HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

cureyourhead

4 karma · joined September 5, 2016

submissionscomments
cureyourhead··on Ask HN: Will the future have several more programmers or a few excellent ones?
When AI are everywhere, the ability to tinker with them, repurpose and reshape them to your specific needs and desires, will then be the point of difference. So coding will always be important.

If AI-in-everything becomes as ubiquitous as the written word, which it will, our lives will be vastly transformed. The ability to code will become like the ability to write is now: the absolute bottom rung of the ladder to enter society as a participant.

If AI and energy become essentially zero cost then the differentiator will be how clearly you can tell them what you want them to build, and how useful are the things you choose to build. Oh, wait, so no different to coding today. So coding will always be important, and increasing saturation of advanced technology will only make it more so.

If you are assuming, as counter to these points, AI where you can essentially say: make me a FB clone that will make me 1 trillion dollars per year, finish it in 2 hours. As in, you have a Magic Lamp, then, either everyone will have a Magic Lamp, and the differentiator will be your mind, or only those who can afford it will have a Magic Lamp, so the differentiator will be money, equivalently again, your mind. So coding, in the purest sense of giving instructions, will be important.

To put all this another way, when the number of things to which people can give instructions to produce results increases in number then will also increase the number of people who are capable of giving instructions to such things.

cureyourhead··on Ask HN: Do you worry that your product will be killed by one of the tech giants?
But you can control it. Adopt a strategy resilient to big company interference. Don't think of yourself as a fake victim of big companies. There's always things you can do. Have you forgotten the even basic lessons of MS vs IBM, you fucking idiots?
cureyourhead··on Ask HN: What does Facebook actually do these days?
They make the world more open and connected.

That's true.

What they're also doing is preparing their markets ( fb, messenger, WhatsApp, oculus, etc ) for future products, like VR chat, VR multiplayer gaming and events ( Fb handsfree - voice controlled VR headset for gaming, social and events ), telepresence androids. Building psychological profiles to guide buying behavior, and adopt products like order clothes, items and food for delivery. Partnering with Amazon for delivery. Working out how to keep order and stability in a big community. Assisting intelligence collection.

The core UX is only one area of innovation. Much happens towards these other ends. In a lot of ways FB is far more future looking than the rest of the Big 5.

cureyourhead··on Ask HN: What is the cleanest code sample you've seen?
Everyone talks about clean code, but where are the real world examples? Javascript, Python, something useful and which inspires that the ideal of clean code is actually possible.

I'm considering the perspective that think clean code is this ideal that can be misused by reviewers to blackball otherwise good code for arbitrary personal reasons.

I know the book Clean Code and I like the ideas in it. I just haven't seen any production examples and I'm considering the idea that talking about clean code is a hand waving way to criticize others contributions without substance.

cureyourhead··on Ask HN: Middle way between being the boss and being a slave?
Thanks a lot!
cureyourhead··on Pardon Snowden
The story of Snowden being a patsy is going to come out. It will be even more entertaining than the snowdengate tale act 1. But it will probably come out in 20 years.
cureyourhead··on Pardon Snowden
Well he was a patsy so pardoning him reduces the risk he will blow true story of the most successful increase in intelligence gathering capacity since WWII... So there's that. Pardon him for sure. And never doubt he's a patriot. But he doesn't believe in openness. He helped usher in a new age of secrecy. I think that's a good thing. I also think people should actually know the real.
cureyourhead··on Ask HN: What should I do?
Thanks for your compliment. You saying that helps me feel a lot more belief in myself again. I guess I'm perceptive. Montreal is a good place. I considered it as a base for my startup because it's affordable, open minded and has interesting culture. Never been there tho. I wish you a lot of good progress in your investor search. I'm currently looking for one and at a much earlier stage. Again thanks for the comment it lifted my spirits.
cureyourhead··on Ask HN: What should I do?
Man up and pass on the cost. In some sense in this situation you are a slave to market forces beyond your control. Price gouging once they've built lock in on an API is pretty much a natural part of any service's lifecycle. If you can afford to ride it out, eventually the forces of competition will take over and prices will come down a bit.

From the way you talk about potential partnerships or help with gmaps it seems you really believe in the value of your business. That's an asset. Try to articulate this value more clearly but understand that gmaps is unlikely to just "help you out" or "invest" in you at this stage since: 1) it's not their mandate and 2) they're the incumbent and potentially you are eating a piece of something google wants to do.

At the stage you're at ... 4-5K MRR 25-100K DAU ( I'm guesssing ), and suddenly a slave to a price gouge, an investor can help you out. Definitely try to find one. There's probably a lot for them to like in your situation, not the least part of it being that you're to some extent desperate for their help right now.

I love your non-defeatist attitude. Don't give up. Keep going. You know what you're doing is somehow close to how Airbnb started right?

cureyourhead··on Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
We are all Windows programmers now.

The web is really just one enormous operating system we're all just hacking on.

But it's only slightly better then this but not as clean as Linux. W3C sort of plays the role of Torvalds

cureyourhead··on Ask HN: What's the point of making smartphones slimmer and slippery?
It's a few things

1. Timelines. In the future these devices will just be screens. Transparent and flexible. So this is the timeline that leads to that future.

2. Economics. You can ship more devices because they're lighter so the revenue per pound is higher.

3. Sexual selection. The many arbitrary extremes that exist in nature in males function as points of difference with no function but the attraction of mates. Consumer 'mating' with a device functions the same way as sexual selection. Every purchase makes that phenotype more likely to occur in the next generation. Thinner has caught consumers eyes as an effective selective feature.

4. Mastery. People feel satisfied by achieving mastery. Finding ways to squeeze more stuff into less stuff is one way people feel like they're mastering stuff.

cureyourhead··on Coding Challenge for MI5
Well done!
cureyourhead··on Ask HN: What happened to Facebook graph search?
This is public.

But assuming it wasn't... How likely? How can one answer such a question?

It presumes their use is counter to FB interests

On that I disagree. Yet assume that is instead true.

Even then I feel there are far many more interests that weigh on the side of using these than on blocking them. So I predict they will remain open

cureyourhead··on Coding Challenge for MI5
Clearly the horizontal span lengths , between each fixed height step, encode a useful sequence.

Numbers. Or an offset sequence. If it's a simple cipher recovery should be quick.

Somehow this whole thing reminds me of Egyptian fractions

How long will hn take to solve if we work together

Okay what if rearranging the red strips so their edges are flush encodes a transposition. Key for the cipher.

I'm betting hn will solve when post is 49 minutes old

cureyourhead··on Ask HN: What happened to Facebook graph search?
It still works. You just need to use the GET API for reliable results.

E.g.

Friends of friends

https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/friends/friends

Mutual friends of two people

https://www.facebook.com/search/<id1>/friends/<id2>/friends/...

Photos where both people are tagged

https://www.facebook.com/search/<id1>/photos-tagged/<id2>/ph... or

https://www.facebook.com/search/<id1>/photos-of/<id2>/photos...

Photos recommended for a person

https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/photos-recommended-for

Photos liked by a person

https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/photos-liked

Photos commented on by a person

https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/photos-commented

Stories or posts liked by a person

https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/stories-liked

There's plenty of other words operators and entities

IDs are numerical

Should get you started

cureyourhead··on Ask HN: What should I do as a forever alone software engineer?
Update your perspective.

It's women not girls.

And stop thinking of yourself as some sort of exception. You are not. And that notion is making an artificial distance between you and others.

You are just another human. Your experience and your place on the bell curve is neither exceptional nor terrible.

Loneliness and vulnerability are Universal. They form some of the basis of your connection with others. Stop trying to avoid them.