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emrekzdon Show HN: Web app that lets you send email time capsules

This is very cool and makes me smile because I used to use a simplified version of this as a take home project in engineering interviews.

One usecase I find particularly interesting is predictions. People often predict the future like “in 2 years we will have AGI” etc. It would be fun to fact check these predictions on the exact date 2 years later. Pick top tech leaders or politicians and scrape all their predictions and make a leaderboard of who got it right or messed up. could be fun to try.

emrekzdon Building Arc Intelligence: Agentic AI for Complex Financial Analysis

Thanks for the comment! Our approach has been very much depth-first rather than breadth-first. We’re laser-focused on the private credit industry for now and plan to stick with B2B for the foreseeable future. The biggest takeaway for us while building Arc Intelligence has been that accuracy is everything—and hitting those high accuracy levels really comes down to staying focused.

emrekzdon Launch HN: Warrant (YC S21) – Authorization and access control as a service

not sure if I'm understanding what you are comparing with. what is your alternative?

if we are taking authz as a need in your org and also a single point of failure for your entire services (as you said in your comment), are you suggesting you would instead build / host your own Zanzibar like authz service, and that your in-house solution would do better in terms of availability than this external solution?

leaving aside how much you'd lose on productivity, I would guess your in-house solution will break more unless you spend a lot of time making that a highly available service (and you'd depend on other SaaS for that as well, which may also break).

emrekzdon Stripe Financial Connections

Unlike Plaid, Finicity and Yodlee have direct integrations with some banks. Example: Silicon Valley Bank has direct integration with Finicity. SVB through Plaid breaks quickly (because they require some weird 2fa policy).

Let me know if I'm missing something but if Stripe is A) providing reliable connection to common banks Plaid misses and B) saving it's users from all the headaches of integrating with old school services like Finicity/Yodlee, then charging a premium sounds like fair game.

emrekzdon Going from $110k to $24k for more skin in the game

I hope you find extra motivation from the extreme contraints you forced on yourself in the longer term. Making yourself live on 24k in NYC is not a good idea. Publicly sharing that is an even worse idea. I’d be surprised if this gave a positive signal to your investors, but it surely won’t to anyone you possibly employ/pay salary for.

emrekzdon AlgorithmWatch shuts down Instagram monitoring after threats from Facebook

If I have to make a guess it’s much more likely that their deep learning algorithms learned nudity is more engaging (without them using that as a feature). This obviously doesn’t mean the platform isn’t responsible. I agree we need to have regulations that require these companies to ensure their algorithms are “inclusive”.

emrekzdon LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe

Perhaps the author is in an alternate universe.

Unlike what the author thinks linkedin revenue isn't largely fueled by recruiter business. It is driven by where he thinks they are weak: linkedin marketing solutions, or in friendlier words "feed interactions". See the most recent microsoft earnings report:

https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https://c....

And unlike what the author thinks linkedin navigated the current climate around social networks pretty well. Not only they've succeeded in keeping the network out of the political environment, and showed strong growth in user base and engagement (see above report), they also ranked as the most trusted social network consistently according to Business Insider Digital Trust study:

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-digital-trust-study-from-...

I'm not going to argue the author does not have valid points, but the main argument doesn't connect with actual results.

emrekzdon A2SV: Africa to Silicon Valley

My focus is on hiring marketplaces, and ensuring equal opportunity is one of the most important challenges in building an efficient marketplace.

I am also a strong believer that diversity is the bridge to equal opportunity.

I will be sharing this with my network. Kudos to all who made this program happen.

emrekzdon How LinkedIn exfiltrates extension data from the browser

How would you feel if you opened a program and the program started to check your file system to see what other programs you had installed?

Not true. You definitely figured out how to market your scraper by lying. Nice job!

emrekzdon Ask HN: Why are big companies so much less efficient?

You can't generalize but most often that is the case. Having said that I'm surprised nobody brought up maybe the most important factor: sunk investments.

If you have a brand name and credibility at stake, if you have customer liability, if you have built significant the features and infrastructure, if you hired the people that run and maintain those, if your revenue depends on current status of your product... We can keep going on but, you have to take extra actions and caution as you introduce change. That means additional complexity.

However keep in mind big companies can benefit from certain types of barriers to entry such as regulation that provide them efficiency over small companies. For example US immigration policy favors big companies, and IMO GPDR will do so as well.

emrekzdon Launch HN: Promise (YC W18) – Cost-effective, more humane alternative to jail

And in your investor deck you "promised" your VC investors there is a potential for huge monetary return in this. That's what the VCs will look at anyways. Side benefit to community? nice to have but who cares.

emrekzdon Since 1700, Wine Glasses Have Gotten 7 Times Bigger

Not sure about wine glasses but universities have at least 7 times more incentive to publish BS papers these days.

>> "These days, the average British pour of wine is 250 milliliters".

According to data collected from dive bars. And I'm serious, see the article they referenced in the paper: https://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/Article/2014/10/24/Direc...

Modern wine glasses are designed for drinking experience and you are supposed to hold the glass using your fingers from it's stem. And that's exactly why you don't fill half of your glass and try to carry 250 milliliters of liquid with your fingers.

emrekzdon Show HN: Orange Forum – Web 1.0 style forum written in Go

The term "Web 2.0" is an unfortunate choice and as a consequence it has been rarely used correctly. Funny enough I've been to a Web 2.0 Conference about 10 years ago where almost every speaker used it incorrectly.

Web 2.0 has nothing to do with a technical revision or change in the Web. It was used by Tim O'Reilly back in 2004 (and became popular) and refers to the rapid change in the way the web is used, more specifically the switch from static web to user generated content.

I'm sorry but your forum is all about UGC, and AJAX has nothing to do with Web 2.0.

emrekzdon How Booking.com manipulates users

> all these annoyances can easily be avoided by choosing the right browser.

The right browser == non-graphical browser. Good joke.

You can achieve the same by installing a simple browser extension for managing cookies & randomizing browser footprint. Firefox has some.

emrekzdon Benchmark Capital Sues Travis Kalanick for Fraud

> Uber, AirBnb, Snapchat, Dropbox, etc will all crumble. None of these companies are anything special.

Lol. Please share some of your wisdom with us. Leaving aside taxi companies like Uber and useless things like Airbnb, can you tell us what companies do anything special these days Master Foo?

emrekzdon In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”

You "need" to make $1.5M/year for "similar" lifestyle. Maybe you should either reconsider your lifestyle or your math skills.

note: I made the assumption you didn't move to a village in a 3rd world country.

emrekzdon Ask HN: Is S3 down?

In December 2015 I received an e-mail with the following subject line from AWS, around 4 am in the morning:

"Amazon EC2 Instance scheduled for retirement"

When I checked the logs it was clear the hardware failed 30 mins before they scheduled it for retirement. EC2 and root device data was gone. The e-mail also said "you may have already lost data".

So I know that Amazon schedules servers for retirement after they already failed, green check doesn't surprise me.

emrekzdon I am an Uber survivor

Perhaps because her name would be indexed by the search engines as this story is shared thousands of times? Would you like the #1 search result for your name to be a sexual harassment story?

emrekzdon If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely you shouldn’t have hired them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge

Humans transfer knowledge most effectively when they are communicating in person. Of course this does not mean you will achieve the highest productivity in an office by putting 20 people in the same room, but it still says a lot about in office vs complete remote work.

A lot of companies create the type of culture where it's not pleasant to work in the office. However, having half you team work remotely on random days of the week isn't the right solution to this, and I don't think it could be justified by saying "I trust my employees". Just create the right team and the right environment. People will want to spend time together when there is inspiration and motivation involved.

There is a lot more to the implications of strong tacit information transfer that extends to how innovation ecosystems work. For anyone curious I would suggest finding the research around the subject.

emrekzdon Intelligence Report on Russian Hacking

There is no evidence of hacking here.

U.S. Intelligence community is losing serious credibility _probably_ due to Obama administration's pressure. Claiming RT (A Russian News Source) manipulated the elections through their coverage is one of the worst arguments to pick. Especially after majority of the mainstream media has openly and aggressively supported one candidate during the whole pre election period. This is almost the equivalent of saying "don't mess into our own way of manipulating". Ridiculous.

These reports are not helping anyone but perhaps Trump.

emrekzdon Uber's billion-dollar losses expose the fragile state of the on-demand economy

I disagree with your main argument. Uber is buying growth, and it is buying growth that yields network effects. I live in the Bay Area and yes uber prices have been ridiculously low and they stayed the same for long. However one thing changed; now I see other riders sitting next to me while I pay the same price I always paid for UberX. Demand enables pooling. Network effect in pooling is obvious.

You are also dismissing the fact that traditional cab companies are going out of business. My main counter argument against"there isn't innovation on uber anymore" would be simply pointing out what is happening to traditional players. I don't think they are coming back with the new rules of the market, any they were forced to leave this early because uber "bought" growth.

emrekzdon Rant HN: There's 1-Click Unsubscribe, then there's these assholes.

Hilarious. This is where the "report as spam" button comes in.

emrekzdon ScoreBeyond predicted New SAT scores using Glicko ratings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glicko_rating_system

emrekzdon ScoreBeyond predicted New SAT scores using Glicko ratings

Very cool. I'm wondering how you guys apply Glicko to this domain when all questions test different subjects.

emrekzdon An opensource alternative for the TSA’s $300k line assistant

Lol. Please. Let's avoid a discussion about how a useless site could be built better.

emrekzdon How We Built Uber’s Highest Query per Second Service Using Go

No. One engineer built it in two days.

emrekzdon How We Built Uber’s Highest Query per Second Service Using Go

I don't think I've learned anything from this article. It's interesting how quickly the keywords pick up on HN (Uber and Go).

More than 3 years ago we've implemented a reverse geocoder web-service that indexed complete Census TIGER dataset. The service handled over 15K reqs/sec on a 2011 macbook, doing exact in polygon search(no approximations). We implemented an optimized (for in polygon search) R-tree data structure for the lookups.

Assuming Uber's geofence lookups would rely on a much smaller dataset than TIGER, I think you could have come up with a much more efficient implementation requiring a fraction of the resources.

And again, use of Go; irrelevant.

emrekzdon Improve your touch typing

Thanks for building this web application. I think these should be improved for a more effective teaching experience:

1) The app should offer guidance on which finger should be used to reach each key. Initially learners are more open to developing wrong habits and using particular fingers (they feel more comfortable with) to reach keys.

2) There should be a better flow for communicating progress. What is my overall progress? Am I assessed for all the keys? what are my strengths / weaknesses? what should I work on? etc.

3) I think there should be a language support. Typing words in a language become automatic as you do them more often, for example the stop words that come up very often in English are usually typed really fast by people, because they have memorized the sequence by having typed them thousands of times.

emrekzdon How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight

there is working a trick for long distance flights. I used it a few times to get cheaper tickets:

when you are buying long distance flight tickets, pick a city close to where you will depart (this will add an additional flight transferring from your departure city). When you get multiple transfers there is a possibility that the offered price will be cheaper (I confirmed this with an agency when I initially figured this out). If you get a cheaper price buy it and call the airlines to tell them you will miss the first flight, and have them correct the check in location to your departure city. I was able to save $100 travelling from europe to east coast last time I did this.

emrekzdon Benchmarking D vs Go vs Erlang vs C for MQTT broker

While your "benchmark" (if we should call it that way) obviously make no sense, I would suggest you guys look into how concurrency and parallelism are different concepts.