comment><comment><USER10> I hope someone can explain the fascination with this story to me. I read it when it was on the front page of HN on July 4th, but the story was less interesting than the headline. I'd like to hear why others are so fascinated with this story.

<comment><USER8> From the research institute that made the discovery: [https://www.cindaq.org/copy-of-sagitario-la- mina](https://www.cindaq.org/copy-of-sagitario-la-mina)

WHY IT'S IMPORTANT:

* The discovery has the potential to help us understand the social and behavioral complexities of the region's earliest inhabitants.

* This new research shows ochre was of great, if not critical, importance to the culture and lives of Paleoamericans, given they were willing to take such enormous risks to get it. Red ochre is the most commonly identified inorganic paint, used throughout human history. It's considered to be a key component of human evolutionary development and behavioral complexity. Ochre minerals were collected for use in rock paintings, mortuary practices, painted objects and personal adornment. They may even have had medicinal qualities.

* The mining activity from more than 10,000 years ago also shows the early application of geological principles that were only documented 400 years ago.

* Together with the exploration of Hoyo Negro, where the remains of Naia were found, the exploration of these caves is advancing research techniques, especially using 3D photogrammetry and virtual reality.

* The abundance and diversity of animal and plant remains found in these submerged caves enables scientists to recreate what the environment was like for Ice Age Americans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If anyone would like to get involved with cave diving, it's somewhat accessible. For about $5k in training, $5k in equipment, and perhaps four weeks of time you can gain the experience and certification necessary to dive caves.

<comment><USER12> I thought that cave diving was much more dangerous than scuba diving. 4 weeks really?

<comment><USER13> It is incredibly dangerous in comparison (as a scuba diver). These courses generally have a requirement of being a very competent diver (hundreds of logged dives, for example) and they just won't pass you if you don't know what you're doing. Cave divers take things very seriously.

<comment><USER4> I have a "full cave" card and about 100 post-certification cave dives. I have been actively ocean diving and even doing wreck diving, which are overhead environments, but I haven't been in a cave in 10 years. I still likely take a refresher/checkout course to polish my skills with an instructor just to be safe if I wanted to cave dive again. Your instincts are what can kill you in a cave diving.

But it's worth it, you visit places that few people have seen with their own eye and it's safe if you follow the rules.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This episode of the Joe Rogan podcast is with "master builder and architectural designer, teacher, geometrician, geomythologist, geological explorer and renegade scholar" Randall Carlson.

Randall talks a lot about a flood happening ~12.000 years ago, during a period known as "The Younger Dryas" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas)).

Key moments for anyone who doesn't want to watch the 3 full hours are:

0:04:16 Homo sapiens idaltu, oldest modern human skeleton> 7000 generations of humans

0:05:45 new discoveries lending credence to Graham Hancock's thesis

0:06:22 Gobekli Tepe

0:07:30 Tunguska Event, speed and kinetic punch

0:08:27 Possible reason for purposely burying of Gobekli Tepe

0:11:15 Cleopatra < Great Pyramids

0:12:28 Scale of potential loss of human civilisation due to massive impact event(s)

0:14:20 Oxygen isotopes in Greenland, summit ice core samples

0:17:18 Implications for our modern mainstream model of climate change induced catastrophe

0:24:00 The limited scope of the modern climate change debate/'consensus' view and the danger of that, see 0:38:38

0:26:25 Greenland Ice Sheet project history

0:27:31 Little Ice Age, important context

0:29:00 Two periods of global cooling in the last two thousand years

0:30:32 Holy Grail Quest Stories

0:31:33 Dendrochronologists' discovery of stunted forest growth in northern hemisphere in the period of the Grail Quest for 8-10 years, supported by historical records of the time leading to Justinian Plague

0:33:20 Recovery, brought on by return of warmth, 900AD, medieval warm period

0:35:06 Cathedral building phenomenon, ended by Little Ice Age, Black plague

0:38:38 Why are we ignoring this evidence? The problem with the IPCC

0:40:59 The real Inconvenient Truth

0:42:00 Eemian interglacial period temperature oscillations

0:42:22 Oboriginal tales past down through oral tradition about sea levels, analyses by archaeologist W. Bruce Massey

0:45:59 Younger Dryas

0:47:56 Rate of sea level rise, not smooth

0:48:43 Late Pleistocene mortality graph, ~120 species of mega mammals went extinct

0:50:00 Dominant hypothesis of "overkill" or "blitzkrieg" to explain the extinction of the mammoths..

0:52:13 Founding fathers of geology > new school of thought, catastrophism v uniformitarianism

0:54:49 J. Harlen Bretz' proposition of gigantic floods in pacific North West being ignored by peers in 1920

0:56:12 Transition in earth sciences incorporating parts of Bretz his findings, but with a modern example that doesn't scale or compare with Bretz' findings; the new dogma

0:59:36 Joe mentions the problem with the "overkill" hypothesis and Randall adds to it

1:00:05 One of the many mammoth cemeteries

1:01:50 Joe is spooked by Randall's snorting and tries to play it off by referring to the drawing of the "ivory floor" of the London docks covered in Siberian mammoth tusks

1:07:07 Joe asks for Randall's desktop wallpaper, Randall keeps him in suspense for a little longer, shows satellite photo instead

1:11:00 Canada didn't exist

1:14:41 The Bering Strait during Ice Age is exposed, connecting Siberia to North America, 14000-15000yrs ago

1:15:54 Indonesia, modern day v Ice Age

1:16:55 Hundreds of stories that parallel the story of Noah, coinciding with the existing data

1:19:09 if we accept that the stories are based on real events, what do the parts of the persons with foreknowledge imply?

1:19:53 Europe now v during Ice Age, ~15000 yrs ago

1:20:35 Mt. Jumbo, Missoula, Western Montana, shorelines reaching to tops of the hillside

1:21:27 Latreurolle Falls, Basalt layers

1:23:53 West (boulder) Bar giant current ripples, 50ft high

1:25:54 New trend in evidence, geological community is moving in the direction of Randall's assertion, some of the older guard is defending the idea of the jökulhlaups, group of Canadian geologists, John Shaw et al., are challenging this

1:27:50 Where the water for these massive floods came from, asteroidal impact

1:28:45 Impact craters of the last 10.000 yrs, potentially causing massive tsunami's

1:30:45 Modern consensus view of the Younger Dryas, exact match with Plato's account of the subsiding of Atlantis beneath the waves

1:34:20 Recent research, shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds in Younger Dryas boundary sediments, micro-diamonds, nuclear glass all correlates with massive cosmic impacts

1:35:40 Overspecialisation in modern science, pro's and cons

1:40:02 Listing recent discoveries supporting Younger Dryas cosmic impact hypothesis and narrowing down date to 12.800-12.900yrs ago

1:42:37 Randall mentions gratification as he theorised this 25yrs ago and Joe asks how he became so obsessed with this

1:52:58 What this all means for our species, on a larger scale, big picture, according to Randall

1:53:41 Emerging evidence human population crashed during Younger Dryas

1:55:16 Book of Matthew interesting quote where Jesus talk about what the end of days will look like, what it implies

1:58:33 The moral to all of this, what should we do in terms of consumption of Earth's resources and what to direct our collective efforts at

2:01:34 Error of gradualism in the environmental movement

2:03:27 We'd be fucked without Jupiter

2:03:53 Sacred Geometry and Freemasonry

2:06:58 Difference between modern and ancient architecture, "textbooks in stone"

2:08:48 What is the Masonic Order, "secrets of Freemasons", Masonic traditions

2:12:30 Freemasons as custodians of ancient symbolism, Noah's ark, acacia tree, DMT

2:16:15 DMT as a boon to mankind and the mistake of criminalising it

2:21:34 Climatic optimum after population crash/ Ice Age

2:25:14 Climate shifts again into neo-glaciation, 6000yrs ago

2:27:40 Traumatic effect on consciousness as result of surviving near- extinction event, perhaps gene-deep

2:29:44 insert ''aliens'' meme

2:30:26 Responds hypothetically by calling back to the "7000 generations of modern humans" point and potential advancements of past civilisations, kicks off from there

2:37:58 Freedom to innovate stifled by bureaucracy, encumbering creative processes

2:40:39 Resistance motivates action

2:42:32 parable about making your own way

2:44:05 Why the name "Sacred Geometry"

2:44:56 Architecture, geometry, of our solar system is in perfect balance to allow for us to exist; Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune via bucket mechanism deliver Panspermia to Earth

2:50:02 (Hypothetical) New Jerusalem as representation of our solar system, furlongs, horse racing, 7920, miles, numbers math my brain

<comment><USER15> Wrong thread?

<comment><USER14> Definitely not. Since the time period of when these caves were mined is around the same time a big flood might have happened.</comment></comment></comment>


The $500 Startup - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tweaky.com/the-500-startup/

<comment><USER2> What do you get in return for all of this? As I read it the person who signs up gets to work with you two, plus they get the $500 in credit at tweaky.com, but I do not see what you guys are getting out of this relationship. I am not trying to troll, I am just curious.

<comment><AUTHOR> We want to show people how easy it is to use Tweaky to hack together an MVP.

Out of this we'll build some case studies we hope to get PR out of and hopefully that will lead to more people coming onto Tweaky and purchasing tweaks.

We don't take any equity in the businesses or anything like that.

<comment><USER2> That sounds like a good deal for both parties. I wasn't sure if you guys would be taking equity in the businesses for the $500, which is why I asked. Thanks for clearing that up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great idea - is it open for anyone in the world, or is it geographically restricted?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're open to anyone, anywhere in the world. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think it would be wonderful if there was some sort of rapid and easy framework for mobile apps, like WordPress is to web sites. Just throwing that idea out there.

</comment><comment><USER5> What you provide seems very very trivial for any web programmer. How you explain that this service adds some value for a company?

<comment><AUTHOR> Tweaky is for small business owners and non-technical people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this open to only web startups?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not at all, in fact we've had a couple of applications for physical products - definitely something we're interested in.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should you fire average devs and have only talented devs in a team? - <AUTHOR>

Let's say you have a team with 10 developers. Some of them are great, but a year later you discover that 3 of them are average (they have no talent). They want to change something and learn new things, but still they are slow, make bad decisions and other dev. outperform them.<p>Would you fire them? Would you give them a chance to improve? Other ideas? <comment><USER3> at least be humane about it.

you don't simply "fire" people for performing below expectations. do the extra legwork, and find a way to get them properly "laid off", ie, "eliminate their positions" -- which shouldn't be too difficult here, as after all you say you'd rather hire more senior people -- so they can (1) get unemployment benefits, (2) roll their insurance off into CORBA if at all possible (or the equivalent of you're not in the U.S.), and (3) have at least a theoretical possibility of rehabilitating themselves and getting another job.

"firing" per se is just plain vindictive, and seriously endangers their ability to look out for their physical welfare on the short run, and to right their course (in terms of finding a career that's better suited to them) in the longer run

I know that you aren't particularly concerned with their welfare (you sound like you're basically fed up with these people, and couldn't care less). but the bottom line is that you still have to recognize that the company shares at least SOME responsibility for the situation. (after all, who hired them, anyway? was it, umm... you, by chance?)

and also, treating people humanely just happens to pay (considerable) dividends. as in, the morale of the rest of the team, your company's reputation (and your own reputation).

i've seen the (lingering) after-effects of letting go of people gracefully and magnanimously, and of doing the opposite, many, many times. it's well worth the money to do these things properly (and humanely).

</comment><comment><USER4> If they're average, not terrible, I'd agree with 37signals - there is no such thing as rockstar people, just rockstar environments.

If you're not sure you've built an inspiring, learning environment where everybody feels driven to do their best, are you sure a) it's them, not you? b) anyone you'll hire will do any better?

The way you've worded it though, it sounds like they are a bit rubbish. Maybe it's the kindest thing, it's painful all round if they're trying and failing.

</comment><comment><USER5> "no talent" is "average"? That sounds a bit... well, wrong. Granted, really talented people are orders of magnitude more productive, but "average" means someone that's worse than half of people, but also better than half; more or less.

<comment><AUTHOR> OK, maybe wrong wording, but by average I mean people who will never exceed your expectations and have moderate problem solving skills/or development speed/or technical excellence attitude.

I am thinking about tough decision now, and so far I am going to fire those average people and hire 1-2 great developers instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It really depends. For example, you could have an average developer who has a huge amount of domain knowledge. Their coding skills may be sub-par but that doesn't mean they are not valuable. They may also have strengths in UI, sysadmin, etc.

On the other hand a developer could be average due to lack of experience, which is something that can be remedied by time and training - code reviews can help, as well as a reading list etc. We all have to start somewhere. Give those that show promise - but lack experience - some guidance.

It also depends a lot on where you are in the development cycle. Are you mainly doing maintenance work, bug fixes, minor feature additions ? An average team should do fine.

Where you don't want mediocre developers is in the early stages of a big project - bad design decisions and poor programming practices can make later development a nightmare.

I'm working on such a project right now and it's highly demoralizing - <USER2> day I find a new WTF and I just don't have the time to refactor everything - my recommendation at this point is to scrap the lot and start over, but that's not likely to happen. That's the result of mediocre developers in over their heads without a clue, and it can have a huge negative impact on your company's productivity and bottom line.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you're in a 1st world country you can't just fire people for being average without opening yourself up to a lawsuit. That's why good tech companies develop harrowing interview gauntlets.

<comment><USER8> The US is not a 1st world county???

Here you can't fire them "for cause" and deny them unemployment benefits (which will increase your payments into the system going forward) but these sound bad enough that it's probably worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Case by case basis. There are many factors which can make a developer good for the team.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here are more details.

dev 1. very slow, but solid. Need constant guidance to solve problems. However, can dig into boring/weird problems and reliable person. dev 2. distracted by interned and have problems with focus. Knows a little about many things, do many mistakes, but trying to improve. dev 3. was weak indeed from the beginning, but doing much better after several months. He is 31 and I don't think he will become great developer eventually.

</comment></comment><comment> DifE-Q I would give them a chance to improve somewhere else.

<comment><AUTHOR> why?</comment></comment>


Classic bug reports - <AUTHOR> http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1270 <comment><USER2> Ulrich Drepper strikes again: [https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12701](https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12701)

For a smart guy, when he's wrong he is completely wrong. And any good work he might have done is wiped out by his arrogance. Not to mention he prevented bugs from being fixed.

But here is my favourite bug that cannot be fixed:

[https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=650371](https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=650371)

Basically, the number of steps on Gnome volume control can't be configurable because apparently there are no situations you would ever want to do that. Except for hardware setups that don't report back volume information...

<comment><USER3> The worst part about people who respond to bug reports in that way is that for most people, it just intimidates you into thinking you are wrong, and stupid for even asking. It's like an amature trying to beat a lawyer in court, you can't win, even if you're right.

<comment><USER4> >It's like an amature trying to beat a lawyer in court

I see what you did there:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=362178](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=362178)

:)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Although in slightly different vein and, strictly speaking, not reported to a public bug tracker, this AMD CPU bug report by Matt Dillon is probably my favourite (link: [https://www.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2012-03/msg0...](https://www.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2012-03/msg00000.html)). Tracking the intermittent problem to the lowest level and blaming the CPU and not the numerous layers above it surely takes guts.

<comment><USER6> How do you even fix that? Do you have to update every compiler so it checks the generate machine code for that problematic sequence and insert some nop's, or is there a way to update the cpu itself?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You can say what you want about Drepper, but as far as scanf() and siblings are concerned, there is only one one safe way of using them: Not using them. Better write comprehensible reliable code to implement input scanning.

<comment><USER8> But he didn't just say you're better off not using scanf(). He insisted, quite incorrectly, that that the glibc behavior was correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _> Alas, Ubuntu Bug 1 is still unfixed_

What? Status is shown as "Fix Released", since the rise of Android and iOS has shrunk Microsoft's market share.</comment>


Stockfighter's Jailbreak CTF trainer is live - <AUTHOR> https://www.stockfighter.io/#jailbreak <comment><USER2> I rarely want to like a product more than I want to like Stockfighter, because of both the people involved and the underlying concept.

But there are a million other things I want to sink time into improving. Music, my Starcraft MMR, boxing. To finish a day hacking and coding, come home, and - for months, if I want good results - do more hacking and coding feels like an exhausting prospect. Even if the scenario is fun, it feels contrived.

I'm not presenting any solutions. Maybe I'm just not the target market, because I don't have the desire right now to code all day and then code some more. But I wonder how big that target market is?

<comment><USER3> > because I don't have the desire right now to code all day and then code some > more

Tell me about it. Speaking only for myself, I have near-constant coder's guilt - a term I just made up to describe the nagging voice in my head that keeps telling me I should be coding more in my free time. It sounds something like this :

"somewhere a rockstar wizard ninja is writing a C compiler in Haskell and here you are wasting your time with Overwatch, you miserable slacker"

<comment><USER4> Hi man, I just interrupted my game of Overwatch because a colleague pointed me to this comment. My C compiler in Haskell is located here: [https://github.com/tinco/nanc](https://github.com/tinco/nanc) it's not fully functional yet, but will be soon ;) Also, just got owned by a team with 3 tracers :(

edit: Just read what this thread is about. I really like to program, so much so that I usually find an hour or two per day to code (not every day, check my github streak if you want) Usually it's between 11pm and 1am, after dinner, after a movie with my partner, when she's playing a video game or watching a series, I do some coding.

So I also play video games or watch movies. I like competitive games, mostly SC2, DotA and now Overwatch, but I don't worry about my MMR the way I used to when I played over an hour per day. Compared to achieving a high MMR building a ninja rockstar software project like a C compiler in Haskell is easy. Who is going to compete with me? It's a crazy idea anyway! I just work on it a couple hours per week, and after a year or two it'll be an impressive project no matter what. It's got everything I learned in it.

Regaining the MMR I had in SC2 back in University will take me months of hard practice, but when I feel like continuing my C compiler, the commits are still there. The C compiler stems from a deep passion I have and a deep frustration I feel with the state of the art, that's why even if I don't dev on it for a few months, I'll go back to it eventually and continue. So... I can relax and play Overwatch for an hour or two, no worries. (Overwatch is much more forgiving than SC2 or DotA btw.)

<comment><USER3> > Hi man, I just interrupted my game of Overwatch because a colleague pointed > me to this comment. My C compiler in Haskell is located here: > [https://github.com/tinco/nanc](https://github.com/tinco/nanc) it's not > fully functional yet, but will be soon ;) Also, just got owned by a team > with 3 tracers :(

Haha what an unexpectedly fantastic response. Kudos on your cool side project, and triple Tracers sounds like the pinnacle of frustration :P (is this a new meta? I was just watching a top tier EU game where one team rolled 3 tracers + 2 winstons)

> Overwatch is much more forgiving than SC2 or DotA btw

Couldn't agree more. I personally find SC2 almost too stressful to play competitively these days (as a 30 year old fogey), and the match length of your typical MOBA is also a major turn off for a casual like me.

> So I also play video games or watch movies. I like competitive games, mostly > SC2, DotA and now Overwatch, but I don't worry about my MMR the way I used > to when I played over an hour per day. Compared to achieving a high MMR > building a ninja rockstar software project like a C compiler in Haskell is > easy. Who is going to compete with me? It's a crazy idea anyway! I just work > on it a couple hours per week, and after a year or two it'll be an > impressive project no matter what. It's got everything I learned in it.

I'll be using your experience for inspiration. I also love coding - particularly once I get started - but lack the discipline to make a habit out of it in my spare time. Hopefully in a few months I'll have some similarly interesting work to show for myself :)

<comment><USER4> Could very well be then! They played 3 tracers a winston and a Mei. (Winston had a play of the game smashing four of us in Mei's ulti :\\)

I'm 29, experience the same with SC2, it's just not fun if all you can do is to learn the meta and polish your mechanics.

Whatever you build, make sure it's test driven! Nothing beats sitting down to work on your project and the only thing you need to do is to run the test suite to remember what you should work on next. It also helps you chop your project up in fun achievable sized bits. I make it a point ending every session with 1 red test.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was lucky enough to beta test this so I've had time to clear the trainer levels. And let me just say, wow. The tricks and turns you have to navigate to get through this are some of the best fun I've had sitting in front of a computer.

I like that people are evaluating this against things like Overwatch, because for me, Stockfighter is a form of entertainment. I still play video games occasionally, but in my growing adult years, I'm not able capture that same rush from winning.

Not so with CTFs. Maybe it's because I'm a relative newbie, but the dopamine rush I get from winning a level is incomparable. There is something about a solve, when you get that brainfeel where you just _understand completely_ what is going on, that is unique. Perhaps that's what black hat hackers feel when they p0wn a system. The closest recollection for me is when I smashed through that top level brick in World 1-2 of Super Mario Bros, and I could run across the roof to win the level.

<comment><USER6> Brainfeel...I like that word. I'm going to keep it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You all have great timing. It's very likely that something will melt down soon, but I'm not going to notice, because I'll be in a chair getting my arm inked up. It's going to be a nine-fives kind of day!

Mean feedback about the UI, especially if accompanied by an even meaner summary of what you'd rather the UI does instead, is most welcome.

 _Later_

(Erin's Calcifer tattoo is taking longer than expected, so if you want to wait like another 15 minutes before doing whatever unforeseen sequence of things in the UI that will hard-panic all the servers, your timing will be perfect).

<comment><USER8> I was actually going to say I like the UI quite a bit at first glance. I haven't bit in yet, but overall I really dug the layout.

<comment><USER7> There are things I want to do with this UI that we couldn't do in Microcorruption --- ways to make assembly a little more accessible to programmers who aren't already from security or game development, where the people who crushed Microcorruption came from --- because the assembly was a flat marked-up blob of text. But there are definitely ways in which it's a step back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The user interface is appalling. Whoever designed this has managed to produce worse ergonomics than a single 1970s-style terminal, for essentially a similar set of tasks (editing text+binary files and piping data through commands).

I see some discussion of "files", but seem unable to list them or explore the filesystem. I don't know if this in-game filesystem is supposed to be on the "AVR" device or an imaginary "developer machine". Where do the outputs of running commands like "compile" go? Why can't I inspect the compiler? What actually comprises the state of the system I'm interacting with? If this is notionally to find good developers, why is the UI sandboxed inside a web browser, where building and using tools (which is what good developers and reverse engineers _do_ ) is incredibly painful?

Half the commands produce no output and make no visible change to any state, e.g. "load garbage". Almost all commands silently ignore extra parameters. There's _no tab completion_ , _no history search_ , commands don't even show up in the output log...

Links and commands seem to randomly be assigned to either always open in new tabs or load in the current tab of the browser, both in the "debugger" and help pages.

Moving through command history puts the cursor at the left hand side of the prompt. There's noticeable latency when single-stepping the program, which is just astounding.

Did nobody try to use this shit, even a little?

<comment><USER10> I haven't tried this, but [https://github.com/ketchupsalt/debugger](https://github.com/ketchupsalt/debugger) might be of interest to you.

More generally, it's not actually sandboxed inside a web browser, you can interact with system through REST-ish API as well. see [https://starfighter.readme.io/docs/retrieve-device- status](https://starfighter.readme.io/docs/retrieve-device-status) for some documentation on that. It's obviously pretty inconvenient to get a full debugger type experience that way, but I don't really see how they could make it less sandboxed, given the constraint that the authoritative copy of everything must run on their servers for security.

I do wish all the commands gave some sort of feedback, load in particular is super frustrating that way.

<comment><USER9> This line seems like a bug to me (assigning the int 16 to a variable that should be of an enumerated type {I8, I16, I32, S, R}, though I don't know if Go has those):

[https://github.com/ketchupsalt/debugger/blob/master/commandl...](https://github.com/ketchupsalt/debugger/blob/master/commandline.go#L73)

<comment><USER7> There are probably a zillion little bugs in that thing (I haven't used it in months) but if people really want it to work, I'm probably less than 4 concerted hours from making it workable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Starfighter is a new, weird kind of recruiting company. We detect and market underpriced programming talent. We do that by creating opportunities for programmers to casually and effectively demonstrate aptitude."

Having a hard time parsing this. Do you find underpriced talent and help them get paid more?

<comment><USER12> Susie works making crud apps for a boring insurance company. She is a brilliant programmer but due to where she lives, personal situations, she hasn't faced a challenge that lets her know the extent of her abilities, etc, she is working below her potential.

Susie creates a novel solution to one of Stockfighter's games. Stockfighter uses that solution as evidence to present her to companpanies as a great engineer. She gets job offers for more money, challenge, and satisfaction than she currently has.

<comment><USER13> Is that really the problem though? In my circle, plenty of people are doing the boring crud apps at random big company. The problem is that they're paid very well. So taking a job that is more challenging often involves taking less money, for more risk, with a small possibility of a payoff. Is there really a surplus of highly interesting tech positions with better than average pay that are desperately looking for people? If you're struggling to find talent, you're probably not paying enough.

<comment><USER14> >The problem is that they're paid very well

Are you sure? Tech companies you've heard of on the west coast (other than Amazon) are paying their most junior people at least $100k. When I looked at big boring insurance companies in the Midwest (toying with the idea of staying close to home) I was seeing closer to $50k for entry level and $80k for mid- career.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I know this is a low-quality comment, but i just want to congratulate the whole stockfighter team for getting the jailbreak ctf out. it looks like it was a ton of work and looks fantastic. as somebody who was excited about it after trying my hand at microcorruption, i'm super excited to see this finally. hats off!

<comment><USER15> one comment on the trainer: when you click on the Jailbreak link, it just drops you into the debugger, if you, like me got lost, run the `tour` and then click on the little person+ head and go to the documentation and go through the quickstart.

yay!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am a bit worried that stock fighter is the wrong approach. If Susie wants a better job inwould recommend my path:

\- if you want to find a better paying job, take each lunchtime and call every job advert you qualify for that pays 20k more than you earn. Do this for three months. You will get the raise.

\- even better is to supplement this with LinkedIN, blog posts, network maintenance (when did you last have call or have coffee with your previous boss?)

\- do this for the next three jobs.

You are now at the pay ceiling for your skill set. Well done.

Now ... err ...

Start your own business, preferably selling something that scales (your time does not scale and you are selling it at pretty much the max - say 100-150k)

</comment><comment><USER17> Dev hiring is a sourcing problem, not a filtering problem.

The people behind starfighter are brilliant and I respect them big time. So, probably they know what they're doin. I am excited to see how they want to solve dev hiring since starfighter looks more like a product that does filtering, not sourcing.

(I am thinking since a long time to build something that leverages Github to find and reach out to engineers; e.g., when a company looks for Angular people to just parse the Angular repo for engineers that watch / contribute to the repository and reach out to them. if you have any ideas on this or want to help, please shoot me a message).

<comment><USER18> It's both. They're focusing on the sourcing part, which is commendable, but I'd still like companies to engage a better filter. The one most have now is the equivalent to trying to hammer square pegs into round holes with bit of wood they happened to find.

Unfortunately, changing that appears to be a very tricky social problem. It's going to take a recruiter (or recruiting company) with such a great reputation and track record that companies trust that recruiter's judgement in personnel implicitly. But how?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Question: are frequency, consistency, and productivity important metrics for bubbling up users that get noticed as really good candidates?

I poke around every now and then on stockfighter but am definitely not looking for a job change in the near term. Is this use case something y'all support?

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER20> wow, I just found microcorruption, now it looks like there's man-months of fun ahead.

Technical comment: "forgot password"-link is not wired to anything? Not working for me on FF at least.

<comment><USER21> The forgot password link doesn't work for me in Chrome either, but I found this URL and it seems to work: [https://www.stockfighter.io/ui/forgot_password](https://www.stockfighter.io/ui/forgot_password)

<comment><USER22> Fixed. (And yep, that is the correct URL.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is the server struggling again? None of my input into the UI seems to be having an effect.

<comment><USER7> I'm getting crazy high latency just through the login page. Looking into it. The emulator servers (a pair of m3.mediums) are barely breaking a sweat.

<comment><USER24> Is the tour supposed to end abruptly at "this is r1" ?

<comment><USER7> It is not! You are the third person to tell me that's happened. Looking into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So it's proprietary?</comment>


Peloton: The Self-Driving Database Management System - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cmu-db/peloton <comment><AUTHOR> Andy Pavlo recently gave a talk about it at DataEngConf ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzMnyYdO8jk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzMnyYdO8jk)).</comment>


The Poetry I Was Grateful for in 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2017-in-review/the-poetry-i-was-grateful-for-in-2017 <comment><AUTHOR> I really, really enjoy reading poetry, which feels incredibly complementary to writing computer code, to me. But somehow I do a terrible job keeping up with new stuff that's published each year. So I find pieces like this, by Dan Chiasson of The New Yorker, super valuable.</comment>