dosycorp

Firstly, it speaks of how ignorant we all are, as a public mass, of how the world actually works, even the reality of an "obvious" situation we aspire to be commenting about. Because you cannot actually "delete facebook". Neither can you "delete" the entire service as if it is some "app" on your phone, or old-skool word document on your laptop, nor can you delete the data it knows about you. Even if FB actually deleted the data they had about you, you can't make their AI's "unlearn" everything they got from you, and you can't make their 3rd-parties delete your data as well ( no matter what you well-intentioned t&cs-ninnies might say to counter this, I just don't believe you that there's anyway to make these things happen ). So you can't Delete Facebook. The first rule of Facebook is: Facebook is eternal.

Secondly, even if you go ahead and delete your account, your protest is impotent. Your victory is symbolic. Your effort at self determination will be undone. Because it's sort of like people saying they were going to leave California ( or the US ) if Trump got elected. So you can do it, but it won't change anything. It will probably end up severely disrupting / hurting your life. And in the end, you most likely won't do it. What this reveals about our ignorance is how powerless we actually are, and how ignorant we are of what Facebook has become. It has become a utility. It is ( mostly ) essential. Even if you do not use it, other services assume you do, and your access to those is gatekept by your ( non-existant ) FB account. And if you do use it, or use Messenger, or Whatsapp, then it is a good way to stay in touch with people you know. And if you really use it then of course you know why you need it. Second rule of Facebook is: Facebook is necessary.

So the third thing I like about this is, how ignorant this hash tag reveals us to be with regard to the way to deal with Facebook. It's not about individual actions. It's about the collective. FB has begun to impinge upon the collective. It has become a utility. And it exists forever, despite the actions of individuals. When it goes rabid / stray, what is needed is collective actions to bring it back under control of the commons. Within the bounds of the common good. Only regulation can subdue Facebook to the useful and the good. Not protest. The third rule of Facebook is: It's a utility, stupid. Regulate it.

The HN post is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16895043

Pretty simple (beanstalk / elasticsearch, no sessions): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16895043

Hope you find this database useful.

Ok, I created it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16895043

I'm replying you because you were interested in this ( or seemed to be ).

TL;DR — I got hire pwned and made a site to let others share.

I was on Hacker News and complained (later regretting it, I don't like complaining, especially not like this) of a bad experience I had while hiring with a YC company.

I didn't think much of this comment, it was just a good way to vent, even if as I said, I felt bad about doing it a day or so later.

But the comment garnered a lot of attention, more than 30 votes and 10 sub comments. I started thinking I had hit some nerve, which surprised me.

I was also surprised how most of the comments were supportive of me. I expected the usual HN contrarian, "yes, but,it's probably the exact opposite of how you see it, here's why," but there wasn't really any of that, at least not strongly stated. A few of the comments even started calling for me, or people in general, to "name and shame" the company the anecdote related to.

I still have not decided, and right now don't feel as if I can say I agree with, the notion of complaining about these things in public forums as being something that works, either for the person complaining, or just in general. But I think other people want that sort of thing ( one comment even called for a database of these experiences ), and I realized I had just the sort of simple code lying around from another ( failed ) side project so I thought I could reuse it ( finally implement that Redis search ) and let people vent their experiences in a database where you can search by company name.

That's it. That's the experience that led to creating this. Let's see what happens. I don't think anything will come of it, but let's see. It will certainly be interesting to read other people's experiences, and maybe it will be useful for people to do so.

Demand for risky operations by motivated buyers, should lead to some doctors taking on the role / label of risk-takers / explorers.

Since they can get the customers other, risk averse doctors are turning away, and pull in rare-treatment seekers on their own.

- nearly everything is compressed

- many things are encrypted

Therefore,

For any given "random" ( "high entropy" ) string of length X, there's some non-negligible chance it's already been sent.

But it's far less likely that a ( partially degraded ) non random string is sent. Why ?

Consider this:

"the cat sat on the hat" ( probably sent )

"the cut sat on the hat" ( still probably sent )

"thx cut set19n the mkt" ( waaaay less likely to be sent )

"thKxc8t suts n x4e m-t" ( probably never sent ... until now :) )

My reasoning is like, all random strings are ( happy / random ) in the same way. They all look alike. High entropy, but low organization / structure. Because of compression and encryption, any random string probably has as good a chance to be sent as any other, so looking at random strings doesn't really get us anywhere ( but I do make a very very rough calculation at the end that says probably all 7 byte strings have been sent ).

It's going to be far easier in my opinion to find an "almost-language" string ( partially degraded, like the above examples ) that's never been sent.

Remember, Google whacks? 1 search result. One tactic was putting together uncommon words. Another was misspellings.

Basically the intuition / intuitive idea I'm trying to convey is : pick any random high entropy string of given short length, and pick any language string of given short length, and they are both, in my opinion, more likely to have been sent than an "almost language" string of same length. The more degraded you make it ( up to a point, heh ) the less likely it was ever sent.

Very rough calculation about random strings

So, assuming the question is for what X is p > 0.5, and assume that 1 zettabyte has been sent through the net through it's entire history, so 10^18*8 bits, or roughly 2^(63.8), so roughly every 58 bit string has been sent.

So roughly every 7 byte string ever possible has been sent on the internet. Probably.

I pushed back at the contract, and asked them to ask their lawyer if that was really necessary. When they insisted on a contract for the homework project I pulled out of the process. It just felt so wrong.

The worst part, is not that they would seek some way to freelance a small part of their system, nor that they would actually use ideas from hiring interviews in their product -- but that (it seems) they would so blatantly lie to someone they professed to want to hire that this was homework, when in fact it was not. Even worse was the feeling of disrespect that they wanted to freelance part of their system for USD450, trying to abuse the hiring process/ talking a big game about offers, to unfairly lowball the price. Like they are a well funded, established, largish YC alum, at least they can afford to pay market. Anyway, everytime I see "XXXX is hiring a YYYY in ZZZZ" on here from them, I'm reminded. Feels good to vent.

Just sad. Anyway, I'm not going to name names because this is unwise to do that in a public forum.

Anyway, I only added the above anecdote after writing the following comment.

This is why Triplebyte is so good. You do a single technical interview ( after a quick online quiz ), then get fast tracked to final interviews at various YC / silicon valley startups.

Sure, maybe not everyone wants to work for a smallish startup. But some of their clients are 200+ people. So...it's not all the same.

https://medium.com/@dosy/sending-forbidden-files-on-gmail-us...

Please excuse the tone I'm using. I'm just working out my style, and so on. Not an excuse. Just asking for kindness while I work out a writing voice.

Anyway I can summarize here:

- try to send many file types on GMail, get blocked for security reasons

- convert the file to a text file using https://textonly.github.io/txtmode

- attach the text file to the email and send it no problemo

- use the same link to convert the text file back to the archive

- congratulations you just used GMail to send a file GMail ( in its infinite wisdom ) did not want you to send

I'm not making this as a hack and I hope no one uses it to do bad stuff obviously, this is just to get over the poorly implemented "threat scan" GMail currently uses, which blocks plenty of useful and harmless files, and which disingenuously forces the "workaround" of uploading to GDrive.

This tool is hosted on GitHub pages. You can view the source code here: https://github.com/textonly/txtmode

In one sense it appears tone deaf to how much CC-licensed sharing can be argued to enable an economy of content creators, by lowering certain transaction costs.

But in light of recent revelations and the public mood, it seems more prescient: perhaps pointing the way to a future where everybody pays for every little bit of content they consume, rather than being the product themselves, in a "free" offering. That old idea of micropayments for content, here we come, eh? And the EU being the first (for once) to lawify it. Is it too early to pat them on the back?

If you can encourage reuse, that's good. If you can encourage payment, that's good. Different strokes, for different folks, works. As I understand it, the proposal forces payment. That's not good. Creators choices should not be constrained in this way.

Instead of constraining options, I feel EU legco, should see if there is an opportunity to legislate to ease the way for implementing and executing micropayments / content transactions ( a real problem ), if there is, do that. Law that engages with and enables technological realities, rather than trying to constrain something already useful, would seem to work better here.

Maybe the Senate’s deference in part is motivated by their belief he may run and win in a few years and they hope to win favor from a man they may end up working for.

Secondly perhaps it is motivated by them not wanting to appear too knowledgeable nor too much of a threat to Mark, to put him at ease, lest they otherwise provoke his wrath.

Third I think their attitude is certainly motivated by the awareness, from those in governments, just how powerful internet giants, particularly FB, are. I believe in no small ways have these companies upended the conventional relationships of individuals, and corporate individuals, to the state. They command vast resources, such as people and intelligence ( and automated processes pertaining to them, i.e, algorithms or bureaucracy, pick your favorite term ), traditionally the purview only of state entities.

I’m quite sure that many in government consider these companies are direct threats to the future of their model of governance. But they also feel they must handle them very delicately. Because they do not want to risk a premature confrontation they are unprepared for.

But if any person alive today was going to mount some sort of the future coup against conventional government, spearheaded by the new tech elite, then Mark is a perfect candidate. He is a student of history and demonstratedly strategically effective.

In this light, perhaps the biggest takeaway of a public questioning such as this is how much of a theatrical side show and possibly a distraction it is from the new reality these powerful groups find themselves contesting.