Ford Stole Tech for Best-Selling Trucks from MIT, Professors Say - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-02/best-selling-trucks-use-tech-mit-says-ford-stole-from-professors <comment><USER2> The patents (8,069,839, 9,255,519, 9,810,166, and 10,138,826) are strange. Each describes a system where both gasoline and ethanol are available in separate tanks and the mixing is controlled to minimize knock. That's a dead end as a commercial product. The claims, though, were drafted to cover a system where the fuel enters the cylinder through both a port and direct injection, allowing some tweaking. It's a stretch to claim these patents cover a single-fuel engine.

Ford can probably argue that the claims are not supported by the specification.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish journalists would stop using the "theft" metaphor for patent infringement. It's misleading and wrong, especially when there are other forms of IP malfeasance (e.g. theft of trade secrets) that are much more appropriately called "theft".

</comment><comment><USER4> So they say they own a patent for dual port- and direct-injection? It will be interesting to see how it plays out; Ford is hardly the only company using the technique on their DI engines. I also wonder if it will pass a sniff test -- is using traditional port injection on a DI engine novel enough to be patented? I guess I can see where it might be, but what a low bar for innovation we have.

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't think it's novel enough. Toyota and Subaru have been using it for years. I had no idea Ford was doing this as well. It's a good idea. The port injection prevents carbon buildup on the valves and ports.

<comment><USER6> I have a DI engine (Volkswagen 2.0 TSI), the carbon build-up is very annoying / expensive. I think they still have not fixed it, but not entirely sure:

[https://forums.vwvortex.com/showthread.php?6984506-What- Happ...](https://forums.vwvortex.com/showthread.php?6984506-What-Happened-To- The-Dual-Injected-EA888)

<comment><USER5> Oh yeah, I used to have a used BMW with an N54 engine with the same issue. I ended up buying a media blaster, crushed walnut shells and cleaned up the ports preemptively.

<comment><USER7> CRC intake cleaner seems to work the OK for a homegamer solution. Make sure to follow directions, as they are not obvious. Best used every 20k or so on GDI engines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm confused as to who actually owns the patents. The title says "Ford stole tech [...] from MIT, professors say", but the lawsuit is "Ethanol Boosting Systems LLC v. Ford Motor Co.".

I'm not certain how IP rights works at MIT, but if the patents are owned by MIT, wouldn't MIT be the party that needs to sue? If so, why is it instead "Ethanol Boosting Systems"? Does _MIT_ feel that MIT IP was stolen?

<comment><USER9> From the article:

>The professors transferred ownership of their creations to MIT, one of the premier U.S. research universities, which then granted exclusive patent- licensing rights to a small company the three men founded, Ethanol Boosting Systems LLC. EBS offered to license patents on the enhancements to Ford in 2014, but the company declined.

If EBS doesn't get paid, then MIT doesn't get paid.

<comment><USER10> I'm curious as to who funded the research in the first place.

<comment><USER11> MIT. MIT is not a university, it is a private corporation which monetizes the research it discovers.

<comment><USER12> MIT is _also_ a university; the two elements of their existence are orthogonal, not mutually exclusive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Since the article is not helpful on details:

A Delaware docket search indicates the patents in question are US 8,069,839 B2 ;US 9,255,519 B2 ;US 9,810,166 B2 ;US 10,138,826 B2

The 826 issued end of November, 2018. Independent claims 12, 21, and 31 are for dual injection system engines.

Given that Bloomberg indicate only infringement of one patent, I speculate that is the 826 patent issued in late 2018. Now that 826 is issued, they are able to pursue.

826 is a continuation filing in the family that starts with 7,314,033. I haven't looked at the family, nor tried to make any appraisal of merit.

<comment><USER13> Having now looked at the 826 patent, I'm inclined to agree with Animats' comment elsewhere in this thread regarding the claims vs. the specification, which plainly shows two separate fuel systems that hold two different fuel types.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Greedy inventors"

Said the car company exec... Jesus what balls. Still, MIT isn't exactly small and lacking funding, so I'd expect this to drag on until an inevitable undisclosed settlement.

</comment><comment><USER6> Aside from this patent dispute, it's interesting to see if there are any innovations left for ICEs. I know one idea is camless:

[https://hackaday.com/2016/02/16/where-are-all-the-camless- en...](https://hackaday.com/2016/02/16/where-are-all-the-camless-engines/)

</comment><comment><USER14> There doesn't appear to be any claim that Ford directly incorporated any MIT research into their engines? Simultaneous invention happens, and broad patent claims make it even more likely.

</comment><comment><USER15> The Ford-MIT Alliance began in 1998. I wonder how much, if any, of Ford's money paid for the research by the MIT professors[1]claiming patent on their research.

I would be surprised if MIT-Ford didn't have a lot of legalese set down for just such an occurrence. MIT has been closely tied to industry for good and bad.

[1] [http://ssrc.mit.edu/programs/ford-mit- alliance](http://ssrc.mit.edu/programs/ford-mit-alliance)

</comment><comment><USER16> Curious to see how this goes. IANAL, but wondering why it's taken 3-4 years for this claim to surface? Is there a statute of limitations on IP infringement?

If I'm Ford, I surely would have triple checked every IP angle before putting a new technology in every single vehicle I make. So I'm just guessing that there was some original arrangement which now looks inadequate for the inventors. That or Ford's lawyers messed up in a big way. Just speculating of course.

<comment><USER17> It can take a long time for a lawsuit to actually happen. There's a lot of ways to drag out negotiations over a patent and it can be a while before both parties can't come to an agreement, resulting in a suit being filed.

<comment><USER18> Yup. One of the best examples of this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns)

A clearly novel invention (intermittent windshield wipers) that took decades and more than $10M legal fees to get paid for.

<comment><USER19> If I live to be a thousand years old, I'll never understand how that was considered "novel." But that's just me.

<comment><USER18> Lots of inventions like this seem obvious in _hindsight_.

<comment><USER20> Clearly, without this _invention_ , wipers to this day would still work on a sigle speed, calibrated for heavy rain. Millions of tons of wasted rubber and plastic, etc.

<comment><USER18> The specific mechanism was quite clever.

"Someone would've eventually invented this" can be said about everything we use. Someone would've figured out the Internet, internal combustion, flying, etc. That doesn't mean it's not a notable accomplishment to do so.

<comment><USER19> But does every "notable accomplishment" require a 20-year monopoly?

Anytime there's a foot race to the patent office, we, the consumers, are the inevitable loser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am not taking sides, because today's Ford Co is not saddled with Henry Ford's controversies, and both MIT and Ford are large organizations. I don't know who is right, a jury might decide.

There is an interesting movie, "Flash of Genius," about Robert Kearns, an inventor and his interactions with Ford over the "delayed windshield wiper."

I won't reveal any details over the movie plot but there is a short scene where Kearns is lecturing his engineering students about engineering ethics, which reminds me of a documentary by PBS: "NOVA: Holocaust on Trial" (2000)

I cannot find this last movie anywhere, but <youtube> has it available. Should be mandatory viewing for engineers, but it is difficult to watch or listen to the details.

<comment><USER22> The delayed windshield wiper case is not cut and dry (no pun intended). With solid-state electronics (SSE), a delay circuit using capacitors is relatively easy to create. Patents are supposed to be "non-obvious". SSE's were relatively new in the early 60's, but once people got practical experience with them, a delay circuit is obvious to practitioner in that line of work, which in theory should make it non-patentable.

It's kind of like "doing X on the Web" patents where X itself is common and/or unpatentable. Adding web-ness shouldn't change the patentability of X, but for some odd reason it has. When new parts and tools come along, they make the mundane possibly seem innovative for a while until people or judges understand that the new tools are not magic.

The web-based-auction patents are an example. They simply automated manual auctions; any programmer/analyst with industry experience can do that. Running it in a browser didn't make it special, but that apparently bedazzled patent reviewers. (Copyrights can cover look and feel, but I'm talking about functionality.)

The patent office simply does not take seriously, "must be non-obvious to persons having ordinary skill in the art". If 90% of experienced programmer/analysts can code up a web auction system, it's not obvious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> MIT patented a method and device to make the most useless interior electronics package and noisy experience for passengers?

</comment><comment><USER24> Just another patent troll, MIT isnt immune or righteous - look what they did to Aaron Schwartz.

The patent in question describes a two tank system with separate gasoline and ethanol. Afaik, Ford is not doing anything like that.</comment>


Race to drill into Antarctic Vostok lake - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16907998

<comment><USER2> According to the latest reports, they have indeed reached the water. [http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iSjLDy87-...](http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iSjLDy87-GE- PY41R-TiGX0GBSNA?docId=CNG.3ccfa3fdf33a23e06fbc68862a74e4a7.751)</comment>


TAWS - The (browser-based) Amiga Workbench Simulator - <AUTHOR> http://home.datacomm.ch/mrupp/TAWS/WB.html

<comment><USER2> Is this just another cheeky Javascript "amiga simulator" gag site in Javascript? Or is there any real functionality here?</comment>


The Importance of the Side Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.ekinoderm.com/wordpress/2008/09/the-importance-of-the-side-project/ <comment><USER2> _your company/university might own your project. You need to carefully examine any contracts/papers you signed when you took your job and look for any restrictions on intellectual property ownership_

A solution for this is to start a project under a pseudonym and never reveal your identity. Some projects, like I2P or mlDonkey, have pseudonymous contributors.

<comment><USER3> Add Tor for maximum effect.</comment></comment>


The forehead-slappingly stupid attempt to cancel Steven Pinker - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/the-forehead-slappingly-stupid-attempt-to-cancel-steven-pinker/ <comment><USER2> What Pinker apparently has said, and is a popular opinion these days that I see all over the place, which some people see as extremely racist and others don't, is that police killings being proportional to arrests is evidence against bias in using deadly violence, _given_ there is an interaction in the first place.

It seems like a complete non sequitur to me, is the problem. Even with strict framing where you don't look at/think about bias in the arrests. One can imagine a world where anywhere from 0% to 100% of killings were justified, but regardless having the exact _same_ number of deaths. The casualty number logically tells you _nothing_ about whether any of the actions were appropriate or necessary.

So rightly or wrongly, it makes sense to me if a lot of people think nobody could be this obtuse and assume bad faith. Especially when, you know, it's someone widely believed to be smart.

<comment><USER3> It seems like you've misunderstood the conversation about these killings. The mainstream of the discourse about police killings of black men is rooted in the notion that they're being killed because policing is a malevolent, explicitly racist institution whose racism manifests in a proclivity to kill black men at higher rates than white men. This is what a very large fraction of my affluent, nominally-educated social circle believes, and it's dominated the conversation about these protests. This isn't a new line; the original round of BLM protests were even more statistically illiterate on the point than the current ones.

I've always found it ludicrous for people to tar a statement as offensive on grounds of being a non sequitur and thus in bad faith. This relies on being confident that both you and the accused have an aligned and 100% accurate sense of the discourse, and that there's no way that any reasonable number of Pinker's more than half million followers could hold the belief he's addressing.

(Not that it matters, but since this is a pretty high-emotion subject, I'll just lay my cards on the table: As far as I can tell, the notion that police kill unarmed men _at all_ is abhorrent. I am and long have been a strident supporter of greater limits on the police (and carceral system), but fantasizing that police killings are racialized is just going to lead you to the same blind alley of pseudoscience and IATs that BLM is in. That doesn't mean that I think the racial skew is a non-problem: the higher arrest rate is largely mediated through a higher crime rate in the black community, a problem whose roots lie in a much larger racial justice problem that is similarly disserved by misinterpreting reality).

<comment><USER2> No, I haven't misunderstood the conversation; I'm not interested in it at all, just in one specific point about what Pinker specifically wrote.

I guess that's not what you want to talk about, but I wish you wouldn't reply to me if you don't want to engage.

<comment><USER3> It appears you've also misunderstood my comment (or I've misunderstood yours). Your claim is that Pinker's comment was a non sequitur, as arrest-proportional killings don't convey information about whether the killing were necessary.

But in the context of a conversation that assumes that the population-relative skew of killings is driven by racism, it's not a non sequitur at all: it provides evidence against the ubiquitous, confident claim that the population skew is due to explicit racism by the police. It's still possible that a black men being arrested has a higher chance of being killed _relative to the necessity of doing so_, but nobody has even tried to make that case statistically.

If I've misunderstood your point, perhaps you could clarify, instead of giving a petulant, low-effort response.

<comment><USER2> It seems you are suggesting it's possible for _killings to be driven by racism_ , but for the _skew_ of killings _not_ to be driven by racism.

It's a very fine distinction, which I am not interested in validating or invalidating, but I'm thinking it's not relevant to why Pinker's tweet was ill-received when he wrote: "Data: Police don't shoot blacks disproportionately." and "Problem: Not race...". He just wasn't that finely tuned.

<comment><USER3> > It seems you are suggesting it's possible for killings to be driven by > racism, but for the skew of killings not to be driven by racism.

Well more precisely, I'm happy to accept that population-disproportionate killings of black men are due to racism, but understanding the facts is important to understanding how that racism manifests. Ie, if it matches the arrest rate and/or the violent crime rate, we're facing a much broader racial justice problem than simply throwing an IAT at every cop in the country. I don't understand why Pinker's tweet wouldn't be interpreted in that light.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I commented about the coming cancellation of Steven Pinker 6 days ago, as it has been developing for a little bit on social media and follows several other campaigns to censor and oppress other professors: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23788095](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23788095).

The charge of "scientific racism" leveled against Pinker is simply rhetorical warfare, waged using an emotionally charged term like "racism". The pursuit of objective, quantitative, rational, scientific analysis is now under attack using this label. It is the mob burying their head in the sand, unwilling to yield when reality disagrees with their ideological stance. It is anti- science. But these days, even being objective and scientific is seen as offensive to the progressive mentality. And I mean this literally, as seen in the recent Smithsonian chart that they took down ([https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines- rationa...](https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational- thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333)).

Cancel culture isn't a recent trend - there are entire websites dedicated to cancel culture on college campuses, such as [https://www.thecollegefix.com/](https://www.thecollegefix.com/). Free thought, free inquiry, and open debate are under attack from those that want only their worldview to prevail. It is a direct threat to a free society and much has been written about it recently from Quillette ([https://quillette.com/2020/07/01/on-steve-hsu-and-the- campai...](https://quillette.com/2020/07/01/on-steve-hsu-and-the-campaign-to- thwart-free-inquiry/)) and Harper's ([https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice- and-open-debate/](https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/)) and others.

I'm not sure how to fight back except to create direct consequences for those pursuing cancellation. Perhaps we need to shame and demand the firing of everyone who signs such letters, demanding censorship and cancellation of others.

<comment><USER5> The "Open Letter to the LSA" by what what you describe as "crazed and radicalized students at Harvard" asks:

> to remove Dr. Pinker from the LSA fellows list and the list of media experts > falls within the purview of the LSA because of the goals that the LSA has > set for itself ...

> We want to note here that we have no desire to judge Dr. Pinker's actions in > moral terms, or claim to know what his aims are. Nor do we seek to "cancel" > Dr. Pinker, or to bar him from participating in the linguistics and LSA > communities (though many of our signatories may well believe that doing so > would be the right course of action).

If that's "cancel culture" \- how do I tell the difference between "cancel culture" and any other sort of advocacy which results in removing someone from a couple of lists?

Because I've been trying hard to understand what "cancel culture" means, and the descriptions of it don't seem to make any sense.

<comment><USER4> There is some debate as to whether cancel culture is real and what its exact definition is. This article from RealClearPolitics discusses it and includes links to some opposing views as well: [https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/07/15/cancel...](https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/07/15/cancel_culture_is_real.html)

To me, cancel culture is the notion of introducing political/ideological/personal stances into various spheres where it doesn't belong (is not directly relevant) and using it to suppress certain views, punish those who harbor those views, exclude certain lines of research/debate from being pursued, and instill fear (of reprisal) in those who might otherwise explore those areas. It is not focused on correctness of views or resolution of conflicting conclusions, but rather blind censorship, suppression, and use of fear.

In this case, the LSA recently introduced a "racial justice" policy and now the signatories of this letter are claiming that inclusion of Pinker is not aligned to this new policy. What does racial justice have to do with the LSA's core field that isn't already included as part of the pursuit of truth? Very little. It is the injection of a political and ideological view into a scientific sphere. Adoption of such a policy enables the weaponization of the organization's structure/laws against Pinker.

The specific incidents (statements made by Pinker) that are called out in the letter are issues that can be debated without such a policy in place. The correctness of some claim (like "there is no racial bias in police shooting") is worthy of scrutiny independent of this campaign to cancel Pinker. After all, isn't that the point of research - to develop ideas, gather facts, form arguments, and compare against other findings? Why isn't that sufficient - shouldn't the truth set us free? Researchers and professors are both allowed to be wrong and allowed to form opinions that disagree with the prevailing sentiment. Without that there is no environment for honest learning and expansion of societal knowledge. But cancel culture precludes such exploration by taking ideological opinions as fundamental factual presumptions. And there is no room for error in these situations - someone like Pinker can have a lifetime of achievement and correctness and then be judged on a couple tweets by a random selection of engineers, grad students, and assistant professors.

As for Pinker's specific claims - it is fairly trivial to validate them, or at least agree that there is substantial grounds to hold those opinion. The letter itself makes no serious argument against those statements that they find so problematic. I don't want to derail this post by analyzing each claim, but my point is that it is about ideology not facts.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for your answer.

In my wrestling with the topic, I've tried to understand why certain things are called "cancel culture" while others are not.

For example, is the opposition to Colin Kaepernick part of cancel culture?

To go to your definition, we have to ask if standing up for the national anthem in order to play a football game is a sphere where it doesn't belong - which is clearly true. People play football games all the time without an anthem. So the anthem is there for some other purpose.

We can see that the ritual around the activity - standing up for the anthem - suppresses the views of those who think the flag is not worth that respect. And we have court cases which show that in other circumstances, not standing for the flag is protected free speech and protected religious speech.

And we see how adherence to the ritual is used to punish those who harbor those with other views, where the "mob" reaction in this case includes Trump's call to fire those who refuse to stand.

Yet, while Kaepernick's case seems to fit your definition, that isn't what people seem to mean by "cancel culture."

(I could go on with other cases, but my comment is already too long.)

You write that they say that Pinker's views are "not aligned to this new policy". But all they are calling for is to have his name removed from a couple of lists where the LSA privileges some LSA members over others. They are not calling for him to be removed from the LSA, but only not given special ranking. Pinker himself says he's not worried this will cancel him.

So what does "cancel" even mean here? Is _any_ loss of even minor status equivalent to "cancel"? Because it reads like the people involved are snowflakes who can't stand the least bit of possible negative consequences to their speech, and I can't figure out why anyone outside the LSA would care.

You write: "What does racial justice have to do with the LSA's core field that isn't already included as part of the pursuit of truth? Very little."

Now, I know squat about the LSA but your argument comes across as a 19th century view of science. Science ethics classes often use the Tuskegee syphilis experiment as an example where the 'pursuit of truth' lead to racial injustice. If truth sets us free, how were the African-American men involved any more free as a result of the study? And Guatemala considers its sibling experiments there to be a crime against humanity. So no, I don't think simple "pursuit of truth" is the right framework to think about this topic.

Again, I know squat all about the LSA. But going right to "must defend the unhindered investigation of truth" \- which has been proven time and again to be wrong for other fields of science - just doesn't seem like a good defense.

You write "Researchers and professors are both allowed to be wrong and allowed to form opinions that disagree with the prevailing sentiment." I looked at William A. Jacobson essay you linked to. Jacobson writes that he faces "no adverse employment action because of my academic freedom and job security".

Since he's free to 'form opinions that disagree with the prevailing sentiment' \- how is he "cancelled"?

And I see that elsewhere - Stephen Hsu resigned from his administrative position at MSU but retains his tenured faculty position. Yet that's still called part of "cancel culture" even though he can use his job to form opinions that disagree with the prevailing sentiment.

It seems like tenured positions are a strong weapon against being cancelled, so why aren't the people who complain about cancel culture also pushing for more tenured positions, and stopping the exploitative adjunct teaching position where people with opposing viewpoints aren't "canceled" so much as "don't have their contract renewed for the next term"?

But it feels like many of those who complain about cancel culture also want to remove tenure in teaching positions and increase uncertainty in the ability to express ideas - which comes across like "cancel culture" is (re-using your phrase) "simply rhetorical warfare".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


React Toolbox – bootstrap your app with beautiful Material Design components - <AUTHOR> http://react-toolbox.com/#/ <comment><USER2> Really cool!!! I think this is also useful on helping people construct components.

Thanks!</comment>


Ask HN: Do you think VR could replace the web at some point? And if yes then how? - <AUTHOR>

Just crazy thoughts inspired by Oculus Rift. Do you think it will be possible to create a game-like framework like MMORPG or Second Life, something like a virtual city where anybody could create his own building(instead of a website), that would replace/complement the web in the future? Looks like we already have the technology, what's to stop people from creating a virtual reality? Would there be practical applications for it that would make it worth the effort? What do you think? <comment><USER2> It likely would work. Facebook heavily hinted at strong social integration with the OR. I likely see Facebook doing this or at least they gave me that impression in their stock holders call.

It makes a lot of sense. I certainly would use it. The big "draw" for me. Would be watching movies with my friends, in a full theater settings, despite continents of separation.

</comment><comment><USER3> Stuff hanging on head is doomed to fail so success of the current incarnation of VR will be very limited. Just like the latest 3D implosion, no one wants to wear the damn glasses.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hey, I'm working on a project that will make that possible. Are you any good with C++?</comment>


Ask HN: What is the most advanced text-to-speech tool/api available? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> SABLE is pretty advanced. It is a "XML-based [language that] allows users to add addition controlling commands in text to affect the output."

[https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/festival_demos/sable.html](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/festival_demos/sable.html)

It's part of the Festival TTS system.

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazon's Polly?

[https://aws.amazon.com/polly/](https://aws.amazon.com/polly/)</comment>


How the Internet Gave Mail-Order Brides the Power - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/how-the-internet-gave-mail-order-brides-the-power-1af8c8a40562 <comment><USER2> I feel as though they always had 'the power'. They are exchanging a good they are born with (attractiveness), for a good that their older partner has typically worked their entire life for (money).

If anything, I'd say the historical power play is the man being taken advantage of for his simpleminded sexuality, not the other way around.

<comment><USER3> > If anything, I'd say the historical power play is the man being taken > advantage of for his simpleminded sexuality, not the other way around.

This male trait reinforces itself automatically.

If a man is not sufficiently obsessed with simple-minded sexuality, then he will not do what it takes to transmit this traits to the next generation. Hence, not being obsessed with simple-minded sexuality is an evolutionary dead end that gradually dies out ...

We are the way we are, simply because if we were not like that, we would not even be here.

<comment><USER2> I agree with the sentiment, but there's an important caveat.

Simpleminded sexually exclusively is not generally a good thing.

1\. you waste time and energy breeding with unfit people

2\. you do not accelerate evolution.

Clearly these are not good things. It's important 1 gender is more advanced- minded when it comes to sex to avoid this. But only 1. If both sexes were advanced-minded, then people would likely stop reproducing as much, and this trait would die out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's often a strange disconnect in these kind of discussions between 'bargaining power' in an abstract economic sense and more real-world understandings of power - for example, it's somewhat of an economics truism that polygyny (multiple wives) improves female bargaining power, but it doesn't necessarily map that well to real-world improvements in female welfare due to all the other societal stuff. Migrating to the US similarly may make that wonderful 'bargaining power' a thing of the past...

For this particular on-line dating case, the old Carnegie Tech saying comes to mind: "The odds are good, but the goods are odd". These mail-order brides may be getting to pick and choose among a wider pool, but it's a pool of guys who are still resorting to this model of meeting a wife...

</comment><comment><USER5> The most interesting thing about this article for me was the caption of the photo of Leonor and her son:

> _Leonor and her son Zen. Photo by Meredith Talusan._

My name is also Zen, and I've never met or heard of anyone else with this name :) That's cool.

<comment><USER6> I've met a Zen in Australia. Might've been you if you ever lived in Adelaide and studied acting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Summary: the internet gave mail-order filipina brides power because internet access is such a high bar that there are relatively few filipina women available to be found _on the internet_. The article specifically notes that local, internetless women often poach men who have arrived to visit the girl they met on the internet.

<comment><USER8> That doesn't sound right.

<comment><USER9> Probably most Filipinas have some degree of internet access now (i.e. free Facebook), but attracting a mate online is a special skill.

<comment><USER8> Maybe, but that's not a summary of the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wait. What happened to Jonathan and Leonor? Did thy get married?

(Just as I was getting into the story...poof...ended :-( )

<comment><USER11> The journalist presumably didn't have time to hang around for the next 5 years to see how it will work out.

<comment><USER10> Well, married may be a bit far out...

What about just a week later so we know if they were even getting along in person? And how their expectations and understanding upon meeting each other changed?

<comment><USER8> There's a documentary, Seeking Asian Female, that charts a relationship like this over a longer period of time (although the bride is Chinese). You might be interested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> To the extent that women happily exploit the fact that men are obviously obsessed with "getting a piece of her", women will always have quite a bit of power over the fantasy of men. But then again, to the extent that men make sure to have the dollars, if becomes the power of fantasy against the power of money ...

</comment><comment><USER12> So don't waste your time online. Just vacation in the Philippines and pick out a bride then. If that's what you want.

<comment><USER7> Heavily downvoted, but this does seem to be the message of the article?

<comment><USER12> Maybe the dating sites have hacker news bots? I wrote this response as a joke, but thinking about it...</comment></comment></comment>


Python stdlib Docs Quick Search for Firefox - <AUTHOR> http://code.naeseth.com/python/libjump/

<comment><USER2> This is great, but unfortunately assumes you know the exact name of what you're looking for. My suggestion: if the query doesn't return a result using the current algorithm, redirect to a Google query of "%s site:docs.python.org".

As an example, let's look at izip. If I search for itertools.izip using this, it works as suggested - but if I just search for izip, I get "Sorry, nothing was found matching izip." Based on the description of the service, this is correct (but not that helpful - maybe I just didn't feel like typing out itertools). If it fell back to a site-specific Google search, I would instead get a page of search results - and the first result would be the manpage for itertools, which has exactly what I'm looking for within it.</comment>


No, Auto-GCAS could not have prevented the Germanwings crash - java-man http://theaviationist.com/2015/04/06/a-gcas-could-not-prevent-germanwings-crash/

<comment> java-man Quote:

"The A-GCAS as it is now, must be activated by the pilot: once activated it can't be overridden (the computer will recover the plane taking over command of the plane), but a pilot who wants to commit suicide has the option to disarm it."</comment>


Show HN: Hiburo open beta is ready - <AUTHOR> https://hiburo.com/blog/2013/10/9/open-beta-is-ready/

<comment><USER2> Some screenshots would be nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are all about showing the real thing — working on one-click demo feature right now.

<comment><USER3> It seems a little strange to me to promote a launch even at a minor scale with no screenshots or video at all showing exactly what the product is.

The blog consists of one entry. On the front page, the first "feature" is putting your team "in perspective" as they are "checking in and out" \- of where? For what purpose?

Share, discuss, plan - in what format? Chat, stacked posts, threaded view a la yammer or the like? This is very vague!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry that it throws you away, but currently we are looking for users who are ready to fill five inputs and click that green button.

We decided against screenshots because shortly will be adding a quick link to demo. It is a minor promotion to get as much criticism as we can get before going beyond open beta.

<comment><USER4> But you won't get criticism without showing people the app. Heck, I won't sign up for services that only have little explainer videos instead of screenshots and text, there's no way I'm filling out a form to figure out whether or not I care about this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Love the graphics on your home page!

And it's time to set DEBUG = False in your Django settings file :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

And debug mode is off now :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How are you different/better than Trello?

<comment><AUTHOR> Trello is a very specific tool. Hiburo is not a task manager alone, we focus on teams, broader workflow, setting the right atmosphere for communication in general. We have pure fun elements like achievements too.

Check out this landing section[1], you can find most of our main features there.

[1] [https://hiburo.com/#features](https://hiburo.com/#features)

<comment><USER7> You mean like brightpod.com :)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Cracking passwords with a simple genetic algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lyle-nel/siga <comment><USER2> I don't understand, what is the input and output of this at a conceptual level?

One of the examples apparently takes a list of leaked passwords from MySpace - and so what does it "crack" then? I think the phrase "high impact substrings" down in the explanation is the key, but it's not wholly clear to me what the ultimate purpose of this is.

The 'GA without a fitness score' idea seems interesting, but it would help to know what exactly the algorithm is trying to do.

<comment><USER3> adding possible combinations of characters, ngrams, from the 'organisms' file and checking them against a leaked password list, apparently tested on the 'rock_you' list of leaked myspace passwords, which is ommitted from the repo but the repo has a standin empty file where you put your own list of leaked passwords

it will genetically run through all ngrams and check if it is in the pass list to determine how to advance the evolution of the algorithm

does this crack passwords genetically? well, yes and sorta

it's a proof of concept against an existing list of real leaked passwords, proving that it could efficiently crack a number of these real passwords real people were using to protect real personal data

but from there you have to extrapolate the effectiveness on all possible passwords..

if you train against the myspace list then the passwords would have to resemble myspace passwords

can you train the algo on the myspace list then try to crack nuclear codes? very unlikely, unless government officials are protecting their access with passes like 'WARMACHINEROX'

<comment><USER4> > unless government officials are protecting their access with passes like > 'WARMACHINEROX'

I chuckled, imagining how some government official changes his password right now.

<comment><USER5> I chuckled, after misreading that as "warm ache in eRox", and wondering what 'eRox' were...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's not accurate to say there's no fitness function. There is a fitness function, but it is not a continuous function. (There's no way to have a GA without some notion of fitness.)

<comment><AUTHOR> There is no explicit function that decides which organisms are more fit than others. But you are right that there is selection pressure since all organisms have the same lifetime(they are eventually popped from front as newer ones are pushed to back). This means that if they did not produce viable offspring, the genetic information does not stay in the simulation.

<comment><USER7> Like I say above (my comment was tongue-in-cheek but) I really like the idea of a FIFO queue rather than an explicit fitness function. I'm thinking of writing a little a-life/learner thingy just for fun at some point and I'll definitely nick your idea. Is it a common approach in genetic algorithms? Is there some research on it?

Also, for some reason I thought you actually used a LIFO stack. So, what if you did? My guess is organisms that put more offspring on the top of the queue would take longer to be popped from it, so that they'd have a better chance to produce more offspring. They would also benefit from organisms almost as successful as themselves (but not more).

Is this also a known approach, and if so, how well does it work?

<comment><AUTHOR> The queue structure is one of my own ideas. It is possible that it has been done before, but I did not check. There does not seem to be a lot of research on this topic. That being said, it is a nice toy problem to explore genetic algorithms and diversity.

Regarding the stack approach, I would suspect that new genetic information would immediately be lost since a new organism dies before having much chance to produce offspring. In the off chance it manages to produce offspring, those offspring would also be lost almost immediately since they get popped first.

If you are really curious, you can change line 163 in vivarium.cpp from a pop_front() to a pop_back() to see what happens.

<comment><USER7> Thanks - my assumption was that the speedup in dying would increase the reproductive pressure and make the whole process a lot more competitive. But GAs are not my specialty (far from).

I am indeed very curious, but also very, very short on time! Before I can justify picking up someone else's code I have a couple of pieces of coursework and a dissertation to work on - but I might get some time round abouts next weekend, I'll let you know how I get on :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand, I tested it for you and my suspicions where right. The simulation simply stalls early on. Nothing interesting happens after that.

<comment><USER7> Oh well - so much for that then!

I'll still try to give your code a whirl next weekend. I know how useful it is to get some feedback for your projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting approach.

Especially if you were to feed the training set with most-used password lists from leaked databases or similar.

Do you have any performance metrics against bruteforce for example?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes the training set should be representative of the candidates you want to crack, also the larger the training set is, the better it seems to perform. It is also important to note that, as passwords are being cracked they become part of the training set. So the program can start of completely blind then it will figure out common structures as the simulation progresses.

I have not put them head to head, but the program seems to find passwords that are far outside the tractable search-space for a bruteforce attack. Passwords like the following are found withing a few hours:

34 a111111111111111111111111111111111

20 12345678900987654321

19 9876543211234567089

19 password12345678910

18 sexytinkerbell2013

18 prettyprincess4812

18 mickeymouseforever

18 littlepinkprincess

18 iloveyoumomforever

<comment><USER9> So XKCD style correcthorsebatterystaple-esque passwords would fall in no time?

<comment><AUTHOR> Almost yea. In a few hours it manages to find these horse related passwords.

15 strawberryhorse

15 ilovehorses1995

15 ilovehorses1994

15 ilovehorses1234

15 horselover4ever

<comment><USER10> Cool system. For clarity though, those aren't xkcd style passwords. They're words that form a normal pattern. Xkcd requires that the words are randomly generated.

<comment><USER11> Sorry for going slightly OT but I think more people should know this:

xkcd style passwords are actually called diceware passwords [1], the wikipedia article [2] links to arstechnica that reported in 2014 [3] that the original author upped his recommended diceware password length to at least 6 (random) words.

You can obviously always use a bigger dictionary too (as long as you choose truly random).

[1] [http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html](http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html) funny enough, chromium doesn't like the ssl versions the site uses "ERR_SSL_FALLBACK_BEYOND_MINIMUM_VERSION"

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diceware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diceware)

[3] [http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2014/03/dicewa...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2014/03/diceware-passwords-now-need-six-random-words-to-thwart- hackers/)

<comment><USER3> this is easier to understand with a bit of math..

let's say you have a pad lock with a 4 number combination, each of those numbers being a ring of 6 numbers themselves(o)

we have four 'slots' with six possible numbers for each slot

that means there are a total of 1296 combinations, (possible values)^(slots), 6^4=1296

a contemporary computer can do 1300 calculations perceptually instantaneously

now we look at randall and diceware's suggestion of using a series of words to bulk out your password, since a word in english is built of a possible combination of 26 character alphabet the possible values becomes 26

for a four letter word, all possible combinations of those 26 characters becomes 26^4=456,976 possible combinations, again, all values can be computed in nanoseconds

what i think randall and diceware is hoping to achieve is a higher permutation value with little tax on the user's memory

conceptually [c,o,r,r,e,c,t,h,o,r,s,e,b,a,t,t,e,r,y,s,t,a,p,l,e] is 25 characters long with each 'slot' having 26 possible combinations.. 26^25~23x10^34, that is a huge number of possible permutations which makes brute forcing finally impractical

but here is where the whole thing starts to break down a bit..

because the suggestion is to use real words to aide in remembering which negates character length in lieu of number of words

that also means that figure above is significantly less because the first in that list of 456,976 permutations is ['a','a','a','a'] which would be invalid in regard to existing words, so in reality that 450,000 figure is significantly less

'correcthorsebatterystaple' can be broken into 25 characters 'slots' or 4 word 'slots': [correct,horse,battery,staple]

what was 26^25, is now (possible words)^4

we can keep going, look at randall's most recent book(i), using the 1000 most used words

possible words becomes 1000 and 4 slots we are looking at 1000^4=1,000,000,000,000 possible permutations

which will take a contemporary laptop a few hours, respectively, to churn out

all this broken into a chart:

         81 = 3**4 : [(3),(3),(3),(3)]
         253 = 3**5 : [(3),(3),(3),(3),(3)]
         256 = 4**4 : [(4),(4),(4),(4)]
         456976 = 26**4 : [(26),(26),(26),(26)]
         1000000000000 = 1000**4 [(1000),(1000),(1000),(1000)]
        ~230000000000000000000000000000000000+ = 26**25 : [(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26),(26)]
        ~640000000000000000000000000000000000000000000+ = (26*2+10)**25 : [(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62),(62)]

what this is showing you, is that anything that makes things easier for you also will make things easier for a cracker

for best security increase the number of characters when possible avoiding words.. using a combination of lowercase(26 characters) and upper case(26 characters) and numbers(0-9, 10) for 26+26+10=62 possible values.. and put those characters in as many slots as you can muster

(o) [http://www.padlocks4less.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/i...](http://www.padlocks4less.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/c/o/combination_padlocks_2.jpg)

(i) [https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/](https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/)

<comment><USER12> diceware is a list of 7776 words. You pick 6 words. (That's 7776^6). If the attacker knows you're using Diceware, knows what word list you're using, and knows how many words you're using (ie worst case) you get 12.9 bits of entropy per word. If the attacker doesn't know how many words you're using, or they don't don't what wordlist you're using you get more than 12.9 bits of entropy per word.

You've made a mistake here:

> 'correcthorsebatterystaple' can be broken into 25 characters 'slots' or 4 > word 'slots': [correct,horse,battery,staple]

> what was 26^25, is now (possible words)^4

1) No-one suggests using 4 words. Randall uses 4 words because it fit in the cartoon. Diceware suggests using 6 words for minimum.

2) No-one at all suggests using just the 1,000 "most common words". Diceware is a list of 7776 words. Except there's more than one diceware list.

<comment><USER3> i should think you could grok from my comment that i'm on board for your two points

why explain away the comic as just being an example but then confront the comment as being unaware?

why did i use 4 word 'slots' instead of diceware's suggested 6 minimum? because the comic did and that was referenced in the gp

why did i use 1000 words instead of diceware's 7776? because the number of words is arbitrary for an explanation, and, as i stated, i was playfully referencing, and intentionally promoting, more of randall's work

your comment fails to negate anything in my explanation, which was meant as a means of explaining how to think about these things

what the effectiveness of the ga cracking repo shows is that people are using even less possible words than dice's 7776 or randall's 1000

and the concluding statements that more variety with less patterns equates to better security stands

> The complete list contains 7776 short words, abbreviations and easy-to- > remember character strings. The average length of each word is about 4.2 > characters(o)

i'll be kind and round that 4.2 up to 5

> Diceware suggests using 6 words for minimum

so we are looking at 6 words of 5 characters.. 30 total characters

let's compare diceware to individual characters:

        ~220000000000000000000000+ = 7776**6 : diceware with 6 word minimum
        ~800000000000000000000000000000000000000000+ = 7776**10 : diceware with 10 words
        ~2800000000000000000000000000000000000000000000+ = 26**30 : english alphabet, 30 characters

>what this is showing you, is that anything that makes things easier for you also will make things easier for a cracker

(o) [http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html](http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html)

<comment><USER12> Why are you comparing a 30 character word with a 6 word passphrase?

You need to look at bits of entropy.

A 6 word passphrase is about the same as a 12 character password if you use any printable ASCII character.

<comment><USER3> because entropy is directly related to the number of possible values and number of values in the password, which is what i am comparing

i then went on to establish those values as being only those in the english alphabet, 26 characters, stead your referenced ascii set or even the diceware character set which allows some special characters

then i took the minimum suggested diceware length of 6 words, rounded the average word length of 4.2 up to 5, which gives us 6*5=30 characters

so one diceware password example:

        affixafireafootagainagateagave

        can be seen as diceware would have it, 6 words of length 5:
          [affix, afire, afoot, again, agate, agave]
        or 30 individual characters:
          [a,f,f,i,x,a,f,i,r,e,a,f,o,o,t,a,g,a,i,n,a,g,a,t,e,a,g,a,v,e]

so utilising any underlying pattern, here only using the diceware wordset, weakens a passphrase of equal length

or if you want to abstract away from the actual values that you use to determine a passphrase's strength you could say: diceware lowers the entropy of an individually random value passphrase of equal length

but that phrase unecesarily contains verbage that can confuse whereas my previous comment showed all of the number possible permutations in such a way as to easily see that one is greater than the other making the guess space larger

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's not clear to me what this does, or if it's useful. You have a fixed- length vector of strings and you make cross-overs between elements in the vector based on non-uniform random distributions. That is to give more chances to younger offspring to procreate. Then you apparently remove the oldest (i.e. first) strings in the vector, and replace them by appending offspring. But then you also mention you are not deleting older organisms. I'm a bit confused.

I think it's wrong to say you don't have a fitness function. Your fitness function is "Is this string a password?" and the score is binary. Why do you say there is no fitness function?

Also, in your examples, is "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" really a password?

<comment><AUTHOR> The part about not deleting organisms, is a small caveat that I omitted in most of the discussion since it makes the algorithm just a bit harder to understand. To clarify that point, since you asked, the organisms can be popped from the front of the container if we provide a maximum population size. If we do not provide a maximum population size, we do not delete the organisms. Older organisms do however lie dormant due to the non-uniform distribution, thereby providing the same advantage as selection while preserving a greater degree of genetic diversity. If there is anything else that is not clear to you then I am open to any questions you might have. I will help where I can to clarify things.

With regard to the fitness function, I think I agree with you that checking if the offspring matches a password will fall in the category of a fitness function albeit a binary one. I will update my description to include that, thanks.

With regard to if it is useful, I will let it stand or fall on its own merits. If people are going to use it to find bad passwords, then I would say yes it is. It might be pertinent to mention that I am interested in genetic algorithms in general and this is a good practical way of exploring my own theoretical ideas.

Yes, "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" really is a password. Have a look at the rock_you list of passwords and sort them by length. There are some extremely long but silly passwords in there.

<comment><USER13> Wow, I am surprised about the "aaa..." password. Thanks for clearing that up.

When I asked how useful this was, I assumed the organisms were removed from the front of the list. If you keep everything, then yes I can see how this can be used to crack passwords. It's not clear to me how it would be useful otherwise, as which organisms stay in the list is not homogeneously random, and so one organism might be quite unlucky (even though its offspring could have been very successful).

So basically this can be viewed as an accelerated brute-force of long/complex passwords?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would not put it in the category of brute-force since it really does have all the properties of a genetic algorithm. But yes it does succeed to a greater extent at cracking passwords that are intractable(long/complex) with a brute-force approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How fast can it go? And alternatively, how fast can it go with hashcat?

This looks awesome, but without the GPU speed advantage I'm not sure how well it'll fare against the almost 80GH/s I can do on my desktop with cudahashcat.

<comment><AUTHOR> When using hashcat, it will run as fast as hashcat's dictionary mode. Since we are being cute with named pipes, hashcat thinks its reading a dictionary. There is a caching problem with hashcat though, that is why I set the segment size to 1, so that it can update siga's gene pool as often as possible. I am optimistic that there might be a solution to that so that we can leverage hashcat to its full potential.

It might be interesting to note that the older versions of hashcat seems to have supported reading candidate passwords straight from stdin. I have not played with that yet, but I suspect it might work a bit better.

<comment><USER15> one thing to note is that the gpu hashcat uses a very complex cacheing, which basically boils down to a buffer per password length, i.e. a buffer for 12 character passwords, a buffer for 13 character passwords, and shoves passwords in accordingly. Once a password buffer hits a certain threshold, they all get sent to be cracked. This means you may not get feedback for a certain length try for a while, if it's not a common length. One thing to consider would be to figure out that threshold and keep things internally until you hit it, so you can fill a buffer in one shot. Realistically, you aren't going to get around this very easily, as this buffering is done for performance reasons, in that some of the kernels used rely on same length passwords for performance increases.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I did not know that. It is something to think about.

<comment><USER15> Another thing to keep in mind is that hashcat can generally test guesses _faster_ then you can feed them over the various connections, i.e. memory -> memory copy for pipe memory -> pcie -> card for loading to the GPU. Also, in cracking rigs, you often have multiple cards over pcie x1 connections, further lowering bandwidth for those cards. One thing I'd highly recommend is trying it with a rules. This allows the GPU to expand your word guesses out on the GPU itself, turning a single guess into thousands of guesses or more. This bypasses memory bandwidth issues, as it's done on the GPU itself, and also means that a lot of rather trivial checks can happen automatically (try it with a 1 at the end, try it with a 2 at the end, and so forth).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It uses a stack [1]. Therefore, I like it <3

[1] The stack is used in place of an _explicit_ fitness function. I have nothing against fitness functions. But the bit about using a short stack instead, is really cool.

Edit: Woa. Hang on. New organisms are pushed to the _back_ of the structure while dying ones are popped off the front- so that's a queue. My bad. But I still like it.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's correct. It is a queue

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I loved this, since it's a different approach to genetic programming (with the FIFO list) that could work in different kinds of problems. Also the way it is applied to password cracking itself, is an extremely interesting way to exploit the non-random properties of real world passwords.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really appreciate your enthusiasm. It is one of the core concepts and passwords seemed to be a good way to explore my FIFO idea in a practical manner. It might well have been done before, but from preliminary searches I could not find anything on it(not that I searched really hard). Due to its simplicity, I suspect it will lend itself to some pretty efficient implementations.

I would be interested to hear what other kinds of problems you see it being used for.

<comment><USER16> Not sure exactly what would be another application, but it's a mental model that looks "general", when we have a few prerequisites, that is, not just a solution, but multiple solutions to a given problem (find a password among many hashes in this case), and where solutions could be related in some way so that using the past solutions could restrict the search space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is really cool. I'm surprised just finding common substrings through evolution works so well. Wouldn't just using the existing substrings in a dictionary work better than mutating new and random ones?

And is it really moral to do this? The only applications of this are pretty unethical.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have found that top say 2000 ngrams from a large password list is a good starting population. That being said, it learns the structure of passwords surprisingly fast if you start of with purely random organisms.

As for the moral argument, even though this has probably been discussed at many different venues on many different occasions, I lean toward the sentiment that having good tools to gauge how good your password policies are is essential. Not to say that this is a good tool, but it is _a_ tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Would you care to explain like I am 5? Layman's terms... What are you doing and how are you doing it?

<comment><AUTHOR> The topic assumes some knowledge of genetic algorithms as well as password hashing.

You can look at the section "How it work" on my github page for some diagrams and a decently lengthy description.

In simple words: Each organism is a password(a string). Passwords can mix(have sex) with each other in novel ways to produce offspring. If the offspring(a mix of the parents) also matches a password, it is added to the list of organisms. Older organisms eventually die, so it is up to the offspring to keep producing offspring in order to preserve the genetic line. The result of this simulation is that high impact substrings like "love", "luv", "mother" and "fuck" stay for a very long time in the genepool since any organism that consists of at least one of them will have a better chance to produce a child that is a password(viable offspring).

If you still don't understand, feel free to ask more questions.

<comment><USER19> Even simpler, it:

1\. Finds the substrings that are popular in passwords. 2\. Combines them to make likely passwords that haven't been tried yet. 3\. Rinse and repeat

Useful against noob passwords - of which are there many in the wild - and more effective for some applications than the usual dictionary search.

But ineffective against randomised strings like KPF27k5ANv791P2Yi88xd88D7iALX3kH, or against XKCD random word salad passwords like QuantumGerundApoptosis as long as they include at least one unusual word.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it is completely useless against random strings as one would expect, but with word salad it not completely useless. For example, it can find words like "tequieromuchogerald" and "paulaalejandrailove" easily enough. I haven't fully explored its ability to do this, but I suspect starting with a dictionary of words instead of a random population might aid it in finding XKCD like random passwords. In general I don't disagree though, passphrases if chosen correctly can be completely intractable to a password cracker.

<comment><USER8> It might be interesting to use the word frequency of the target language as some sort of weight for each word, or maybe as a multiplier for the number of times that word will get pushed to the back of the queue, i.e. the words with the most frequency get to be repeated more than 1 time when pushed to the back, or something like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see what you are saying. To some extent this is already true ,since high frequency ngrams(substrings) already dominate the gene-pool if they happen to facilitate the production of a large amount viable offspring. That is why you would see swearwords with high frequency since that is what many people use for passwords(in the case of the myspace list).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> ~OT: I predict John Koza's Genetic _Programming_ [1] approach will enjoy a revival in the near future. We've discussed the impact of the recent crop of "AI" systems on various work fields, but my bet is on IT programming being one of the earlier successes of having machines doing grunt work.

[1]: [http://www.genetic- programming.com/#_John_Koza%E2%80%99s_Pub...](http://www.genetic- programming.com/#_John_Koza%E2%80%99s_Publications)

<comment><USER21> Sounds interesting. Can you expand on why?

<comment><USER20> There are interesting developments in formally defined and verified programs (including implementations). For certain domains that are non-intuitive, exploring the solution-space is now much nearer in reach.

For example (as I noted in private communication to John Koza) exploring the protocol-space of distributed consensus algorithms on top of something like Microsoft Research's IronFleet (with the GP generating Gafny code) appears to be both possible and imo a fruitful avenue for researchers in the field.

[p.s. Note that Genetic Programming is distinct from Genetic Algorithms.]</comment></comment></comment>


Twilio launches support for Picture Messaging (MMS) - <AUTHOR> https://www.twilio.com/docs/api/rest/sending-messages

<comment><AUTHOR> A picture is worth 1,000 words. This is awesome!</comment>


Product-building articles by PMs at major tech companies - <AUTHOR> https://find.xyz/map/product-management-search-engine <comment><USER2> There is clearly a lack of boards/forums/websites dedicated to product managers. But what I miss the more is a website, when we can get valuable insights about best practices.

On HN you can get super useful information about any stack/language/framework by reading the comments, but when you are a PM you have nowhere to get that kind of information

<comment><USER3> My partner is struggling with this very thing at her work, I'm curious: what are go-to resources for PMs in terms of professional development?

<comment><USER4> Working with more senior PMs is the only working solution I have found.

Product Management is a very complex role...there is no straight forward learning path today other than doing the job ,building shit and strong mentor ship!

<comment><USER5> I couldn't agree more. I had the PM title twice before I worked with some senior PMs at a very successful Fortune 50. What a difference experience makes. I cringe when I think about how incompetent I was in my first two PM roles.

<comment><USER6> Ditto. My first three stints (albeit with zero help from peers or mentors) were terrible. It seems like you need a couple of epic screwups under your belt before the patterns start to present themselves.

<comment><USER7> Would you be open to chatting to me as a mentor?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had high hopes for /r/ProductManagement/, but it's not very active. That said, here are a few of my favorite product management resources: \- [https://medium.com/@johnpcutler](https://medium.com/@johnpcutler) \- [https://www.productplan.com/blog/](https://www.productplan.com/blog/) \- [http://firstround.com/review/](http://firstround.com/review/) \- [https://www.kennorton.com/](https://www.kennorton.com/)

</comment><comment><USER9> General question I've been wondering tangentially related:

Engineers:

is working [edit: replacing 'under' with 'with' due to replies! good clarification, didn't mean under] with a non-technical product manager a dealbreaker for you? (Do you look to filter out places you'd work at while job searching?)

Conversely, have you ever worked under a non-technical product manager you loved? Would you mind sharing details about your situation?

<comment><USER10> I was a non-engineering background PM (I dropped out of high school). I can tell you about what I didn't know early in my career that was painful for me then (and something I've internalized hard now): It's ok to say "I don't know". Conversely, saying "I have the answer" when you don't is lying.

The worst thing you can do as a PM is to make a technical assertion that you don't understand to a technical audience. You will instantly lose the audience's respect and trust (and those things are very hard to get back). To my mind, being technical is about actually understanding how things work such that you can make arguments grounded in facts and experience about systems. If you make arguments like "why don't you just rip out Mongo?" without understanding how painful that would be, it's really hard for people to believe in you.

Being non-technical doesn't mean opting out of technical discussions, it just means saying "I don't know" when you don't know. This is something I see PMs screw up all the time.

In reality, nobody knows everything, but pretending you know something when you don't is a verifiable road to hell.

Lastly, product is about two things: intuitive narrative and fact-based decision making. If you can't reason about your product hypotheses from first principles and/or bring established respected metrics to the discussion, you deserve to not be taken seriously.

<comment><USER11> > "why don't you just rip out Mongo?"

Related tip: ban the word "just" from your vocabulary. As an engineer, hearing a non-engineer say "can't we just X" is never a positive experience. Just that one word carries so much baggage - it's the shortest way possible to say "I don't value your expertise or expect you to have thought this through".

Sentences with "just" in them always work better if you drop the word.

"Why don't you rip out Mongo?" \- now we can have a conversation.

"Why don't you just rip out Mongo?" \- you've just started a much more hostile conversation entirely by accident.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good to know there other PMs out there. I have found HN invaluable over last few years for news discovery and insights. Not sure we need a new board just more PM posts in this one.

</comment><comment><USER13> Some product and business management blogs that I follow:

Google's re:Work blog: [https://rework.withgoogle.com/](https://rework.withgoogle.com/)

Harvard Business Review (HBR) blog: [https://hbr.org/the- latest](https://hbr.org/the-latest)

Practicing IT Project Manager blog shares curated links to project and product management articles: [http://blog.practicingitpm.com/](http://blog.practicingitpm.com/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone want to discuss website find.xyz? I have a hard time finding information on the internet. As they state on their website, if you google something it's SEO game and very often how much the article matches your keywords and not specifically highest quality articles first.

However, I find it hard to find information on find.xyz that interests me. When you click on tech you see a lot of Benedict's tech news (Maybe he is investor?). Maybe the problem is the site seems to be new.

How do you find information online? I tend to find best articles here on hackernews and on twitter, but it is very random. I wish there was a way to find high quality articles on stuff that interests me without googling for hours.

</comment><comment><USER15> The Women in Product community is an incredible resource. If you're a PM and identify as a women come join us at [https://www.womenpm.org](https://www.womenpm.org) or [https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?id=160194611065222&ref=co...](https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?id=160194611065222&ref=content_filter)!

</comment><comment><USER16> This is glorious! And actually saves me quite a bit of time. This subject extends much deeper than the rote teaching of "soft skills" to engineers. And is more akin to realizing one's own humanity ;)

I can also recommend a text called Product Design and Development used in the grad-level MIT class

[http://www.ulrich-eppinger.net/](http://www.ulrich-eppinger.net/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Two sites I've found on Product Management while listening to Indie Hackers podcasts include:

\- Product Management HQ: [https://www.productmanagerhq.com/](https://www.productmanagerhq.com/)

\- Roadmap.com: [https://www.roadmap.com/](https://www.roadmap.com/)

I haven't used them enough to rate how good they are, though.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's the same with DevOps. There are very few books and thousands of articles. I'm slowly trying to filter and categorize them so they can be reviewed and summarized, because only a few people will ever read these things and the information won't get to regular people.

</comment><comment><USER19> Most of the Product related articles you see on medium or on internet are mostly ideas or advice.

There are very few "rubber meets the road" kind of resources.

<comment><USER20> I'm curious to learn more! I've generally been trying to write articles based on personal experience rather than abstract frameworks or untested advice.

In your mind, what would a "rubber meets the road" kind of resource look like? What sorts of questions would it address?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been a PM for over 2 years now, and not really sure it is right for me anymore. Anyone jump from PM to something else?

<comment><USER22> What were the parts that you thought were not a great fit?

<comment><USER21> It's just an extremely nebulous role and completely different from company to company, which means you could be perceived as great in one co and terrible in another. I find it hard to measure my own real value.

<comment><USER23> You're right - it differs from company to company.

I think you'll enjoy the role if you are in a company where the PM drives the feature - the PM determines what features should be implemented, does the design (UI, logic, behavior, etc and then Dev does the technical design and codes it).

One way to measure your value is also your ability to solve customer's problems. By this I mean - you could have a feature/capabilities and then a customer has a unique situation; being able to figure out how to use your feature in a non-conventional manner or coming up with a work-around (not one that creates a loop hole) to solve the problem can feel rewarding. The challenge though is that it is sometimes difficult to quantify this when you are trying to move companies

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you're looking for your next PM role in London, hit me up. Email address in profile.

<comment><USER25> Same here for Munich! :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Thanks! It is a good article about PM, I will recommend to my friends.

</comment><comment><USER27> Thanks, this is useful.

</comment><comment><USER28> Agreed with the lack of resources being available. This is one of the main reasons why we, at Pendo, launched [https://productcraft.com/](https://productcraft.com/)

</comment><comment><USER29> Great find thx for sharing</comment>


Fuzzing DNS Zone Parsers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cambus.net/fuzzing-dns-zone-parsers/ <comment><USER2> This is a little disturbing; nsd is kind of a big deal, and afl on zone files is a pretty basic test to run. Kudos to the author for doing it, but why haven't the authors of nsd done it already, and what else haven't they done?

There is really no good reason for DNS servers to be written in C anymore.

<comment><USER3> > There is really no good reason for DNS servers to be written in C anymore.

I'm a little behind on docs, but we have a pretty decent start on one in Rust: [https://github.com/bluejekyll/trust-dns](https://github.com/bluejekyll/trust- dns)

We still need an AXFR, IXFR, or replication solution.

Also, I haven't had time to fuzz the zone parsers, so I can't guarantee we're resilient to the above yet, but the packet parsers are getting pretty widely used across multiple Rust projects now through the trust-dns-resolver library.

<comment><USER2> What's wrong with rsync?

<comment><USER3> Nothing. Depends on the mode of operation we want to support. I want to support that, but we need to add some signal handling (or similar mechanism) to properly reload configs after an raunchy is done.

Right now a restart would be required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nobody knows how to parse zone files.

I fuzzed a few zone file parsers several years ago, but to find the differences between implementations rather than crashes.

The problem is the format is really poorly specified, has been refined over about 10 RFCs, and still riddled with ambiguities. Every implementation out there handles things slightly differently.

I'll just dump some notes I wrote at the time, containing a list of RFCs and some findings, to gist:

[https://gist.github.com/nlyan/2a958fa476182e1b07955a945f0d70...](https://gist.github.com/nlyan/2a958fa476182e1b07955a945f0d7052)

<comment><USER5> Off topic: Hello from the person who forked synergy a couple of years ago :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Excellent! Would you be willing to do a second article on the process you used when wading through the findings?</comment>


Top 100 VCs Worldwide Twitter Ranking - Agree with the List? - <AUTHOR> http://peerreach.com/lists/venture-capital/ww?page=1

<comment><USER2> Top-100 based on what metric? Fund size, total amount of funding, twittercount?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this list was curated partly by celebrity status. I checked only the top 5 of that list and the follower number varies , so its not in order of hightest to lowest.

It cannot be fund size as someone like Dave McClure or Jeff Clavier's funds have lower fund size then say Khosala Ventures.</comment></comment>


Very unhappy with Meetup.com Perks - <AUTHOR> http://peachshake.com/2011/02/06/very-unhappy-with-meetup-com-perks/ <comment><USER2> One of the biggest problems Meetup seems to have is that they have a 'one size fits all' model, which shows again here. And most of it is geared towards smaller groups.

I'm one of the organizers of a Meetup with 4300+ members. Many things that work with 10 members, don't work with 4000. And they don't seem to filter any of it: After a year or two they send us an email: "Congratulations, you'r 2 years old. Most groups then pass the 50 member mark!". We had about 2000 or so.

We have events every 2 months (with about 400 attendees). If we don't plan one for the next month, they email us "It's important to have regular meetings, plan one now!". We spend months planning our events, they cost a ton of money, and would like to decide for ourselves, instead of having automatic meetup suggestions.

Unfortunately I don't know any good competitors (meetup has a lot of features, especially around waiting lists/RSVP's). And the switchover would be a pain, as there is no way to export your members :(

</rant>

<comment><USER3> Have you noticed much fallout from the recent redesign? It seems like there was a huge amount of outrage (mainly from organizers) [1], but I'm guessing that the lack of competitors means that meetup organizers are left with no viable alternatives.

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/28/meetup-feels-the-wrath- of-t...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/28/meetup-feels-the-wrath-of-the-crowd- after-radical-changes/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Despite the title, this post is a great thing for meetup. It sounds like they took the classic advice - they launched early with a minimalist feature. Now this post tells them exactly how to improve it.

Of course, thousands(?) of potential advertisers are reading a "very unhappy" review, but I think that's overstated. The review is clearly positive on the idea, and on meetup in general. With a few tweaks, this sounds like a useful platform.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is partly me screaming to hopefully get some attention from them. I'd love to give them feedback, but I couldn't get ahold of anyone. Their customer service is pretty much nonexistent as far as I can tell.

But yeah, I love the idea. I just hope they improve the execution.

<comment><AUTHOR> Follow up: I just got a tweet from Meetup giving me a link to their contact-us form. They're listening, it just took me a while to get their attention.

<comment><USER5> When you have the CTO commenting on your blog, you are definitely attracting the right kind of attention.

<comment><USER6> A pretty decently-sized chunk of the dev team reads HN, I think it was only a matter of time. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I run Hackers and Founders, SV, and we're getting together with the organizers of the other HN/Startup meetups in the area (the New Tech's, Founder Dating, 106 miles, H&F SV, etc..), and one of the main topics of conversation is going to be how much meetup.com sucks for our groups.

H&F as well as SV NewTech are building their own software to try and fix these problems, but it's going to be a bit of a pain in the ass. Especially, since they don't let us have access to our email lists.

</comment><comment><USER8> #1 problem: NO UTF-8 Language Support

<http://www.meetup.com/boards/thread/8385095/0/>

If you still haven't voted, please add your voice here:

[http://meetup.uservoice.com/forums/37079-ideas-and- suggestio...](http://meetup.uservoice.com/forums/37079-ideas-and-suggestions- for-meetup/suggestions/1082271-support-utf-8-character-encoding-throughout- the-si)

</comment><comment><USER8> Meetup's Serfs Sling Mud at CEO Scott Heiferman

[http://www.observer.com/2011/tech/more-tribulations- meetup-d...](http://www.observer.com/2011/tech/more-tribulations-meetup-deals- feature-causes-frustration)</comment>


Ask HN: Is it me or is Mint useless now since Intuit bought it? - <AUTHOR>

For the past week now I'v been trying to add my BOF account and I just get error message after error message. There post on the issue on Get Satisfaction has been going on for a while now. Anyone else having the same issues? <comment><USER2> Mint has been useless due to the fact that they have never let you set the date in which your monthly budget starts its cycle.

<comment><USER3> Also no double-entry ledger. grr</comment></comment>


Why would an ISP not offer up-to-date Ruby support? - <AUTHOR>

I'm asking out of genuine curiosity, not spite.
Just tried to create a Rails app on Dreamhost, only to learn that they only support Ruby 1.8.7 on shared server accounts. It's my understanding that v1.8.7 is very obsolete if not entirely deprecated. If so, I'm a bit perplexed why a major ISP, with prominent mention of Ruby & Rails support in their wiki, wouldn't want to keep up.
Am I missing something? <comment><USER2> Because for them, probably the cost of maintaining rails applications out of the box, is bigger then the approximate gain of offering an up-to-date ruby installation on their servers.

I don't feel like 'Dreamhost' is _prominent_ in the Ruby community. Actually I'm the ruby mailing lists and at least 6 ruby-related IRC channels (I don't do Rails yet, I'm more of a Sinatra afficionado). I never seen ONCE dreamhost mentioned there.

Even on rails website[1], the recommendations are: Heroku, Rails Machine, Brightbox, Engine Yard for hosting, Rackspace (hosting rails website IIRC) or Linode.

[1] [http://rubyonrails.org/deploy](http://rubyonrails.org/deploy)

</comment><comment><USER3> The wiki says "You can use rbenv or rvm to install other ruby versions on DreamHost". I guess they just don't care enough to upgrade system-wide, or have some internal issues that hake it harder than expected.

Also, they're your hosting provider, not ISP. Your ISP provides you access to the internet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently using rvm to upgrade requires sudo access. I'd have to upgrade for that. Also, tks for the hosting provider v. ISP clarification.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> DreamHost is mostly used for LAMP stack. you might want to Use heroku which offers first-class ruby support.

        https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/ruby

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - much appreciated. I've used Heroku to test a couple of "hello world" apps, but was hoping to use DreamHost's shared server account in order to learn the tricks of deployment for myself.</comment></comment>


What the Study of Chess Experts Teaches Us About Building a Remarkable Life - <AUTHOR> http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/01/06/the-grandmaster-in-the-corner-office-what-the-study-of-chess-experts-teaches-us-about-building-a-remarkable-life/

<comment><USER2> In music, one huge factor is copying people. Stevie Ray Vaughan not only knew every Albert King lick, he knew them well enough to use them in new ways. To be a good musician, you need vocabulary and facility. Learning to play other peoples licks will help you with both. Playing in front of an audience or with other musicians will give you good feedback and make you focus on the end result. Listening a lot will also help. John Scofield listened to a Miles Davis record he owned until the needle wore through the vinyl. He could play (and sing) every note on the record. Great interview with Bill Evans on learning to play [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEHWaGuurUk&feature=PlayL...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEHWaGuurUk&feature=PlayList&p=280670934BD363DF&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=15)

</comment><comment><USER3> "What does DP [Deliberate Practice] look like for fields that don't have a tradition of performance-optimization, such as knowledge work, freelance writing, entrepreneurship, or, of course, college?"

Does anyone have a system for answering this question?

<comment><USER4> I don't. It's an excellent question though.

There may be literature out there on this -- please tell me if you know of any.

You probably want to look at examples where this has been done and try to abstract a method out of those. Neil Strauss's _The Game_ (about pick-up artists) is a marvellous example. And Colvin explains in _Talent is Overrated_ how Abraham Lincoln deliberately practiced writing by analysing, simplifying, and trying to reproduce others' writing.

If I were to attempt an answer, I'd try something along these lines:

1\. Figure out what an excellent outcome is.

For writing, this might be a collection of articles/books. Tricker for entrepreneurship. Are Page and Brin examples of excellence for entrepreneurship? Could you model them and be successful without being in the specific situation they were in? Is Branson a better example? Is it likelihood of success, imapct, or profit that you want to optimise? It's worth noting that many things that have a tradition of deliberate practice -- chess, music, and sports -- have simple measures of excellence (win, make it sound nice, win).

2\. Break out the outcome aspects that matter.

Good writing not only has clear and lucid prose, but a storytelling structure that engages and entertains the reader. Entrepreneurship involves, amongst other things, identifying a solution, producing the solution, marketing to customers and investors, inspiring employees.

3\. Compile specific examples of the aspects.

Get articles with excellent prose and books with excellent stories. This is harder for entrepreneurship, but probably doable.

4\. Modify the specific examples into exercises.

Rewrite the article into bullet points so that you can later write the prose from those. Split the story into pieces and write on cards so you can later practice arranging the story. Specify the requirements for a web-app that's a solution to a problem so that you can practice implementing it from that.

5\. Perform the exercises and evaluate your performance. Repeat.

This is where the deliberate practice takes place (though performing these steps can also be a form of deliberate practice -- for meta-understanding of performance improvement in the field). The time-span of each exercise can vary enormously -- from seconds to months (for some things that can't be easily simulated).

Of course, this process should be iterated and refined. I think it would be much easier to do this with a partner that have similar goals.

What are your thoughts on this?

<comment><USER5> "You probably want to look at examples where this has been done and try to abstract a method out of those."

Robert Silverberg in his essay " The Making of a Science Fiction Writer" (originally published in "Worlds of Wonder" and later in "Reflections and Refractions - Thoughts on Science Fiction, Science and Other Matters") explains in great detail (40 pages in my edition of R&R) how he used stories of writers he admired as raw material for extracting the principles of "how to write well" (enough to be be awarded the Hugo and Nebula and sell everything he wrote) and the results of his applying these perceived principles to write stories embodying each technique.

Quoting from azgolfer's comment above, "In music, one huge factor is copying people. Stevie Ray Vaughan not only knew every Albert King lick, he knew them well enough to use them in new ways. To be a good musician, you need vocabulary and facility. Learning to play other peoples licks will help you with both."

Silverberg copied writers he admired. But the principle is the same - study a "work" that has already achieved your desired outcome, extract a principle or technique by analysis, embody it in _your_ work, get real world feedback on its effectiveness. Rinse, repeat.

Caveat: I am not very sure how this would apply to entrepreneurship.</comment></comment></comment>


Trend expert says probability of a recession this year is 17% - <AUTHOR> http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/04/28/jim_hamilton_do.html <comment><USER2> The guy at my hardware store who sold dozens of new paver driveways last year said that business has practically shut down this year. Housing is definitely affecting consumer spending.

The Dow always sets records before going into a recession.

<comment><USER3> 'Course, the Dow also sets records roughly half the time that the U.S. is _not_ in a recession.

I do see some worrying signs - real estate for suburban Boston really is a bloodbath for sellers, the numbers on consumer debt remind me a lot of 1929, and some local restaurants seem to have reduced business lately. But if I had to make a call, I'd guess that we're midcycle now, at the beginning of a large boom.

<comment><USER4> But how long do we have until the dollar falls through the floor?

If I had some significant assets I would be starting a company in Europe so I can afford to rebuy America once it is dirt cheap.

<comment><USER5> It already has. My guess is that the dollar will rise.

<comment><USER4> Why?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> ...which is probably only a little higher than the average year.

</comment><comment><USER6> How do recessions affect the market for startups?

<comment><USER7> The same way a boom affects the market for startups. But in the opposite direction.

Seriously though: In a direct sense, the effects might not be too great for us "Web 2.0" startups (people don't cut back on YouTube when money is tight). But there would be less money going around, so at least indirectly it's going to be a degree tougher to run any kind of business.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: We are preparing for interviewing with Paul Graham. Your questions? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> A bit over a month ago Graham "declared war" on Hollywood — and while it's a bit early to see how that turns out, I would like to know if he's started investing in that direction and what feedback he got as a result of that push

</comment><comment><USER3> Why does he persist on using the method he does for showing page 2(etc.) on HN?

</comment><comment><USER4> If you were starting over again, just out of college(or dropping out of it), what would you do?

For how long do you want to run ycombinator like it is(with you working somehow close to the startups instead of just hiring people to do it)?

Do you regret your "venture" in painting? If not, why?

</comment><comment><USER5> How about asking him some q's unrelated to yc. Like, what does he miss most about not living in New England anymore? What does he do when he is not working? Fav TV show? Fav food/drink. Type of mobile phone or computer has uses?

<comment><USER6> > Type of mobile phone or computer has uses?

You can find the answer to this question here <http://paul.graham.usesthis.com/>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What advice would you have for a student just entering college interested in working in development for tech startups? What should they prioritize out of just academics?

It's often said that it's more about the team then the idea. From your experience with YCombinator, what are the signs of an effective team member. Moreover, what can you do to prepare yourself to be an effective member of a startup team?

</comment><comment><USER8> Why didn't you use LISP ?</comment>