Leveling up as a student-entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://brennanjp.com/post/42781013597/leveling-up-as-a-student-entrepreneur My experience as a student-entrepreneur going to school full-time and then taking the plunge and leaving school (only temporarily, I think) to work full-time. <comment><USER2> I think your singular focus on executing with Price Intelligently is something (IF MAINTAINED) you will thank yourself for doing for a very long time.

<comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't agree more, Ex. Thanks for the endless support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> nice post JB!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Jack ;)</comment></comment>


New Lanyrd feature: JS badges for speakers/attendees to display their events - <AUTHOR> http://lanyrd.com/blog/2011/badges/

<comment><USER2> this should be very useful. just hope the script loads quickly, as that's my only real concern with badges.

<comment><AUTHOR> We put a lot of thought in to loading times of the badge. There are some performance notes here:

<http://lanyrd.com/services/badges/docs/#performance>

We're serving the initial 2215 byte script from Amazon's CloudFront CDN, so it should load lightning fast. You can place the script link at the bottom of the body to make absolutely sure there's no chance of it blocking the load of the rest of your page.

Once that script has loaded, it looks through the document finding all of the badge configuration links. It then assembles a single URL to our badge service which fetches all of the badge data in one HTTP request. This goes through a 10 minute Varnish cache, so it should be nice and fast too and should survive even if your site is getting a huge amount of traffic.

Finally, the badge degrades gracefully so in the event that Lanyrd.com is down (again, the Varnish cache is meant to help protect against that) your page will load fine, you just won't get the badge content.</comment></comment>


Show HN: ApexCharts – Open-Source Chart Library for Web - <AUTHOR> https://apexcharts.com/ <comment><USER2> Cool colors. Just a note, the footer github link [0] is a 404. Please fix

[https://github.com/apexcharts/apexcharts](https://github.com/apexcharts/apexcharts)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed! thanks

<comment><USER2> No problems. Cool project!</comment></comment></comment>


Swift (programming language) - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(programming_language)

<comment><USER2> Never mind that there already was a language called Swift. I really hope they trademarked or copyrighted the name, but it seems unlikely - they'll probably just get steam-rollered and forgotten.

[http://www.cs.cornell.edu/jif/swift/doc/index.html](http://www.cs.cornell.edu/jif/swift/doc/index.html)

<comment><USER3> There were actually two (released at approximately the same time): [http://swift-lang.org](http://swift-lang.org). Apparently the name isn't terribly original.</comment></comment>


What the Rich Won't Tell You - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/opinion/sunday/what-the-rich-wont-tell-you.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion&action=click&contentCollection=opinion&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=4&pgtype=sectionfront <comment><USER2> The problem that these people are experiencing is that they are in a very special privileged position (weather through their own work or through inheritance), yet they realize that most people they will interact with will never attain their status.

It is not about hard work, or "bootstrapping" yourself. Its all about the luck. And they have been lucky. They are reaping the benefits of their luck at a disproportionate rate then the these other people. And they aren't doing anything about it.

It is ridiculous that people who make $250K or more a year (and I don't care where you live) think that they are "middle class". Bullshit. You are wealthy. Most other people are not. The quicker you admit to it - the more the economic disparity becomes obvious and something has to be done about it.

In Inequality for All—a 2013 documentary with Robert Reich in which he argued that income inequality is the defining issue for the United States—Reich states that 95% of economic gains went to the top 1% net worth (HNWI) since 2009 when the recovery allegedly started. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequality_for_All](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequality_for_All))

By continuing to state that they are 'normal' or 'middle class' or 'frugal' \- they are really trying to convince themselves that they are not the on the "taking" part of society.

<comment><USER3> > It is ridiculous that people who make $250K or more a year (and I don't care > where you live) think that they are "middle class". Bullshit. You are > wealthy.

If you are making $250k/year through a job, and you depend on that money for daily life, you are not wealthy. You are a high-income earner. You can kind-of put your kids through private school and maybe even get a rent-a-maid more often than lower-earning folks, but if your yearly spend is close to $250k/year, you're not wealthy.

If you are making $25M/year through a job, and you depend on that money for daily life, you are _still_ not wealthy. You'll be classified as an ultra high net worth individual by banks and money managers and qualify for a lot of cool rich people shit. You'll probably trade American or Delta for NetJets or Delta Private Planes (a benchmark a lot of folks in this article used as "elite snobbery," which it really isn't in many cases), or you'll make the mistake of buying your own jet, but if your yearly spend is >$25M/year, you're not wealthy.

Why? If you lose your job in both cases, you are _screwed_.

Wealthy is never having to work for your money because your money works for you. Having a high-income helps towards _getting to_ wealthy, but you can also just buy more expensive shit with that income and just stay high-income.

The way I see it: you're wealthy when you can do, wear or say nearly whatever the fuck you want and not worry about your money/lifestyle going away.

<comment><USER4> >If you are making {$25M|$250k}/year through a job, and you depend on that money for daily life

Here's the thing: the second half of this snippet doesn't make any sense. No one _needs_ that much money to get along with their life. Living frugal is precisely that: requiring much less expenditure than you make. It's entirely possible to live on $40k in expenses per year. Many, _many_ people do that every day with $40k or even lower.

How can one _depend_ on so much expenditure? There's no reason. That amount of money minus absolutely vital expenses calculated according to minimum market rates for healthcare, housing, and food will always be more than enough to retire on very early if saved wisely.

If you set yourself up to be screwed even after making that much money, you're making very poor decisions.

<comment><USER3> _You_ don't need that much money per year, but I'd be very happy with that level of income (and I'm getting closer)!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What judgy bullshit. How about: Very rich people who have any brains whatsoever realize that they are still human and their kids can be kidnapped for ransom money or they can be robbed or otherwise targeted.

Like, you know, basic survival instinct kicks in at some point and you realize downplaying it is the only way you can walk down the street without a big fat target on your forehead.

The entire article has a subtext of "We should talk more about these things so we can take away their extreme privilege." The entire thing is openly hostile to their very existence.

Gee, I wonder why millionaires would go "Why, no, we aren't _rich_. We are just, you know, _comfortable_." when talking to someone who openly wants the rich to cease to exist somehow.

<comment><USER6> I agree. I don't see the point of the article -- it basically says "we should discuss the rich some more" and nothing much else; I can't find any constructive or productive conclusion in the article.

And I strongly disagree with the premise that the rich want to BS themselves via euphemisms or hiding their income and thus they'll remove some imaginary stain. I am sure _some_ of them do that, but what the author misses is that many people who worked hard and/or inherited a ton of money aren't scumbags and are actually down-to-earth. And as you pointed out, they also don't want to paint a target on themselves. I don't want people knocking on my door begging for money (relatives I haven't seen in 15+ years already do that, damn it), or having an increased advertisement exposure (gods, please no!), or having people trying to hack my website, invoicing system or whatever. I am much better off living with my loved people and my money and chilling and enjoying life instead of constantly working to tighten security from every direction I am likely to be attacked from. No, thanks!

I have been gradually improving my financial life by working hard and picking my battles and now that I can freely order two copies of the so-called iPhone X (or Pro, we still don't know the moniker) without feeling much pressure... I honestly am much more judgemental on how do I spent money.

The fact that you have money and you worked for them to me automatically means you learn the value of money and don't want to just throw them in a black hole.

 _(For what it 's worth though, I wouldn't feel guilty in front of a house- maid... I'd either raise her wage by 50% or so and in doing so would make sure that person remains loyal to me as long as she wants that kind of career for herself... or I would discuss it once with my wife, we'd conclude we shouldn't increase wages based on vague guilt feelings, and be done with that topic forever.)_

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> And yet, everyone knows it's those darn millennials with their avocado toast that are the "problem"

Why doesn't Beatrice just pay her housekeeper more? Then instead of shame, she could feel pride in helping bring up the world around her. Her shame is evidence that she can afford it and "knows" she could improve the life of another individual.

Also what benefit does the $6 bread confer? While I'm not sure I agree that $6 is "obscene" for bread (mine costs $3.50 or thereabouts), I don't understand how you can buy something without heavily justifying its cost.

<comment><USER8> RE: $6 bread.

Cheap bread is an issue with the poor. It's increadiably unhealthy.

But it tastes great, is cheap and keeps kids happy but doesn't have the stigmata of lets say ice cream which is as bad.

I think if you are paying $3.50 you probably are having healther bread. $6 as well.

You 'could' produce cheap healther bread in bulk, but we are not. So expensive is healthy can be a good proxy on diet.

<comment><USER9> You likely meant to use the word "stigma." Stigmata means something different.

<comment><USER10> I dunno, ice cream stigmata does sound pretty bad to me. Though, on second thought it seems like it wouldn't be as bad as regular stigmata.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel like the best thing we could do for everyone living in these expensive cities is to improve public transit and remove zoning restrictions.

Getting all the rich people to give up their nice houses is not going to have a meaningful impact on prices for most of us.

When I think of the alternatives I think of Soviet Russia, where if you weren't born in Moscow good luck moving there because (besides needing a permit) there was a years long waiting list for apartments. Which is essentially what you get when there is limited supply and no way of resolving competition: everyone just gets put on the waiting list. Which is what we see happening with subsidized housing programs in all major US cities, they exist, but there's a years long waiting list.

<comment><USER12> After the war the government built housing projects in NYC. Would it really be that hard to do that again?

<comment><USER11> I think the verdict on housing projects, in the sense of high rises dedicated to housing poor people, is a bit mixed, which is why many low income housing authorities have subsidized housing instead.

If you're just talking about the government building houses and then acting as a landlord, then that may have less downsides, but still has all the issues of any government provided service not being very responsive to people's needs.

Personally I like the system that Singapore has where most property is owned by the government and then leased to private entities, often for 99 years. It means that the entity capturing the value of land in the long term is the state, but still lets development get done by private entities.

But in terms of what is realizable, it seems more likely that we could relax zoning than have NYC all of a sudden find the money to build lots of housing and successfully execute on that project and not make it a hideous brutalist disaster where people don't want to live in and continue to maintain that property well. Maybe you are more of an optimist about government than I am, but IME everything where the government actually has to do something, it's done poorly. Not that private development is perfect, but there at least there is some form of feedback from a well regulated market.

<comment><USER12> >Personally I like the system that Singapore has where most property is owned by the government and then leased to private entities

>But in terms of what is realizable, it seems more likely that we could relax zoning than have NYC all of a sudden find the money to build lots of housing and successfully execute on that project and not make it a hideous brutalist disaster where people don't want to live in and continue to maintain that property well. Maybe you are more of an optimist about government than I am, but IME everything where the government actually has to do something, it's done poorly.

In Singapore most property is built by the government and it's of a high quality. It can be done well, it simply requires a political imperative.

The private sector reacts to this by building higher quality housing because the government sets a floor on quality. Maybe you are more of an optimist about the private sector than I am but I've lived in shitty private apartments in Europe and decent government housing in Singapore. If the private sector doesn't have discipline imposed upon it, you get slumlords.

Anyway, plenty of the government housing projects in NYC are nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've dropped this comment elsewhere here today, already, but:

All the more reason to enable people to signal their wealth (sexual fitness) and raise taxes at the same time - by repurposing "Sumptuary Laws." For example: If you want a car that's white, yellow or blue, no extra tax. If you want a red car that's a significant tax. If you want a purple car, that's a really big tax. Note that, with Sumptuary Taxes, you don't have to be wasteful or conspicuously consume, or pour a large amount of carbon into the atmosphere in order to signal your wealth - the red paint and purple paint don't cost much more than blue or grey. So this is also a very green proposal.

With Sumptuary Taxes you can show people you're rich and they're not and help the commonweal at the same time: showing that you're one of the responsible, caring rich.

(Sumptuary – related to the word sumptuous, of course.)

Sumtuary Laws were tried in England in the Fourteenth Century, but for almost the reverse purpose – merely to prevent poor people from wearing clothes that resembled the clothes rich people wore. This didn't raise any revenue and was intended to save rich people money while increasing social barriers. The laws weren't very successful and they didn't last long.

<comment><USER14> I've thought for a while now that charities should do something similar and get in on the wealth signalling market. Not so much cars but I think fashion would be a great industry for them to take on. Instead of dropping $200 on a shirt and feeling guilty, the rich person gets to drop $200 on a shirt and feel good about it.

<comment><USER15> The only problem I see with this is so-called "charities" charging $200 for a shirt and claiming an obscured donation to charity. The person buying the shirt can feel good about it, and the company selling the shirt can donate $1 and still keep their promise that they made a donation.

Maybe I'm just cynical, but I think with the current economy and business practices going on that I have a right to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think this phenomenon perpetuates false beliefs along the entire economic spectrum as well. I grew up middle class, and myself and my friends always considered movie stars as the richest people around!

When in reality, movie stars have nickels compared to executives, and old- money families. Many folks just can't comprehend the difference between 5 million dollars in assets, to 500 million dollars.

Which begs the question: at what dollar amount does wealth become obscene and unnecessary? It's a moving target, but if I had to throw a dart I would probably pick 100 million as being the upper limit for wealth for an individual. There is just no reason to have more than that.

<comment><USER17> I don't think there's a threshhold. Take Bill Gates for example. He's done a lot of good in his life. He built a huge company that transformed personal computing, employed an army of people and then put billions of dollars into poverty mediation programs that the world's governments didn't seem to be able to handle. Along the way, he also payed billions in taxes. Without old Bill, the world is many billions of dollars poorer.

I think there's a lot of value in letting people that are 10,000x better than the average person at creating wealth do so. Maybe there should be something to limit the excesses of luxurious consumption (I for one, favor a progressive VAT), but I think trying to impose punitively high tax rates on very successful people makes society worse off in most cases.

<comment><USER18> Bill did not build a company alone. He built it off the backs of employees. His earnings are so substantial that it is fundamentally impossible for him to earn it off of his own two hands and intelligence alone. No one man has enough intelligence or physical ability to generate a billion dollars. Can one man create the windows operating system? Can one man construct a boeing 747? If no one man can construct a boeing 747 than how can their exist people who have wealth greater than the worth of a passenger airliner? There is only one explanation. This wealth was earned unfairly.

What Bill and all other billionaires do is utilize the labor of other people. Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple are all group efforts where humanity pools their collective power together to construct something greater than one man can produce. The issue here is that, the leaders of these groups get rewards that are disproportionate. There is no way one human can contribute labor worth 50 billion dollars to the world. It it physically impossible. The taxes that Bill paid is wealth generated by the employees, not Bill.

<comment><USER19> Bill was able to organize the labor of people into something more productive than the sum of its parts. That is a relatively rare skill. Luck comes into it, and we can debate how much of a factor time, place, family networks, etc played into it. But regardless there were incumbents that were much more likely to succeed than him at the start.

IBM had the biggest advantage here. Snatching defeat from the jaws of certain victory is one of the largest blunders in modern business.

Gary Kildall failed to land a suitable deal with IBM, and would have been the next in line to be Bill Gates. Even if he did make the deal his personality made it unlikely he'd structure the deal as BillG did which enabled the clone market.

Or Seattle Computer Products that owned the actual DOS BillG used.

Ultimately it was BillG that executed the vision and did so relentlessly for multiple decades. Not many other executives were sleeping under their desks at the time. This was particularly what impressed IBM enough to take a chance on them. Their work ethic as a company was well noted in the industry. BillG set that example from the top.

<comment><USER20> Bill G used a mixture of cuthroat and illegal activities to crush competition and create a monopoly. In his absence, we may well hve had a thriving ecosystem of compatible adn far more secure technology. Or some other cutthrouat like Steve Jobs would have won. Just because the game is winner- take-all doesn't mean the winner did nearly all the valuable work.

<comment><USER19> That was true in the 90s with netscape. Less so during the 80s when his position was being cemented. He even sent IBM over to Gary Kildall initially. It was only after that meeting failed that he went out and bought QDOS.

The point is that Microsoft wasn't always a monopoly. It took skill to get there, and there were opponents that started with much better hands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Some people don't understand that 250K a year is not rich in or near expensive cities. If you live in the bay area and your mid/end career, 250K/houshold a year is barely middle-class. And if you live in palo alto, 250K for a household, you're almost eligible for low-income housing assistance. Perhaps at 1 to 2 million per year or more, you can call it rich.

<comment><USER22> "...and inherited wealth of several million dollars..."

It's this part that definitely makes her rich.

<comment><USER23> +1. The key thing is that this takes a lot of stress off of her shoulders. That 250k annual income is now spending money. She can spend it all and not worry about savings. I make more than that but can't spend most of it because I have to think about the future---buying a house, kids, rainy-day fund, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > ... "with big price tags on them" that "have to be removed, or Sharpied > over, so the housekeepers and staff don't see them."

This is silly? The staff already knows you're wealthy. How? You're paying their paychecks.

EDIT: I kept reading. "Instead, such moves help wealthy people manage their discomfort with inequality".

</comment><comment><USER24> I think the key here is "finance". Granted this is the New York times focusing on New Yorkers.. but clearly the name of the gain is still finance.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm much more interested in learning about what they thought their lives would have been like after becoming wealthy _before_ they became wealthy.

I'm interested in seeing how windfalls change people.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's not that there shouldn't be rich people, the question is how many and by how much. Obviously on some level we have finite resources.

Maybe it's crazy, but I had this idea that perhaps some reasonable limit could be determined mathematically, say, the income of a given top ratio should not exceed the income of the same bottom ratio by the square root of said ratio (e.g. the top 10% should not make more than 3.16 times more than the bottom 10%).

<comment><USER26> Fiat money is just a concept made up by governments, so no – the resource is not finite, and I think that's the crucial point in lots of these conversations. Innovators create and deliver value to large populations of people and are rewarded for it economically – this is supposed to be fair, and arguably is "the american dream" because the premise is that they are being "fairly" compensated for the overall value they've delivered to society at large.

The closer you get to individual transactions as examples, the easier it is to ignore that it's not a zero-sum game. I think we all agree we're probably paying too much for an individual iPhone X or whatever, but few disagree that the creators of these devices deserve at least the amount of wealth that their creations "gave back" to society through value, convenience, efficiency, and so forth on a society-level scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Perhaps they are uncomfortable because subconsciously they know that they don't deserve their wealth. The discomfort stems from another root emotion... guilt.

<comment><USER27> I don't think they subconsciously believe they don't deserve their wealth. I think some may subconsciously feel guilty because they don't do more to help with their wealth.

<comment><USER18> [https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocr...](https://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocrats_the_pitchforks_are_coming)

Here's a guy that consciously believes he doesn't deserve his wealth.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Explore Pokemon Emerald inside your browser - <AUTHOR> https://maierfelix.github.io/emerald-engine/static/ <comment><AUTHOR> If you don't have a ROM file on hand (Attention, large GIFs):

[0]: [https://i.imgur.com/pYI9ipl.gif](https://i.imgur.com/pYI9ipl.gif)

[1]: [https://i.imgur.com/isgIRLD.gif](https://i.imgur.com/isgIRLD.gif)

[2]: [https://i.imgur.com/GMqDYKr.gif](https://i.imgur.com/GMqDYKr.gif)

[3]: [https://i.imgur.com/HmvBTAV.png](https://i.imgur.com/HmvBTAV.png)

</comment><comment><USER2> How does a person get a ROM?</comment>


Show HN: PodBinge – Listen through podcast backlogs like an audiobook - <AUTHOR> https://podbinge.app <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, creator here. Near the end of 2019 I got the idea to listen through the backlog of some of my favorite long-running shows that had been going since 2010. It was possible, but not easy in most podcast clients I found, and none made it especially easy to just keep listening without manually downloading episodes or gave me an idea of my progress.

Podbinge is best suited for when you want to listen through a podcast from start to finish. Audio dramas like "The Program" make this feel like your listening to an audiobook, where long running comedy series like My Brother, My Brother and Me can give you a tour of the pop culture of the moment and catch you up with the in-jokes with rest of the fandom.

This is my first top-to-bottom made and released product, so feedback is very much welcome and appreciated. There's no revenue generating functionality yet, but I'm looking at adding support for binging multiple podcasts at once and interweaving episodes chronologically as a premium feature. Let me know what you think!</comment>


Report: Wall Street Is Getting Cold Feet on Bitcoin as Crypto Crash Continues - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/report-wall-street-is-getting-cold-feet-on-bitcoin-as-1831288970 <comment><USER2> When it finally bottoms everyone will be going spazzy again...</comment>


Human-level concept learning through probabilistic program induction - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/content/350/6266/1332.full <comment><USER2> Isn't it the case that human one-shot classification tasks can rely on a pre- existing corpus of concepts that span a richer and broader area?

For example, someone who looks at a segway, won't just see the pixels of a two wheeled vehicle, and that it is axially unlike a bike, but they may have also read articles about it, and know that two wheeled vehicles without peddles or mechanisms for riders to stabilze them, imply the device has a self-stability function.

Thus, a human being could group a segway or unicycle segway type device, with BB-8 style self-balancing/gyro balls that people can ride as chairs. But to do so, they are relying on reasoning about how the device must work, not just image recognition.

I mean, I welcome all of these advances at getting better at recognition tasks, but I still feel like we're producing "Fast Brain" AI, not "Slow Brain" AI.

<comment><USER3> I was thinking this too. I'd be curious if one could even provide a single clear and unambiguous example of something people learn via "one-shot" classification.

<comment><USER4> From personal experience, touching a red hot stove. No further classification was needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bayesian program learning looks really promising, largely because it requires less data than deep neural networks to learn.

A couple things to note:

1) One of the authors of the paper, Russ Salakhutdinov, has worked alongside Geoff Hinton to produce major advances in deep learning.

2) While the title appears to include a broad set of problems, for the moment their work has been on images.

<comment><USER6> I agree, but I'd expand on that and say that BPL and Probabilistic programming in general benefits hugely from the fact that it is interpretable and thus useful in ways that deep learning is not quite as useful. On top of that, the integration of causal concepts allows the program to generalize to completely novel situations in ways that it's unclear whether it nor other techniques can. For example, can we teach a neural net that if the sun didn't rise tomorrow people would still go to work at 9am? (As long as they weren't too freaked out of course :-) )

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _This paper introduces the Bayesian program learning (BPL) framework, capable of learning a large class of visual concepts from just a single example and generalizing in ways that are mostly indistinguishable from people._

This is one of the most exciting and readable papers I've come across.

Does anyone know if the code is available anywhere? Can we reproduce their results? I can think of a dozen applications for such an ability.

<comment><USER8> The link to the code is in the paper as well. After reading the media hype around the paper I thought I should read the paper, and like you, was surprised to find a very readable paper. Although I think to really understand the mechanism I am going to have to read the code, because without that this just looks like a good parlor trick (because the permutation in stroke output is kind of a fun but minor piece of code, yet a big part of the media breathlessness.)

There should be a flurry of activity as practitioners take these concepts and start applying them to other fields, such as static code analysis. Much of the magic seems to be in the choice of atoms that you feed in to the algorithm.

<comment><USER9> The take home here is actually that by modelling the physical process of writing you get a more accurate model. It requires fewer examples partly because of pre-training, and partly because of physics hard coded into the model structure. It's not just the atoms that you feed in, but the entire algorithm is designed around drawing glyphs.

It's not entirely clear how you'd apply these concepts to new problems. Certainly in many cases you could come up with more detailed models of the processes involved. But in others, like text understanding, it's not at all clear how you'd make models more sophisticated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some articles about this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10733556](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10733556), [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10728641](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10728641).

</comment><comment><USER11> IMO something like this is the future of AI. I've been trying to crack it for a while as a hobby. I also use vision tasks as test but unfortunately my algorithms get stuck in local maximums or coarse representation of images.

I'm not sure this paper's algorithm is that powerful either. It seem to start with a squiggly line grammar that is already close the the final written text- like characters it is trying to learn. This narrows the model space very much and makes the problem easier.

It would be more impressive if it started with an SVG like grammar and learned to draw any kind of image. This is the approach I try to take anyways even if I can't seem to get very far.

The problem is that the search space is so large and so irregular with regards to output that you can't brute force it. You need to somehow cluster similar generative rules of different complexity together then get your algorithm to search the model space in a way that it tries simpler rules first, then goes on to try generating more complex rules but prioritize the ones that are known to have similar output to the simpler ones.

Basically you have to cluster your generative rules into an taxonomy that your algorithm can navigate from the top. It's exponentially inefficient to try to generate "dog" until you have recognized that the simpler "animal" is a good approximation.

I also think that in the ultimate solution, the output leaf statements of the grammar will be parametrized like a normal programming language, so that for example, the algorithm can generate a color, a radius and then generate 100 circles referencing this single color and radius to represent repeated patterns without having to learn their size and color individually when they are clearly homogeneous or invariant across a bunch. The bayesian, occam's razor, solution to a bunch of similar things that you don't have a category for yet is shared parameters. These parameters is how you learn with very few examples. You don't have to learn a full new category to make good predictions, the algorithm can simply notice the homogeneity in a part of a scene and extrapolate immediately.

<comment><USER12> Err... Nothing is the "future" of AI. Not even deep learning. If you knew what the future of AI was, you'd have your PhD and faculty position in no time.

<comment><USER11> Bayesian generative models are logically and mathematically on a better foundation than deep learning's "It works but we don't know why". Bayesian models can be proven to be optimal under more flexible assumptions than deep learning. They are also more in line with human like common sense reasoning.

Not sure how to make them computationally tractable however.

We'll see, I guess...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can someone who understands this explain it? I tried to read the article, and it felt like there wasn't enough math there to explain what they were trying to do exactly.

<comment><USER14> Bayesian Program Learning is probably the most powerful of the technologies that come with the use of fully probabilistic programming languages. This is a subset of a technique known as "probabilistic generative modelling", in which one designs a model based on inference algorithms like MCMC or Particle Cascade, that generates samples based on some simple rule. You can learn more from a pretty good online book called Probabilistic Models of Cognition: [https://probmods.org/](https://probmods.org/), also here: [http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~fwood/anglican/](http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~fwood/anglican/) and here: [http://probabilistic- programming.org/wiki/Home](http://probabilistic-programming.org/wiki/Home).

<comment><USER13> Very cool, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Seems like a good direction, seems more intuitive to me. Very classy that it is all in a github!

</comment><comment><USER16> Getting a certificate error on chrome for android</comment>


Building a Swift library for ordering food - <AUTHOR> http://ordr.in/blog/2014/6/9/ordrinterns-building-a-swift-api-library

<comment><USER2> Check out the source code here! github.com/ordrin/api-swift</comment>


A retired Navy SEAL commander's 12 rules for being an effective leader - <AUTHOR> https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/05/a-retired-navy-seal-commander-s-12-rules-for-being-an-effective-leader <comment><USER2> This article is pure fluff, but I started the book recently myself and it's pretty good so far.

By the way if you are interested in SEALs the book "Breaking BUD/S" by DH Xavier is excellent - contains a lot of lessons for life in general. Don't be a blue falcon, for starters.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Let your subordinates start all answers with 'Sir, yes, Sir!', but not with 'Sir, no, Sir!'".

</comment><comment><USER4> for(word: words) { synonym = synonym(word); print('Do {0}, but not {1}', word, synonym); }

:)

<comment><USER5> Reminded me very much of the scene in Mystery Men[1] in particular the quotes of the Sphinx[2]

[1] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132347/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132347/)

[2] [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132347/quotes?ref_=tt_ql_trv_4](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0132347/quotes?ref_=tt_ql_trv_4)</comment></comment>


Skillcrush, a community-driven, fun way to learn new tech skills - <AUTHOR> http://skillcrush.com/

<comment><USER2> I see some definitions and explanations of some words and such on the site, but no obvious explanation of the site.

Unless that's it, you get a daily email with some illustrations and explanations. (?)</comment>


One Ad to Rule Them All - <AUTHOR> http://oneadtorulethemall.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> The Ryanair one is particularly apt.</comment>


Why Isn't Paypal More Successful? - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/05/why-isnt-paypal-more-successful.html <comment><USER2> Because they appear, from many people's perspectives, to be nothing but scam artists?

For instance, I auctioned off a motherboard on Ebay. The guy paid for it with Paypal. Sent off the motherboard. The guy refused delivery, and then accused me of not sending it.

Being a nice guy, as he actually didn't receive the motherboard, I refunded the guy his money.

Then he filed a complaint with Paypal for me not sending the motherboard. Paypal would not listen to my side of the story at all, even though I had proof of shipping and proof of his refusal of delivery.

So then Paypal gives him the money (from my account) for the cost of the motherboard. So the guy walks away with my $200, and Paypal doesn't care, and does nothing, and actively seems to want this to be the outcome. This wasn't bad customer service. This was company policy.

There's a reason this site exists, and why I tell everyone to never, ever use Paypal if they can help it:

<http://www.paypalsucks.com/>

<comment><USER3> Totally agree and hence now avoid PayPal at all costs.

It seems they have this policy as it is cheaper to deal with an unhappy seller who has little/no protection legal or otherwise (especially if they have used thier PayPal balance for payment) and who will generally not chase them through the court system (in which case PayPal will argue it is a case between the buyer and seller, not PayPal and the seller), than an unhappy buyer who often has the backing of thier credit card company (or bank) to fight chargebacks on thier behalf and in most cases win.

As a vendor/retailer, especially if you have your own ecommerce store or sell high value items, be VERY wary of PayPal and only ever complete transactions if all buyer details match and protections are in place (buyers are verified and items sent only to card billing address).

Posted something similar a while back, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=361361>, and it is sad to see little has changed.

<comment><USER4> Ditto. I just put up a variation on this response at the blog itself:

This is a great response and encapsulates many of the issues I have with PayPal. I would add to it that enough people have been burned by PayPal to give it a lousy reputation; you can't write a post about the company without people chiming in with horror stories. My family's business -- see www.seliger.com -- is the kind of company Paypal would presumably want to use their service, but after I had a bad experience with them, I never would.

The first comment on <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626518> Hacker News answers, "Because they appear, from many people's perspectives, to be nothing but scam artists?" With this kind of reputation, why _would_ people use Paypal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Comment I left over at the article:

I began using Paypal right when they launched, when it was an application for beaming payments over the IR ports of Palm Pilots (remember that?!).

I continued to use Paypal after they migrated to web payments and discontinued the Palm support.

About four or five years ago I became hugely disillusioned with Paypal and never use it, and refuse to support it at my two ecommerce companies.

Why?

As a customer:

* Supporting Paypal is a signaling mechanism. It says "I am too rinky dink to get a merchant account".

* The dispute resolution process drags a third party in.

* The account can be frozen.

* The appeals process is laborious and indeterminate.

* There are too many steps at checkout.

* Paypal wants to force me to upgrade to a full verified account. I have to supply too much information. I have to wait for 2 deposits to clear, then report their sizes.

* Even for the 1-off "act as a merchant account" process flow, if I try to use a credit card that has previously been registered with Paypal as a full account, Paypal will NOT LET ME do the one-off transaction; I have to come up with a (long forgotten) password to the Paypal account.

* There are about 50 more user-interface horrors that I don't recall right now, but I would seriously (seriously!) hit my fingers with a framing hammer before I would use Paypal again. I don't have emotional reactions to most brands. Apple? Eh. Windows? Sort of dislike it. Amazon? Sort of like it. ... Paypal? HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE.

As a merchant (<http://Smartflix.com> and <http://HeavyInk.com>), I won't use Paypal because

* all of the above

* crappy admin interface

* crappy interface to delegate rights to other employees

* fear of having funds frozen

* inability to re-charge a credit card for follow in transactions (unreturned DVDs, late fees, etc.)

I wish Paypal nothing but death.

\--- Travis Corcoran, President <http://SmartFlix.com> "What do you want to learn today?"

<comment><USER6> What do you propose people use for user to user payments? If you buy something from another person on the web, paypal is pretty much your only option. And if you are the seller, its pretty much the only way to get your payment right away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can think of a bunch of reasons:

* PayPal support leaves a lot to be desired. They lock accounts without reason and don't offer much support as to why.

* Transferring money from your bank to your PayPal account takes a long time. Even longer if you are not from the US.

* Many people have credit cards. Why add another middleman?

Less personal but relevant issues:

* PayPal makes you spend money that you HAVE. A credit card doesn't.

* Branding. Not everyone trusts companies with their credit card, why would they trust a company that has very little do with the process over one who is actually vending the item/service.

<comment><USER8> _Transferring money from your bank to your PayPal account takes a long time_

That's the banks' fault. They still take their sweet time clearing checks, and screw customers over in other ways so it's not surprising that it takes a long time to transfer cash from them

<comment><USER9> But in the context of "why don't people use PayPal" it still looks like PayPal has a problem to the customer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is Paypal successful at all? It is really a pain to use, especially if you have a problem. If eBay and a few other sites didn't more or less force me to use it, I never would.

<comment><USER11> I've been using PayPal for several transactions a month since 2002 with no problems. They did temporarily hold my account when I went over a certain limit, due to EU money laundering laws, but once I proved my ID, etc, it was back up and running.

It's quick, easy, convenient and they're the only company I'm aware of that makes it easy to pass money around from place to place _internationally._ (That is, there are many local services, but as a Brit who does 80%+ of billing in US dollars, it's pretty much unbeatable.)

<comment><USER12> But if you are a Brit that moves to the US you are screwed. Paypal.com won't let you have an account because you already have a .uk account and the .uk account won't let you have a US address. You can't close the account and use the same email/credit card to create a new account because they are already in the system. Calling support just gets you form letters

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I find the fees for recieveing payments from ebay auctions kinda stupid. Just eBays way of hitting you twice.

</comment><comment><USER14> Paypal is a back-end company.

They haven't been able to (a) build a user experience that users really feel confident with. (b) find and fix all sorts of other problems their users might have.

I think b, while not a problem is the real issue. Missed opportunity. Online banking, managing your personal finances, investing, budgeting as well as paying & accepting payments online. All these things are still difficult and as such, most people don't do any more then the minimum to solve a very big problem.

They might use online banking to access accounts or pay a bill when the bank forces them.

The possibilities they missed out on by achieving so little in the past 10 years are enormous. From the creation of an alternative, underground economy that they talked about in early days to the creation of a platform where you manage all your money. They could have shaken up the industry become a bank focusing on transaction/small savings accounts and the rest of the small retail stuff that banks hate doing. They could have become the front end for banks.

* A lot of the dispute resolution, customers service issues and such that make up the bulk of comments here are a problem. But they are (I think) caused by a combination of regulation, oligopoly & problematic incentives.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've had Paypal since 2000, and it was a boon when actively dealing with virtual properties. More recently, I've come to love their virtual credit cards for making one time purchases on sites which may not be entirely trustworthy.

That said, when things did go wrong it was a major PIA to correct them. When their fraud detection kicked in because of my traveling, the hoops to get the account reactivated were enormous.

When doing business through Paypal, I had to take in account the fraud rate, which for virtual properties was quite high.

Most likely, for normal people selling normal things, the hassle is just not worth it.

<comment><USER11> _That said, when things did go wrong it was a major PIA to correct them. When their fraud detection kicked in because of my traveling, the hoops to get the account reactivated were enormous._

I'm a platinum card holder of a major credit card and I had exactly the same issues (except my card was deactivated for _2 weeks_ ). I don't think this is a PayPal problem _per se_ but one of a general lack of customer service standards in the finance industry.

<comment><USER16> Hmm... I've had the opposite experience with my credit card issuers. When I'm traveling a lot for business, I seem to have a card number stolen every 9-18 months. When this happens, the issuer always phones me before I notice any odd charges (and then I phone them back to handle it, because anyone can claim to work for the fraud detection department). Both companies have also been good on the rare occasions when I've disputed charges.

Of course I always travel with at least one spare card, so it doesn't inconvenience me much if they need to cancel a card and send me a replacement. But I wonder how that would work if I didn't regularly return to a fixed address? How do the digital nomad types handle these problems?

<comment><USER11> Not exactly a solution, but I have five credit cards. A few of them I don't even use any more but it's handy to have them there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Many sites perceive that accepting payment through paypal dilutes their brand. Whether this is valid or not is open to argument of course.

I've never had a problem with paypal (or ebay for that matter) but I use both sparingly. Most of my paypal transactions occur on Newegg and other large-ish online shops. I wouldn't use it for a large purchase with a private party simply because I don't trust private parties with large purchases, no way I see for any intermediary to smooth over human nature.

</comment><comment><USER18> I never used PayPal much, but I created an account to pay for a software subscription a couple of years back. A few months later I got an email from PayPal about an automatic renewal of that subscription that was failing because the associated credit card had expired.

Not only there was no indication that the payment would occur automatically, nor were there any way to cancel it. Absolutely unbelievable.

I immediately canceled my account and never used PayPal again.

<comment><USER19> That sounds more like an issue with the software subscription being automatic, not some evilness on PayPal's part?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I use PayPal and ShareIT to sell software. I originally set up two options because I specifically didn't want people to have to trust PayPal. In both cases people can buy directly by entering a credit card without having an account.

It turns out that at least 80% of people choose to use PayPal. Even big corporations where I thought PayPal would be an anathema choose PayPal in preference to ShareIT.

In cases where people won't deal with PayPal it seems like they won't deal with ShareIT either and they ask for a direct invoice. Despite my initial expectation, I've _never_ had someone tell me they specifically wouldn't use PayPal who then chose to use ShareIT, even though I do make a point of asking in cases where they insist on a direct invoice.

I'm not sure what any of this means, but my experience is that when given a choice between PayPal vs another provider they probably haven't heard of, they do use PayPal. I think if there is a bias, it is against all such 3rd party payment providers vs. directly supporting credit card transactions. As one commenter suggests, not supporting credit cards yourself is a strong signal that you're not a well established, reliable software vendor.

</comment><comment><USER21> Because ebay bought it?

<comment><USER22> Indirectly, yes, I think that was a problem - by buying PayPal and closing their own payment service ("BillPoint"?) they ensured PayPal never had to worry about competition again.

<comment><USER23> and not to mention completely blocking Google Payments from having any part in ebay auctions, and shutting down the excellent Western Union Auction Payments service, where the buyer pays the fee to send the payment, and ebay can't double dip in the fees (charging the seller a fee for the final value and then charging the seller a fee to receive payment through paypal).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I must obviously be in the minority opinion here, but I've been selling online for over 6 years using PayPal, many thousands and thousands of transactions, and really have had very few issues - no more then I have had with 2checkout or Moneybookers. Their procedures are fairly normal, I don't feel their customer service is any better (or worse) then other merchant providers I have worked with, and all in all they do what they say they will do.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have never understood why most people even created PayPal accounts. A PayPal like system that worked well would be very convenient. But, when I go try to create an account, I always get stopped by the Terms of Service. How could anyone think that is reasonable? Why should I waive my cardholder rights for an associated credit card? If you walked into a store and they asked you to waive your rights under your cardholder agreement in order to use a credit card, would you do it? And, then you read about the dispute resolution process. It is clear that if you ever get any money out of the system, you should just consider yourself lucky. I'd say that if you think of money in the system as play money and don't care about any associated bank account or credit card, then PayPal would be OK. Otherwise, it is not reasonable. I conclude that most people don't read the agreement, and just hope.

</comment><comment><USER26> How does TipJoy compared to Paypal in terms of ease of use, transparency, APIs etc?</comment>


My bf got me to code - <AUTHOR> http://fongchin.com/bf-got-me-to-code/

<comment><USER2> "Then I got hooked. I like the feeling of being able to control everything in a browser"

I liked this. Remove the "in a browser" clause, and I think you found the core of every passionate developer. There's also those that enjoy sharing with, or enabling others, but I suspect this one covers 99.99999% of all code writers out there.

<comment><USER3> My motivation comes from a very different angle, though I don't know how shared it is. What I love about programming is the feeling of having to control everything. Computers don't forgive, they forget when you least want them to, and fuzziness is impossible. Writing code helps me clarify my own thoughts and ensure that I really know what I am saying. The mental state of a good hacking session is better than meditation for me, and saving time and the joy of creation are nice side benefits. Am I misunderstanding you? Are you using decimal places to indicate forceful intent rather than logical prediction?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm I think meditation is awesome because it clears my mind. I like coding just for the pure satisfaction of being able to solve problems elegantly and feeling confident about it. Part of it is control, but mostly for me it's about the certainty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Years ago, probably around 2006 or 2007, my gf learned how to design and slice in HTML and CSS too. Its a good starting point although the real challenge will be actually picking up a real programming language thereafter. Best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER5> this is so cute!! congratulations. Song is a great teacher.

</comment><comment><USER6> lol. with this kind of title you will be spammed for sure. good luck, but own fault.

<comment><AUTHOR> enlighten me... what kind of spam?

<comment><USER6> there are a lot of lonely guys out there.</comment></comment></comment>


Thank you for the latest update :) - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the latest update, all the little interface tweaks and polish are wonderful.

A quick feature request: A 'liked' submissions link on users own profile. Would give a list of previous stories that you have upvoted.

Also I've heard a few people say they want search the past few days. I'd love to see it too but it looks like it would take more effort than the value it would generate currently

</comment><comment><USER2> I agree. I'm real into the fact that I can see if people responded to any comments I've said without trying to find the post again.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ah, I just saw the orange asterisk next to my comments and submissions. This will indeed prove to be useful. But seeing the replies to my own comments is the best, thanks.</comment>


A Week with the Coin Beta - <AUTHOR> http://edwardchang.org/post/112004662375/a-week-with-the-coin-yc-w13-beta

<comment><USER2> I had purchased 2 coins and was very excited to get it - up till the point where they asked for my social security number.

There is no reason why they need that information. And even if they did - their website looks like it was created in a total of 5 minutes.</comment>


Dubious (Computer programmer) Deal, Cloaked by National Security Claim - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/us/politics/20data.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> >Mr. Montgomery's former lawyer, Michael Flynn - who now describes Mr. Montgomery as a "con man" - says he believes that the administration has been shutting off scrutiny of Mr. Montgomery's business for fear of revealing that the government has been duped.

Can lawyers make such statements against former clients?</comment>


Elon Musk: we must put a million people on Mars to ensure humanity has a future - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-planet-civilisation <comment><USER2> Very well written article with a lot of food for thought. Musk is thinking along the lines of colonizing Mars to save the human race. This is visionary thinking; maybe realistic, maybe not, but visionary.

The Americans have a great love of adventure that extends to space travel, but we are also an impatient people who want Buck Rogers and the 25th Century to happen tomorrow and not in 450 years.

Unfortunately, Vietnam and the Great Society and post-Vietnam stagflation of the 1970s put an end to our brief push out of the gravity well. Trillions of dollars were earmarked for other purposes, pushing Nasa and its quaint, difficult-to-understand projects to the back burner.

Post-Apollo, Nasa limped along with the Space Shuttle and the I.S.S., but the Shuttle is dead and the I.S.S. will eventually lose its political support. Now we can't even fly our astronauts to the I.S.S. without Russian assistance. What kind of commitment to human space flight does that demonstrate?

So, it's refreshing to see a smart visionary like Elon Musk actually walk the walk. If he says he's going to put a greenhouse full of plants on Mars by 2030, I believe him. This is a project that Nasa could have, and should have, done long since.

But since the country no longer supports this kind of public effort, at least we can place our hopes in private efforts to accomplish the same thing. Many of the 15th-16th Century explorers of the New World were privately funded, after all.

Probably in the end, it will be public-private partnerships that get us into space for good; the country will decide that it wants people to be in space, and firms like SpaceX will become contractors to Nasa like the rocket companies of old. But the difference will be that these newer companies are space-capable on their own, can launch their own craft from their own pads and bypass Nasa completely. Perhaps Nasa will then be more of a research organization, doing the deep space probes and basic research that private firms can't justify.</comment>


SpaceX Resume - cole-maclean

Hi everyone, I've made an online resume at http://www.spacexresume.appspot.com in an attempt to get a position at SpaceX. I'm posting it here looking for any comments or advice you guys might have and to use you as a resource to help my chances. It may also help in the off chance the right person sees it and likes it.<p>A couple comments: 1. I've intentionally broken some links to content I don't want posted in this version
2. Part of me is nervous about posting this to the wild. I've copied SpaceX's base webpage without explicit permission, but my intentions are good and believe it's an innocent use of their source code. If some of you disagree, I'll take it down.
3. If anyone works/knows anyone that works at SpaceX, feel free to put in a good word for me =) Thanks everyone,
-Cole <comment><AUTHOR> As logn mentioned, the images look like they were done in 1995. I'd go so far as to say the entire website looks very antiquated.

Also, don't use online slang like "tl;dr". It took me years to figure out what that actually meant. We're not all on Reddit. In fact, the inclusion of such slang in a professional document biases me into thinking you'd probably spend a good portion of your work day on Reddit.

Better alternatives for "tl;dr" are "summary", "synopsis", "overview", etc.

You mention that you know a lot of the site and its contents sucks. You should have cleaned all this up _before_ posting it to HN, as that would probably be the short window in time where someone with SpaceX would see it. Don't publish half-ass work.

<comment> cole-maclean Okay that's fair, sounds like a better path to go would be to make an entirely updated website.

Hahaha, you're right, I'll change the slang.

The link content is broken on purpose, and I think the About Me section is weak, but I don't consider this half-assed. Maybe I posted this prematurely, but I did want to get a sense of peoples opinions and advice. And I'm glad people are giving me honest advice. I'm getting the sense that it's simply not good enough, which I think is better to find out now from you guys other then a rejection letter from SpaceX.

Really appreciate the comments.

<comment><USER2> You need to have someone edit your copy. 'Your Motivation Statement' is a huge jumble. I know you're excited but calmly examine why you want to work for SpaceX and then, when you're done, get someone good at editing to read it through for you and rip it apart.

This is a first draft, that's why he said it was half-assed.

Your final version shouldn't have any obvious mistakes at all. You're applying to work for a SPACESHIP company. Details are incredibly important.

example: "Each section of this website will start with a TL;DR to summarize the content of that page. Fell free to have a look around!"

TL;FR, Fell, and !. You're writing something that should actually be fairly formal. Don't use exclamation points. Fell is a typo. There should be no spelling errors or typos. TL;DR was covered.

Not trying to break you down, just trying to tell you this shit really matters.

<comment> cole-maclean You're absolutely right. Don't worrying, you're not breaking me down, it's all valid and solid advice. Sounds like I got too excited in both my motivation statement and posting the site. I've diabled the site, but hopefully I can take all the comments here and post a nearly final version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> SpaceX has a very clear description how to apply <http://www.spacex.com/careers.php>. They offer the possibility to inculde a videolink, thats definitely a chance to stand out. Depending on the position your applying for you may have to work on very critical szenarios. Try to give your application the level of perfection a mission critical component would require. Also consider SpaceX probably recieves hundreds of applications. It may be better to stricly follow their guidelines in order to keep their application system efficient.

<comment> cole-maclean I think that's a valid point. My plan was to upload a conventional CV, but have the opening line refer to the website. I'll work on the perfection part. Thanks for the tips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> clickable: <http://www.spacexresume.appspot.com>

Also, your linkedin profile says you are in Canada. I hope for your sake that you're a US Citizen; otherwise you won't be able to work at SpaceX.

</comment><comment><USER5> Your tl;dr on About Me is 20%+ of the text that follows.

Your images are dithered like it's 1995.

This all feels a bit cheesey. I'd just make a general homepage for yourself with a blog page. Invest in your own domain name. Also, mimic the style of modern web pages (not SpaceX). Take your News to Me stories and make a fuller blog post for each one. Omit the dates so it doesn't look like you put this together in a day. Maybe add some physics/space/engineering posts too.

Further, blatantly copying the SpaceX homepage is a foolish move. One, instead of calling you for an interview, their legal department might send you a stern letter. And two, it looks a bit desperate. You should be an all around brilliant person in high demand for jobs, not someone spending a week thinking how to weasel your way into an interview for one company.

<comment><USER6> While I don't think they'd be so heavy handed, I do agree that lifting content directly from their website and using it as part of your application probably wont give the best first impression. Also it looks like you're using a standard web palette in your GIFs which is causing the ugly dithering effect.

<comment> cole-maclean Okay awesome, thanks for the tips blockjack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's an interesting idea! The major point I would make is that it isn't clear why you want to work at SpaceX - the only point that alludes to it is that you want to work there because "Mastering space is one of the toughest challenges this generation will work on, and I want to be a part of that challenge from the beginning by working for one of the first private companies to tackle it"

Secondly - I'm not quite sure what you want to do at SpaceX; you haven't really defined your value to the company. If you want some further points email: seb [at] xtextx [dot] com. I used to work as a recruiter.

<comment> cole-maclean Awesome. I'll try to better communicate why SpaceX is _the_ company I want to work for. Specifying where I see myself working and adding value is a great idea, thanks sfrechtling.

<comment><USER7> Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't you have to be a US citizen/permanent resident?</comment>


A Tutorial on Countable Ordinals (2010) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~tf/fundamentalsequence.pdf <comment><USER2> This is IMHO a much better introduction to countable ordinals:

[https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2016/06/29/large- counta...](https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2016/06/29/large-countable- ordinals-part-1/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks like a paper that would be in SIGBOVIK.

[http://sigbovik.org/](http://sigbovik.org/)

</comment><comment><USER4> wayback URL:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20200209091540/https://www.dpmms....](http://web.archive.org/web/20200209091540/https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~tf/fundamentalsequence.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> IMO this author is very good at philosophy of mathematics as well as mathematics. He's not COMPLETELY alone in that, but it is refreshing.</comment>


Billion dollar brains  - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/3566e886-e32a-11e0-bb55-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1YuX4kXcn

<comment><USER2> And how many of these companies are EBITDA profitable, and not lifestyle companies.

I remember the business week cover of Kevin Rose, which gave a similar mythos- narrative. But Digg never lived up to the hype. It flamed out.

But in a gold rush, you make money selling the dream

</comment><comment><USER3> basically most of them are creating the same things on the internet "social networking" and advertising. It's just amazing that people from the old generation are supplying ammunition to the new generation on making easy money thru the internet.

I mean, come to think of it, the new generation creates the interesting stuffs and the old generation are the ones enjoying it with amazement. It's just a matter of inventions and creating a need for the invention.</comment>


Don't Ignore the Trolls. Feed Them Until They Explode. - <AUTHOR> http://jezebel.com/dont-ignore-the-trolls-feed-them-until-they-explode-977453815 <comment><USER2> The article is ridiculous: _Criado-Perez 's crime? Advocating (successfully) for Jane Austen to appear on a £10 banknote...Doesn't she know that money is man-paper!?_

A woman is already on every piece of British currency that I can find in my pocket.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=british+money&source=lnms&tb...](https://www.google.com/search?q=british+money&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=n9_PUuGYLsrF0QWph4CQDw&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1534&bih=793)

<comment><USER3> We don't get to choose whether the queen goes on or not.

<comment><USER4> Sure you do; many nations have made that choice. Of course, it might not help the gender ratio on your currency. The only money I can find with a feminine picture is a dollar coin with a Native American woman.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> barry-cotter It is a pity that the internet is full of assholes and that they send deeply vile and abusive messages. Even Gawker Media employees don't deserve that kind of shit.

That said this was very funny.

 _I 'm trying to think of an instance when anonymous women descended, spewing violent rape or castration threats, upon a man for expressing an opinion as innocuous as Criado-Perez's. I can think of instances of funny, political, retaliatory trolling—like when Twitter feminists co-opted the #INeedMasculismBecause hashtag, or when Rick Perry's Facebook page was deluged with questions about menses. But those are not examples of aggression, they are self-defense. They are not analogous to "I will rape you in an alley" or "Don't leave your phone at home, sweetie." They are reactions to misogyny—the same brand of misogyny that fuels internet trolling. They are women speaking to power—the same power structure that empowers and perpetuates anonymous trolls._

<comment><USER5> No true Scotsman? If women trolling is by definition self defense, you won't find any examples of women trolling, no?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a shame such a boring writer is to replace Charles Darwin. I can think of many women who I would like to see on a banknote other than Jane Austen. Funny enough one of the 2 abusers is actually a woman.

<comment><USER7> But in her time Jane Austen's prose was considered assertive and radical, wasn't it? Just because you think her writing is boring today doesn't make her any less significant in historical context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> jezebel on HN

<comment><USER9> Could you put your point on HN as well?

<comment><USER10> It's a shit source for a shit story that attracts a bunch of shits posts from people who I would describe as utter shits.

There is nothing interesting in this submission. Perhaps so ething mily interesting wod be how they were caught, or how some company is trying to stop attacks like that, or etcetc.

But this?

<comment><USER9> _> It's a shit source for a shit story that attracts a bunch of shits posts from people who I would describe as utter shits._

I came to HN for the tech news, but stayed for the intelligent and insightful commentary.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Volunia launching for Power Users in a few minutes - <AUTHOR> http://www.volunia.com/

<comment><USER2> Not the least clear what this does.</comment>


GraalVM: The holy graal of polyglot JVM? - <AUTHOR> https://www.transposit.com/blog/2019.01.02-graalvm-holy/?c=hn <comment><USER2> Supposedly es4x (powered by GraalVM) cracked the top-5 empower benchmarks, while no other Node/JS frameworks are in top-20/top-30 (iirc):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUJ85k3aEg4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUJ85k3aEg4)

The assertion in the ^ video (from the es4x author) is that node programs hop across the http/libuv/v8/etc. boundaries all the time, and that's the majority of the overhead, not actual business/program logic.

So, es4x sitting on graal brings all of those http/event loop/js runtime infra projects into a single optimizing VM.

My memory is ~fuzy on the details, but I believe I got our apollo server running running on es4x a few months back, and the latency was ~double node, which was still impressive IMO, but I didn't see the amazing gains that the author does. Not sure why.

<comment><USER3> I integrated a really simple JS runtime into a C# project once and found the same thing. V8 was orders of magnitude slower due to the interop overhead. Even though the IronJS compiler was very simplistic it was just so much faster to do it inside the CLR and let the MSIL JIT optimize to the degree it was able. An example of "worse is better" I suppose.

<comment><USER4> Just like Google did with their FloatMath class, after Dalvik got replaced by a proper JIT compiler.

[https://developer.android.com/reference/android/util/FloatMa...](https://developer.android.com/reference/android/util/FloatMath)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Clojure "Hello, world" compiled with Graal running in Docker wasn't that bad: [https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/66e024439cdefbc43375...](https://gist.github.com/cellularmitosis/66e024439cdefbc43375a4988882af11)

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you tried to build anything larger with Graal/Clojure?

<comment><USER6> I'm not GP, but we have done several native Clojure CLI apps with Graal:

[https://github.com/latacora/wernicke](https://github.com/latacora/wernicke)

[https://github.com/latacora/recidiffist- cli](https://github.com/latacora/recidiffist-cli)

[https://github.com/latacora/caro](https://github.com/latacora/caro)

As well as several internal tools. It mostly works fine. Graal is actually the default JDK on my development machine.

If there's one thing I'd fix, it's the ability to bake dylibs into the single binaries. E.g. if you want good elliptic curve TLS, you need sunec.so/dylib/dll, and part of the point for native-image for us is the ability to ship a single binary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Watch out if you choose the "enterprise" version; you can't use it for development of an app that will be used in production.

<comment><USER8> Indeed you need to buy the enterprise version for use in production. This is funding the project so that the majority of the features can stay open source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Until GraalJS can get even close to native JS VMs in performance, I still think of it as Java VM.

[https://github.com/graalvm/graaljs/issues/74](https://github.com/graalvm/graaljs/issues/74)

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I am reading that issue incorrectly, but it seemed there was some back and forth on startup time penalties and what constituted a valid benchmark to compare the two systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If what they just wanted was ES6 syntax, why not use Babel? But I guess what they really wanted was to get off of their deprecated JS runtime (Nashorn).

</comment><comment><USER11> Great to see GraalJS is a realistic option. This polyglot VM idea is fascinating, though it's not likely to go anywhere for my personal use until GraalVM Python gets some traction. I check in on it now and then - every time it hits HN - but it seems to be going nowhere. Anyone have any experience with that?

</comment><comment><USER12> GraalVM Community is GPLv2 with no support.[0]

GraalVM Enterprise costs $18/mo/core[1]. Every machine running GE needs a license so a 16-core production server, 4-core staging box and 4-core dev laptop will cost you $18*24 = $432/mo.

[0]: [https://www.graalvm.org/docs/faq/](https://www.graalvm.org/docs/faq/) [1]: [https://www.oracle.com/uk/a/ocom/docs/corporate/pricing/graa...](https://www.oracle.com/uk/a/ocom/docs/corporate/pricing/graalvm- price-list.pdf)

<comment><USER13> According to your first source, GraalVM

> is free for testing, evaluation, or for developing non-production > applications

This means that the price model is, perhaps unsurprisingly, close to the OracleJava one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I found this helpful for getting going with OpenJDK 8/Graal on Mac OS X (but the instructions are highly applicable to Linux as well).

[https://blog.softwaremill.com/graalvm-installation-and- setup...](https://blog.softwaremill.com/graalvm-installation-and-setup-on- macos-294dd1d23ca2)

<comment><USER15> There is a brew cask now: [https://github.com/DeLaGuardo/homebrew- graalvm](https://github.com/DeLaGuardo/homebrew-graalvm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Mind me asking some questions here?

(openjdk 8)

Do you need to install graalvm separately on the target system, or can the compiler and runtime be packaged with the application in the uberjar?

Do you need to change the the java execution command line to enable graalvm?

Does end user need to know anything about truffle or is it api for language developers?

<comment><USER6> GraalVM has several parts. If you want to run polyglot apps directly, yes, you need to install GraalVM. If you compile your JVM apps to native, no, you get a standalone binary.

Truffle is a developer-facing API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am still dreaming on Ruby, C extension, Rails, along with Javascript bundling all running solely on GraalVM and nothing else.

Although Chris Seaton is no longer working on TruffleRuby, so I guess this isn't going to happen anytime soon.

<comment><USER18> > Although Chris Seaton is no longer working on TruffleRuby

I'm still working with TruffleRuby, just at Shopify instead of Oracle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It needs to support wasm on the front and the back, as well as RISC-V on the back (and maybe on the front). When it does those things, it will be The Ring.

<comment><AUTHOR> WASM: [https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/1358](https://github.com/oracle/graal/issues/1358)

Wasn't able to find anything about RISC-V, file an issue :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't get it. Seems like a lot of overhead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, what do you mean?

<comment><USER20> Bloated JVMs are not worth the trouble. Especially with containers...

<comment><USER4> Containers are catching up with features that bloated JVM have had for years, without their monitoring and debugging capabilities in production.

We still don't see any business need to bother with containers, other that being trendy and fashionable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Customers running js on your server in a Java VM doesn't sound very secure. I could be wrong but when I see Java I get the suspicion that user code and privileged server code are running in the same process. Of course they could have a properly sandboxed java process and are just using Java because that is what they are familiar with.

<comment><USER22> That perspective is somewhat dated to be blunt. A modern Java deployment would be identical security wise to node, with one app per Java process running with the minimum of privileges.

<comment><USER23> I think you are being very polite here. Fearing the JRE/JVM in this particular way falls somewhere between superstitious and ignorant.

<comment><USER24> I have no worries, because I make sure to sacrifice chickens to my Tomcat apps each day. Although going into the cloud is making it trickier, chickens generally can't fly that high.</comment></comment></comment></comment>