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grourk

148 karma · joined February 27, 2009

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grourk··on DNC just open-sourced their voter registration platform
Perfect handle.
grourk··on The busy trap
That's not the point. Are you too busy to read the whole post?
grourk··on Facebook e-mail mess: Address books altered, e-mail lost
How do you know when someone has deleted their Facebook account?

They'll tell you.

grourk··on Amazon EC2 and RDS in US-EAST zone down
Your us-east-1b might be my us-east-1a.
grourk··on Where has all the money in the world gone?
Huh?

I've learned a bit about money, and this comment strikes me as conspiracy theory having nothing to do with "how money really works".

grourk··on Heroku Isn't for Idiots: developer time and comparative advantage
AWS provides this now with VPC.
grourk··on Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
Oh, it wasn't funny? My mistake. Thanks for letting me know.
grourk··on Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
Which part is ironic? That I upvoted a joke I found funny, even if was mocking me? Or that I upvoted a comment from a person who disagrees with me?
grourk··on Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
I upvoted you before you added the second paragraph because I thought your joke was funny. "But your equivocation between silencing other viewpoints and eliminating unhealthy voices is not useful." Why not? I was making the point that it's often not easy to tell the difference.
grourk··on Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
The problem is you might identify as "fool" someone who simply doesn't agree with you or the established groupthink. Re-read the first few paragraphs and replace the word "fool" with "person who doesn't agree with you" -- now it says something very different.
grourk··on Mark Zuckerberg sells 30.2 million shares of $FB common stock at $37.58
Were you actually confused and thought he meant "loose"?
grourk··on Being Shy Is Just a Bad Habit, and You Can Break It With Regular Practice
"Some people say shyness is like gayness, something your born with. I haven't observed that to be the case, not that I've researched it."

It actually is the case, for those who have researched it. Simplistic example that demonstrates this: I have two 1-year-old nieces. If you say, "Hi!" to one she gets excited, looks you in the eye, and smiles and giggles. Do the same with the other and she'll smile but immediately bury her face in her shoulder.

I think what you're talking about -- and many of the other comments on this page -- isn't shyness, but something completely different that actually has a much more descriptive name: Social Anxiety Disorder.

grourk··on Being Shy Is Just a Bad Habit, and You Can Break It With Regular Practice
Didn't read the article, but I read the headline to my wife who has a Masters in Clinical Psychology and is studying for her MFT license exam. Her response, "That's garbage. Shyness isn't a bad habit, it's a personality trait; and it's perfectly normal." She went on, "The American culture tends to favor the extraverted, but studies show that introverts have just as meaningful lives as extraverts. They tend to have a more refined sense of self, they tend to know what they like, and they tend to be more selective with their friends. Introverts make great leaders and work well in groups, they don't demand extra attention."

She points out that people conflate anxiety with shyness. Same with anti-social habits and behaviors. Being under-socialized and not open to new experiences... I'd guess that's what this lifehacker article is doing. So if it's encouraging people to open themselves up a little more, more power to it. But please stop making "shyness" out to be some kind of defect!

grourk··on Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (May 2012)
Everyone. Everyone is hiring Software Engineers.
grourk··on Go 1 Release Candidate 1
"There are many inaccuracies, anecdotes and personal opinions that in my and many others' opinions don't matter..." The content of your comment renders your comment meaningless. It's like a Hofstadter Strange Loop of meaninglessness.
grourk··on We Need to Talk About Android
This has nothing to do with his post. Did you read it beyond "What's wrong with Android?" and "Fragmentation"?

He's saying that for his purposes Android is not up to snuff, and then lays out the reasons -- fragmentation was one of them.

There can be an discussions about topics besides market domination. Such as what sucks about Android and how it could be better. An "endless parade" of such discussions doesn't prove that people don't understand what wins a market at all.

grourk··on Netflix loses 800,000 subscribers (stock drops 28%)
Netflix works a treat with my webpass connection on my ps3. Never stops or stutters.

That said, I'll probably cancel because there's nothing I want to watch anymore.

grourk··on Siri Co-Founder Quits Apple
He or she also stated their opinion: "and IMO, correctly pointed out". The statement that it is widely claimed was sort of the point of the comment.
grourk··on "Anonymous" Hackers Take Down Child Porn Websites, Leak Users' Names
How's that?
grourk··on Google Joins Apple in Push for Tax Holiday
Do you use the Internet? GPS? Do you drive on roads? Do you buy goods from companies that utilize those roads and infrastructure? Do you benefit from protection by police and fire departments? Do you live in a building up to a certain safety code? Do you drink water? Do you deposit money in FDIC insured banks? Do you work for or own a company that benefits from any of these things?
grourk··on Logging out of Facbook is not enough
Because the majority reaction to any HN post is a technical pissing contest you have to learn to ignore if you want to glean anything interesting from the thread. If you're not interested in that, or in showing-off your own geeky credentials, then you're mostly wasting your time participating in an HN "discussion".
grourk··on Reed Hastings responds to criticisms and announces Qwikster
When I think of Netflix, I think of renting flicks on the net... which is, um, what the original name meant. Also there's the whole last decade of this association.

When I think of Qwikster, I do not think of anything related to DVD by mail. The only associations that come to mind are Friendster and Quixtar. It sounds cheesy and cheap and fly-by-night.

grourk··on Nymwars: A view from the trenches within Google
Huh?
grourk··on AWS Post-Mortem
There's a summary block at the bottom -- but it's not a summary.
grourk··on United States loses AAA credit rating from S&P
S&P and Moody's don't exactly employ an "army of experts" either. It's a few analysts making a rather subjective judgment and voting. (Literally, a few).

And the investors who are actually buying US debt don't rely on ratings agencies to give them guidance, and do in fact have expertise in-house to evaluate these things.

As has been mentioned elsewhere on this thread, institutional investors don't treat US bonds like any other, subject to triggers and rules like AAA-only. It's an exceptional case that is treated differently than the others, and one rating agency's opinion is not going to make as big an impact as people seem to think.

It comes down to this: where else would they put their money?

grourk··on Nginx JSON hacks
If you need to proxy through nginx on your own server to pad some external api's json (to enable jsonp), wouldn't you be able to put that server on your own domain? Obviating the need for cross-domain jsonp?
grourk··on Ask HN: Are you using Riak? What for?
It's a continuous stream. We break it into chunks similar to what Luwak does, though.
grourk··on Ask HN: Are you using Riak? What for?
We use Riak at Dropcam to store H.264 video streaming from cameras running 24/7 which needs to be available for playback on the website and mobile apps. We needed a block store that could scale to handle petabytes, tolerate disk and node failures, and provide always-on write- and read-ability.

Riak fits the bill very well, though we did need to make a few mods to workaround certain problems. But it's Erlang/OTP, fairly small code-wise, and easy to modify.

grourk··on Poll: What database does your company use?
Ditto (http://dropc.am). Very write heavy load for us, which Riak handles without blinking. Fault tolerant, robust, and easy to administer. Every machine is identical, no special "master" nodes or anything like that.
grourk··on Riak doesn't use consistent hashing
It's worth clarifying the post title. Does Riak hash keys onto the ring? Yes. Does Riak hash nodes onto the ring? No. Is that still considered "consistent hashing"? I don't know.
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