Sonnet for Dennis Ritchie - <AUTHOR> http://www.edmundjorgensen.com/2011/11/09/sonnet-for-dennis-ritchie.html

<comment><USER2> I clicked the link with my spine pre-cringed, ready for cheesy hacker poetry. Instead I found a lovingly crafted epitaph in stylish, uninterrupted verse. I immediately looked to see the other poetry. I was shocked that there were only two others posted --- I refuse to believe that someone who wrote this and _The Little Bank of San Pietro dei Fiumi_ (also beautiful) has only written three poems. Post more, Mister Jorgensen!

<comment><AUTHOR> So glad you enjoyed this, and "The Little Bank"! I just started the process of moving things out of the drawer and onto the site. There's a big backlog but I'm posting every week or two to avoid a "verse bomb" effect. However there's an RSS feed if you're interested.

Thanks again for the response. It's great to see that there are other hackers out there interested in poetry.

<comment><USER2> Wonderful! Consider me subscribed.

I also just bought your book; I'm looking forward to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great, would love to hear what you think...you can find my contact info on my site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was prepared to laugh, but that's actually...a little touching. Now who said hackers have no creative spirit!

</comment><comment><USER4> "Exists, what can it be but information?

Your ghost performs the world's computation."

Beautiful!

</comment><comment><USER5> TIL that an english sonnet is not at all the same thing as a french one (I was confused at first, because in french a sonnet is a _very_ strict form of poetry, which is not respected at all here). So thanks for that, and beautiful text, by the way :-).

<comment><USER2> Both forms are pretty strict, but yeah, the French gets a little less leeway. He _is_ respecting the English rules, while using some chic slant rhymes. I know English is abab cdcd efef gg --- am I right in remembering French as abba abba cc dccd?

<comment><USER5> French sonnets must recpect the following two rules:

\- rhymes are abba abba ccd eed

\- lines must be Alexandrine

This last rules implies a lot of things :

\- each lines must be exactly 12 syllabes

\- the caesura (either between the sixth and seventh syllabes (for two hemistiches lines), or between the forth and fifth and between the eighth and nineth (for three parts lines)) must respect a lot of rules which makes it pleasant to read (for instance, the syllabe just before it cannot be feminine (roughly, it means it should not end with a 'e', but it's a lot more complex than that))

\- rhyme genre must alternate (either a and d and feminine and b, c and e are masculine or the reverse)

\- maybe some other nasty things I don't recall right now.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for setting me straight! Where did you learn these rules? I went hunting and couldn't find much --- not even agreement on the rhymes for the quatrain (which you imply isn't a quatrain at all?).

<comment><USER5> The end can be in 'cc deed' but it is quite uncommon. Usually, the first two strophes (does that word exists in english?) are quatrains and the two other are tercets.

I learned some of that in middleschol or highschool (in France) and for a few details by reading the french Wikipedia. But more importantly I have a friend who is very knowledgeable on this kind of subjects (a3_nm here on HN), which is really cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very touching! Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Spoken like a hacker, not a hack.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wasn't sure if "Steve Jacks" was an admirer or some clueless middle manager at a newspaper meeting not wanting to talk about "C" because everyone is running "PCs" these days.

But here's his original letter: [http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-10-18/news/chi-11101...](http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-10-18/news/chi-111018jacks_briefs_1_vending- machine-unix-traffic-light)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for bringing this up / posting the link.

Someone brought up a similar point in comments on the poem itself--I added a direct link in the attribution.</comment></comment>


How to get accepted for a Y Combinator interview - <AUTHOR> http://leavingcorporate.com/2008/03/24/how-to-get-accepted-for-a-y-combinator-interview/

<comment><USER2> Here's one suggestion they left out which I think would help: have something to show the partners (ideally, a working prototype)

<comment><USER3> Great point, I definitely endorse that point as well. We didn't have a prototype when we applied, but we created one by the time we were interviewed. Showing even a rough prototype will explain your idea better than anything you say during that 5 minutes.

<comment><USER4> I do wonder about the demo. All is well and good if it works with no glitches, but what if a spectacular bug catches you out when you don't expect it and the whole thing blows up in your face?

By limiting the scope (rather than the maturity) and testing heavily you can be reasonably confident, but it will leave you with a less impressive demo to throw up.

<comment><USER5> Don't worry about that. We've given enough demos ourselves to know they always break.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I also believe it helps to have an accent of some kind. PG _loves_ accents.

<comment><USER7> You are just jealous you don't have one.

<comment><USER8> When I first came to the US I was still dating and, of course my accent came up in conversation pretty early. I remember a couple of times saying "oh thanks, I like your accent too", only to be told "but I don't _have_ an accent" ;-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The 3 months is just the beginning. After that, you will continue to build your product, find investment, hire employees and create an actual business. This process will take years!"

Read that over a few times. By putting your name on that application, you're starting a commitment to your co-founders that you should take seriously... Life can take a turn, but for the most part, you should be prepared to set aside a couple of years at least-- losing a co-founder early on can be pretty deadly.

</comment><comment><USER9> Union bylaws obligate me to point out that with a similar expenditure of effort and planning, you could "raise" more than twice as much money as a YC "round" by consulting for a month, and then simply start your company.

The market does not care whether your friends are "top quality players" who make important contributions. You are not a unique snowflake. If your product or service offering works, you will win.

<comment><USER10> > you could "raise" more than twice as much money as a YC "round" by > consulting for a month

However, you'd be one month behind in development. For a start-up, that could be critical.

<comment><USER9> If the first month is critical, you're probably picking a crappy segment to chase. Yeah, the window's closing on social networks. Go do something else.

<comment><USER10> Its not the first month thats critical, its the last month. Any plan with an extra month at the end has more chance of success. The problem with a startup is that the total amount of time available is rarely known in advance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I assume that PG, after all his bashing of the college application process, is _very_ careful about not giving the wrappings more weight than the applicant. So hints like these wouldn't be worth much. All of these points are really obvious anyway, the kind of things you would consider when writing any important text.

<comment><USER3> The wrappings are what exposes how good (or bad) the applicant is. Thinking that your natural wonderfulness will be obvious no matter how you fill out your application sets yourself up for failure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143097>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143451>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=96078></comment>


Show HN: A little JavaScript game written in five hours (mobile-friendly) - <AUTHOR> http://danbolt.github.io/rita-daniel-ideas/pikochan/ <comment><AUTHOR> I couldn't sleep last night, so I decided to hack out a really small 'dodge the obstacle' game in Phaser and JavaScript.

It's not particularly polished, but consider going for a high score!

<comment><USER2> How'd you make the artwork in less than five hours? It's pretty good! Pixel art is currently beyond my abilities, which I need to fix. Whatever your process is, I was hoping to osmose it, if possible. Any pointers to start building this skill?

Your game is neat. Does there happen to be a github repo somewhere? Also, how'd you like Phaser?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! The artwork is more or less twelve 16x16 images, which I drew in an hour or so. The music was generated from a script, and the font was taken from Creative Commons.

I'm not a trained artist, but I've mostly doodled on my spare time. I'll pick one or two particular pieces of technique I'd like to improve, then draw quickly and iterate on them a few times. It can be very frustrating, and progress can be slow, but I'd encourage you to practice! Feel free to show me your work too! (@savagedanface)

You can look at the source code and art assets here: [https://github.com/danbolt/rita-daniel- ideas/tree/master/pik...](https://github.com/danbolt/rita-daniel- ideas/tree/master/pikochan)

I'm very fond of Phaser, because it lets you iterate quickly and doesn't impose a "paradigm" for development. It has a high browser compatibility and is mobile friendly so you can reach a wide audience as well.</comment></comment></comment>


Looking for cofounder/hacker for MMO - <AUTHOR> I have a growing space MMORPG with paying users and positive cash flow.  Last year I decided to really go all out on it and refocused my efforts more on marketing which has worked wonders.  I now have way more paying users than I can handle and need another programmer who is expert in networking/DB/back end C++ programming to take the lead in scaling things up.  I have a gorgeous new graphics engine that will be ready to launch in a couple months and I would love to be able to handle the accompanying influx of new players.  I would prefer someone looking for mostly equity and a cofounder mentality to help me grow this thing.<p>Please email me at Jeff at StarSonata dot com if you have any interest. <comment><USER2> Check out the book, "How to Get Rich" by Dennis Felix. He's the guy that owns Maxim magazine. One of his tenets is to never give up any of the ownership of your company. Period.

One of his stories is about the time that four key employees sat him down and told him they wanted 25% of the company or they were going to go out and compete with them. He told them to hit the road. He'd rather do all their jobs while we found replacements than give a share of his company.

Later on, he estimated that 25% share at $80 million. Oh, and the company they tried to start folded. And a couple came back to work for him.

You obviously have traction. You have a raving fan base. Don't give up a substantial portion of your company to someone you don't really know because you don't want to cut a paycheck.

If your marketing is working and you are making some money with the project, pay a hacker 100% of the profits and eat beans. You are going to win in the end.

You may "lose" a few bucks now, but those few dollars could get you your own island in 10 years.

<comment><USER3> Balance this against the richest people in the world who did give away equity when it was appropriate. I guess it depends on the situation.

<comment><USER4> I'm not even sure it depends on the situation, it could be a uniformly dumb idea that he succeeded in spite of. Every business has at least one of those.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't help you here - wish you luck, but ...

I was wondering if it was cool with this list to post a job listing for a cofounder for a startup? I was thinking about doing the same thing, but wasn't sure about the HN list etiquette?

<comment><USER6> I think the idea here is that if you think it would be interesting to readers then you post it. If people like it then they vote it up.

<comment><USER5> Quick newbie question: Does a post require a certain number of points to make it into the RSS feed? I noticed that not all threads from HN make it into my Google Reader subscription...

<comment><USER6> I think the RSS is the same as the front page based on a casual perusal of the source code:

      (newsop rss () (rsspage nil))

      (newscache rsspage user 90
        (rss-stories (firstn 25 ranked-stories*)))

      (def gen-topstories ()
        (= ranked-stories* (rank-stories 180 1000 (memo frontpage-rank))))

      (def rank-stories (n consider scorefn)
        (bestn n (compare > scorefn) (recent-stories consider)))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Could you please expound on the marketing you did? I have been in a comparable situation (indie games developer) but found myself a bit lost when it came to successful marketing. I basically ended up spending thousands of dollars on Google Adwords, and the return was questionable. I also dropped $1000 on GamesBannerNet, which had horrible return and was a waste of money. What worked for you?

<comment><AUTHOR> I did Google advertising for over a year with very questionable returns and then I added a new landing page, tons more graphics and screen shots all over the web site, worked on the first 5 minutes of the game play experience a bunch, and added a lot more key words to the Google campaign and reduced my bids by a lot so I was only basically getting the dregs, but getting them cheap. All these changes took the ROI on advertising from about 1:1 to about 3:1 where it is now. It seems to be almost all about the landing page and the web site, at least in my experience.

Before I focused on marketing, I spent a solid year just improving the game with negligible financial effect. The first month I spent enhancing the website had 10x more effect than all the game play improvements I've ever done.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, that's really useful, and makes a lot of sense considering my experience too. I am going to take this to heart and work harder on the website!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> that looks really, really cool. i have significant experience in all the areas you mentioned, and was pretty close to emailing you, when i saw your client app appears to be windows-only. and since it looks like you're using directx, the possibility of a mac port seems slim. i just can't bring myself to sit in front of a windows box all day.

best of luck to you all the same. looks like you've got a winner on your hands.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our new graphics engine which will be coming out in a couple months is based on the open source Irrlicht graphics engine which is Windows, Linux, and MacOS. We're just going to support Windows at first, but in theory, versions for the other systems should be pretty easy as we're using cross platform sound and networking libraries as well.

I am torn, though, in deciding whether or not to support these other platforms even if the port is quite easy. I don't know if the extra people that it would bring in would be worth the extra QA to maintain three different versions on the client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> sounds interesting - depending on how much revenue you generate and how you see yourself strategically in relations to folks like EVE/CCP games, it may be a good time to speak to a VC...

max (maxniederhofer.com)

</comment><comment><USER10> man, i wish i could check this out. good luck.

<comment><USER10> i mean, i run a mac. jesus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice game, Jeff, if a little buggy. :)

</comment><comment><USER12> No offense, but this sounds a little shady. Maybe part of this is because it's a game project, which inevitably suffer from terminal optimism. But if you really have a working product and more paying users than you can handle, why are you looking for another "founder". This is the time where you should be hiring employees, not splitting the business risk.

<comment><AUTHOR> I could raise more money and hire an employee with the expertise I need, but then I would dilute and give shares to the investors. I would prefer to dilute by giving shares to another programmer who wants to work with the start-up mentality and really shoot for the stars. If I don't find someone with the skills the project requires who wants to work largely for equity soon then I will hire someone to do it as an employee or a contractor. Didn't PG write that you should always prefer employees who want as much equity as possible?

<comment><USER13> Maybe co-founder isn't the right word. That implies an even split of equity. Is that what you mean? Is this about offering someone 40% or 5%?</comment></comment></comment>


A Boeing 737 Max Test Flight Had Its Ups and Downs - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/boeing-737-max-test-flight-ups-and-downs <comment><USER2> Awful taste on the part of Wired to work in a pun on an article referencing two tragedies that ended in the loss of 346 lives.</comment>


Recycling Chaos in U.S. As China Bans 'Foreign Waste' - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2017/12/09/568797388/recycling-chaos-in-u-s-as-china-bans-foreign-waste <comment><USER2> Good for China, they've got an environmental nightmare to deal with, and part of it comes from the US offloading lots of "recycling" operations there, and I use that term loosely, particularly for electronics. We also "export" pollution to China by buying cheaper products that would be more expensive if they didn't externalize their pollution costs, and it's sure better to externalize that pollution abroad than domestically. The US, in my opinion, has been burying its head in the sand about the pollution which occurs when manufacturing everything that we use.

Recycling, save for very specific things, is neither environmentally beneficial nor economically viable. We recycle so many things because the operations are subsidized, and we feel good because we assume the recycling bin doesn't end up in the dump.

Sorting refuse for recycling is a time consuming, tedious process. I hope that automation can actually make recycling more things viable. Reuse is best, but lots of things can be recycled for raw materials, particularly metals. Plastics don't recycle very well, glass requires more energy to reprocess than making new glass, and paper can be allowed to biodegrade or mixed into existing paper process.

<comment><USER3> Nobody forced china to take America's trash. They simply undercut other recyclers, making them economically unviable. The same thing happened with rare earths, china didn't mind to pollute their land to process them, again making cleaner but more expensive means of production economically unviable. This is really the crux of china's environmental problems: if your competitors cheat by cutting corners in environmental protection while you don't, you simply don't exist after awhile. Unhindered capitalism.

Until China starts be more aggressive in cleaning up their environment or the USA decides to sanction against polluting industries, nothing will change.

<comment><USER2> It sounds like China is starting to crack down. It's a luxury you have once you're affluent enough. The bootstrapping process is sadly very dirty everywhere that it's happened.

<comment><USER4> > The bootstrapping process is sadly very dirty everywhere that it's happened.

Not on the scale China's has been. Their environmental destruction has been on such a scale that nearby countries, even those separated by ocean, have greatly impacted air quality and the oceans themselves have been greatly affected.

Sweden wasn't wreaking Poland's skies and waters as it industrialised.

<comment><USER5> You're underestimating the amount of pollution other countries produced during industrialization. There used to be rivers in the US that were flammable because manufacturers discharges so many volatile effluents into them.

London's "killer fog" is quite famous, and Russia's Lake Karachay still holds the distinction as the most polluted spot on earth.

Sure, China affects its neighbors. China is a big country compared to Sweden.

<comment><USER6> England was so polluted that the wildlife evolved dark camouflage to blend in with soot covered trees: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Modern dumps can be very environmentally friendly. The bottom can be clay sealed with leak monitoring to protect the ground water. With a little extra effort they can designed for methane capture to prevent problematic off gassing. Maybe aluminum and other purish metal scrap gets taken out of the waste stream and the rest goes back to the Earth. Some carbon capture happens and the site can be mined in the future if it seems worthwhile. Add video monitoring of what goes in for future prospectors to evaluate the ore body and call it a day.

Recycling does not make much environmental sense and considering it is sort of like a little ritual that washes away your consumption sins, maybe a net negative on getting people to consume less. Even mass compost is a problem, potentially spreading plant diseases and, in the Bay Area, getting poison oak in your mulch is a real downside. Oakland is now charging more for compost disposal than for garbage, so some kind of problem is going on with it. Plus one one truck zooming around waking people up in the morning instead of the current three.

<comment><USER8> Shipping your garbage half way around the world does indeed make little sense. But Recycling itself is a good idea - we used to do this, AT&T did it with everything they made, milk and soda came in reusable bottles, other products like instant coffee, creamer, ovaltine, and others also came in glass instead of plastic - yes, reuse does cost the manufacturer more, but right now, those costs are still present, they're just being passed down to an unknown party, at an unknown point in the future.

We should be trying reduce plastic use to places where really nothing else can do the job - and use more glass, metal, , and paper instead.

<comment><USER9> > ... Recycling itself is a good idea ... milk and soda came in reusable > bottles, other products like instant coffee, creamer, ovaltine, and others > also came in glass instead of plastic - yes, reuse does cost the > manufacturer more ...

As you say at the end of my quote, that's reuse, not recycling. Plus you're really only talking about using glass bottles instead of plastic bottles. None of that means that "Recycling itself is a good idea".

<comment><USER8> Arguably, Glass, and Metal are easier to recycle - but more energy intensive to do so - its much easier to sort glass and metal than the 9000 kinda of plastic.

I'd argue that reuse and recycling are in many cases, functionally semantics.

<comment><USER10> There's no reason to recycle glass. The planet is made of it. Almost every rock you see around you can be melted into glass.

And it's completely harmless if thrown out. At most crush it first.

The only thing worth recycling is metal.

<comment><USER11> This is dated but really interesting: [https://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/old/5703.pdf](https://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/old/5703.pdf)

It's worthwhile to recycle glass.

<comment><USER12> First paragraph of the conclusion section:

 _Recycling of glass containers saves some energy, but not a signifcant quantity compared to reuse. The primary energy saved is about 2.2 x 10^6 Btu /ton, or 13% of the energy required to make glass containers from virgin raw materials. This estimate includes energy required for the entire product life cycle, starting with raw materials in the ground and ending with either final waste disposition in a landfill or recycled materal collection, processing, and return to the primary manufacturing process. The actual savings depend on local factors, including population density; locations of landfills, recovery facilities, and glass plants; and process efficiencies at the specifc facilities available. The savings increase if wastes must be transported long distances to a landfill or if the containers are made in an inefficient furnace. They decrease if there is no local MRF or glass plant, or if material losses in the recycling loop are high. If the MRF is as much as 100 mi away, savings from recycling are negated._

<comment><USER11> Sure! It's the 2nd best choice. Reuse as much as possible. What can't be reused, recycle. But it's significantly better to recycle it than throw it in the garbage for almost everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is going to work out great. All the technology for automatically sorting and recycling plastic exists. There are production plants using it. The best sorters aren't widely used yet, but they're available. Even ABS/polyethylene/polystyrene sorting is available. The US has been shipping unsorted wasted to China, but now will have to sort and recycle it domestically.

The biggest plastic recycling plant in the US is in Riverside, California.[1] In go mixed bottles, out come injection molding pellets. The technology is working at scale right now.

Bloomberg sees this ban as a boost for the US plastics industry.[2]

[1] [https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/carbonlite- inside...](https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/carbonlite-inside-the- worlds-largest-plastic-bottle-recycling-plant-0)

[2] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-06/china- s-b...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-06/china-s-blow-to- recycling-boosts-u-s-s-185-billion-plastic-bet)

<comment><USER14> Check this out, from Finland [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_1sOPqM_VA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_1sOPqM_VA)

<comment><USER13> Nice. Most of the sorting is done by mechanical methods - shakers, screens, flotation tanks, magnets - but most plants still have a few manual pickers pulling out strange stuff. That's a robot job.

Then glass and plastics are chopped into pellets, and sorted by color and material. That uses the same vision technology used to sort farm products. Vision-based sorting is so fast that it's routine to sort _individual peas_ using machine vision. Sorting glass cullet into clear, amber, and green works just as well. Sorting plastic by type is rarer, but here's a line for that.[1]

Here's a overview of a production recycling plant.[2] A random mix of stuff goes in, and stage by stage, each material flow becomes more uniform, until material ready for reuse comes out.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mppwM_gkSY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mppwM_gkSY)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkILrp11Jq0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkILrp11Jq0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The almost-invisible consumer habits of the past 100 years circumscribe virtually all of the greatest environmental disasters of the next 100, bearing in mind that "environmental disaster" has only existed since the steam engine or the logging of the Old Growth forests, depending upon where your measure of advanced development begins.

When you visit a grocery store, there's a garbage dump wrapped around most of the products. Some of it's biodegradable, compostable, and recyclable, much of it isn't. We can remediate and save some of these processes and luxuries, but that they are mostly unsustainable is evident to anyone who comprehends industrial engineering.

<comment><USER16> When people go on about climate change, it bothers me because the fact of if climate change is man accelerated or not is totally irrelevant. CO2 is the least of our pollution problems, when you look at planned obsolescence, cellphones more powerful than 2000s laptops that are designed to only have a 2~4 year lifecycle, the prevalence of electric cards which all take barrels of oil to produce, the total and complete lack of real rail systems in the US, which use a fraction of the power consumption of cars (a system America use to have and is now gone), etc etc etc

Climate change is irrelevant because if people simply consumed less and demanded products that last longer, we'd reduce carbon emissions as well as other forms of pollution. The real inconvenient truth is that overall consumption needs to go down. It means smaller factories, less industry growth, higher paying factory jobs and a total change in our fundamental value systems ... so really it's never going to change until after the next global collapse .. not that 2008 bullshit, I mean a real one.

<comment><USER17> >Climate change is irrelevant because if people simply consumed less and demanded products that last longer, we'd reduce carbon emissions as well as other forms of pollution.

Not so. Carbon stays and accumulates. It's not the annual emissions which matter, it's the total emissions to date which matters.

At this point, we've _already_ put too much in the atmosphere. Continuing to emit, at a lower rate, would still be adding to the problem. It would be an improvement over emitting _even larger_ amounts, but we'd still be making the overall situation worse off with each passing year.

<comment><USER18> > Carbon stays and accumulates

Stop hand waving. Trees use it, algae use it, at the very least. Carbon doesn't stick around with the persistence of mercury. Rate of emission is precisely what matters. The problem is that it outpaces the consumption. There's an opportunity to create an industry of carbon consumption that will only arise after the crisis point (depending on which countries blink first).

<comment><USER19> A good chunk of the atmospheric CO2 is only removed by geological processes that take tens of thousands of years. Trees and algea only bind carbon temporarily, it's released when they rot. Only a part of the carbon stays in the soil. The carbon cycle is pretty complex:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am dismayed at how little people care about this. If more people (not even everyone) had some basic knowledge of plastics and the will to rinse the containers they recycle, sorting would be much more efficient. But I'd be willing to bet that most people use their recycling bin as a kind of funny second trash can. I know my roommates do. We got fined and they _still_ put dirty paper towels and plastic containers with food on them in the recycling bin (since technically these are made out of recyclable materials). Effectively though, the recycling is being used like a special garbage can.

<comment><USER21> Solutions which require universal virtue are usually doomed.

<comment><USER22> I think so too. Maybe a way around is if you think of it as being largely carrots and sticks. When the stick is big enough the results can be comparable to those of universal virtue.

<comment><USER21> That is true. But that way lies totalitarianism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The Chinese government has already relaxed the proposed rules somewhat, in response to criticism that the increased standards were actually impossible to meet with current processes and equipment. And this article fails to mention that many of the Chinese companies in this sector were grossly negligent in their handling of the "contamination" \- of course no one wants to say "our buyer in China had their license revoked because they were literally pouring toxic waste in a river" but that's the sort of thing that was going on.

There are business opportunities here, too. The more positive one is in automated (mostly computer vision based) sorting systems. Automated sorting that's clean enough for China's new standards is possible with existing technology, but there are a lot of opportunities for both new entrants and existing companies in the sector to improve speed and reduce costs. In the long term, this is definitely the path forward.

The second opportunity is for other countries in the Asia-Pacific region that are less picky about environmental regulations, to buy American recycling exports, clean them up to Chinese standards, then resell to China. In the short term, I expect we'll be seeing a lot of this.

<comment><USER24> I agree that more automation is going to happen. But I also think that regulations which increase recycleability will be required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A similar ripple is happening as China scales back on coal.

Coal gets mined in Utah and shipped on unit trains out to Stockton, CA and put on freighters to China. A local developer is trying to move that port to Oakland but upwind of a residential area. He'd been turned down a few times but he tricked an administrator into a bad contract which the city has rejected. A lawsuit was filed.

[http://nocoalinoakland.info/tagami-files-for-summary- judgmen...](http://nocoalinoakland.info/tagami-files-for-summary-judgment/)

[http://www.wri.org/blog/2017/01/china%E2%80%99s-decline- coal...](http://www.wri.org/blog/2017/01/china%E2%80%99s-decline-coal- consumption-drives-global-slowdown-emissions)

I don't think Tagami will have demand but the lawsuit goes on.

</comment><comment><USER26> I highly recommend the documentary Plastic China. It is heartbreaking to watch the stories and struggles of the families that are filmed.

It's available to stream on Prime video. It is a real eye opener for what happens next to some of the waste we throw into the recycle bin, long after we have forgotten about it.

<comment><USER27> Got Prime, but "This title is not available in your current location"

Heh. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Seems like Germany had this one figured out. One non-recyclable thing found in your building's garbage and you're all in trouble. The US is way too lax on enforcing good practices. We waste too much, and when we do feel good recycling drives we do it lazily.

<comment><USER29> Agreed but like maybe companies shouldn't produce waste packaging, etc.

This sounds an awful lot like "blame the litter bugs".

Adam Ruins Everything - The Corporate Conspiracy to Blame You for Their Trash:

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

<comment><USER28> How about not buying stuff with poor packaging. Sure, sometimes we don't have a choice, but many times we do. Often it's as simple as preparing food at home versus getting take out. I'd prefer laws to mandate recycleable packaging. Problem solved. Petrochemical industry will be ticked.

<comment><USER30> People working 12 hours per day don't really have time to cook. Also if stuff wrapped in plastic is cheaper, people will buy it as money is a limited resource they need for so many other things.

Unless there is government action to mandate some sort of rules around this - mainly to force companies to use reusable containers - blaming little consumers is a fool's endeavor.

<comment><USER19> Luckily most people don't work 12 hours per day.

<comment><USER30> Lots of poor and blue collar working class people do 12 hour work days (for example truckers or workers in construction). And these are the people that are usually described here as "primitive" consumers who only eat fast food and buy cheap prepared food in plastic containers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't understand why there's so little education in America about what is recyclable and what isn't. When I lived in Japan, every district in most cities had detailed documentation about what goes where on what day, how to clean it, etc. When you go to restaurants, there's images of the items that are recyclable on their respective recycle bins and images of what goes in the trash on the trash bins. There's also drains to pour out pet bottles, etc.

Is it that hard to spread some basic documentation about recycling?

<comment><USER32> Easy—there's more money to be made from Americans being wasteful.

<comment><USER31> Aren't we losing money by no longer being able to sell our recyclables to China? Isn't the crux of this article the exact opposite of what you're saying?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> In my mind this illustrates the obvious flaws in the globalized economy where we build these wacky supply chains based on exploiting poorer countries.

Other examples abound. Shipping chickens harvested in Arkansas to be butchered in China and sold in Massachusetts is another.

<comment><USER34> Snopes doesn't think that chickens are going on such an incredible journey.

[https://www.snopes.com/china-chicken- reshipped/](https://www.snopes.com/china-chicken-reshipped/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's amazing that a "waste shipping industry" between parties on opposite sides of the planet can exist at all.

I guess it's possible because "developed nations" send back empty container ships which might as well be turned into dump trucks?

<comment><USER36> The sheer size and capability of China (hundreds of millions of people willing to work extremely hard in exchange for little money) has allowed a wide variety of things to happen in the world that otherwise simply wouldn't be possible.

Their deciding that they no longer are willing to participate in things like this can be a massive (in a time frame and to a degree that a lot of people will be utterly confused and scratching their heads "but how can this be, it doesn't make any sense!!!???") game changer.

<comment><USER37> I'm not sure its the 'game changer' they wanted. Labor rates going up in China means, more automation in the US. Its not a matter of them-vs-us jobs; its a matter of cheap labor vs automation. And the smart money is on automation today, since its growing explosively in manufacturing and warehousing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Also Related:

[https://plasticbank.org/](https://plasticbank.org/)

[http://www.earthbench.org/how-to-bottle- brick.html](http://www.earthbench.org/how-to-bottle-brick.html)

<comment><USER38> I'm confused by Plasticbank. They seem to pay for plastic. While they divert plastic from oceans, doesn't paying for plastic increase demand?

It sounds like the Cobra Effect -- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect) \-- where paying for dead cobras, intending to lower their numbers, motivated people to breed more, which increased their numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Of the vegetables in the supermarket, the ecological / organic have the most packaging. I find it ironic that if I want to use reusable bags to buy greens, I am pretty much forced to go non-organic.

<comment><USER40> It strikes me that the packaging is to prevent you from getting the organic goodies at the inorganic price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> impact on my neighborhood economy is severe. i don't know how much is the chinese decision and how much other factors. but we used to have people who regularly stopped by to pick up bulk cardboard and scrap metal. apparently cardboard isn't worth anything at all anymore and we have to manage the impact on our waste stream. and because the price of steel has fallen to $0.03/lb, and id requirements have been toughened up to discourage theft, we can't even get the homeless meth addicts to haul away steel anymore.

<comment><USER42> > and because the price of steel has fallen to $0.03/lb

Since when? I'm pretty sure it's around $0.10/lb right now and stainless is around $0.30/lb.

<comment><USER41> thats what we get for clean hot roll scrap around here. none of the people who used to come by with trucks think that its worth the gas money any more. $0.10 is definitely worth gas money, so idk

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> One way this could be partially solved is with better technology. Like a digital trashcan that analyzes your trash and alerts you/rejects your trash it if it's not sorted correctly, maybe tell you what item wasn't recyclable. Just brainstorming here. It would help me, because apparently I keep making mistakes in what I think is recyclable and what isn't. Even though I read the guidelines for years now.

<comment><USER44> Search for CleanRobotics, they are building one in my city

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Homo sapiens have existed hundreds of thousands of years without plastic.

13 hours this post has been up and almost no mention of reducing plastic consumption. It costs zero, sends the signal upstream to produce less, and solves all these problems.

How do we not even talk about using less?

I reduced packaged food by about 95% and found it _improved_ my life. My diet became more delicious, convenient, and cheaper, based more on fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, and bulk legumes, nuts, and grains. Here's a video on it: [http://joshuaspodek.com/leadership-environment- podcast-5](http://joshuaspodek.com/leadership-environment-podcast-5).

Here's a podcast episode on it: [http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/joshua- spodek](http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/joshua-spodek).

It's been more than six months since I've emptied my landfill garbage and months since I emptied my recycling. My compost, on the other hand, I empty a couple times a month.

How is the headline for this story not: "It's past time we stop producing garbage by 90%. It will improve your life"?

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm a little bit disappointed as the story just looks for new ways to get rid of the plastic problem. Why not produce and use less plastic? In the EU some countries ban plastic bags, others introduced or increased prices for bags. On the other hand more paper bags are available and prices for them dropped, too, resulting in more people using paper bags or starting to use cotton-bags.

<comment><USER46> The problem with solutions like this is that life is more complicated. Plastic bags are easy and energy efficient to produce and to ship to the end-user. Paper bags degrade incredibly poorly in the anaerobic environment of landfills and they use more energy for shipping to the end-user. IIRC, a paper bag that is not reused three times before being thrown away or recycled ends up using more energy and resources than the plastic bags being banned, and a high- density plastic bag needs to be reused 10 times, and a cloth bag needs to be used 150+ times to be better than low density plastic bags.

<comment><USER19> Paper bags may use more energy, but they dissolve in the ocean instead of turning into microplastics and accumulating in the food chain.

<comment><USER46> They may dissolve in the ocean, but the US does not dump its garbage in the ocean. When you put them in a landfill the last for a very long time. A very, very long time. When people want to determine the age range from a core sample of a landfill then just look for paper because it does not degrade in an anaerobic environment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Send it to the next cheapest place to dump garbage outside a rich country.

Probably Africa ... someone there will surely be happy to take money to dump first world "recycling" by a roadside.

What's really needed is a ban on exporting garbage/recycling from this country, not a game of musical chairs whilst various countries ban "importing".

Or just dump it in the Pacific Ocean .... oh hang on we already do.

</comment><comment><USER48> >'CEO Steve Miller says the robot uses cameras and artificial intelligence to separate recycling from trash "in the same way that a person would do it," but faster and more accurately.'

This looks like an issue we could actually address.

What if every recycler world wide could get their hands on open source AI sorting software and open robotics.

Anyone know of any open source projects along these lines?

</comment><comment><USER49> This is a domino we should pay attention to.

</comment><comment><USER50> But ... if there was actual recycling (you know, re-using of materials) this wouldn't be a problem ! This only makes sense if environmentalists (politicians and activists) are lying about what recycling is. Either lying outright, or lying by not doing basic checks on their claims of what gets reused.

</comment><comment><USER44> Something interesting not discussed thus far:

Most glass that is sent to recycle, if broken and not directly re-usable, is used as 'daily cover'.

That means they grind it up into bits, then spread a 1" layer on top of the landfill each day to help introduce stability, and start the decomposition process.

</comment><comment><USER51> This is probably a very good move. At some point, the clever marketing behind "Keep America Beautiful" will lose its believability, and people will demand what the creators behind KAB have been trying to avoid: corporate responsibility for creating less wasteful products. What we have now, in the form of the recycling industry and its associated regulations, are an outsourcing of that responsibility to individual citizens, cities, and states.

Regulations in this area need to shift from recycling to sustainability.

"KAB downplayed industry's role in despoiling the earth, while relentlessly hammering home the message of each person's responsibility for the destruction of nature, one wrapper at a time. ....KAB was a pioneer in sowing confusion about the environmental impact of mass production and consumption."

Then in the 80s the industry faced another challenge; the landfill crises that led to recycling. Heather Rogers writes:

"All this eco-friendly activity put business and manufacturers on the defensive. With landfill space shrinking, new incinerators ruled out, water dumping long ago outlawed and the public becoming more environmentally aware by the hour, the solutions to the garbage disposal problem were narrowing. Looking forward, manufacturers must have perceived their range of options as truly horrifying: bans on certain materials and industrial processes; production controls; minimum standards for product durability."

"In essence, Keep America Beautiful managed to shift the entire debate about America's garbage problem. No longer was the focus on regulating production—for instance, requiring can and bottle makers to use refillable containers, which are vastly less profitable. Instead, the "litterbug" became the real villain, and KAB supported fines and jail time for people who carelessly tossed out their trash, despite the fact that, clearly, "littering" is a relatively tiny part of the garbage problem in this country (not to mention the resource damage and pollution that comes with manufacturing ever more junk in the first place). Environmental groups that worked with KAB early on didn't realize what was happening until years later."

[https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product- design/recycl...](https://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product- design/recycling-is-bullshit-make-nov-15-zero-waste-day-not-america-recycles- day.html)

[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti- lit...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti-litter- campaigns/)

</comment><comment><USER52> Part of the solution might be to ban the import of goods packaged in plastic.

</comment><comment><USER53> Ship it to Nevada. Use solar powered smelters and centrifuges.

</comment><comment> dis-sys the biggest impact for some people reading Hacker News is that there is now a pretty big uncertainty on those "second hand" Xeon processors you purchase on ebay.

<comment><USER54> If anything I'd say this will increase the supply of second hand hardware, as it will be cheaper to resell it, than break it down and recycle it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Us Europeans use Africa.

There was a scandal with chemical waste killing a few Africans couple of years back.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Ivory_Coast_toxic_waste_d...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Ivory_Coast_toxic_waste_dump)

I think that countries should take care of their own waste. That's what we get taught as kids right? Clean up after yourself.

</comment><comment><USER56> Britain's largest export, by volume, is waste paper / cardboard. It _was_ going to China and coming back as cardboard.

<comment><USER15> At least, properly separated, it degrades and can be reprocessed into more paper and cardboard. The US exports CRT televisions and chipsets for electronics with such minimal production quality as to be considered destined- for-disposal.

In some regions, pirated materials derived from metals, petrochemicals, and advanced dyes are immediately destroyed and shoveled into landfills: [http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/steam- rollers-c...](http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/steam-rollers- crush-nearly-two-million-pieces-of-pirated-news- photo/51341789?esource=SEO_GIS_CDN_Redirect)

The brown paper bag and the Anchor Hocking jar are going to come back in a big way...

<comment><USER8> I'd love to buy more of my stuff in glass.

<comment><USER15> Even something as simple as being able to have a clerk fill my jar with a weight of instant coffee would cut down my recycling mass by an average of about 50g per week and eliminate some plastic. Glass doesn't have a limit on recycle phases if handled correctly but all plastic other than PLA has a pretty short recycle lifetime.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tesla CEO Musk Says Company Is Flattening Management Structure in Reorganization - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-ceo-musk-says-company-is-flattening-management-structure-inreorganization-1526308678 <comment><USER2> Bloomberg article on the same topic: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-14/tesla- s-c...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-14/tesla-s-churn- making-it-tougher-for-musk-to-burn-short-sellers)

They also point out that those executives left behind their option packages which is somewhat of a red flag and begs the question what is going on behind the scenes.

<comment><USER3> Supposedly Doug is taking time off before getting started on the Model Y in a few months.

We'll see.

<comment><USER4> I'd have no problem believing it really is a leave of absence. Almost everyone would be burned out after dealing with the intense pressure and really long hours for months on end.

I wouldn't necessarily take this as a sign he is planning to jump ship.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There are rumors floating around that Tesla was very close to their late June target of 5k/wk after their latest line closure. If that so, I think they have turned the corner here.

The steps they are taking sure seem to look more like optimize cash-flow after the R&D is done, rather then a continue full-build to get to max capacity.

Edit since some are downvoting:

Report from Freemont on Model 3 Production line 5/13/2018 (midday):

* 4290- Last 7 days production of M3 * 638- Last 24hrs production of M3

The last line shutdown/retooling had a significant improvement on the speed of the M3 line. Everything is working in conjunction like intended and no bottlenecks anywhere. The upcoming May line shutdown for retooling is going to be much shorter than past, and currently scheduled for May 26-27th weekend. Shutdown could get moved up if production continues to increase at its current rate. The sentiment from the line is 5k sustained is pretty much guaranteed and 6k before end of June is very likely. Bottom line is I was told this is as good as Tesla employees have felt about the M3 production since production began.

<comment><USER5> >Tesla was very close to their late June target of 5k/wk after their latest line closure

According to Tesla...

Their numbers this entire year have been highly highly questionable.

<comment><USER3> not according to Tesla. This was a leaked report.

Bloomberg is also projecting near 4k/week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious to see Elon publish rough stochastic simulations of his Tesla Model 3 assembly lines. Both current and proposed. Full automation without buffering at several stages requires massive uptime for all segments.

<comment><USER7> I don't avidly follow Tesla, but love reading about production processes. Did he mention the simulations would be released somewhere?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In other words, Tesla losing executives and not able to replace them quickly enough.

<comment><USER5> Depending on the article, it either is Pro-Tesla, or saying what you post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Musk is sounding a tiny bit out of control lately...

</comment><comment><USER5> While I dont believe in Tesla, I still decided to buy Bitcoin instead of short selling Tesla.

</comment><comment><USER10> every single little thing that involves this company has to be front page finance news, it's so irritating. yesterday there was literally an article that said "Tesla model S rear ends truck" and if you click into the article, it didn't even involve autopilot....it was just a normal accident. imagine a headline that read "Toyota Camry rear ends truck!"

it's so fucking annoying.

<comment><USER11> They pay a PR company good money to make that happen.

<comment><USER12> So your theory is that Tesla has hired a PR firm to launch a negative news campaign against themselves?

<comment><USER5> Its not negative news, its news.

Plus, if they pay a company to write a negative article, its not 'really' negative.

It might look like a negative article, but the words are to convince you that it really isnt bad.

<comment><USER12> Do you have any evidence to support that? I would argue that that scenario is way less likely than ICE / oil companies spending resources on a negative campaign givsn the current trend of negative Tesla stories making it to the national news, where as the positive ones do not to the same effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Paywall :( Perhaps a better way to earn money than tracking users.

<comment><USER14> Three business models have emerged for newspapers:

* Be a sponsor's mouthpiece. This works pretty well if you're OK with your news being nothing more than someone's PR department.

* Advertising. This, as you say, hinges entirely on tracking users.

* Subscriptions. Also hinges on tracking users.

In short, you're _absolutely right!_ There could be a better way! I just don't know of any and can't think of any.

I'm 100% convinced this failure of imagination is just my personal failing, through. I'm very interested in knowing what this better way could be, and I'm sure the news industry would similarly be deeply curious. What do you have in mind that's practical, workable, reliable enough to build a business around, and in no way, shape, form, or manner involves tracking users?

<comment><USER15> Charge me per article I want to read. 25 or 50 cents? Make it seamless so I can hit Apple Pay and then read the article. I would do it, and I bet so would many others.

<comment><USER16> I genuinely don't see many people doing it, at least not enough to make a tangible difference to the papers bottom line. The only answer these days is a subscription service, but I don't want to subscribe to 50+ different ones... be nice if there was a general 'internet' bill included in your ISP that distributed the money according to the sites you visited the most. Though that's a whole tracking/privacy problem once again.

<comment><USER17> This is similar to the idea mentioned, but again... requires you to be logged in and tracked. I liked the first implementation of it, not sure about the current form. [https://contributor.google.com/v/beta](https://contributor.google.com/v/beta)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The key to Elon Musk making Tesla work well is figuring out how Apple works so well. I have no real idea how Apple manages to be effective and innovative with 100,000+ employees. I don't think Elon Musk really understands what they're doing either but I really hope he can replicate it.

The most obvious answer is that Tesla becomes a division of Apple and Tim Cook helps scale Tesla, as he helped Steve Jobs scale Apple.

<comment><USER3> Tim cook is a awesome COO. As a CEO, Apple is squandering all of the advantages that Steve Jobs left them with. They have been without any clear direction or product vision for a while now, and continuing debacles like the Mac Pro situation (5+ years and counting since Apple has a had a competitive pro stand alone machine), the poor quality of the new Macbook Pro (bad keyboard, dongle hell), the absolute joke that is the Mac Mini indicates that Apple is loosing the ability to even evolutionary improve their products.

This is because you don't have a guy with product vision at the top. Instead you have someone who is great at optimization.

So yes to Tim Cook. No to running Tesla.

<comment><USER19> _Tim cook is a awesome COO...So yes to Tim Cook. No to running Tesla._

Isn't operations what Tesla needs right now?

<comment><USER3> Operations is, but not at the expense of having a vision of what to deliver.

You can hire and define operations, you can't do the same for product vision.

<comment><USER3> What elon needs is a clone of Shotwell from SpaceX. Someone who shares the vision, but can execute the day to day.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Congresswoman defends "states' rights" to protect ISPs from muni competition - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/07/congresswoman-defends-states-rights-to-protect-isps-from-muni-competition/

<comment><USER2> Sounds reasonable to me. If people want to build ISPs they should do so with their own money - either investment or charity. Forcing people to fund the provision of an ISP is immoral, and it's economically destructive too.</comment>


GPUs as a service with Kubernetes Engine are now generally available - <AUTHOR> https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/06/GPUs-as-a-service-with-Kubernetes-Engine-are-now-generally-available.html <comment><USER2> With the new discounts on preemptible GPUs ([https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/06/Introducing- imp...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/06/Introducing-improved- pricing-for-Preemptible-GPUs.html)), the economics of quickly spinning up a fleet of GPUs with Kubernetes for a quick parallelizable ML task become very _interesting_. (assuming that Google allows enough GPU quota for a fleet of GPUs for nonenterprise users anyways)

What I want to use Kubernetes + instant-GPU-fleet for deep learning hyperparameter grid searching. (i.e. spin up a lot of preemptible GPUs; for each parameter config, train the model on a single GPU in parallel for linear scanning speed scaling).

Kubeflow ([https://github.com/kubeflow/kubeflow](https://github.com/kubeflow/kubeflow)) is _close_ to this functionality, but not quite there yet in user- friendlyness. (you have to package everything in a huge Docker container and launch jobs from the CLI; ideally what I want to do is to spawn containers and start training directly from the JupyterHub notebook on the master node)

<comment><USER3> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and helped launch Preemptible VMs).

> (assuming that Google allows enough GPU quota for a fleet of GPUs for > nonenterprise users anyways

This is actually why we have separate preemptible quota [1], which we grant more freely. You can't stock out our full-price customers, so we're happy to let you spin up tons of V100s (and as of this morning TPUs!).

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/compute/quotas#quotas_for_preemptib...](https://cloud.google.com/compute/quotas#quotas_for_preemptible_resources)

<comment><USER2> I was wondering why there was a separate quota. That makes much more sense!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> We have been using GPUs with GKE for a while. At some point, we used 20+ GPUs in an production workflow without any problems.

Everything generally works well, maybe except the initial phase when some containers won't port well from nvidia-docker-compose due to problems with Cuda libraries. Ideally, you need to match the version of Cuda everywhere.

My dev setup for quick experimentation with GPU docker container on GKE: [https://tensorflight.blog/2018/02/23/dev-environment-for- gke...](https://tensorflight.blog/2018/02/23/dev-environment-for-gke/) .

</comment><comment><USER5> Are these GPUs on bare metal or virtualized GPUs on VMs

<comment><USER6> Everything in GCE/GKE is running inside VMs, but when you attach a GPU you get the whole GPU (via PCI passthrough).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> On a related note, last week I took a dive into Kubernetes on gcloud for a personal project and came out with some interesting knowledge.

First off, this was for a _small_ personal project. Something that I originally intended to run on an f1-micro. I decided to check out Kubernetes mostly to learn, but also to see if it could offer a more maintainable setup (typically I just write a mess of provisioning shell scripts and cloud-init scripts to bring up servers. A bit of a mess to maintain long-term). So basically, I was using Kubernetes "wrong"; its target audience is workloads that intend to use a fleet of machines. But I trudged forward anyway.

This resulted in the first problem. You can't spin up a Kubernetes cluster with just one f1-micro. Google won't let you. I could either do a 3x f1-micro cluster, which would be ~$12/month, or 1x f1-small, should would be about the same price. Contrast with my original plan of a single f1-micro, which is ~$4/mo. Hmm...

Well after playing around I discovered a "bug" in gcloud's tooling. You can spin up a 3x f1-micro cluster. Then add a node pool with just one or two f1-micros in it. Then kill the original node pool. This is all allowed, and results in a final cluster with only one or two nodes in it. Nice. "I know what I'm doing, Google is just being a dick!" I thought. I could still spin up Pods on the cluster, no problem.

Then the second discovery. The Kubernetes console was reporting unschedulable system pods. Turns out, Google has a reason for these minimums.

All the system pods, the pods that help orchestrate the show, provide logging, metrics, etc; they take up a whopping 700 MB of RAM and a good chunk of CPU as well. I was a bit shocked.

I'm sure most developers are just shrugging right now. 700 MB is nothing these days. But remember, my original plan was a single f1-micro which only has 700 MB. This is a personal project, so every bit counts to keep long-term costs down. And, in deep contrast to Kubernetes' gluttony, the app I intend to run on this system only uses ~32 MB under usual loads. That's right; 32 MB. It's a webapp running on a Rust web server.

So hopefully you can imagine my shock at Kube's RAM usage. As I dug in I discovered most all of the services are built using Go. No wonder. I love Go, but it's a memory hog. My mind started imagining what the RAM usage would be like if all these services had been written in Rust...

Point being, 700MB exceeds what one f1-micro can handle. And it exceeds what two f1-micros can handle, because a lot of those services are per-node services. Combined with the base RAM usage of the (surprisingly) bloated Container OS that Google runs on the nodes in the cluster. (Spinning up a Container Optimized image on a GCE instance I measured something like 500 or more RAM usage on a bare install...). And hence why Google won't let you spin up a cluster of less than three f1-micros. You can, however, use a single f1-small since it has 1.7MB of RAM in a single instance.

At this point I resigned myself to just having a cluster of three nodes. _shrug_ the expense of learning, I suppose. And perhaps I could re-use the cluster to host other small projects.

It was at this point I hit another road block. To expose services running on your cluster you, more or less, have to use the LoadBalance feature of Kube. It's convenient; a single line configuration option and _BAM_ your service is live on the internet with a static IP. Except for one small detail that Google barely mentions. Their load balancers cost, at minimum, $18/mo. That's more than my whole cluster! And my original budget was $4/mo...

There are workarounds, but they are ugly. NodePort doesn't work because you can't expose port 80 or 443 with it. You can use host networking or a host port; something like that. Basically build your own load balancer Pod, assign it to a specific node, and manually assign a static IP to that node. (hand waving and roughly recalling the awkward solution I conjured). But it requires manual intervention every time you want to perform maintenance on your cluster. The opposite of what I was trying to achieve.

To sum it all up; you need to be willing to spend _at least_ $30/mo on any given Kubernetes based project.

So I gave up on that idea. For now I've fallen on provisioning shell scripts again. Though I've shoved my application into containers and am using Docker- Compose to at least make it a little nicer deployment.

I also took a few hours to run through the Kubernetes The Hard Way tutorial; thirsty for a deeper understanding of how Kube works under the hood. It's a fascinating system. But after working through the tutorial it became _very_ clear that Kube isn't something you'd want to run yourself. Not unless you have a dedicate sys/devops to manage it.

Also interesting is that Kube falls over when you need to run a relational database. The impedance mismatch is too great. Kube is designed for services that can be spread across many disposable nodes. Not something Postgres/etc are designed well for. So the current recommendation, if you're using a relational database, is to just use traditional provisional or a managed service like Cloud SQL.

P.S. For as long as I've used Google Cloud, I have and continue to be eternally frustrated by the service. It's a complete mess. Last week while doing this exploration I ran into the problem where half my nodes were zombies; never starting and taking an hour to finally die. I had to switch regions to "fix" the problem. Gcloud provides _no_ support by default, even though I'm a paying customer. Rather, you have to pay _more_ for the _privilege_ of talking to someone about problems with the services you're already paying for. Incredibly frustrating, but that's Google's typical M.O.

Not to mention 1) poor, out-dated documentation; 2) The gcloud CLI is abysmally slow to tab-complete even simple stuff; 3) The web console is made of molasses and eats an ungodly amount of CPU resources just sitting and doing nothing; 4) little to no way to restrict billing; the best you can do for most services is just set up an alert and pray that you're awake if shit hits the fan. 5) I'm not sure I can recall a single gcloud command I've run lately that hasn't spewed at least one warning or deprecation notice at me.

<comment><USER8> Were the system pods using all that memory or just reserving it? It's not straightforward to scale them, because the node might run just your tiny Rust server or 20 high traffic web apps. You don't want the log agent to keel over just because of the latter. GKE and many other Kubernetes deployments use something called addon-resizer to determine CPU and RAM given to cluster services. The problem is that, typically, it scales based on node count and the settings are usually conservative on the lower end, i.e. your case of a single node. I think it assumes clusters are all at least 10/15 nodes. On a test cluster, I see the metrics server using only 16MB of RAM, but it requests 104MB. Ironically, the autoscaling nanny in the same pod uses another 8MB.

This is a known issue that is not easy to solve in the general case. I think Tim Hockin ran a conversation about how to autoscale on the very low end at last year's Kubecon, with people like you in mind. The other use case he brought up is how to set up services in a Minikube cluster that might be running in a 2GB VM.

<comment><USER7> > Were the system pods using all that memory or just reserving it?

700MB was the sum of all the requested minimum RAM for all those service pods. So yeah, you're probably right that they're ceilings of sorts. Still it's a bit crazy to see a logging service, who's job is merely to haul logs off to a different server, requesting 200MB.

I'm also bewildered by Container Optimized OS's memory consumption. IIRC it was 500MB+ bare; doing nothing. As reported by top. I forget which, but I stood up either Debian Stretch or Ubuntu 18.04 and it was only ~200MB with Docker installed.

<comment><USER8> The logging service numbers are easily explained: the remote server might have transient failures, so the forwarder will cache stuff in memory (the alternative is to just stop reading the logs, but then you risk losing messages if the pod dies in the meantime). You complained about Go, but it doesn't help that the fluentd agent is written in Ruby. There's a new Go rewrite of it, but I don't think GKE or others use it yet.

Was COS a standalone GCE instance or GKE? In the latter case, memory will be used by the usual suspects: fluentd, kubelet, kube-proxy, docker, node- problem-detector. For both, there are also a few Google daemons in Python (ugh).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How about making vanilla k8s usable on-premise first...

<comment><USER10> I have a lot of bare metal servers in a rack at my home.. Tried getting kube running well last night actually.. Well if you're using Ubuntu server 18.04 GOOD LUCK. There's plenty of issues in the various repositories around kube. I eventually just tried using Canonical's conjure-up tool to install kube.

You'd think that Canonical's tools would work on their LTS right? wrong.. absolutely wrong. It couldn't even do an openstack install either. Absolutely abysmal.

<comment><USER9> Yep and there are altogether problems that come up after you got it running. E.g. you probably want to make use of PVCs, but there is no stable dynamic- storage provider yet. Google isn't even working on it as far as github is showing.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Neptune.io, A self-healing platform to fix server alerts automatically - <AUTHOR> http://www.neptune.io

<comment><USER2> Great concept! I'm in the process of setting up a Neptune account, and already I can see a couple clear use cases:

* For alarm conditions that don't have a scriptable fix, but DO generally entail the same sequence of diagnostic steps (checking running processes, memory usage, etc.), set up Neptune to automatically run these diagnostics and email the output to our PagerDuty team. Then, by the time they log into a machine, they already have all the information they need to act. * For alarm conditions that DO have a scriptable fix, instead of automatically running the script, email the script out to our entire ops team. This way, even if the most expert person isn't available immediately, someone else may have the information they need to fix the situation right away.

Besides CloudWatch, what are some of the other integrations you're looking to implement next?

<comment><AUTHOR> @fancyremarker, great use cases. We are working on adding support for webhooks and pagerduty integration in the next version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It will be interesting to know what kind of integration is planned for Nagios as it already supports Event handlers[1] for executing script when there's a state change.

[1] [http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/eventhandlers.html](http://nagios.sourceforge.net/docs/3_0/eventhandlers.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> @Ecio, we are different in a few ways: 1) we are monitoring tool agnostic 2) we provide a much better UX than clunky nagios interface 3) unlike event handlers, we provide best practice script templates so that you don't have to figure out entire script yourself 4) finally, we offer rate limiting features for executing scripts (think don't run this action more than 3 times in last one hour).

In a way, neptune is your virtual first-level on call engineer. If we can resolve alerts for you automatically, neptune won't bother you. If action fails for some reason, it's escalated automatically to right on call engineer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had a great experience working with the neptune.io service to automate some of the remediation tasks that I used to run manually on my cloud servers. Keep it up guys. Looking forward to many more powerful and cool features.

</comment><comment><USER5> I am actually getting ready to go to a meeting today to discuss server alerts. Great time. Best, email@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> @jmarrapodi, great to hear!. Every server on an average generates about 5 alerts per month and if they are not handled properly, they will cause outages. In fact, amazon (AWS) and facebook ([https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150275248698920](https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150275248698920)) built internal tools to handle this exact problem. Our mission is to democratize it for everyone!

<comment><USER6> > Every server on an average generates about 5 alerts per month

Source?

<comment><AUTHOR> This was based on empirical survey with over 80 companies (startups, medium size and big enterprises), and this is also in line with our personal experience managing thousands of servers at AWS.

<comment><USER7> The thing about averages is it hides the good and the bad into one lump number. If your systems were forced to rapidly scale up, maintain various features, and need to refactored/rearchitecured, your probably seeing more than 5 alerts a month. Which makes something like neptune.io usefull since customizing the response based on alerts is your only choice in the short term. Not many if at all any services out there offer solutions to poorly functioning systems. And just to add, at the pace some startups grow, you'll never have a perfect set of systems in place, so you just deal with things as they come. Great systems are a luxury for startups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Which cloud platforms do you support? Does it work on private data centers?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm Kiran Gollu, one of the founders of neptune.io. Currently, we support AWS. However, our SaaS is hosting platform agnostic, and our agent offering can be easily adapted to private data centers. We will add support for private data centers in the future versions.</comment></comment>


Hacker News get us over 1000 visitors on Launch :) - <AUTHOR> http://telech.at/blog/telechat-launches-with-over-1000-visitors-the-first-day-without-advertising-or-sending-emails/ <comment><USER2> Cool product! I know this is a nitpick but you should include a link to your homepage (<http://telech.at>) somewhere on your blog so readers don't have to manually type in the URL.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can't reach your site. Cloudflare ends up saying it's offline?

<comment><AUTHOR> it is working now. it had a traffic spike and we boosted the RAM. please check again.</comment></comment>


Be Aware, Hollywood Steals Copyrights - <AUTHOR> http://passwordbreaker.blogspot.com/2009/07/be-aware-hollywood-steals-copyrights.html This story began in 2003 the Santa Monica-based filmed entertainment company released the long-awaited sequel to the blockbusters The Terminator and Terminator II which was called Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines. Terminator 3 was quite a success and as every movie in the series it has got its fans. <comment><USER2> "I'd written my first program PwlTool*. This program could be used to reveal cached passwords in the Windows 95 operating system..."

I wonder what legal use such a program would have? Perhaps this (theft of copyrighted material) is karma at work.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not a lawyer, but my guess is that using someone's source code for its artistic value in a movie would count as fair use.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't fall into any of the fair use exceptions. The USA fair use exceptions are far more liberal than in other jurisdictions. Simply because the use was not anticipated in the creation of the work doesn't mean that you are free (libre) to do it.

Is it parody? Is it educational? Is it news reporting? Is it an insubstantial part? No, not "fair use" in the UK.

In the US there's the notion of the use being incidental, which definitely works for documentaries but I think you'd be hard to swing it in this instance. With a good lawyer he should be able to win that case IMO.

This is not legal advice, I'm not a copyright lawyer.</comment></comment>


LSD could make you smarter, happier and healthier. Should we all try it? - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/04/01/lsd-could-make-you-smarter-happier-and-healthier-should-we-all-try-it/ <comment><USER2> "Acid is not for every brain - only the healthy, happy, wholesome, handsome, hopeful, humorous, high-velocity should seek these experiences. This elitism is totally self-determined. Unless you are self-confident, self-directed, self-selected, please abstain." \-- Timothy Leary</comment>


Free Online Philosophy Resources Arranged by Topic - <AUTHOR> http://thedailyidea.org/resources/ <comment><USER2> Trying a few and it is good.

But for the topic like metaphysics, is the topic list normal?</comment>


Ask NH: please evaluate my idea, math exercise solver - <AUTHOR>

It's been a while (some years) that I have had this idea in my mind. Now I'm considering to implement it, but I still have some doubt.
The idea is to build a webapp to solve math exercises aimed to high school (and maybe lower) students having difficulties learning math. The app solves exercises showing passages and explaining the rules used in the solving.
It's not a project where I can release a prototype quickly, because it requires some core functionality to be useful (involving parsing and some AI) as well as some kind of interface capable of printing math on the web.
My doubts are about the market. I know a lot of people have problems understanding math at school, but I don't know if students are a good target when it comes to monetize.
Any feedback on this is really appreciated. <comment><USER3> @DeusExMachina: Where I come from (India), poor parents go through considerable adversity to send their kids to good schools. Young adults of disadvantaged opportunity (and this is an emerging nation of immense socio- economic disparity) are enhancing their skills - one course at a time - <USER2> at work. This is the story of a few billion here, and I can safely say it also holds true for much of South Asia, China(?), Africa and South America. Ours is currently a great world beyond just social security and health insurance - ours is a great world beset with great inequity and suffering - where the only recourse for the underdog is to obtain meritocracy and education. Our world is a story of _billions_ of underdogs. In my lay opinion, your product sounds great, and we are looking at billions of potential users - who will inherit our world and will run it. Every minute. Do not worry about a market. The market is already here.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would have paid for this when I was in high school. Maybe up to $15 or $20/month. When I found Maple in university and the step-by-step demonstrations of integration and derivatives, it was a godsend. I could pinpoint the exact step I didn't understand and work from there.

Consider targeting specific standardized tests. Parents seem to pay good money for their kids to have an advantage on standardized tests.

As far as prototyping, it could be a matter of taking something like Sage, Maxima, or Eigenmath and adding some hooks to output intermediate steps and text helper messages. They all output LaTeX IIRC, so you just need to hook that up to a latex-to-png program to render. You can target a specific problem like derivatives or simple integrals, and run some adwords for it to see if there is any interest.

<comment><AUTHOR> Starting with derivatives and integrals was exactly what I was thinking about. What surprises me is the pricing: I was thinking about something lower.

Thank you for the feedback.

<comment><USER4> Well, I was probably an unusual case. Very interested in math, very bad at learning from teachers, and earning a bit of disposable income. I ended up spending about $50 one term on math learning software that turned out to be total crap, so spending that on something that worked wouldn't have been out of the question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm confused about this idea. Will your app be used as a teaching aid? I think that's hard, because not only it has to solve the problem at hand, but it has to solve it in a _pedagogical_ way. If it just generates the answer without teaching teh student, it will meet with a lot of resistance.

Even if you solve this problem, chances are that many educators will oppose this idea, unless _all_ their students have access. It would be unfair for other students who are not rich or tech savvy enough to use your app.

High school students would be a hard market, I would think, unless you app is viewed as a cool "cheater app". A better approach is to go through learning centers catering to students, e.g. Sylvan Learning Center or direct marketing to bigger and more affluent high schools.

<comment><AUTHOR> What I'm thinking is exactly something pedagogical, an app that shows you the passages with explanations on why and what rule was applied, with different rules for granularity.

I know it's not an easy app to implement, maybe I'm too naive but I think I have an idea how to do it, applying some knowledge I have in AI as well as math. To me the kind of exercises you do in high school have always been easy to solve, seeming mechanical and algorithmical and suited to computers. During university I worked with theorem provers too, that seem to me much more complicated programs than this, giving me a sense of feasibility. Maybe I'm just mistaken, but I would like to give it a try.

I don't understand why or how educators could oppose the idea, since it would be something that students would use at home to do homework. I'm thinking about an easy interface, so few people will be cut out and I'm thinking about a low price point, so I hope I will not cut out poor people.

My aim is education, but I understand that it could be used for cheating too. But cheaters find ways to cheat anyway (this has always has amused me, they are really creative on this), they are not my target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just so you know (competitor analysis?) there already exists something like this: <http://www.mathway.com/> is one. I think there are others too (search for 'math solver').

I think it's an interesting idea but I don't know about how good a market it would be. The price would be low, and it is a commodity product, so you would have a hard time separating yourself from your competition.

Also: "I don't understand why or how educators could oppose the idea, since it would be something that students would use at home to do homework." This is exactly why educators might oppose the idea, since students could simply load their homework into your site and be given the full solution to copy out.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a great thing to do. I just don't know if you can make a business out of it. It might be better to just give the thing away - it would be a great demonstration of your skills as a programmer. You could, for example, create it as a python module (or whatever language you're working with), release it open source, and make a 'homework helper' site as a demonstration of what it can do (while also helping students, and not just the ones with money to spend).

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't know if you've seen this, but WolframAlpha now shows the steps to a solution in human-readable form. For example: <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=integrate+xe^x+dx> Click on "show steps" by the solution.</comment>


Stellar Foundation to give $121M in XLM cryptocurrency to Keybase users - <AUTHOR> https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/38925/stellar-foundation-to-airdrop-121m-in-xlm-tokens-to-users-of-slack-alternative-chat-app-keybase/ <comment><USER2> They've been giving the coin away for at least the last 2 years, but they are still resorting to giving it away means there are issues with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> What do you have to do to claim the airdrop?

<comment><USER4> How to join the drop:

1) install Keybase: [https://keybase.io/download](https://keybase.io/download)

2) add your device

3) in the app, go to devices (second to last item in the nav) and add two paper keys

4) click on your avatar (top of nav) and select "View profile"

5) click "Prove your [GitHub, Hackernews]" and follow the steps (HN might take a while to update, took about 2 mins for me)

6) now you should be able to join the drop</comment></comment>


The Complete C# Unity Developer Course by Ben Tristem - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/EnrollCourses/status/964039408822505472 <comment><USER2> Thanks for listing this, please note we also have a much newer version which we've poured our heart and soul into here: [https://www.udemy.com/unitycourse2](https://www.udemy.com/unitycourse2).

Any questions simply email me at email@example.com

With gratitude

Ben</comment>


Intel Core i7-8086K Review: 40 Years of x86 - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i7-8086k-cpu-8086-anniversary,5658.html <comment><USER2> _> Of course, most folks won't consider the extra $75 worth paying for moderate gains at stock clock rates. But again, this is a limited-edition piece of hardware steeped in history._

I'm not sure what about it is "steeped in history." Other than the name, it's just a Coffee Lake i7 with a few barely-perceptible tweaks and a fancy box.

But, hey! Marketing gonna market, I guess.</comment>


Chocolatey (apt-get for windows) Kickstarter, only 4 days left - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ferventcoder/chocolatey-the-alternative-windows-store-like-yum <comment><AUTHOR> For those of you who haven't used it, Chocolatey will change the way you get a box up and running. Think of it as Nuget/Gem/NPM but for windows apps.

Want paint.net? "choco install paint.net" Want sublime? "choco install sublime" It is that simple.

It has been a free project for a long time but they've got a kickstarter to help fund major enhancements, (virus checking, package moderation, more "sys- admin" type tasks to monitor machines on a network). It only has 4 days left, I really hope everyone considers backing, or at the very least, share it with friends that may be interested.

<comment><USER2> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I love chocolatey. I can setup a new windows dev box faster than a mac one thanks to this little nuget.

</comment><comment><USER4> Every developer who has benefited from Chocolatey should show some love for this project. And that is a TON of people.

</comment><comment><USER5> Chocolatey is a game changer. Definitely worthy of kickstarter funding!

</comment><comment><USER6> Isn't Windows 10 coming with a package manager?

<comment><USER2> OneGet the package manager aggregator that has a Chocolatey provider. That's why it's crucial to support Chocolatey!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your mission in life? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Mainly it is serving Allah.

Everything positive is an act of piety, from smiling to strangers, answering Stack Overflow questions, to simply getting a contract done quickly and above expectations. Avoiding anything that pulls me towards sin - things like banking/finance institutions is the major temptation for sin, as well as day trading.

Never focusing on money as a goal in itself. Money is there to do good and to invest into good deeds. I would invest all my money and energy into something if it is good enough for the world.

Being honest, especially when it is bad for me. Never be deceptive. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Never promise or commit to that which can't be done, never hide flaws when selling.

Liberating others. People are trapped in dead end jobs, especially where I live. They are forced to accept bribes, lie, and other immoral things. I like to work with people whose goal is to train and improve pay for their staff and avoid jobs whose only goal is to disrupt and make life difficult for the majority.

Craftsmanship. I see craftsmanship as not the process of creation, but extracting the meaning of what is already there.

Like when you take photographs, you don't just look for a subject matter with beautiful lighting, colors, crisp focus. A food photographer tries to capture temperature, flavor, moisture. A wedding photographer tries to capture emotion and even inject a little sexiness.

With programming or UX/UI, you are not just building features. You are solving a problem. You understand the pains of the user, the emotions, the process, find a way to cure it.

It's not about creating something new, but deeply understanding, appreciating, and immersing myself in God's creation, both the good and the bad.

<comment><USER3> I try to do the same, I hope you don't mind I borrow your words.

<comment><USER2> Go ahead, no copyright

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My purpose is to honor, obey, and serve my Lord Jesus Christ.

Subordinate to that, my purposes are to love my wife, to love my children, to raise them well, to be kind and helpful to those I meet in life.

I live this out imperfectly, on all fronts. But that's my purpose.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a "purpose" I am aiming to achieve I suppose.

I believe there are some universal truths and that they are able to be understood by man. I try to identify these very very basic truths, confirm them, then apply them to my life.

I am still young (24) and recently have focused on learning about what other people think those truths are, to give myself a basis of understanding. Part of this is freeing myself from my own beliefs, so I purposefully don't totally follow any religion/political allegiance/ideology. So for example, I have studied some of the major religions (Hinduism & Buddhism so far) and have delved into philosophy. I think understanding what other people think is truth will help me understand.

We'll see how this all goes in the long term, but it has inspired and motivated me to keep learning.

On the career side, I am setting myself to start a PhD in Accounting so I can hopefully become a tenured professor. Helping people is a big part of what I want out of my career, and this falls in line with that.

<comment><USER6> We are in hard times where good and bad are subjective.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A rough guideline for me is to help advance humanity on its path of technical progress (because the life I love is because of technological progress); to help those living in poverty around the world (because after I die, chances of me being born into a poor third-world country are too high); and to reduce the threat of global warming (because after I die, I want to be born again and not be un-existent in a timeless void because our planet is trashed).

My reasons are selfish unfortunately. I'm also not extremely motivated to make a personal impact on my own, so I aim to earn a high salary so I can donate to people who know what they're doing.

<comment><AUTHOR> So become an investor in other people's social impact projects?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Automation.

I think humans are wasting a lot of time doing things that don't really accomplish anything important.

Real simple tasks like cooking food, doing laundry, scheduling things, etc.

Really any super simple task that has repeated and predictable steps: I want to remove those completely but not at the subordination of other humans or high cost.

There are basically two issues with current solutions: Humans are involved and they aren't completed without input from me. I still have to decide the task I want to be done and I still have to pay lots of money to have it done. These solutions should be affordable, ubiquitous and low touch (much like you don't think of your refrigerator) where basically every person uses automation, which frees up time for everyone to do enjoyable tasks.

My big pet peeves with lots of startups are that they are pointless (they don't solve a problem, just introduce a solution or toy) and they are almost always targeting well-off customers. Why do the rich Millenials (forgive me) get all of the products and everyone else doesn't?

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you support UBI when everything is automated? Or do you think there will be infinite new possibilities created as older tasks get automated?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Make double digits billions, and dump the majority of the proceeds into creating the most advanced research institute humanity has ever seen.

No research papers, and thus no publishing to journals. Lots of basic research and epistemic hygiene. Emphasis on understanding core mechanics of things from the ground up. Clinical trials used only as mere regulatory formalities, not as crutches to throw things at the wall and see what sticks.

Secondary goal is to bring about the creation and large-scale deployment of robotic infantry to fix the security and human rights situation in some of the world's poorest countries. The technology to do that has already existed for some time.

Beyond that I'd really love to write and direct an HBO series based on _X- COM_. Bringing back a ton of 90s games with AAA production values would be really fulfilling as well. Recapturing the magic of SimCity 2000 with modern technology is to me what dreams are made of.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice vision. Do you have a startup or a project currently aligned with that if you don't mind me asking?

<comment><USER9> Yeah. With any luck it'd be the thing obviating the need for research papers, though that is a late-stage goal. Either way the degree of alignment is fairly high.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> this reminds me of the monster ad:

When I grow up, I want to file all day. I want to claw my way up through middle management. Be replaced on a whim. I want to have a brown nose. I want to be a Yes Man. Yes Woman! Yes sir! Coming sir! Anything for a raise sir! When I grow up…I want to be under appreciated. Be paid less for doing the same job. I want sunshine blown up my dress.

<comment><USER11> In high school (2+ decades ago), we had to take some skills assessment exam that purported to suggest a good career for us. I don't remember what mine said, but a friend revealed that his recommended job was "clerk".

(He's now a front-end web developer.)

<comment><USER12> Was it called G.O.A.T. by any chance?

In all seriousness though, that's one of the reasons I dislike academia. It seems to have a propensity towards limiting people, maybe it's just been my experience so far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I learned how to complete the vision of leaders with persistence and dedication. In my IT career came to know that I can make any vision successful. I am following and think they are doing good to the world. My new leader who wants to convert my idea and his idea into a product. Note: I am an employee working on half of salary what I earn in my last organization. Obviously, money is not always the great thing.

</comment><comment><USER14> We all know that the ultimate goal is entropy. The best way to get there is to improve efficiency.

The low hanging fruit is human communication. It's ridiculously inefficient. We need another revolution, like Gutenberg's printing press or the Internet.

Nothing is more frustrating to me than seeing people build more apps and websites. I have over 100 apps on my phone and over 1000 online accounts. Everything now has its own app (city, festival, school, bank, store, appliance, car, restaurant, grocery store, airline, taxi, band, currency, etc). Clearly, it doesn't scale.

My mission at the moment is to build a general-purpose computer-assisted communication interface (think IDE for the mind) that will replace 80% of applications.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! How would you differentiate from existing assistants?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> To make self-driving cars at thing as soon as possible. Right now a lot of companies from what I understand really need to be able to get enough data accumulated so there's openings I think to be able to drive for them and collect data on a laptop, that sounds like the coolest thing ever to me...

</comment><comment><USER16> My mission is simply to be. To exist in the chaos and beauty of the world. Take it in for all it's worth, contribute something back, and go about my merry way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wise. 'row row row merrily life is but a dream.'

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Education.

All problems on this Earth, and perhaps life, no, evolution itself is simply a function of "education".

Helping people adapt better to the variety that is existence is my life goal. Unfortunately, the monetization aspect is in direct, to say the least.

</comment><comment><USER18> To live to see a more equitable, more pleasant world, brought about by both technological and cultural evolution. To contribute to that in some small way would be icing on the cake.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't have any.

<comment><AUTHOR> Honest. I like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> To protect the people I care about.

</comment><comment><USER21> Contributing to science

<comment><AUTHOR> A noble goal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> this might sound cliche, but make the world a better place

<comment><AUTHOR> A noble endeavor indeed

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> To flow very well.

</comment><comment><USER24> Create new knowledge

<comment><AUTHOR> Does all knowledge already exist and is meant to be discovered or new knowledge can be created?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have none

<comment><AUTHOR> An open mind

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> To be happy.

<comment><AUTHOR> How about just to be?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> enlightenment and reproduction.

<comment><AUTHOR> A very optimal mission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> make games</comment>