About Pando - <AUTHOR> http://uncrunched.com/2012/04/09/about-pando/ <comment><USER2> It's nice to finally see companies tire of Arrington's shit. Out of two jobs in less than a year. Hope the trend continues.

<comment><USER3> I hope so too. Maybe he'll stop posting "news" about himself and realize how uninteresting his drama is. And maybe at that point I'll stop leaving annoyed, uninteresting, and bitter comments about how annoyed I am of seeing his name pop up anywhere.

I think this will be a good test, so to speak, of Pando to see if they hop on the drama train like those at TC enjoy(ed) doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yawn. These are not the tech news you are looking for. Move along. Move along.

</comment><comment><USER5> Another source of drama, woohoo. Also, how much effort did they go to to make such a simple page so unresponsive. Still harkening back to TC I see. The page is nearly completely unresponsive for a good 6 seconds while who-knows-what loads in. What the hell?

According to Chrome's Inspector it took 20.60s to load entirely. (And after the wait, they're not even using the Twitter widget properly as it's giving a 4xx error)

</comment><comment><USER6> Go. Away. Arrington.

I am tired of your Paris Hilton shit - you provide no value to the tech community.</comment>


Faster: Fast numerical calculations in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/AdamNiederer/faster <comment><USER2> When I read "absurdly fast", I expected to see some benchmarks against an equivalent SIMD implementation in C or at least a similar library in another language.

Please consider adding such benchmarks so that we can assess how fast this library really is when compared to other more established libraries.

<comment><USER3> I'll add benchmarks soon; I'm trying to make it usable first ;).

Right now, it's within 5% of ugly-style explicit SIMD code in the absolute worst case (the example in the README is more like 1%). The hot bit (the body of the map) compiles down to 100% simd instructions in the order LLVM thinks will be the fastest, and the load/store bit has an extra branch per load/store. This is because faster is mainly a bunch of 1-line wrappers around SIMD intrinsics, and a bunch of polyfills which only get used on machines which don't support those intrinsics.

The main reasons you'd experience a perf hit compared to explicit SIMD when using this library would be using runtime feature detection (minimal, and not implemented yet - would add around 2 branches per simd_iter call), getting lazy with gathers/scatters rather than ugly bit-level hacks, and accidentally using operations which aren't vectorizable on your machine (scatters on non- avx512, reductive operations on non-sse4.2, etc) and not realizing it (explicit simd will throw a SIGILL; faster will use a scalar polyfill).

<comment><USER4> Can't you test for the capabilities of the processor once and use the right SIMD code from then on? Maybe it makes sense to introduce a block around the SIMD code, which gets compiled into different blocks of SIMD instructions. Then you only pay for choosing the right block once. That's what I would do in Haskell at least.

<comment><USER5> This has to be done at a granularity coarse enough that the function call overhead doesn't kill the performance. It has to be entire loops, for example, not just some primitive operation like a dot product (which has at least 3 different implementations on x86).

On my C code, I have a build script that rebuilds a shared library 3-4 times for different CPUs (e.g. with and without -mavx2) and then uses dlopen() to choose the right one at runtime. The actual SIMD code has a bunch of #ifdefs to choose the appropriate implementation for primitive operations.

GCC has function multiversioning [0][1] (__attribute__((target("sse4.2")))) to enable choosing a function implementation based on CPU capabilities at runtime, but that is not suitable for the use case I describe. I want my "high level" code to be the same, but using the right implementation for "primitive" ops like dot product. Using multiversioning would completely kill the optimizer and cause excessive register spilling and other unwanted artifacts.

[0] [https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/FunctionMultiVersioning](https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/FunctionMultiVersioning) [1] [https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-6.2.0/gcc/Function- Multiv...](https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-6.2.0/gcc/Function- Multiversioning.html)

<comment><USER4> > This has to be done at a granularity coarse enough that the function call > overhead doesn't kill the performance. It has to be entire loops, for > example, not just some primitive operation like a dot product.

Yes, You are right! I understood, that they wanted to add the branch to _every_ SIMD instruction. I concur with branching outside of loops.

Re Rust: I expect that one could use a macro around the function (or annotate it, if the macro system is good enough) that generates these different functions and branches to the right one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if one could do a Rust version of [https://github.com/ekmett/rts](https://github.com/ekmett/rts) ? It's a SPMD- on-SIMD exploratory hack, with SOA and masked branching, built on C++ templates.

Core is [https://github.com/ekmett/rts/blob/master/src/rts/varying.hp...](https://github.com/ekmett/rts/blob/master/src/rts/varying.hpp) and [https://github.com/ekmett/rts/blob/master/src/rts/vec.hpp](https://github.com/ekmett/rts/blob/master/src/rts/vec.hpp) .

<comment> Ar-Curunir So something like rayon + faster?

<comment><USER6> Yes, plus integrated branched control flow using simd masks.[1]

[1] eg, random ggl link: [https://gain-performance.com/2017/05/14/umesimd- tutorial-8-c...](https://gain-performance.com/2017/05/14/umesimd- tutorial-8-conditional-execution-using-masks/)

[https://github.com/AdamNiederer/faster](https://github.com/AdamNiederer/faster) [https://github.com/rayon-rs/rayon](https://github.com/rayon-rs/rayon)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For better or worse I have a very big soft spot for things in programming that go fast, even moreso for things that go _really fast_.

I look forward to learning more Rust so I can get an excuse to use this.

<comment><USER8> Back in the day we had to add extra STOP statements at the end of our Fortran programs if the machine was really fast because it would crash through the first one or two.

<comment><USER7> Really?

That's actually awesome! CPU's and GPU's are capable of breakneck speeds, so I love to see things that really make the most out of the capacity available.

<comment><USER8> Nope. This is what used to pass for a programmer joke.

          STOP
      C Add a couple more stop statements in case someone runs this on a Cray and it is going so fast it breaks though the first one:
          STOP
          STOP

<comment><USER9> Well, there _is_ this: [http://elixir.free- electrons.com/linux/latest/source/arch/x8...](http://elixir.free- electrons.com/linux/latest/source/arch/x86/kernel/process.c#L360)

Yes, Linux does the equivalent of

        while(true)
        {
          halt
        }

I don't think that code will loop, but why take the risk?

There is/was a detailed description of what it takes to stop an OS that included multiple ways to stop the CPUs, executed in order in the hope/expectation that one of them would work that in the end hit a similar loop, but I can't find it anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Author of Faster here. Thanks so much for posting this; I was wondering where the flood of stars was coming from!

</comment><comment><USER10> How do these numbers stack up to equivalent algorithms in C and Fortran?

Are we going to see a RustBLAS soon? Something open-source that could go up against MKL for performance would be really amazing.

<comment><USER11> What's the point of reimplementing BLAS in Rust? Those libraries have been polished for literally decades. They're not even security critical.

<comment><USER10> No point of doing it in Rust specifically, as opposed to any other language.

But the point would be no longer having to trade software freedom (or at least open source) for performance -- try benchmarking Numpy built on MKL vs OpenBLAS and you'll see what I mean.

If someone gets inspired by a new language to try and write a free or open- source MKL competitor, because that language has such-and-such features that make it more feasible than in Fortran or C, then that'd be fantastic. All I was suggesting is that it'd be cool if Rust was that language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Superlatives are problematic because for instance "fast" is relative to something and that something might change over time.

Superlatives are usually challenged and you will require proof. The proof itself can also be challenged. Suddenly you are spending a lot of time.

I would rather say: "SIMD math library" rather than "Fast library".

<comment><USER13> "Faster" is technically a comparative, not a superlative. Otherwise, sound advice.

<comment><USER12> Right, superlative is not the right term. "Fastest" would be the superlative, and is not in use.

I am just generally against referring to software in absolute terms like: simple, fast, friendly, lightweight, etc. since it can be misleading.

I consider a good practice to separate facts and opinions to achieve clear communication. Passing opinions as facts is dogmatism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there a simpler way than building to find out whether a crate requires nightly, as this one does?

<comment><USER15> You could try clicking on the "build|passing" badge and see what it's being built against.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Utterly superficial thought, but how about the name "fastr" for this crate?

<comment><USER17> Making it harder to look up / talk to people about seems worse ;)

<comment><USER18> Are you referring to "fastr" or "faster", though? I'd imagine the former is much, much, much easier to google for and remember than "faster rust library", which could return basically any piece of rust code ever.

<comment><USER17> fastr is a loaded term already anyway, plenty of google hits for it (graalvm's r implementation). Crates.io search works just fine though

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Won't the compiler be autovectorising that kind of code already?

<comment><USER3> Sadly, even something like [1.0f32].map(|s| s.sqrt().abs().recip()).collect() doesn't get vectorized 99% of the time; you can check the disassembly and you'll see sqrtss et al.

<comment><USER20> There are some llvm flags you can pass to see what got autovectorized in the rustic output. And some that make it autovec more stuff. It is really sensitive to container size. Just throwing a few flags when compiling n-body speeds it up quite a bit over the one up on the benchmark game. I got it to beat the c implementation which had explicit SIMD with portable rust code. Still didn't beat FORTRAN with ifort but faster than gfortran. Also, when rust brings in an llvm with newgvn the autovec should get better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I thought modern languages optimized code into SIMD instructions where it could automatically...

I know Java does this.

<comment><USER22> They do. It's called auto-vectorization and the Rust compiler does it (mostly by virtue of LLVM). But there are _thousands_ [1] of SIMD instructions just for x86_64 alone and auto-vectorization doesn't come close to covering all of them. Even if auto-vectorization does cover the instructions you want to use, you might be justifiably uncomfortable with relying on it for performance in every case (or perhaps you simply can't rely on it), and would instead prefer to explicitly write out the transformations.

[1] - [https://software.intel.com/sites/landingpage/IntrinsicsGuide...](https://software.intel.com/sites/landingpage/IntrinsicsGuide/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't see absurdly fast anything in this post. Are there any benchmarks that would support the statement "absurdly fast numerical calculations"?</comment>


If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the fallout - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160424-if-cryonics-suddenly-worked-wed-need-to-face-the-fallout <comment><USER3> > "There's no guarantee that this 'being' would be the same one who first > entered into the cryogenic process, either. As de Grey says, the question > remains of "whether scanning the brain and uploading it into a different > substrate is revival at all, or if you'd be creating a new individual with > the same characteristics."

I think this is probably a bit misleading. I can't imagine de Grey being anything other than reductionist in his views about the mind, so I can only imagine his interpretation of this question to be as follows: "has the scanning process captured all the relevant information about the person's mind?" Have you created a new person (by missing out some information from the original's physical instantiation), one who is perhaps very similar to the original, but where some details are different because the scan was not of high enough fidelity?

Of course, it's still unknown whether it's even possible to extract sufficient detail from the brain; if by unhappy chance it turns out that some of the quantum details of the brain's state are important to the mind, then it's possible we may simply never be able to copy a person. Let us hope that is not the case.

<comment> T-A So if I manage to create a perfect copy of you, you have no objection to me shooting you - the original one - in the head afterwards? After all, you - <USER2> perfect copy - will still be alive and well.

If that prospect makes you a little uncomfortable, you are intuiting the problem of "pattern identity" vs "continuity identity".

<comment><USER4> If you make a perfect copy, the identity has branched. There are now two distinct entities (with continuity) that are starting to diverge, why would any of them accept to be shot?

<comment><USER5> ... not to mention, each of them might feel some small measure of empathy for the other!

What if one did this regularly? Would battle-hardened cloners become insensitive to "retirement" of their doppelgangers, or as the last survivor of the series of slayings would they start to feel hunted?

Really feels at least a few centuries too early to even gauge whether it is possible to substantially capture (let alone reproduce) the state of a brain. Sure would be disappointing if it turned out you could get 90% of the functionality with a ten-state DFA featuring frowning and pooping, but it would make cryonics a whole lot easier. "Just leave me enough brainstem to get home."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reversible vitrification is a serious field of research that actually appears pretty close to realization for use in the fields of tissue engineering and organ transplant. A number of independent research groups are working on a variety of approaches. Some sample reading:

[http://www.the- scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34190/...](http://www.the- scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34190/title/Icing-Organs/)

[http://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/2169002...](http://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/21690025-after-decades-piecemeal-progress-science-cryogenically- storing-human)

[http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2015/nov/discovery- co...](http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2015/nov/discovery-could-open- door-frozen-preservation-tissues-whole-organs)

It is also the case that a rabbit kidney has been vitrified, thawed, transplanted, and it worked for a while. See:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/)

I think that progress towards reversible vitrification of organs is one of the most important drivers of growing support and acceptance of cryonics among those who write and opinionate. It is hard to throw out the evidence for preservation of fine structure in the brain when there is earnest progress towards preserving the similarly fine structure needed for organ function.

</comment><comment><USER7> _"You can't have the technology to wake people up and not have the technology to do a bunch of other great things, like provide abundance to the population."_

Sure you can. Just a couple paragraphs previously, you were making the point that cryonics is "just medicine", and medicine and (for example) agronomy advance at very different rates. I can easily imagine a future in which we have the technology and medicine to revive all of the frozen cancer patients, or all of the frozen ALS patients, but are still struggling with drought, climate change, and widespread poverty.

</comment><comment><USER8> Funny to me that they call out the excellent Vanilla Sky (yes, I know Abre los Ojos is better) and the horrible (but fun) Demolition Man, but don't mention the much more likely Idiocracy.

In seriousness, people who will wake up will face a form of Future Shock that will look tame by our standards. The Forever War touched on this incredibly well.

<comment><USER9> What about Futurama? The whole show is about someone who gets woken up from being cryogenically frozen. We could stand to learn a lot about Fry and his adventures.

<comment><USER10> I love Futurama, but come on. The only thing you're going to learn by watching that show is how to write a funny TV script.

<comment><USER11> Really? What about Jurassic Bark[0]? That episode is extremely sad and precisely about the fallout of being cryogenically frozen.

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Bark](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_Bark)

<comment><USER12> The saddest futurama episode ever.

Only seen it once, it made me feel too depressed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I feel like when we're able to put frozen brains in fresh bodies, refugees coming back from a different era will be lesser concern than the whole technological immortality thing. How do we ensure everyone has access to immortality (because this obviously needs to be a human right)? How then do we deal with population growth when people don't die of old age?

<comment><USER14> 1) countries in developed countries quite regularly spend $100K-$1M to treat illnesses in poor people. I think a larger concern would be that they would choose to spend $50K to freeze a severely ill poor person than $1M to treat that same person.

2) as long as immortals don't have more children than mortals, then immortality has a surprisingly small effect on population growth.

The effects I'd be worried about would be the effects of having the majority of the world's wealth and power being held in the hands of immortals and cryogenic trusts.

<comment><USER15> Ever read 'Altered Carbon' by Richard Morgan? This SF novel (quite a page- turner, btw) is set exactly in the world like that: changing bodies extends life, and the powerful understandably have more access to that, accumulating wealth.

<comment><USER16> Soon to be released as a series on Netflix

[http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/netflix-altered-carbon- serie...](http://variety.com/2016/tv/news/netflix-altered-carbon-series-order- sci-fi-1201683629/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If cryonics suddenly worked, we'd need to face the extremely serious question of why we let almost everyone die before, i. e. how we could've made one of the most catastrophic humanitarian and public health oversights ever.

<comment><USER18> Uh, we didn't know better? I don't even understand how you could force guilt on ignorance

<comment><USER13> We can start freezing people now. The question would be, since cryo worked, why we didn't start freezing people when we already knew it could work in principle and had the technology.

<comment><USER19> It isn't that simple. You can't just toss people in a freezer and figure out how to revive them in a few centuries. We already know that the freezing process damages and destroys tissues.

<comment><USER13> I'd argue burying them or cremating damages and destroys tissues even worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Let us know when someone successfully revives a frozen rodent. Until then this stuff is just idle speculation, on par with worrying about the "fallout" from an alien invasion.

<comment><USER20> If, in 20 years, they discover how to revive a frozen rodent, it would still be worth it to freeze it today.

<comment><USER10> Why? I doubt we'll have a shortage of lab animals in 20 years.

<comment><USER21> I mean the argument for cryo basically goes "if, in 60 years, we discover how to revive frozen people, we'll probably wish we could go back and tell the people of 2016 to start freezing everybody who's dying right away. So since the only ways to avoid this outcome are total stagnation and mass extinctions that kill us _anyways_, we should probably allocate some money to doing that."

<comment><USER22> Money is finite. Given the available evidence, I'd rather spend it on universal health-care for the poor than on scientifically unsupported medical treatments. Besides which, the largest boosts to life-expectancy have tended to come from public health interventions that cross-cut the age spectrum rather than end-of-life desperation measures _anyway_.

We'd all like to act as if each human life had infinite value, but unfortunately, we don't have infinite resources to act with.

<comment><USER21> Eh, if you factor in economy of scale cryonics can arguably be competetive with end-of-life desperation measures or actually save money.

<comment><USER22> Possibly, but my point was that the actually-effective measures come decades _before_ end-of-life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There was a section about this in the _Transmetropolitan_ comic/graphic novel, if my memory is correct.

Lady gets reanimated in some sort of assembly-line mass process, gets a few days in a shelter, then gets kicked out into society at large. She then basically has some sort of culture shock and ends up homeless again.

<comment><USER24> One of the reasons may be that the future in transmetropolitan is a very dystopian one. They already expected their close ones to be long dead, but they didn't expect the world to be much worse and bizarre-looking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> There is that joke about Cobol - just wondering what could motivate people in the future to actually wake you up. Some skill only you have? Maybe Cobol really isn't such a bad bet.

</comment><comment><USER26> Check out EPR: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Preservation_and_Res...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Preservation_and_Resuscitation)

This I expect will converge with cryonics.

</comment><comment><USER27> Proponents of cryonics completely misunderstand natural selection, and frankly suffer from narcissism. If it were advantageous for organisms to live forever, they would. Without any type of genetic recombination, undying things will not outcompete dying things, period. I hate to break it to anyone, but you're not the perfect human and we do not live in a world of unlimited free energy. The only world in which "you" could live forever is a world where identity itself doesn't exist.

This basic misconception is just the tip of an iceberg of delusional thinking. Disease would have to already be conquered. There would be no economic incentive for reanimation, etc. etc.

History's greatest cultures focused on what they could achieve, not longevity. Remarkable people often die young, and there's more to that than coincidence. This vapid quest to live forever is part of the banality of our time.

</comment><comment><USER28> If.</comment>


Ask HN: Rewarding employees who eat healthy through a mobile app - <AUTHOR>

I currently have a mobile app called Foodsnap where users can enter a description of food, and get calorie and nutrition information back.
We are thinking of creating an enterprise version where employees of Company X can enter their employee ID into the app and start using it.
What we will do is assign positive points for good food behavior such as whole, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.  No negative points will be issued.
What we will do is give the point total to Company X weekly and then Company X can reward their employees however they want for good food habits (an extra PTO day, lunch, etc).
For example, if you eat an apple, lettuce, and oatmeal today, we might give you 4 points for that.  We will be following mainly the guidelines of Harvard's Nutrition Program.
Any thoughts on this? <comment><AUTHOR> So here is the logic in terms of the employer (company owner). Generally speaking, employers want their employees to be healthier so they use less pto, less health care, and to be more productive.

I think there are already some other apps where users can self report their fitness and get rewards through their respective company.

So the ultimate goal of the app is to get people to eat healthier. There are obviously many angles to this such as portion control, fiber intake, and meat, vegetables, and fruits ratio.

As to what constitutes 'healthy', it is pretty controversial, where if you ask 2 doctors, you'll get pretty much 3 answers.

Generally speaking our behavior goals for the user is to add more fruits, vegetables, and fiber specifically. When speaking with UCLA's head of oncology she pointed out that academic literature points out to most people lacking this in their diet and that consuming those items would lead to improved health.

Now as a previous commenter about overeating, at the very least the apple contains 12% fiber and 10% of vitamin C you need daily.

</comment><comment><USER2> I could see people taking advantage if the stakes were high enough- buying two meals, taking pictures of the healthier one, eating the unhealthy one, and throwing the healthy one away off-camera.

It does kinda seem like a solution looking for a problem, but maybe there are problems it solves that I don't see.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> App link for background information: <http://www.foodsnap.mobi>

</comment><comment><USER3> I can see lots of problems with it. The first thing that comes to mind: Eat your usual crap AND then also down an apple to boot to get the rewards. Great way to encourage overeating.

That's just the tip of the iceberg of what I see, but since my initial post was lost in cyberspace, I am taking that as a hint to be brief this time.</comment>


Lucasfilm Responds to 7-Year-Old's Request to Let Jedi Marry - <AUTHOR> http://geekdad.com/2015/04/jedi-marry <comment><USER2> Of course, this should be allowed, but I'm not sure whether we should go so far as to force sith bakeries to make cakes for their weddings.

<comment><USER3> Or fix their X-wings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Quick, someone get their child to request the truth about Han shooting first.

</comment><comment><USER5> Man I'm gonna miss the EU. It was a bit all over the place at the beginning but all of the major arcs after Hand of Thrawn were tightly plotted and really expanded the lore. The yuuzhan vong arc was a treasure trove even if they did kill off the two best character in the whole damn universe (Anakin JR & Chewi).

<comment><USER6> The Thrawn Trilogy and Rogue Squadron were probably the best book series in the EU and unfortunately they were dropped.

<comment><USER7> Zahn's ability to scope a plot that goes from everything-is-doomed to amazing- twist-saves-the-day in each of his _Heir to the Empire_ series is fantastic. Plus, his pacing and character development feel significantly richer than other Star Wars Universe books I've skimmed, and really feel like they naturally build on the original 3 movies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Whoever is doing the marketing lately is brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER9> Thinking about it, it'll be interesting to see if the new movies stick to the pre-Disney EU idea of Luke's new Jedi Order being one that allows marriage and families.

<comment><USER10> As far as I can tell, Lucas' idea of celibate Jedi is just a Christian/Catholic artifact. There's no real attempt to justify it, and indeed there's no mention of such a thing in the original trilogy. Obi-Wan talks about Luke's father being a Jedi, and neither thinks this is especially odd.

In my own mind (and hopefully to some extent at Disney), the prequels and special editions are C-canon, to be disregarded whenever they conflict in any way with the pre-1997 scripts.

<comment><USER11> Even in the original trilogy, Jedis are reclusive monks, so there's a link to celibacy (aren't Buddhist monks mostly celibate, too?).

I'm more surprised that a 7 year old doesn't consider girls icky.

<comment><USER12> He may well find girls icky he may want to marry a guy, a fictional character, or the toaster for all we know. Kids are weird like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The page seems to be down, but the images are still loading. [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fgeekdad.com%2F2015%2F04%2Fjedi- marry)

</comment><comment><USER12> Damn, this will definitely hurt the recruitment efforts of the dark side.

</comment><comment><USER14> The NY Times mentioned this in today's article about Lucasfilm: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/18/business/media/for- lucasfi...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/18/business/media/for-lucasfilm- the-way-of-its-force-lies-in-its-star-wars-fans.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Allowed? Become a sith.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't that mean a loss of benefits with the rebel alliance?

</comment></comment><comment> upgray-d Will they only be able to marry other Jedi, or how does this work?

</comment><comment><USER16> Lucas dodged the question entirely!

<comment><USER13> What part of "you can be married" sounds like a dodge?

Also, it's not Lucas anymore. He sold Lucasfilm (and LucasArts) to Disney for $4B back in 2012.

<comment><USER16> I missed the part where the boy claims to be a Jedi, so the response read differently to me.

Ok, but that brings up another question. Is this a change in policy for all Jedi, or a special dispensation just for this boy?

<comment><USER3> That's a great question. I have assumed that Jedi justice would follow a vaguely American/European precedent based system but now I see that was strictly projection on my part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm pretty sure the Bible prohibits Jedi marriage.

<comment><USER18> Only between Jedi of the same gender. And species.

<comment><USER17> With the entire 5 minutes I'm willing to look into it, it should be fine as long as the children aren't raised as Jedi.</comment></comment></comment>


YouTubers are now just Uber drivers who might get rich - <AUTHOR> https://www.polygon.com/2018/2/23/17037032/youtube-business-stars-creators <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting opinion article on the transition in YouTube's operating model.</comment>


Open-source community stepped in after maps broke across the internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/08/the_open_source_community_stepped_in_after_maps_broke_across_the_internet.html <comment><USER2> Specifically, "other tile servers have sprung up, now that MapQuest no longer serves their rendering of OpenStreetMap tiles free-as-in-beer." Fortunately, switching to another OSM tile provider is really easy on the technical side - you can even set up your own, in a matter of hours.

</comment><comment><USER3> > OpenStreetMap, a company and community

OpenStreetMap is not a company.

Also, only one mention of "OpenStreetMap" in that whole article despite it being what it's really about is a little strange.</comment>


'Collapse of civilisation is the most likely outcome': top climate scientists - <AUTHOR> https://voiceofaction.org/collapse-of-civilisation-is-the-most-likely-outcome-top-climate-scientists/ <comment><USER2> I'm sorry - I don't buy this article at all.

I am not a climate denier, just a reasonable person with a brain. Obviously global warming/global climate change is real. Obviously, green house gas emissions by humans are the main culprit.

But I do not for one second believe that civilization will collapse, at least not in say the next couple of hundred years.

Ecosystems are already toast -GBR will mostly die in the next 50 years. Rainforests and biodiversity, deforestation etc are history. Already dead. But will human beings and our civilization "collapse"? No way.

These "climate refugees" everyone talks about "overwhelming" us actually stinks of xenophobia. And in what way is a climate refugee different from a regular refugee? The developing world is already a catastrophe, yet I wouldn't say refugees are overwhelming us.

Bacially my view is this: yeah it's bad but saying that 6 billion people will die which is what this article suggests is alarmist nonsense.

<comment><USER3> >Rainforests and biodiversity, deforestation etc are history. Already dead.

No they aren't dead. The world has literally gotten greener in recent decades.

Look up "dematerialization." Because of increased technology and wealth, we're actually starting to use fewer raw resources (both per capita and in absolute terms) and therefore our negative impact on the environment is decreasing now.

You don't often hear of this but the data is pretty clear. "More From Less" by Andrew McAfee has the data.

<comment><USER4> McAfee's book primarily cites US numbers, so this represents a kind of cherry- picking. There's a whole lot of earth that's not yet caught up to be able to use less resources.

But no matter if we talk about the US only or about Earth as a whole, biodiversity is way down and the earth is much, much less greener then it was, say, fifty years ago. Much of the 'greening' that has happened are artificial woods (see; China's failing reforestation projects) that suffer from lack of biodiversity, falling prey all kinds of "pests". Like one single fungus killing wast swaths of wood within months.

Our environmental impact is not decreasing. It's still increasing and it will for a long time (until it all comes tumbling down like the house of cards it is).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "senior U.N. environmental official" claims that if global warming isn't > reversed by 2030, then rising sea levels could wipe "entire nations . . . > off the face of the Earth." > Crop failures coupled with coastal flooding, > he said, could provoke "an exodus of 'eco-refugees,' " whose movements could > wreak political chaos the world over. Unabated, the ice caps will melt away, > the rainforests will burn, and the world will warm to unbearable > temperatures. > Governments "have a ten-year window of opportunity to solve > the greenhouse effects before it goes beyond human control," said the U.N. > official. [0]

the above was published by U.N. official in 1989, with point of no return being year 2000, not 2030. People knew it for more than 20 years already.

It is important to keep in mind that alarmism can actually be harmful, where instead of doing anything people just have their burger whole try can, as there is no point doing anything anymore. [1]

[0] [https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0](https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0)

[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/11/25...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/11/25/why- everything-they-say-about-climate-change-is-wrong/#3f848ba412d6)

<comment><USER6> > instead of doing anything people just have their burger whole try can

I assume this is just a typo, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the original was

<comment><USER7> I read it as "instead of doing anything people will just have their burger while they can"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Neo-malthusian arguments have been recycled by the same group of intellectuals for the last 50 years or so. You'd be hard pressed to point to a single prediction they've made that turned out to be correct. If there's a single fatal flaw, it's that they discount how much people will change their behavior in response to a change in circumstances. Unchecked global warming may spell doom for civilization as it currently exists... but adaptations will be made. Food will be grown in places that are currently too cold for it. Sea walls will be built. Air conditioners will be purchased.

If "top climate scientists" want to argue that preventing climate change is better than adapting to it, then that's something I'd engage with. But this? Absolute drivel.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this "top climate scientists" or the "scientific consensus?"

</comment><comment><USER10> And there is literally nothing any of us can do about it.

<comment><USER11> We can try degrowth.

We need to find a way to live well and decrease the GDP. The article talks about the limits of growth for, those who don't know what it is you can watch this video. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz9wjJjmkmc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz9wjJjmkmc)

<comment><USER10> No, we can't try that I'm afraid.

People won't accept that. People have chosen to doom the planet. The problem here isn't technology or economics. It's people and politics. People don't want to survive, they want cheeseburgers and air-conditioning.

<comment><USER11> Maybe you are right, but we need to try something and for me this is what make sense. For instance did you notice the effect of covid in the environment? We need to challenge assumptions. The assumption of growth is one of them. We need to have intrinsical objectives. The goal should not be to save the planet but to act in the best possible way to make it happen.

<comment><USER10> How do you and me try degrowing the world economy? We can't.

>The goal should not be to save the planet but to act in the best possible way to make it happen.

Sorry, but this sort of thinking is exactly what has gotten us nowhere for the last 50+ years.

<comment><USER11> We could channel the consuption taxes to a UBI. This would make local economies more competitive compared the global economy. For example, taxes on fossil fuels would make products made from far away more expensive than local products. With time UBI would not be needed as local economies tooked the global economy role.

There are many attitudes towards climate change. We can be too optimistic and tell ourselves that we do not need to worry because we will have a solution in the future. We can be very pessimistic and think that it is no longer worth it, we all gonna die. I want to have a middle position, I know it is a very big challenge and there are great possibilities, that it will not be possible to reverse what lies ahead, but we will try nevertheless. The objective is not what will happen to the planet, the objective is to define what is our role in all of this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Fellow techies interested in helping solve the climate crisis may be interested in [https://climateaction.tech/](https://climateaction.tech/) :)

<comment><USER11> I am a tech guy, but I am not very optimistic about finding a technological solution for this. The problem is energy, how much energy do we need to change to move to a greener infrastructure? There is also the paradox of jevrons [1]. I need to slow down the economy and, at the same time, ensure that everyone lives a decent life. This would be real progress. [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)

<comment><USER13> There is a whole lot that we can do. A plant caused the last ice age[1]. If we could genetically engineer that plant to grow on the ocean, it would sequester an incredible amount of CO2.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event)

<comment><USER14> Most of the discussion of combatting climate change focuses on reducing atmospheric CO2, but there's an entire second category of approaches: Solar Radiation Management, some of which could be much faster and cheaper than reducing CO2. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_radiation_management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_radiation_management)

While reducing CO2 emissions via investment in renewables is still an important long term goal, if we're already heading towards a potentially catastrophic situation, it seems we should be investigating other forms of climate engineering more seriously?

<comment><USER11> I find some challenges in geo engineering: \- Problem shifting. Gaia is a very complex system, and geoengineering solutions can have unexpected effects \- We don't just have the problem of climate change to solve. Loss of biodiversity, acidification of the oceans, soil loss have to be taken into account. \- We have the jevons paradox. By finding a technical solution to the problem we can think that it is justifiable to continue polluting.

If we could slow down human activity, nature would begin to regenerate. I think it is possible to slow down our development without any major problems for humanity, after all we have never lived in a period of such prosperity. It would be a matter of maintaining our level of wealth (or even lowering it a little) instead of aspiring to more.

Solutions created by us are usually fragile compared to natural systems that are anti-fragile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Voice of action is a Marxist propoganda website

<comment><USER16> I think it is good style to combine especially strong opinions with especially strong supporting facts, proofs, evidence, or arguments.

<comment><USER17> There are no facts in the article to support any of their many sociological positions.

For example, that inequality of asset ownership leads to social decay. That there is even actually social decay or real instability in America.

One thing missed by in the treatise and a lot of comments, is that 'consumption' is somehow tantamount to 'resource utilisation'. Obviously, there is a correlation. But a considerable amount of what we 'consume' does not entail necessarily excessive resource consumption. Plastics, electronics doesn't eat up a lot of 'resources', though some parts perhaps more than others i.e. 'alkaline batteries'. Huge swaths of our consumption aren't even related to resources: entertainment, video games, software, social networks etc..

If they are really smart, they would take some time to decouple the 'resource intensive' aspects of consumption, with those that are not, and help industry to optimise along those lines.

<comment><USER18> >a considerable amount of what we 'consume' does not entail necessarily excessive resource consumption

If you pay for some abstract service, the money goes to pay human beings who ultimately either consume or save, don't they? You pay for something that doesn't involve using a lot of resources in itself, but the money goes to someone who uses it to buy gas or food or whatever, so ultimately consumption is pretty proportional to dollars anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just deploy a solar shade, it's easy.</comment>


Show HN: Automatically interpret and validate nested natural logic arguments - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ParhamP/Natural_Logic_Interpreter <comment><USER2> Nice! For comparison, here is how one could approach this task in Prolog. First, let us introduce a few suitable _operators_ , so that we can naturally state the given facts:

        :- op(700, xfy, and).
        :- op(700, xfy, ==>).
        :- op(750, xfy, or).
        :- op(700, fx, not).

With these operators, the given knowledge could be represented as follows:

        fact('I go to school' and 'I study' and 'I exercise').
        fact('I exercise' ==> 'I\'m healthy').
        fact('I study' or 'I\'m sick').
        fact(not 'it rains today').
        fact('I study' and ('I go to gym' or 'I drink a coffee')).
        fact('it rains today' or ('I exercise' and 'I study')).
        fact('I\'m healthy' ==> ('I\'m happy' or 'I\'m fit')).

Now, all it takes is an _interpreter_ for such domain-specific rules. We can easily implement one in Prolog. Here is a starting point:

        true(C)      :- fact(F), conjunction_conjunct(F, C).
        true(B)      :- fact(A ==> B), true(A).
        true(A or _) :- true(A).
        true(_ or B) :- true(B).

        conjunction_conjunct(C, C).
        conjunction_conjunct(A and B, D) :-
                (   conjunction_conjunct(A, D)
                ;   conjunction_conjunct(B, D)
                ).

With this knowledge base and the given deduction rules, we can query for example:

        ?- true('I study' and 'I exercise').
        true .

        ?- true('I study' or 'I\'m sick').
        true .

        ?- true('I go to gym').
        false.

        ?- true('I\'m healthy').
        true .

        ?- true('it rains today' or 'I\'m healthy').
        true .

We can also use this interpreter to ask the most general query, and it enumerates statements it can derive:

        ?- true(T).
        T =  ('I go to school'and'I study'and'I exercise') ;
        T = 'I go to school' ;
        T =  ('I study'and'I exercise') ;
        T = 'I study' ;
        T = 'I exercise' ;
        T =  ('I exercise'==>'I\'m healthy') ;
        T =  ('I study'or'I\'m sick') ;
        T =  (not'it rains today') ;
        T =  ('I study'and('I go to gym'or'I drink a coffee')) .

Note that a more direct formulation is possible too with Prolog. However, an important advantage of the interpreter-based approach is that it lets us stay very close to the task description. Further, we can easily extend this interpreter with more features that can be implemented on top of Prolog.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a very useful comparison. Thank you.

<comment><USER2> Great! One alternative way to reason about these rules is to recognize that these statements can be modeled as _propositional formulas_ , which can be easily solved with Prolog by using a constraint solver over _Boolean_ variables. For example, in SICStus Prolog, such a constraint solver is available as a library:

[https://sicstus.sics.se/sicstus/docs/4.3.1/html/sicstus/CLPB...](https://sicstus.sics.se/sicstus/docs/4.3.1/html/sicstus/CLPB- Introduction.html#CLPB-Introduction)

This of course requires a slightly different way to encode the task, using logical _variables_ :

        ?- sat(School*Study*Exercise),
           sat(Exercise =< Healthy),
           sat(Study + Sick),
           sat(~Rain),
           sat(Study * ( Gym + Coffee)),
           sat(Rain + (Exercise * Study)),
           sat(Healthy =< (Happy + Fit)).

As an _answer_ , we get:

        School = Study, Study = Exercise, Exercise = Healthy, Healthy = 1,
        Rain = 0,
        sat(Sick=:=Sick),
        sat(Gym=\=Gym*Coffee#Coffee),
        sat(Happy=\=Happy*Fit#Fit).

Since CLP(B) is _complete_ , these are _all_ the consequences that can be derived from the initial knowledge. Note that for example `Gym = 1` is _consistent_ with the initial assumptions, it just doesn't _follow_ from them.

To obtain ground solutions, you can use labeling/1 on the remaining free variables, showing all possible ways in which truth values can be assigned to them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting! Do you know how is the constraint solver library implemented? Does it use a different general implementation than the regular prolog statements?

<comment><USER2> There are several different ways to _implement_ such solvers on top of Prolog.

One way is to simply extend the Prolog engine to handle such constraints _natively_. Many basic constraints are implemented in this way. In fact, you can regard even (=)/2, i.e., _unification_ , as one such constraint, and all Prolog systems implement it, typically as one of their virtual machine instructions. The same method naturally extends to other constraints like freeze/2 and (in)/2, which are often implemented natively. See the system descriptions of GNU Prolog, as one example for a system that handles the CLP(FD) constraint (in)/2 natively.

For _application programmers_ , Prolog systems typically provide an _interface_ in the form of attributed variables are metastructures, so that any programmer can implement a custom constraint solver on top of Prolog by attaching _attributes_ to variables. For example, in SICStus Prolog, there is a hook called verify_attributes/3, and you can provide a custom user-defined specification that handles your own constraints.

In practice, the implementation of constraint solvers on top of Prolog typically involves a combination of both approaches, with some low-level constraints implemented natively (i.e., as part of the engine), and some higher-level constraints implemented via the general interface on the Prolog level.

There are of course also other ways to do it, such as writing a Prolog _meta- interpreter_ that interprets your code _as if_ the Prolog engine supported such extensions. This is likely among the slower ways to provide such extensions, while a native implementation is among the fastest, and using general interface predicates will likely be somewhere between these extremes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You might be interested in ACE: [http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/](http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/site/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Used ANTLR for something similar. Quick googling yields: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24935419/antlr-4-taking-d...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24935419/antlr-4-taking- decisions-from-a-parse-tree)

Further reading, you seem to do quite a bit more.

> I came across this paragraph while studying "Discrete Mathematics and It's > Applications"; therefore, I got inspired to automate this task using > computers.

Congrats, going from reading to an idea to a project to a public repo!

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! I'll research about that. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Divide and conquer recursive implementation" \- so is that backward-chaining inference then? Or something different?

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

<comment><AUTHOR> The validator part of the program almost uses backward-chaining implementation. The "list" of goals" for the backward-chaining is created by the definer part of the program which uses a recursive function.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Concerning `(I study) OR (I'm sick)` in readme example am i correct in thinking that that OR is a XOR here?

<comment><AUTHOR> All ORs are inclusive disjunction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reinventing Prolog?

<comment><AUTHOR> Similar but prolog is much broader and more general purpose of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was confused because the source file was referred to as "the executable" and did not have a conventional .py extension.

<comment><AUTHOR> NLI is a clickable python file. When you click on it you enter a command line interface.

<comment><USER8> Thank you. I don't usually launch Python files (or programs in general) by clicking on them, so it did not occur to me.</comment></comment></comment>


How to Become a Programmer - wikiHow - <AUTHOR> http://www.wikihow.com/Become-a-Programmer#Steps <comment><USER2> This is generally a pretty bad article. Learn databases, then decide whether or not you ever need to know databases? Moreover, databases are put on the same fundamental level as logic?

Also, placing "learn paradigms" at a time before the student knows any language is going to be useless rote memorization that the student will have no idea how to implement when the time comes.

Why does the article start off extremely specific and then just dump into "3. then learn programming"?

Finally, the categories of programmers aren't really an accurate reflection of the software industry. You will have to span multiple of those groups, and you'll never be dedicated to any one of them.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a terrific article! I found a video on how to play the flute, split an atom, how to construct a box girder bridge, and how to irrigate the Sahara desert and create vast areas of viable farmland, and finally how to cure all known diseases.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNfGyIW7aHM>

</comment><comment><USER4> They missed embedded systems programming - writing software to control physical or electrical devices or calculate measurements from sensory apparatus. This would include PLC programming, microcontrollers, motion controllers, kinematics, control theory and so on. This area of software has features which are somewhat distinctive from the other types mentioned. Increasingly embedded systems are everywhere, not only in mobile phones, and there are multiple such systems in modern road vehicles.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't know many people that aren't going to be put off programming by that 1/2 to 1 year preparation on only theory.

A redeeming part of that page is that for each programming career, there is a decent list of useful pointers.

</comment><comment><USER6> Oh wikiHow, where would we be without you?

<http://www.wikihow.com/Cook-a-Great-Tasting-Steak>

<comment><USER7> I noticed this gem in the "Programming Scientists" section:

"Putting worcestershire sauce on volume 1 of Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming and stabbing it with a fork until pudding-like."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I need to flag this because I cannot flag the original.

</comment><comment><USER9> "You can use any simple database package to do this, such as MS access, DB V, Fox Pro..."

Written before most of us were born.

</comment><comment><USER10> That's _not_ how you learn programming.

</comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone else have a good tutorial or recommendation?

<comment><USER12> Norvig's _Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years_ is what I normally recommend people read if they really want to learn how to program.

<http://norvig.com/21-days.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "How to become a programmer". Must. Learn. Logic.</comment>


Finding Your Conference Wingmen (starting with Google I/O) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.grubwith.us/finding-your-conference-wingmen

<comment><USER2> It's an interesting take - usually, for me, these social dynamics are subconscious (but still present). Bubbling it up to the conscious level should be much more effective.

</comment><comment><USER3> PUA for business :-)</comment>


Ask HN: What are your sources of inspiration and motivation? - <AUTHOR> I was wondering what other members of the HN community found as sources of inspiration and motivation. Maybe it's a book, a quotation, a poem, an image, a movie, a project you worked on, etc.
For example, I've always enjoyed this poem by E. Dickinson - a concise recipe for being honest to yourself and persevering.
"Lad of Athens, faithful be To Thyself, And Mystery— All the rest is Perjury—"
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lad_of_Athens,_faithful_be
My hope is that this thread will become full of good sources and discussion.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> One of the things I found most inspiring early on was a sentence in the small print on the back of Nirvana's "Bleach" album:

"Recorded in Seattle at Reciprocal Recording by Jack Endino for $600."

I read that after Nirvana had already gone on to be one of the biggest bands in the world. But here was their first commercial album, where they started out & just before they made Nevermind, and the cost of making that first album was so much less than I'd ever thought. It made things seem possible, that you can start with whatever you have. It meant you couldn't blame a lack of money; if you had $600, you could make an album. Nirvana taught me to bootstrap.

</comment><comment><USER3> After studying Political Science in college, I became a middle school math and history teacher in a low-income community. I witnessed firsthand that the American Dream was not a possiblity for everyone. If a kid is smart and hard working, but the resources aren't there to support her, it is very difficult for her to end up with certain opportunities that rich kids in America take for granted.

I saw technology as one way to help address this complex problem. I took a bunch of night classes in CS, and I'll be graduating with a Masters in CS from a full-time program in May. I wish I started down this path earlier because there is so much to do, but I guess that's how life is. I've found that I am happiest when I am giving to and empowering others, and the technological revolution we are currently living through enables us to do this at an amazing scale. I feel very fortunate to be alive at this time in history, and to have had a path in life that enabled me to find Computer Science. This is what motivates me to work relentlessly every day.

In peace, Mike

<comment><USER4> You said two very different things:

 _the American Dream was not a possiblity for everyone_

and

 _it is very difficult for her_

No rational person thinks it is easy in the United States to go from being low-income to high-income. But hopefully also no rational person thinks it is "not a possibility for everyone" as you first said.

I went from a very low-income family to very high-income myself, so I know it is possible.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it makes any practical sense to talk about whether something is strictly possible or strictly not; if a random kid has 0.0001% chance of crossing the income barrier then of course you can say that "it is possible for everyone", but that doesn't change the fact that for that kid it's next to impossible, period.

<comment><USER6> You had about the same chance of being knighted as a feudal serf.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm rather fond of "The Man in the Arena":

 _It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat._

NB I suspect i like this because of the Mandela connection with one of the all time great rugby stories.

Actually at the moment - I'm finding this mountain biking video rather inspiring - mainly because of the music and wonderful scenery that I've climbed/walked (rather than cycled) over:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ_IQS3VKjA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ_IQS3VKjA)

<comment> aaron-lebo Also from Theodore Roosevelt (Man in the Arena is his speech):

 _Get action. Do things; be sane; don't fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody; get action._

Scholars have interpreted this quote, and Teddy's overall crazed drive as his way of staving off depression.

And from his counsin, FDR:

 _There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still._

A few others that I've collected off of HN comments:

 _Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren 't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which way works better._ \- John Carmack

 _Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success._ \- this, or some variation of this, was used in advertising for Ernest Shackleton's Antarctic expedition

<comment><USER8> Paul Graham's lecture recently really cemented the idea of having a good life is just work on things that interest you and maybe something comes from it but it doesn't matter because you are still doing what you enjoy.

<comment><USER9> Exactly! People want things to come from it so they can finally do all they wanted. Why not do it now? Then adjust your priorities, lifestyle and consuming patterns as to lower both your needs and expectations, and you're less likely to feel let down by life. Does not work for power-hungry needs, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> During a time of anxiety and depression I've discovered Stoic philosophy. Especially the Enchiridion from Epictetus somehow helped me to feel better. Also Seneca² is worth a read. It's over 2000 years old but surprisingly apt for the world of today.

1: [http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html](http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html)

2: [https://archive.org/stream/adluciliumepistu02sene#page/n7/mo...](https://archive.org/stream/adluciliumepistu02sene#page/n7/mode/2up)

<comment><USER11> A great introduction is "A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy" by Irvine

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient- Stoic/dp/019...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient- Stoic/dp/0195374614)

<comment><USER10> Actually in my opinion: No. Read the original texts. The book from Irvine gives you a different impression of stoicism. It has some "self-help with stoic touch" feel that I just don't feel comfortable with. Read some historic context and the original texts. The original texts are quite accessible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Poem: "If" by Rudyard Kipling

Quote: "Everyone knew it was impossible to do. One day, someone who did not know showed up and did it."

Person: Alexis Ohanian - I know he's kind of goofy and perhaps not the most inspirational to someone else, but he gave me hope when I needed it most. I never actually met him. I discovered his story at a serendipitous moment when my father, the last person who believed in me at that time, had just passed away of cancer. I finally learned that, outside of my social bubble, exploring unbeaten paths was a value rather than a defect. I discovered YC and HN because of Alexis. I owe him more gratitude than I know how to express.

Curiosity: Future generations will wonder how we could endure the inefficiencies and unnecessary hardships we put up with. I want to discover why they'll wonder that.

Fear: PG mentioned toward the end of "Before the Startup" that, "If you're absolutely terrified of starting a startup, you probably shouldn't do it." I am absolutely terrified of giving myself a reason in the future to look back and think, "I wish I had tried."

<comment><USER13> I find these lines from the poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling the most inspirational of all:

 _Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;_

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good will hunting, even if it's cliche'd, helped me understand how personality can be a huge problem for oneself, whatever the talents, work and motivations.

There are many quotes that will make you wiser, but to me, the most important thing to remember about politics and society being mostly disorganized and unable to properly help individuals, is that society resembles a growing pool of microbes.

It's blooming with life with diversity, but it's not really aware of itself. To me people are aware of themselves, but society is not aware of itself. People are truly alone in their own life, society is not really there to really help them or make them connect with each other properly. This way, society is unable to really improve itself by improving its subjects. That's why I try to compare society as a live being, holding several cells.

This helped me contextualize myself in society, and give context to what society really is. Also important to never look down to anybody or anything, always be curious and not leave a thought with pessimism, always try to understand the compromises and origins of things. It's not an ode to optimism and positivism, but always be sure to confront your interests as a human in the void of the universe, and understand that even if it looks pointless, if it's a step forward, it's a good step.

I'm also very bad at expressing myself.

<comment><USER15> You're really not. This is the best comment I've seen here for a while.

Mot sure if we could ever reach collective conscious of our so sociery. Anthropologists like Marshsll Sahlins was onxe enamoured with hunter-gatherer for societies for this reason. But large scale industrial societies? I can't see a way for a microbe pool that complex to feel truly whole

<comment><USER14> hahaha :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Every so often I contemplate the facts of my birth - the time, the place, social strata - being free from wants, relative to just about every human that has ever existed - and that, like most of you here, I can create the great capital good of our age, software - out of thin air and at zero cost...

The mere thought of wasting this alignment of circumstance always spurs me to action.

</comment><comment><USER17> The entire history of the human species is an inspiration and motivation, depending on what you choose to read into it. We are practically an infinite collection of case studies in creativity, innovation, perseverance, adaptability, beating the odds... your question is actually very hard to answer because so many great examples come to mind.

As for reading, a few things popped into my head in no particular order:

The Greatest Salesman in the World, by Og Mandino

Emerson's Essays, particularly "Self Reliance"

Biographies of people like James Clerk Maxwell and Tesla

If, by Kipling

Any of Bucky Fuller's books

And really, just look around at what people are doing in our industry. Our peers are a constant source of inspiration. I see what some of my friends are doing the field of IoT and it makes me want to get up every day at 4am and hack until my fingers fall off.

</comment><comment><USER18> "A rat race is for rats. We are not rats. We are human beings. "A rat race is for rats. We're not rats. We're human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice, lest you jeopardise your chances of self-promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts. And before you know where you are, you're a fully paid-up member of the rat pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit." \- Jimmy Reid

That same speech has some other great quotes:

"Let me right at the outset define what I mean by alienation. It is the cry of men who feel themselves the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. It's the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the processes of decision making. The feeling of despair and hopelessness that pervades people who feel with justification that they have no real say in shaping or determining their own destinies."

[http://www.scottishleftreview.org/li/index.php?option=com_co...](http://www.scottishleftreview.org/li/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=336)

This is a strongly left speech and some of it is goin to be offensive(?) to the HN audience, but the good bits are great.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm a sucker for inspirational quotes and have, throughout the years, saved several hundred of them in Evernote.

Take a look, I'm sure you'll find quite a lot that you like:

[https://www.evernote.com/pub/kristofferr/inspiringQuotes](https://www.evernote.com/pub/kristofferr/inspiringQuotes)

<comment><USER20> Nice quote collection, although I feel strongly offended by quoting Mussolini (a brutal dictator and fascist).

<comment><USER21> what if Mussolini the brutal dictator and fascist wrote a clever algorithm or solved a neat math problem, will you feel strongly offended against those who use the algorithm or math equation?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Each week I get an email reminder with this quote in it and the subject "Things Are Hard":

"When you can do whatever you want, you get a variant of the terror induced by the proverbial blank page. There are a lot of people who think the thing stopping them from writing that great novel they plan to write is the fact that their job takes up all their time. In fact what's stopping 99% of them is that writing novels is hard. When the job goes away, they see how hard."

which is part of a pg comment on an HN thread, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1512096](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1512096)

<comment><USER5> Thank you for that quote, this resonates with me strongly. One of the bigger sources of my stress is that internal narrative of "I can't do awesome things because my job takes away all my time". This quote encourages me to re- evaluate my attitude now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The Frontier Is Everywhere – the first video in the Sagan Series by Reid Gower: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY59wZdCDo0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY59wZdCDo0)

It gives me the motivation to work towards a goal which lies tens, hundreds, maybe a thousand years in the future.

Seeing this video puts my own selfish needs and feelings in perspective, and inspires me to do my little part in making humanity just a little bit better.

</comment><comment><USER24> I purchased a copy of the entire works of Michelangelo Buonarotti with high- res pictures that I like to look at: [http://www.amazon.com/Michelangelo- Complete-Sculpture-Painti...](http://www.amazon.com/Michelangelo-Complete- Sculpture-Painting-Architecture/dp/0789318873/)

</comment><comment><USER25> I've always found "Philippe Petit" and "Man on Wire" interesting. "You must not fall. / When you lose your balance, resist for a long time before turning yourself toward the earth. Then jump. / You must not force yourself to stay steady. You must move forward."

</comment><comment><USER26> I am a fan of biographies. Here are a couple of people in history that inspire me:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller)

 _Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree._

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Douglass](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Douglass)

He started as a slave in America and ended up an ambassador of the U.S. to Haiti.

</comment><comment><USER5> I watch this every time I want to restore my motivation and faith in humanity and its bright future.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yijcWsLda8#t=10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yijcWsLda8#t=10)

While ST:ENT was widely criticized as "losing the spirit", I think that its intro - the images, the song, the message - is the perfect and most beautiful description of the spirit of Star Trek. Hope, curiosity, exploration, faith that we can solve all our problems, that things are to get better and not worse - all in there.

</comment><comment><USER27> "Thou mayest," from "East of Eden," John Steinbeck.

Edit: no fair being cryptic. [http://www.timshel.org/timshel.php](http://www.timshel.org/timshel.php)

</comment><comment><USER28> I find Arnold Schwarzeneggers commencement speech to be very inspirstional. I've always admired him for having such wild ambitions(being a body builder) in a conservative country and time. Full speech:[http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=66vkogKQS2E](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=66vkogKQS2E)

Or, if you prefer a shorter version with music:[http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QmD6QwI9nXA](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QmD6QwI9nXA)

</comment><comment><USER29> Watching this has been pretty inspiring to me: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6Oxl5dAnR0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6Oxl5dAnR0)

<comment><USER30> Was completely expecting a rickroll there, linking to a YouTube video without description

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Here's a quote that I have on my desk: "The greatest rewards go to those that take initiative" \- I think Seth Godin said this.

This is an awesome Saturday question! Recently, I wrote a blog post about how to capture motivation and turn them into actions.

Here it is: [http://blog.bottega8.com/capturing-moments-of-motivation- and...](http://blog.bottega8.com/capturing-moments-of-motivation-and-turning- them-into-actions/)

</comment><comment><USER32> _Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore._

André Gide

 _A ship is safe in harbor, but that 's not what ships are for._

William G.T. Shedd

 _Some are always in a state of preparation, occupied in previous measures, forming plans, accumulating materials and providing for the main affair. These are certainly under the secret power of idleness. Nothing is to be expected from the workman whose tools are for ever to be sought._

Samuel Johnson

</comment><comment><USER33> Side projects! They maintain the little spark inside me. Concidentally, yesterday I wrote a piece about motivation and side projects, maybe you can get some ideas: [http://cfenollosa.com/blog/you-only-do-it-when-nobody- else-w...](http://cfenollosa.com/blog/you-only-do-it-when-nobody-else-will-do- it.html)

<comment><USER5> Very interesting post. One thing jumped at me though:

"It started with functional programming, one of the academic topics which has been discussed since the 60s but never took off."

You seem to frequent HN, so surely you must be aware that functional programming actually took off in the end - just now. In the last 5 years it went from something that people would give you strange looks over mentioning, to The Hottest Thing in programming. "Functional" is now synonymous with awesome and something people brag about (whether they understand it or not is another thing, but that's how things are with fashion).

<comment><USER33> Glad you liked the post!

Functional programming is an amazing tool, but I found it super hard to program real world applications. Object oriented programming is much more useful for that, because it represents more effectively the world that we live in, which is composed of objects that talk to each other.

Yes, functional is now cool and awesome and hackerish. Nothing wrong with that. However, while it does make you smarter (since it gives you a new viewpoint and is a new skill), it does not mean that you need to apply it everywhere.

I'll add that us in HN live in a bubble and what we read here is not representative of real world. Of all programmers I know only two really know and have successfully coded stuff with functional programming. So... It has not taken off in my opinion. There seems to be more eyes looking at it, or maybe people using it are more vocal so we read more about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A good source of inspiration, motivation and -- important to mention as well -- abstraction from the real world, is clearly some Spotify playlists based on white noise and world sounds. When I hit the play button, I'm not here for the next hours and I can really focus on whatever I'm doing at the moment.

<comment> aaron-lebo Postrock music (with few vocals) tends to do the same, while adding a little more structure:

* Explosions in the Sky

* Mogwai

* This Will Destroy You

* The American Dollar

* Tycho

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaIvk1cSyG8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaIvk1cSyG8)

I seriously I find that kid's enthusiasm inspirational. Sure, maybe learning to ride a bike is really no big deal, but the euphoria of having truly mastered something new is incredible.

<comment><USER36> That's an awesome video!

I totally agree with you, for me it's the euphoria of seeing it work, after days or weeks of poking and reading and prodding and reading some more and scratching your head and re-reading the same things.

That light-bulb moment is addicting, that's what keeps me going.

Edit: There also seems to be a little bit of correlation between how long it takes to make it work, and how great it feels seeing it finally do it's thing. That can be a source of encouragement to take on a project that's a bigger than your previous one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> For me it's Bret Victor and his Inventing on Principle talk, Learnable Programming article.

</comment><comment><USER38> The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightingale > [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62DqsD2s5V8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62DqsD2s5V8)

It's an Old School message that still resonates by the late Dean of Personal Development.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm watching 'The pursuit of happyness'when I need inspiration. Really love it. 'The internship'is another one that can inspire me. But most of all I'm inspired when I get some success with my project

</comment><comment><USER40>
      "When You Think of Garbage, Think of Hakeem"
        -- Coming to America

Here is a prince who has everything, yet even when on the bottom rung at McDowell's he puts in 100% effort.

</comment><comment><USER41> For me a major source of inspiration & motivation is patio11. I don't really care whether it is podcast, blog post or video. I always learn new things and it also helps me stay motivated

</comment><comment><USER42> Motivation: Money, financial responsibility and security, material affluence, happiness from satisfying curiosity.

Inspiration: High quality work in pure and applied mathematics, physical science, and music.

</comment><comment><USER43> I have a different take on motiviation ([http://rvivek.com/motivation/](http://rvivek.com/motivation/)) - would love to know your thoughts

</comment><comment><USER44> Motivation 3.0 , I find the book , "the surprising truth about what drives us ".Daniel H. Pink.....amazingly accurate and one true sense reveals...what motivates us.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is my go-to place when I need inspiration and motivation: [http://www.thisiscolossal.com/](http://www.thisiscolossal.com/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I love watching Shark Tank, Mixergy and Growth Hacker TV.

It's hard not to get inspired by seeing other passionate entrepreneurs talk about their business.

</comment><comment><USER46> "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free" | "if you are good at something, never do it for free"

</comment><comment><USER46> You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free | If you are good at something, never do it for free.

</comment><comment><USER47> _there are worse things than_

 _being alone_

 _but it often takes decades_

 _to realize this_

 _and most often_

 _when you do_

 _it 's too late_

 _and there 's nothing worse_

 _than too late._

Oh Yes by Charles Bukowski

</comment><comment><USER48> Sheer terror of looming deadline is usually enough.

<comment><USER5> For me it was enough for about two years, after which my brain got used to it so that now I just experience terror, but do not gain productivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> The Amiga, metal music and Alan Kay.

</comment><comment><USER50> James Allen - As a man thinketh

</comment><comment><USER51> sauna & recreational coding

</comment><comment><USER52> 1.01^365 = 37.8

0.99^365 = 0.03

This one thing always motivates me to put the extra effort in everything I do. Good luck mate :-)

<comment><USER53> As beautiful as that is, and as much as I want it to be true, it might not necessarily be true that personal growth can be compounded so easily. It very well may be nearly linear.

I upvoted anyways though, because it really is beautiful.

<comment><USER54> eureka moments and plateaus make it non linear. I think it's more like a repeated S curve at different scale, Fractal-like. Accepting plateaus and going on nevertheless is one of the most important thing for a project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Perhaps a bit darker than the other quotes, but I wake up everyday thinking "At most, I've only got X years left before I die." When you appreciate time/life as a limited resource you'll spend it more wisely. Typically people don't realize this until they're too old, but this is something 20-year-olds should think about.</comment>