leeber

I'm always connected to a VPN that I set up on throwaway cloud servers from AWS, digitalocean, or whatever your preference is. Even on my phone.

So all you'd see from me is encrypted stuff being sent to a random IP address.

I wrote a program to solve chess once. After I realized that it would take a massive amount of computing resources to finish in my lifetime, I abandoned the project.

Most interesting to me is that it really isn't that hard to create a program to solve chess (i.e. the logic behind it), it just would take too much time/money to actually do it.

It's much more difficult to create AIs and approximations like this.

Kinda weird once you realize that fact...approximating a solution to chess is much more difficult, logic wise, than actually solving chess.

Though I wouldn't be surprised if chess is solved in the next couple decades or so.

I probably spend just as much or more time sitting, thinking, and staring at partially written code, than I do actually writing the code. It's frustrating when you have superiors who don't understand that time spent thinking is just as productive as time spent typing.

That's just my personal style, although I've never worked in "large" teams on a single codebase so can't comment on what styles work best in those situations.

Also I never thought I'd be quoting scripture, but this is a fitting passage!

"Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them" ... "So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men."

Another saying about players...(this one's not scripture)

"Real players don't say they're players; they just are"

I've never been out of the country. Will I one day? Sure, but it's not like I have a burning desire to leave tomorrow and spend significant amounts of time and money at some tourist destination on the other side of the earth.

I don't really participate much in social media, I have my own interests and like to just do my own thing. I have friends who share similar interests and sometimes we'll do those things together.

I don't have to share with random facebook friends (whom are really just acquaintances -- who really has 200+ real friends?) how many countries I've been to, how many miles I ran this morning, the wonderful healthy breakfast I ate, the celebrity I met on the street, or how amazing my volunteer experience was, how wonderful my bf/gf/husband/wife is, how crazy it was at the night club, etc etc etc.

I have great memories of lots of things I've done, and I share those memories with the people I experienced them with, and sometimes I'll tell those experiences to close friends or family members, or share them at relevant moments in social situations like a related conversation taking place where I can actually add value (as opposed to just hearing myself talk and looking for more validation from the others around you).

I do what I do and I'm perfectly content. Social media as a whole is an opportunity for people to sideline brag and make them feel part of "the club." They achieve their validation by how many people "like" their photo or post.

Volunteering and traveling are two things that some (keyword some) people use as a vehicle to make themselves seem more important or esteemed than others. If you haven't traveled, surely you're a naive American who doesn't know anything about the world outside of your own bubble -- BUT on the otherhand, if you see the eiffel tower in person you somehow become wise and cultured by that experience. If you haven't volunteered recently, you certainly must be a selfish prick. And of course these people don't say these things directly to you, instead they have become an expert at implying them passively.

Meh.

There was recently a thread on front page of HN about which social networks middle school and high school kids are using. It's mainly instagram, and it's used as a vehicle to allow some kids to attain status as "popular". Everyone "follows" the popular kids, etc. I think the article of this thread highlights how that same popularity contest exists for older people too. Except it's on facebook, and you become popular by posting travel photos, volunteer photos, your color run photos, etc.

Good job, you made a review site? Sorry I know I sound negative but you made a simple review site for domain registrars in an attempt to make commissions from those registrars, and then attempt to get people to refer others to those registrars through you to get commissions.

Unique, new, or innovative? No

Better than current solutions for finding reviews on domain registrars? No

A simple attempt to earn affiliate commissions with a review site? Yes -- this concept has been around forever in the affiliate world.

Not sure why this link is on hacker news...

My personal advice would be to spend your personal time on something actually productive.

Relevant to who/what? Netflix didn't write the article.

It depends who's perspective you're looking at. The article could have been titled "Yahoo's new CIO accused of accepting kickbacks at former employer".

He forgot the last one: "to use python instead"

That was my attempt at a joke. But seriously, I love python when it comes to manipulating data and doing anything statistical. You've got numpy, scipy, scikit-learn, etc.

One more thing--

Would google publish data that shows how searches for porn spike during different times of the day or times of the year, as if it's some "cool and hip and edgy!" insight?

I don't think so.

And for the same reason they don't (whatever reason that is), it would probably also be wise for Uber not to post stuff like this.

I really don't care, nor am I offended. I'm just speculating that Uber doesn't have the brightest team of execs and still have a lot of "growing up" to do.

Comparing Uber to OKCupid is ridiculous.

OKCupid is a dating website which deliberately branded themselves as further on the "edgy" and "hookup" side of dating websites. Then you have POF somewhere in the middle, with eHarmony way on the other side, quite opposite of OKCupid.

I'm not sure why Uber would want to put themselves anywhere on that same scale (i.e. aligning your brand with notions of sex and one night stands). There's a time and a place for everything, and for edgy data analysis like this -- that "place" is edgy dating websites who want to be known for hooking up.

It's unprofessional and out of line with their brand image, obviously why the post got deleted. IMO this further validates all the bad press the media has been publishing about Uber.

Imagine if Uber CEO made a comment like Elon Musk did about the "D" in P85D and having "velcro on the sides of his pants." The media would be ALL OVER that.

Based on what I've read, Uber CEO sounds like a douchebag. But I'm not really sure, never met the guy or seen him in person, it's all from stuff read online.

But clearly the media loves to hate this guy.

I am working on a project that I need to incorporate soon, but I have no plans to take on any investors at all if I can manage it (i.e. and grow organically).

Any reason to do a C-corp vs. LLC in that scenario? (Either way I was planning on using Delaware even before watching this video)

A co-founder is not somebody you take on 2 years down the road.

If (keyword if) the CEO is as much of a douchebag as the media makes him out to be, he likely won't continue to be CEO for much longer.

This is not really "news" at all. I stopped drinking dairy milk a couple years ago because I realized it offered no potential benefits, and only alleged risks that kept surfacing in these studies.

There is literally no up-side to drinking milk, only purported risks. Thus, IMO the only reason to drink it is if you REALLY REALLY REALLY like the taste and can't imagine your life without it.

Also, interestingly - I personally have seen absolutely zero studies that showed milk benefits, that was not funded by the dairy farmers.

Strange, why not just have the user choose a password or a typical 4-digit pin? This would still be way more secure than using the CVC number.

Hopefully they require a password or a PIN each time you send a message with cash in it.

Otherwise anybody could steal money from you as long as they can get into your phone and open snapchat.

How well does this work from the user experience standpoint?

Is it a smooth fluid experience, or prone to lag?

Where in the world did you learn stats from?

You would be correct if we were talking about a standard normal distribution with mean 0 and standard deviation 1. Very different.

In the case of mean 100 and standard deviation ~15 or so, the probability of two samples being at least 10% different is very small like under 1%.

Guys, we're programmers here not statisticians:

def test():

... n1 = numpy.average(numpy.random.normal(100,15,52))

... n2 = numpy.average(numpy.random.normal(100,15,40))

... return abs(n1-n2) / ((n1+n2)/2.0)

...

>>> vals = [test() for i in xrange(0,1000)]

>>> numOver10 = len([v for v in vals if v > .1])

>>> numOver10

2

This may or may not directly apply to twitter, but I really don't understand how unprofitable companies with no direct revenue model get such large valuations based on: number of users, and "potential" to profit from advertising.

Snapchat? Tinder? Twitter? Quora? Tumblr? Etc.

It seems like these are the companies that are viewed as prestigious and noteworthy by the media and startup community. Everybody wants to be the company that gets a massive funding from VC and millions of users. But all of these companies still have yet to prove they can really do it.

The only returns for investors so far is based on the fact that the theoretical valuation keeps going up, and it's self perpetuating. At what point are investors going to expect real earnings to justify the valuation?

Nobody (or very few people) seems to want to solve a real problem, or offer a really useful product that people are actually willing to pay for.

Everybody just wants to get a million users, get a bunch of money from investors, and cross your fingers that maybe one day you can figure out how to actually make the thing profitable. And if it doesn't work out? Well it's somebody else's problem right?

It's sort of funny that, as long as the investor community all agree on $X valuation -- you NEVER need to make a single dollar in profit because the next guy in line will cover your "loss." Or finally some giant will buy you out to acquihire or get rid of competition.

Probably sounds like I'm just a hater and ranting, but just my 2 cents.

Can somebody explain what the use-case for this is? The site says it is a "PaaS that makes it easy to deploy and manage applications on your own servers".

Most apps I've been making follow a similar recipe: run single ubuntu instance on digitalocean, use nginx for http to serve static content for single page app (ex. angular project), and nginx proxy to gunicorn to serve a python flask API that stores and retrieves data to/from mongodb.

Where in that picture would something like Deis fit in? Or is this not for me?

I wouldn't read into it too much.

If he didn't put that in there, tons of idiots would go around saying how net neutrality will support all the crooks of the dark web, illegal filesharing websites, etc. Obviously that's ridiculous and not the case, but it would have really given net neutrality a bad image to the average person who probably has no idea what net neutrality is at all.

We've already got idiots let Ted Cruz tweeting that net neutrality is the "Obamacare of the internet."

You have a great thesis. Period.

Well you might as well go off the grid completely then, don't use anything that could be used to track you like phones, tablets, laptops, stay away from people in general because you never know who the spies are that are trying to catch you. Don't use credit cards, debit cards, etc. Don't keep your money in banks. In fact probably don't even keep currency, buy gold instead. But you won't need that either because the only way for you to be truly safe is to live the jungle and live off the land....until the spies come for you there too. ......or, you could realize that probably NOT everyone is trying to achieve world domination and enslave all of humanity, starting by spying on you with amazon echo.

Ok, let me re-phrase a little bit.

I am asserting my belief that a large majority of people who voice privacy concerns over things like amazon echo are the same people who do in fact use many cloud services. I find it to be ironic if my assertion is true.

Furthermore, I think it all comes down to our perception, and our perception does not accurately reflect "potential to be misused". Our perception is that gmail, dropbox, facebook, apps which store data, etc. are all relatively low threat. However a device that is marketed to record our voices in our homes is perceive to be high threat. In reality though, the "potential to be misused" is present in ALL times we trust a 3rd party with access to our information, or even the potential ability to access our information, or cameras, or recording devices (including phones and laptops).

So like I said, it comes down to trust. Trust amazon or don't. Trust dropbox or don't. Trust your smartphones, or don't. Potential to be misused is equal among ANYTHING that has listening or recording capabilities built in to it.

I get your point, but on the topic of paranoia breeding paranoia, (1) I'm not sure if there is really a causal relationship there, and (2) the government's paranoia a fear of alleged domestic and foreign threats to our safety, well-being, way of life, etc. while the people's paranoia is that the NSA knows what I ate for breakfast.

Despite whether either threat is real or not, I'm less concerned about my facebook privacy being violated and more concerned with foreign and domestic threats of violence.

I have a choice not to use facebook or amazon echo, or whatever. Problem solved on that front. I don't have a choice if somebody wants to fly a plane into dense metro areas with the goal of killing as many people as possible.

Are you telling me that you feel amazon echo is a larger potential threat to your security than alleged terrorist organizations?

What alternatives have you chosen that makes you feel more secure? I'm genuinely curious.

Who cares about what the selling point is? Neither Amazon Echo or Apple is claiming to secretly listen to your most intimate and private conversations, so it can report everything you say over to the NSA.

BUT, those are two devices that would have full capabilities to do so if they really wanted to.

The point is, we trust (or do not) that these services that have access to sensitive information -- are only doing what they CLAIM they are doing with regards to privacy.