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kevinr

506 karma · joined January 19, 2011

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/kevinr; my proof: https://keybase.io/kevinr/sigs/eIOMxJmRlS93xkzabyB_S8zXnf6O517hq3APBJPHl1I ]
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kevinr··on Stripe has frozen Gab.com's account
Start a nudes pinterest. Lmk how it goes
kevinr··on Stripe has frozen Gab.com's account
> If you are looking to subscribe to other profiles you will need to add a payment card. When adding a payment card, your card information is stored by a payment processor, which is called Stripe; or if you are subscribing to a profile containing sexually explicit content, your card information is stored by a different payment processor, Securion Pay.

https://onlyfans.com/terms/

kevinr··on Stripe has frozen Gab.com's account
Try following any of those links now, you fucking tease
kevinr··on Stripe Is Now a $20B Company
> [I]t's clear that the top 10% of companies make up the overwhelming majority of their portfolio. So they go for moonshots.

You've just described the entire business model of every Silicon Valley VC firm, not just YC.

kevinr··on GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
It depends on the law. In the case of the GDPR, it does apply despite the person not being physically in the EU.
kevinr··on GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers
There's one very important problem with this approach: this blocks people from accessing your site who are doing so from the EU, whereas the GDPR applies to EU citizens, wherever they access the Internet from.

In other words, an EU citizen residing in and accessing the Internet from the US has just as much right to invoke the GDPR with these sites as an EU citizen residing in and accessing the Internet from the EU. Blocking people accessing your site from the EU does not allow your site to not respond to such requests.

kevinr··on From Java to Kotlin and Back Again
This is a really useful article. What I really want is Java-minus-Oracle, and it sounded from some of the chatter around Kotlin like it might be that, but it seems what I really want is Groovy.
kevinr··on New Number Systems Seek Their Lost Primes
What a missed opportunity, not to title this article "In Search of Lost Primes".

(inb4 all the Proust fans downmod me to oblivion)

kevinr··on An engineer’s guide to cloud capacity planning
It's not coincidental; I believe the 'sole application' the author talks about was in fact an online game.
kevinr··on Netflix Employees Are Happier with Their Job Than Facebook or Google Employees
Netflix explicitly have a policy of trying to pay the best in the industry, as I was told when I interviewed there. Turns out it works!
kevinr··on Netflix Employees Are Happier with Their Job Than Facebook or Google Employees
Recognizing both expenses and revenue over time is part of generally accepted accounting practices (GAAP).

Intuitionistically, it makes total sense that you get a clearer picture of the true state of the finances of Netflix as a going concern if they recognize the costs of a show on their balance sheet over five years when they expect subscribers to still be watching it for the first (or second, or third) time several years on.

kevinr··on Netflix Employees Are Happier with Their Job Than Facebook or Google Employees
The hed is a little misleading---what is meant by happiness in the article itself is that Netflix employees more likely feel they're compensated fairly and aren't looking for other jobs.

That is, however, really nice confirmation that Netflix does in fact live what I was told when I interviewed there, that Netflix prides itself on offering the best comp package in industry. (They followed that by casually offering to more than triple my salary, so I had some inkling they weren't just making that up, but it's easy to write off one data point in a high-demand field as an anomaly.)

I'm most impressed that Amazon is doing as well as it is in those rankings, given how much shit they've gotten in the press over the last few years.

kevinr··on Procedurally generated electronic music
Oh this is very cool. The structure reminds me of Matthew Brown's "Music for Shuffle" project: http://musicforshuffle.com/2014/04/06/session1/
kevinr··on WePay's (YC S09) next chapter
Zelle is not really the same thing as what WePay does. Zelle is peer-to-peer payments, competitive with Paypal, Square Cash, Venmo, etc. (P2P is a term of art in the industry; it's not P2P in the Bittorrent sense. :)

WePay is about providing payments infrastructure to marketplaces and crowdfunding platforms (Lyft, GoFundMe, etc.). WePay are competitive with Stripe's Connect product (disclaimer: my employer). Braintree and Adyen also have similar products.

Congrats to the WePay folks. I hope this new chapter works out well for them!

kevinr··on Questions to ask in interviews
So few companies are clear about it in their hiring processes, and therefore wind up hiring for all sorts of skills which have at best weak bearing on actual job performance in most roles (eg. brain teaser memorization) that the answer is, empirically, yes.
kevinr··on The Long-Term Stock Exchange Is Worth a Shot
I think it's all going to depend on how the tenure mechanism is implemented. There's got to be some way for new money to "catch up" to old money within some reasonable time horizon, say 10 years, rather than old money's voting power growing unbounded.
kevinr··on Questions to ask in interviews
Does your concern about an interviewer misinterpreting the intent of the question change if the asker presents as a white man?
kevinr··on Questions to ask in interviews
It's going to depend a lot on the individual interviewer how well they can answer that question. If recruiting and the hiring manager don't both have good answers to that question, though, that's a big red flag.
kevinr··on Questions to ask in interviews
Companies above garage size literally employ people to answer candidate questions. If the company hasn't invested the time to answer "What are you trying to figure out about a candidate in an interview?" and its recruiters don't have a simple, objective answer, they should stop interviewing and go answer that before they start again.

A simple answer is something like, "We want to figure out whether a candidate can do the work we need them to do. We do that by giving candidates sample work problems which are streamlined versions of problems we've actually solved at the company in the past. People we hire are more likely to still be employed with us than they are at our competitors after a year. We know we don't hire enough women and URMs into technical roles, and we're instituting a rule that at least one woman or URM candidate needs to be interviewed for each open role."

kevinr··on How we built the unbeatable Dota 2 bot
Standard---maybe not objection, but complication: I'm waiting for the day AI can do this in 2100 KWh. (Human brain uses ~15W continuous. 15 W * 24h * 365 days * 16 years.)
kevinr··on Macie: Automatically Discover, Classify, and Secure Content at Scale
Yes.
kevinr··on Hidden benefits of gossip, ostracism (2014)
That's no different than public feedback, though. It's not a problem specific to gossip.
kevinr··on VPN Report – Reviews of the top VPNs
That's why Kenn only recommends using services with per-user PSK for geo-shifting video streams.

For all other uses, Kenn recommends Algo, and I recommend Cloak, neither of which uses PPTP/l2tp.

kevinr··on VPN Report – Reviews of the top VPNs
When I'm providing security advice to a general audience, I can't expect people to reliably follow detailed instructions. "Oh, use VyperVPN, except you have to use OpenVPN, except on iOS where you're forced to use IPsec, and <detailed description of crypto settings follows>."

I can tell them one thing: use Cloak. And I know that, no matter how they do so, they won't be less safe than they would have been without it.

For more on this, see my followup to the VPN post: https://free-dissociation.com/blog/posts/2017/04/public-heal...

kevinr··on VPN Report – Reviews of the top VPNs
lololol. Half of these VPN vendors show up on Kenn White's VPN Hall of Shame for offering unsafe configurations:

https://gist.github.com/kennwhite/1f3bc4d889b02b35d8aa

For anything actually sensitive, you're better off not using a VPN than using a VPN which provides an unsafe configuration.

If you'd rather not do your own pager duty for something like Algo, here's a recommendation I put together a while ago:

https://free-dissociation.com/blog/posts/2017/03/quick-and-d...

kevinr··on There is no such thing as EQ (2016)
If I was marking this as a student paper, it would go back with demerits for plagiarism, faulty logic, poorly-structured rhetoric, and, to top it all off, bad grammar.

...Dude's a professor?

kevinr··on AltspaceVR is Closing Down
"Lack of funds to cover ongoing legal fees" is "lack of funds".
kevinr··on SEC Issues Report Concluding DAO Tokens, a Digital Asset, Were Securities
I dunno what y'all's problem is, the last ruling like this (from the IRS) meant I got to write $200 in Bitcoin losses off on my taxes.
kevinr··on Identifying Sources of Cost Disease
It is, unfortunately, impossible to prove a negative, not that that's ever stopped anyone from trying. For example, though, a cursory Google turns up no instances of Paul Krugman or Larry Summers mentioning it, which I would expect for something which "most economists" understood to exist.
kevinr··on Identifying Sources of Cost Disease
Serious question: do any reputable economists besides Tyler Cowen believe in cost disease?
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