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kyt

153 karma · joined September 13, 2011

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kyt··on Facebook 'boring'? 1 in 3 users are tuning it out
I find it boring because it's dominated by power users that post multiple times a day. These people may or may not be close to me, but typically they aren't. My closest friends don't post all that often and when they do they get drowned out.
kyt··on What If My Kid…? (A Guide To Odds)
I think people want to know conditional probabilities. eg. P(My child graduates college|I have engineering degree from Stanford). I assume most children of HN readers have a greater than 33% chance of graduating college.
kyt··on Our New Privacy Policy - You Own Your Data, and We Don't Sell It
I don't think the average consumer cares about their data being sold. There is a vocal minority of users that cares about online privacy, but I don't this isn't going to cause a mass exodus from Facebook. Seems more like a publicity stunt to me.
kyt··on We just launched Beluga, a free analytics tool for musicians
First search was "Foster the People." Looks empty.
kyt··on The only way to get hold of a human at Google
Someone broke into my gmail account in 2009, changed the password, and I've never gotten it back. I tried to recover it using their standard form, but they ask all sorts of ridiculous questions like the day I started using gmail, the day I started using Google docs, etc.
kyt··on Tipping doesn't make any sense
What does 'just fine' mean? There is a large restaurant service disparity between the US and Europe.
kyt··on Travis needs your help
Pardon me for being ignorant, but what exactly is Travis CI? I can't find any information on that site or on the github repo page. If I don't know what it is, I can't donate.
kyt··on Goodbye, MongoDB
We dumped Mongo for a lot of the same reasons listed in the article. Their python driver isn't great either.
kyt··on The venture capital model is broken, and this damning report explains why
You could swap out VC funds with hedge funds and the article would pretty much be the same.
kyt··on Computer Science for the Rest of Us (Non-Computer Scientist)
Couldn't view article on my iPhone.
kyt··on Chromium DNS performance
Prompts me to login. Guess I won't be reading this one.
kyt··on Paul Graham consistently says ‘um’ ~7 times per minute
I didn't think he was nervous. That just sounded like his speech pattern. I found it refreshing that he didn't sound like a salesman.
kyt··on Awful Recruiters
You can add cybercoders to that list.
kyt··on Killing Your Startup By Listening to Customers
Did he actually look at the startup? It's also possible that it was just bad -- lacking in usability, useless features that cluttered up the UI, poor aesthetics, etc.

Customer feedback only gets you so far. Often times people don't know what they want or what the core problem they're having is.

kyt··on Show HN: My weekend hack project, Appload.io, get your app's first 1k users
Very annoying. Also, clicking on the background did not kill the window.

New visitors are unlikely to sign up before even viewing the site. You may want to popup that modal on the 2nd or 3rd page view.

kyt··on The things first time founders do…
Read hacker news all day and don't actually work on their startup.
kyt··on Hollywood fights Internet protests with... TV ad, billboard, radio spot
They also fought it today with minimal, biased coverage. I compared the Google trends search volume of the headline stories that were shown today on the major news sites. SOPA was easily 2-3x more searched than any other headline, yet it barely showed up as a blip on sites like FOX News.
kyt··on Wikipedia blackout page
It's not blacked out in mobile Safari.
kyt··on How to travel around the world for a year.
Most interesting part of the article: "So the net cost for the tip was about $22k. I paid for the vast majority of this with one month's consultancy beforehand."
kyt··on Ranking Node.js Module Authors
Seems like they should be ranked by SLOC or number of total watchers for their packages.
kyt··on Quick Salary Tip for Software Engineers
Wasn't part of the job of the technical recruiter supposed to be negotiating the salary? Considering they make a commission off it, I would assume it would be in their best interest.
kyt··on The Documentation Dilemma
I don't understand how this works at scale. This seems to be a strategy for a one or two person team.
kyt··on Why 37signals Doesn't Hire Programmers Based on Brainteasers
I've heard that Larry Page could not pass the Google interview today.
kyt··on Is Foursquare in trouble?
I don't really see Foursquare's use case being for tourism. I see it as more of a Yelp replacement. And for that, I thoroughly enjoy it more. The problem with Yelp is that it feels like a restaurant review app that happens to have a location aspect, rather than a location based app that does restaurants.

Foursquare answers a basic question: what around me is worth doing? (Mainly that is eating for me). Popping up explore this morning gives me a list of interesting coffee shops and breakfast places in my neighborhood. It's truely an awesome feature.

One mistake I think Foursquare made was that their MVP and/or product guidance was too minimal. A lot of my friends have abandoned the product because they didn't see enough initial value. I felt the same thing at first. "I checked-in, now what?" Their social features are only good if you have friends on the service, that are active, AND live in the same area. Their explore, radar, and lists features are awesome, but they came a bit too late and their website is only now catching up to the mobile experience. I also think they still have work to do on the social aspect.

Foursquare is optimized for densely populated urban areas (They are based in NYC), so I'm not sure if it'll reach critical mass like Facebook/Twitter, however, those are still substantial markets. I see it doing very well in Europe.

kyt··on What Is a Data Scientist?
The term is pretty broad. I think the difference between a Data Scientist and a Statistician is the emphasis Data Scientists put on machine learning, databases, and distributed processing.
kyt··on A beginners guide to using Python for performance computing
One of the advantages to implementing these types of problems in C++ is you can use compile-time optimizations, often resulting in 2-3x speed-up.

The results may be a lot different when compiling with just -O2 -ffast-math.

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