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codex

3,238 karma · joined November 2, 2010

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codex··on From India, Proof That a Trip to Mars Doesn’t Have to Break the Bank
The cost differential is about right given that Indian labor, skilled and unskilled, is about 1/10 the cost of the US. This mission employed 2500--not exactly Spartan.
codex··on Show HN: I redesigned the Microsoft employee badge
This particular design doesn't take a lot of skill to create, and I'm not sure the author knows what problem to solve. The triviality of the redesign should be embarrassing to the creator.
codex··on Show HN: I redesigned the Microsoft employee badge
- The photo is the most important feature of the badge; for security reasons, it should be as large as possible.

- First and last names are not as important as one's email address

- The logo is a security risk; should a badge go missing, it's a clue as to where to (mis)use the badge.

codex··on How YC Companies Found Employee #1
Hiring #1 is tricky: you need to find someone good, but also naive. In this era of the ray startup, it makes little sense for a great engineer to work for someone else: the first employees work almost as hard as the founders, but receive 1/50 the ownership of the company. In the age of the acqhire founders' risk is very small.
codex··on Spying by N.S.A. Ally Entangled U.S. Law Firm
Because there was other intelligence to be gleaned which was not the result of spying on Americans. Only the law firm was American; the rest of the parties were not. It's possible (likely?) that the NSA said, "give us everything with a non-American source" which would keep them within the law. I have not seen any evidence from Snowden that the NSA deliberately breaks the laws that bind them, though they make give the law liberal interpretations at times.
codex··on PhD students send out physical copies of their thesis to unknown persons
If students didn't do this, it's unlikely their works would be read by more than a handful of people in their lifetime.
codex··on Prefer mercurial to git
Most bit rot isn't due to cosmic rays, but rather to decay on the disk itself.
codex··on Crushify.org: discovering mutual crushes
This has been done dozens of times. Not sure why it hasn't taken off. I think some people crush everyone then claim they were joking, thereby burning the other side. There should be a limit on the number of crushes allowed.
codex··on Why Startups Fail: An Analysis of Post-Mortems (2011)
This could be more accurately titled, "why entrepreneurs thought they failed." Personally, I'm not sure failed entrepreneurs are qualified to make that diagnosis.
codex··on Spying by N.S.A. Ally Entangled U.S. Law Firm
TL;DR Title is misleading, possibly false. The Aussies spied on a trade negotiation and offered to share the intel with America. It is not known whether or not the Americans accepted any information which was the result of spying on Americans, or passed it on to negotiators. We only know they provided "clear guidance" about what information they would accept.

EDIT: Title fixed.

codex··on Airbnb and Housing
Hotels are a form of progressive taxation: rich out of town travelers pay more for housing than permanent residents. Generally travelers are richer than non travelers because traveling is usually a discretionary expense or paid for by a corporation.

AirBnb eliminates the progressive taxation, thereby raising living expenses for poorer residents. Rich people love it, poor people hate it. Sure, you can make some money in the short term by renting out your spare room, but in the long term, as rents rise, this process involuntarily turns your two bedroom apartment into a one bedroom + strangers' room apartment.

Just wait until San Francisco "Google bus activists" get a whiff of AirBnb.

codex··on Airbnb and Housing
This is a great example of the the danger of consuming "raw" corporate propaganda. Without professional journalists to fact-check, look for other perspectives, and filter corporate self-interest, many readers will come out misinformed. Information supply becomes further tainted by attempts to manipulate the average Joe.

I really hope the NYTimes and Washington Post don't go out of business; I rely on them to adjudicate most of my news.

codex··on NSA Employee Shared Password, Key, Classified Data with Snowden [pdf]
Not necessarily. Snowden took mainly metadata: PowerPoint presentations and the like. I have not heard tell that he took any actual intercepts or personally identifiable cell phone data. I suspect the latter is what is audited.
codex··on CppCat, an Ambitious C++ Code Analyzer from Tula
Any chance of Linux support? How does it compare with Coverity, Clang Analyzer, PREfast, Klocwork et al?
codex··on Entrepreneurs Don't Have an Optimism Bias
Expected value only enters the picture if you can play many, many times. It's more realistic to look at the median outcome, yet every entrepreneur is transfixed by the big exits. If that's not optimism I don't know what is.
codex··on The Day We Fought Back: By The Numbers
A banner impression is not the same thing as watching a video; not at all. A banner impression has very little value. It's more accurate to look at page views.
codex··on Very tense atmosphere at a Google Bus stop in San Francisco
"I'm a fifth generation San Franciscan" sums it up pretty well.
codex··on The Day We Fought Back: By The Numbers
In other words, this campaign had the viewership of about one moderately popular YouTube video.
codex··on Apple Sold More Macs and iDevices Than All Windows PCs Sold in Holiday Quarter
Apple is also selling into the living room. The Apple TV sells 6-7 million of them a year.
codex··on Entrepreneurs Don't Have an Optimism Bias
The high failure rates of startups suggest otherwise.
codex··on John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar
White rice contains very little fructose. Bananas have more but not compared to, say, an orange.
codex··on John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar
Yes. They can be the unhealthy minority in an otherwise healthy diet.
codex··on Why systemd is winning the init wars and other things aren't
If you have a system made up of small and simple tools, it can only so small and simple things. Imagine designing an airplane this way. It would never get off the ground.
codex··on The Day the Internet Didn’t Fight Back
This is what all organizations do when they don't really care about something.
codex··on Today is The Day We Fight Back
Ultimately, uses of technology reflect a society's values. Unfortunately, mass surveillance will be a mainstream value until the fear of terrorism fades. As frustrating as it may be, all the protests in the world won't make these values mainstream.
codex··on JetBrains C++ IDE: Status update and Video report
For large code bases, I suspect Java parsing will not be performant enough. I love Jetbrains but I wish they'd just use clang rather than write a Java parser.
codex··on Beam Me Out Of This Death Trap, Scotty (1980)
The shuttle is representative of a class of problems that occur in almost every software project: uncontrolled complexity. It's easier to fix the symptoms in software than in other fields, so this issue runs rampant throughout all of IT.
codex··on Criminalizing journalism? CNN interviews Glenn Greenwald [video]
Will Greenwald profit financially from Snowden data in his new venture? I have not heard many details.

BTW, at least in the US, journalists have never been allowed to operate extra-legally. Were they allowed to, every mobster would also be a journalist.

codex··on The terrifying surveillance case of Brandon Mayfield
Nobody is perfect and institutions are no exception. However, I'd have to see more than a single datapoint to indite an entire system. Those who are anti-surveillance will no doubt exhibit confirmation bias when reading this article, which is ironic.
codex··on Middle class leaving San Francisco, census says
A net loss of 1500 individuals spread out over four years: in other words, almost nothing.
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