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albertsun

2,052 karma · joined December 11, 2008

I'm interested in technology and journalism. http://albertsun.info or http://twitter.com/albertsun

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/albertsun; my proof: https://keybase.io/albertsun/sigs/N-C7CzpCwwG774s6_TUKXbTFeGrVXlDv8X7W0bxLzC8 ]

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albertsun··on N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption
"In one case, after the government learned that a foreign intelligence target had ordered new computer hardware, the American manufacturer agreed to insert a back door into the product before it was shipped, someone familiar with the request told The Times."

Wow.... this really puts all the furor over Huawei contracts in the US in context.

albertsun··on Texas students fake GPS signals and take control of an $80 million yacht
Sounds like the plot to this 1997 Bond movie. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_never_dies
albertsun··on Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight Blog Is to Join ESPN Staff
While I'm sad that Nate Silver is leaving the Times (I work there), I'm also really excited to see what he's going to be able to do with all the sports data that ESPN has. I'm expecting incredible things to come.
albertsun··on Effective Technical Leadership
Fantastic article. Reading it felt like I was reading a guide on how to become a better coder.

Sidenote: I'm sure to want to reread this in the future. What terrifies me about Medium is that if I'm flipping through my notes, say 5 or 10 years from now, will this link still work?

albertsun··on Project Loon
That's odd, I'm looking at my calendar and it doesn't say April 1st.
albertsun··on Snowfallgate and Startups
Well it's not true that there was no existing relationship. And I'm not sure what anyone gains by your wild speculation.
albertsun··on Association between muscular strength and mortality in men (2008) [pdf]
Published 2008? Hacker News seems to be developing a strong interest in fitness and weight lifting.
albertsun··on Introducing A New Article Design
Right now single page view is the default and I believe that is the plan.

(From an NYT employee who has access to the prototype but did not work on it at all.)

albertsun··on Chinese Hackers Infiltrate New York Times Computers
Keep reading....

"From there they snooped around The Times’s systems for at least two weeks before they identified the domain controller that contains user names and hashed, or scrambled, passwords for every Times employee."

albertsun··on The New York Times Paywall Is Working Better Than Anyone Had Guessed
There's a whole bunch of us (Times employees) who read/submit/comment on HN from time to time.

I didn't have anything to do with Snow Fall, but I did frequently walk past the people who were working on it late at night. We don't have anything formalized like 20% time, but these projects are definitely a labor of love.

albertsun··on Large Investment in OpenStreetMap from Knight Foundation
The way Google is building out its maps data is way more sophisticated. Good look inside here: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-go...
albertsun··on IFTTT forced to remove Twitter triggers to comply with new API policies
IFTTT seems like a perfect case for something that should be an open source project that anyone can install and run on their own servers, not as a centralized service, specifically to prevent things like this. Then anyone could contribute recipes and API clients and there's no central point of failure for them to be all removed in one go.
albertsun··on Introducing human.io
This is a problem I've been thinking about a lot. The trick is the audience we have comes to us through the channels we've created.

It seems unrealistic for us to get them all to use the human.io app.

albertsun··on Introducing human.io
This looks very intriguing but I have a bunch of questions.

Do all the end users, the "humans" have to have the human.io mobile app in order to run "apps"? Is there a way to embed the human.io app/task UI somewhere else?

Is the intention to mostly have lots of people use the human.io mobile apps? Or is this going to be more API based where developers can embed human.io apps into other places?

Is the photo scavenger hunt example an app or a task or is it an app with a single task?

albertsun··on Still running strong after 1,532 days without a code change.
That's the story with the calendar app I use, http://30boxes.com/

I don't think a new feature has been added in about 5 years and it barely seems maintained, there have been a few day-longish episodes of downtime but other than that it works great.

It has all the features I need and am used to, and I don't have to worry about the product constantly changing. In a way it's almost better to use a neglected product.

albertsun··on Lamar Smith Proposes Expanding Hollywood's Global Police Force
If only some tech billionaire could set up a SuperPAC to defeat this guy in 2012.

Here's his Democratic opponent in 2012 https://candaceduval.nationbuilder.com/contribute

albertsun··on Reddit bans The Atlantic, Businessweek, others in major anti-spam move
People realize that most professional news publications now have social media editors or social media teams whose job it is to make that publications content popular on social media sites and in online communities right?

Seems like Jared Keller was doing exactly his job description and got the whole domain banned.

albertsun··on Encrypted Chat Developer Detained, Interrogated at US Border
https://github.com/kaepora/cryptocat

That's the second Google search result for Cryptocat.

albertsun··on The US Census now has an API
The downloadable files for this dataset are much larger than anyone would want to download at one go.
albertsun··on Gittip - Set up recurring tips to people who do great work.
It appears some of the people who you can tip on the site actually had the tip jars set up for them without their knowledge. I think this was on HN before about why that isn't cool.

http://krisstraub.com/2011/11/20/kachingle-and-the-transgres...

albertsun··on Mark Zuckerberg sells 30.2 million shares of $FB common stock at $37.58
Probably to pay his tax bill, right?
albertsun··on FBI pushing for surveillance backdoors on websites
The effect is still there, it makes scaling up more difficult. There are possible futures where very small teams can run services for very large numbers of people.
albertsun··on FBI pushing for surveillance backdoors on websites
The worst part is that laws like these add to the regulatory burden faced by small internet startups to get off the ground. The trickier the legal environment and the amount of rules that a company has to abide by to do business online, the harder it will be to do business and the fewer startups will succeed.

The internet giants, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, et al. might even welcome additional rules like this. They provide additional barriers to entry and provide them more protection against new competitors.

I'd reckon that it's in large part because the internet hasn't had many rules like this that the cycles of innovation online have been so fast.

albertsun··on Cadillac To Release Self-Driving Cars By 2015
I remember back 15 years ago or so when I was a kid visiting Chrysler's proving grounds testing facility there were some self-driving mini vans that had robotic drivers. They were driving (I think) on predefined paths and not on the open road.

I know nothing more about them but it is evidence that people at car companies have not been totally ignoring the concept.

albertsun··on Cargo Cults and Interview Questions
Hey! If it doesn't go well or you change your mind you can always come back to journalism now. We are all desperate for people who can write good code and most of us aren't formally schooled either.
albertsun··on A High Frequency Trader's Apology, Pt 2
Going off the last example, what difference does it make if there is a trojan or not? Bender might very well have chosen to buy at $10.10 and sell at $10.15 without any evil foreknowledge to narrow the spread and it would have caused the some effect on Prof. Farnsworth.

Yes, it does mean that whoever had a sell order at $10.10 gets their order filled faster. But is that trade off worth it?

albertsun··on Amazing optical illusion or "glitch in the Matrix"?
I've seen it at a children's science museum, forget which one. They had a dark box you could look into with some kind of strobe which produced this effect in the box.
albertsun··on Google Drive detailed: 5 GB of free space, launching next week
Err.... Chrome? Google Earth? There are others too.
albertsun··on Gamifying Algebra
It seems that the main improvement here is not anything magical about "gamification" but the idea of presenting students with progressively harder algebra problems in which they get to try out new problem solving methods gradually.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work in many classrooms because the teacher has to manage too many different students learning at different rates and can't tailor the lessons appropriately to all of them at once.

albertsun··on Instagram is "worth" more than the New York Times
You actually still would be extremely unlikely to succeed in doing it because of the dual class stock structure. Most of the actual voting power is in the Class B shares which are owned by a family trust which can't sell shares to anyone outside the family.
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