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balls2you

39 karma · joined February 14, 2015

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balls2you··on Reversing NvAPI to Programmatically Overclock Nvidia GPUs
No. I noticed it too. In the license he revealed his possibly real name and email id, but tried to be anonymous in the blog by using an ID looking like a Bitcoin address. Or maybe he just wants you to send him more Bitcoin for the code.
balls2you··on Ask HN: Co worker does not like me
Talk to the person who says you're condescending and ask them for situations where you were. Then analyze whether you were or not. The problem with a lot of developers/scientists/"people who have been told they are smart all their life" is that they may think they're making a point or describing something but most of them can be condescending because they think they are always right. It is an attitude change.

If you cannot confront your critics, you cannot correct yourself if you're in the wrong. Also it will help you maneuver social situations better.

To be or not to be condescending - that is a situation that needs to be understood, before you actually act it.

balls2you··on Handy, a hot startup for home cleaning, has a big mess of its own
Great article outlining how disconnected the startup culture is from real life and empathy towards its employees and contractors. If this is the direction these startups are going, it will be no surprise that they will all shut down soon. Same fate as Homejoy.
balls2you··on Online Cheating Site AshleyMadison Hacked
Saudi Arabia criminalizes adultery which is "having an affair". Polygyny means you're legally married which is allowed in Saudi Arabia but having an adulterous relationship is criminal.
balls2you··on Dear Unicorn, Exit Please
Why work for a startup then ?
balls2you··on Dear Unicorn, Exit Please
So if you don't exercise your options, then why take the pay cut and work twice as hard for a startup ? The whole thing reeks of a scam against early employees.
balls2you··on Online Cheating Site AshleyMadison Hacked
> Having an affair actually is illegal in almost half the US, and in some states, it's even a felony.

Wow! United Saudi Arabia (USA)!

balls2you··on Inherited Server from Bankrupt Startup
sell it to another startup that is starting up and take 1% Equity
balls2you··on Mac Pro Tower Reborn
What about the fact that developers are writing more and more bloated and slow applications ?
balls2you··on Woman Knocked Unconscious at Parade by Falling Drone
sounds like majority of the folks on Hacker News... a javascript developer !
balls2you··on I am not an asshole, and so can you
tell that to that Brendan Eich guy at Mozilla
balls2you··on Facebook Overhauls Its Inmate Account Takedown Process
Facebook cannot sells ads to inmates because they cannot purchase anything, hence the takedowns. Isn't that obvious ?
balls2you··on Discussion style and respect
>>I think some people get so combative because their identity is wrapped up in being right. It's unfortunate, given our capacity to collaborate and build, that we still struggle with these scuffs.

Unfortunately, that is very typical of Western (USA/Europe) nerds as they always claim to be right. I cannot make that claim for nerds of Asia.

balls2you··on Show HN: Protecting Your Software Assets Using OpenGL
There are users who are pirates and then there are corporate pirates whose businesses are built on copying and pirating popular games and making them look professional. They are the real danger to indie devs not end users in their mother's basement with no money in their pockets.
balls2you··on Show HN: Protecting Your Software Assets Using OpenGL
You're assuming the application that wants to protect its assets and other IP will let you run it in a simulator which is not going to be the case.
balls2you··on Show HN: Protecting Your Software Assets Using OpenGL
This can easily be bypassed by the application itself if it checks that the DLLs or .so files loaded in memory are the approved and check-summed ones and only then progresses to doing anything. This is a non-issue. Applications that are worried about their IP already do this today. Many encrypt even their DLLs and only load then as necessary based on when they feel they are not under a debugger or a malicious DLL or .so is not loaded.
balls2you··on Show HN: Protecting Your Software Assets Using OpenGL
From what I understand when I read the blog, they're trying to demonstrate that you can use encryption/decryption on the GPU to create some form of DRM unique to your application. Their previous blog cites they are into researching some form of copy-protection systems.

As a once-upon-a-time iOS game dev, I can see it being used to handle In-App purchases where your game will only progress after you have purchased something and you get a key to decrypt the next level stuff. I can see it being used in that way. That's why I posted it here. It seemed interesting.

balls2you··on Unicode is Kind of Insane
sounds like something designed without consulting the CJK users...
balls2you··on Don't Write Off Paper Just Yet
Paperless bathrooms exist in various parts of the world. The folks there use water to wash which is more cleaner.
balls2you··on Google Developing “Brillo” Internet of Things OS Based on Android
And it will be called .. wait for it.. the Internet of SLOW Things !
balls2you··on Ta'izz
You should feel good about it because they are able to communicate without reliable electricity or peace.
balls2you··on Show HN: Nip – Use JavaScript instead of awk, sed, or grep
Learn Perl and increase your value instead of being a one-trick-pony !
balls2you··on Goldman's Self-Defeating Case Against a Programmer
Yes but the "Don't copy that floppy" adage is definitely an American thing. So is CFAA, which makes it easier to have prosecuted Aleynikov under CFAA instead of some other laws. It worked for Swartz.
balls2you··on Ask HN: New job is having me switch from Linux to Mac – how do I cope?
Install VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox, give it most of your RAM and hard disk space. Now run Linux on that. That's your best bet for sticking to Linux for most of your work.

You can use browser on the Mac if you want to be able to use the latest and greatest firefox/Chrome but for coding and software nothing beats Linux. All the OS X brew/ports etc are just not good enough compared to apt-get.

You can run the VM using VirtualBox in background mode too and then just ssh to it using the Terminal.app or iTerm.app on OS X.

Copy-paste works really well on iTerm so you can copy-paste links from your OS X browser like Firefox/Chrome to the ssh terminal and use it in case you download software using wget/curl sometimes.

For email, Thunderbird/Mail.app both work really well on OS X and that should be good enough unless you want mutt, which you can then use from your Linux VM.

Most likely your production environment is Linux, esp. if you're in a company that is giving you Macs so most likely web development. Even better if you mimic your production environment in your VM and develop on that instead of developing on a non-standard environment like OS X and then hoping stuff works in production. (Tons of devs do this and it makes no sense.)

balls2you··on Ub-canaries: Programs that try to make compilers exploit undefined behavior
"exploit" => "cyber security" => "hey look, i can do cyber and you can hire me"

just a way to market oneself I guess here by using the hyperbole of "exploit". makes sense if you want to join the knee-jerk infosec industry.

balls2you··on GitHub's 2014 Transparency Report
National Security letters for open source code ?

Or is it for just the private repositories ?

Or is it to be able to "subtly add code" to existing repositories without being seen ?

What would it be for ? I am stumped.

balls2you··on Ask HN: Mechanical engineer that wants to work in the programming field
Don't join Silicon Valley. Your skills are more valued and paid for in Finance. Real hard cash not worthless options that may have value in the future.

EDIT: also do not "commoditize" yourself by becoming a web developer or an iPhone/Android developer either. Do the difficult technical stuff, aim for the "non-low-hanging-fruit" and you will make tons of money, esp. in Finance.

balls2you··on Fuzzy Math That's Creating Many Billion-Dollar Tech Valuations
You don't think we did ? That's just silly to even think that employees who are more emotionally vested in a startup will forget to ask what their equity is. They don't tell you. That's the norm. Consider yourself lucky if you are told what your equity is worth. And it will be diluted to nothing regardless.
balls2you··on Fuzzy Math That's Creating Many Billion-Dollar Tech Valuations
no equity %. The savvy CFOs will not tell you what your percentage equity actually is. this allows the CEO/top brass to dilute the pool by issuing millions of options before the sale of the company to a buyer. Since I didnt work for a startup that went IPO, $ haul was 0. i didn't exercise the options, they felt useless compared to the effort I put in.

EDIT: also as a traditional employee (in my case developer), you will not be aware that your company is being readied for sale to another before it actually happens. Only, if you're a very tiny company like 10 folks maybe you can know. Otherwise a startup that grows from 10 to 100 or more, then forget it.

To clarify I was an early employee after a funding round and not before. Those who are employees before any funding round are basically "founders" and can get some sort of decent payout.

balls2you··on Fuzzy Math That's Creating Many Billion-Dollar Tech Valuations
In my case, both the startups were "sold" off to another larger holding. I personally, did not get anything worthwhile in a serious dollar amount so I chose not to exercise my options. Really, after the dilution your employee stock options are miniscule. And savvy startup CFOs will give employees small quantities of options not large.

EDIT: Yes, and these were not traditional Silicon Valley startups, they were NYC/Finance area startups. The original founders were not developers (your "bros"), they were finance guys!

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