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jamesmishra

591 karma · joined March 14, 2014

Soundryx.com is a network of sensors that detect enemy drones.
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jamesmishra··on Google says AI generated content is against guidelines
This problem is unsolvable in the general case.

Generative models will asymptotically approach the same statistical distribution of real data.

Eventually, content farms will make actual websites... and nobody will know the difference.

jamesmishra··on Ballooning spiders rely on electric fields to generate lift
When I was eight years old, I read the children's book "Charlotte's Web".

Charlotte is a spider, and at the end, she produces a sac of baby spiders that hatch and fly away.

Ever since then, I've been terrified by the idea of hordes of superintelligent flying spiders swarming around a human.

jamesmishra··on Ask HN: Why is raising money from VCs worn as a badge of honour?
Lots of things are badges of honor to various groups of people.
jamesmishra··on The Personal Security Checklist
But then where do you put the hardware keys?

Presumably you would need to obtain all three keys every time you register a new user account on a website.

jamesmishra··on HTTP Feeds
I don't understand. Does the diversity training teach you to treat people differently based on where you think they came from?
jamesmishra··on Lessons from Owning a Bookstore
You didn't "want to be put on the spot"? What does that mean?

You entered somebody else's building. They asked that you wear a mask and offered a free mask for you.

At what moment were you "on the spot"?

jamesmishra··on Countering threats from North Korea
Why do you have to prefix your question with, "Here’s a question I expect you’ll never answer"?
jamesmishra··on Fossil
The first one is a warranty issue. The second one is a work-for-hire-copyright-law issue.
jamesmishra··on Why not hire part-time developers?
Why not hire for part-time roles at Elemano? Didn't you just say that you are working there part-time?
jamesmishra··on Surviving the front page of Hacker News on a 50 Mbps uplink
A lot of startups' products are write-intensive applications with the following requirements:

- strong read-after-write consistency (or their users could receive inaccurate information)

- as-high-as-possible availability (because they lose money whenever the site goes down)

- low-latency operations that are difficult to optimize--such as recommendations, complex full-text search, or large graph traversal

And engineering teams don't notice that their solutions are suboptimal until their product hits scale.

jamesmishra··on I used indie hacking to sponsor my own green card
This is a terrible idea.

Some American politicians have hinted at the possibility of mass amnesty for illegal immigrants, but it is an issue that is widely unpopular--partially due to how that could change the eligible voter population.

I think it is more likely that amnesty either never happens, or it is only offered to specific small groups of people.

Otherwise, America is extremely unkind towards anybody who breaks their laws--especially if your goal is to later apply for a visa or Green Card.

Finally, crossing through the southern border is not so easy. Other immigrants die when they make the journey.

jamesmishra··on [dead]
A few years ago, I experienced a similar scenario as the passenger. I was flying from Baltimore to Chicago. Bad weather forced the pilot to make an emergency landing in Ft. Wayne, Indiana.

By the time it was safe to take off again, the rules declared that the pilot and copilot had been on-duty too long to resume flying. Thankfully, the plane also contained the off-duty pilot, copilot, etc. that were commuting to their next flight. Those guys started their work day earlier and we were back on our way.

jamesmishra··on Ask HN: Can web scraping be the basis of a viable business model?
There is a lot of competition when it comes to building a pure-play data scraping company. There are also various regulatory concerns about scraping various types of data--PII like phone numbers, biometric data like images, or data about concert ticket prices.

But I think there is a huge opportunity in scraping data and then doing something interesting with it. Google is the most obvious example of this type of company. But, for example, certain CRM companies are more about data scraping than working with user-provided data.

jamesmishra··on Excerpt from CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944)
Technically the Simple Sabotage Field Manual is from OSS--the CIA's predecessor.

The Manual is one of my favorite pieces of historical literature, but I think that people become too cynical about large organizations after they read the manual. It is important to understand how coordination can slow down or fail, but becoming cynical only makes the problem worse.

jamesmishra··on Keep a Changelog
Commit messages often aren't nontechnical enough to make for an accessible changelog.

I would like to encourage developers to maintain changelog for their projects, but to host the changelogs outside of the project's Git repository. Maybe put it on the "Wiki" or "Releases" pages on GitHub.

When the changelog is an actual file in the Git repository, it becomes another source for merge and rebase conflicts.

jamesmishra··on India will have nine nuclear reactors by 2024: Govt
I'm no nuclear weapons expert, but I doubt that a peaceful nuclear reactor is going to be a top target. It might just be easier to nuke an enemy's cities and military bases.
jamesmishra··on India will have nine nuclear reactors by 2024: Govt
Both India and Pakistan already have nuclear weapons and capable delivery systems. I don't see how the peaceful pursuit of nuclear energy could make anything worse
jamesmishra··on Calling Rust from Python using PyO3
1. The Python code calling the Rust code raises a runtime-related exception, but it doesn't crash the process.

2. Building Python extensions out of PyO3 code is easy with maturin: https://github.com/PyO3/maturin

jamesmishra··on India tells public to shun Starlink until it gets licence
India's decision might sound silly--especially given how many people on Hacker News trust Elon Musk--but the Indian government is just worried in general about all types of businesses that could be selling expensive vaporware to poor people.

I don't agree with the Indian government's decision regarding Starlink, but I also understand where the underlying logic originated from.

jamesmishra··on Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
Docusign is worth so much because--for their biggest customers--they effectively act as the entire operating system for the legal department. If you are a small customer, then you have not purchased the same experience.

Docusign has competitors, but every company in the space has a powerful incentive to move upmarket instead of providing basic features to small companies.

Docusign has some content marketing that hints at all of the features they sell to large enterprises.

https://www.docusign.com/blog/what-is-contract-lifecycle-man...

jamesmishra··on Bloom/Lambda School requires applying to 460 jobs before giving tuition refund
I think it is a little harsh to set the tuition refund bar to be so high. On the other hand, if I had a friend who was rejected from 459 jobs, I would still advise them to keep applying. What else could I say?

The more worrying part of the Tuition Refund Guarantee is where the student forfeits their right to a refund if they receive a job offer that they turn down. Many coding bootcamp students apply to companies with a serious red flag--such as startups that are about to run out of money. The student may only be able to see the red flag after the company has given an offer, but if a student rejects a "red flag offer", they must assume they will never need a tuition refund.

jamesmishra··on Why Maharashtra's villages flood every year
The title feels a little too specific. Mumbai also floods pretty much every year.

https://thewire.in/urban/mumbai-heavy-rains-floods-reasons

jamesmishra··on Show HN: Caffeine – Minimum viable back end for prototyping
Caffeine is also a central nervous system stimulant of the methylxanthine class.
jamesmishra··on Running a Law Firm on Linux
Law firms often charge by the hour, right? If my law firm switches to Linux, would they bill me more hours if they run into technical issues?
jamesmishra··on Ask HN: What do you think about the no-code movement?
I want the No-Code Movement to succeed--creating tools that both developers and non-developers can use.

But I think that almost every marketing claim from a No-Code company or those dudes selling $500 No-Code courses is false.

jamesmishra··on Facebook is blocking searches for “Kyle Rittenhouse”
I assume Facebook is blocking searches for the name to prevent people from sending angry messages to random men with the same name as Kyle Rittenhouse.

At this point, I think everybody here knows someone who shares the same name with a criminal and has been mistreated for it. What Facebook is doing isn't ideal, but I don't think they are acting in malice.

jamesmishra··on The decline of unfettered research (1995)
I was lucky to take a grad-level math course in error correcting codes from Dr. Andrew Odlyzko, the author of the essay.

I read a lot of his papers ( http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/ ) in the hopes that I would learn something to improve my exam scores, but he has a knack for asking questions so fundamental that they have almost never even been properly formulated before.

If you have some time, I recommend reading a few of his papers. He completely changed my view of mathematics.

jamesmishra··on Notes from the Meeting on Python GIL Removal Between Python Core and Sam Gross
Is it actually a corporate initiative? The project is hosted on Sam's personal GitHub[1].

[1]: https://github.com/colesbury/nogil

jamesmishra··on Optimizations Enabled by -ffast-Math
I don't know if most Rust programmers would be happy with any fast and loose features making it into the official Rust compiler.

Besides, algorithms that benefit from -ffast-math can be implemented in C and with Rust bindings automatically generated.

This solution isn't exactly "simple", but it could help projects keep track of the expectations of correctness between different algorithm implementations.

jamesmishra··on Vienna museums open adult-only OnlyFans account to display nudes
If you want to post on OnlyFans, you have to verify your account with a government-issued photo ID.

I imagine this requirement makes OnlyFans a very unattractive website for child pornographers and other people guilty of federal crimes.

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