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mattmillr

329 karma · joined April 30, 2010

I work at Bloomberg.

twitter: @mattmillr

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mattmillr··on An AI agent published a hit piece on me
> clanker*

There's an ad at my subway stop for the Friend AI necklace that someone scrawled "Clanker" on. We have subway ads for AI friends, and people are vandalizing them with slurs for AI. Congrats, we've built the dystopian future sci-fi tried to warn us about.

mattmillr··on The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs
Those two scenarios are only comparable if you isolate happiness and taxation and completely ignore things like social services and inequality.

I think you're referring to Nordic countries which consistently rank as the happiest countries and also have relatively high tax rates (4 of 5 Nordic countries rank in the top 11 tax rates globally. Norway has oil.) The high taxes that "make everybody poorer" also fund extensive social services that contribute to happiness.

However, this conversation is about making (a class of) workers poorer by using tax policy that puts downward pressure on their salaries. Tax revenues will stay the same, so social services will not be increased. Economic inequality increases because the workers became poorer, the C-Suite and Board Members don't.

mattmillr··on Why did the Motorola 68000 processor family fall out of use in PCs?
It's not intuitive at all, you click the timestamp and the URL changes to the anchor for that comment. Here's the one you copy/pasted: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27722/why...
mattmillr··on Blocked from Amazon Alexa for a week after racism accusation by delivery driver
The primary source is his blog post linked in the article: https://medium.com/@bjax_/a-tale-of-unwanted-disruption-my-w...
mattmillr··on NYC jails want to ban physical mail, then privatize scanning of digital versions
The entire US policing & carceral system arguably traces back to slave patrols. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-invention-...
mattmillr··on Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds
Related, the challenges sound designers face in making dialogue audible. What seem like simple problems (make car climate control buttons easy to use, make the speech in a movie easy to understand) turn out to be incredibly complex.

https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/heres-why-movie-dialogue-ha...

mattmillr··on Netflix lays off about 150 employees
If I got rid of Ada Twist Scientist, I would fail my 5yo's keeper test.
mattmillr··on Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever
My kids are 1 and 3, going to work at the office was definitely the easier part of my day before WFH started! I consider it a good week now if I'm mostly attentive in all the meetings I have and get a modicum of actual work done.
mattmillr··on Photographer Jacob Riis showed “How the Other Half Lives” in 1890s NYC (2017)
There will still be non-air-conditioned subway cars in New York City this summer.
mattmillr··on Photographer Jacob Riis showed “How the Other Half Lives” in 1890s NYC (2017)
I live in NYC with my wife and two kids in a 1 bedroom unit in a prewar building. I've never been to the Tenement Museum and it sounds like I don't need to.
mattmillr··on ‘Sexual’ use of eggplant and peach emojis banned on Facebook, Instagram
> report them just to see what will happen

You realize that if the post is removed, that "seeing what will happen" has a real consequence for the poster, right? If feel like that's even worse than reporting it because you actually believe it's objectionable.

mattmillr··on Why Aren’t We Talking About LinkedIn?
Connection spam is LinkedIn's business model, it's not likely to go away.
mattmillr··on Google removed my ads-free app for “deceptive ads”
I'm not confident a fee structure that incentivizes Google to not be wrong will work that well.
mattmillr··on Glitter bomb tricks parcel thieves
I do this with a patio box, but added a door sensor that transmits to our alarm/home automation system and triggers a recording from the camera aimed at that area and a push notification to my phone. UPS is good at putting packages in the box. On good days, FedEx might get them in the vicinity of the porch.
mattmillr··on List of screw drives
Ikea sells a $8 tool set that includes three sizes of Pozidriv bits - and other bits that perfectly fit their various connectors. It's well worth the cost if you're planning to assemble anything you got from IKEA and not lose your mind.
mattmillr··on Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957) [video]
I second this recommendation. I've been there and saw that camera, as well as the one at Disney Studios in LA. I think the third of the original three cameras from Snow White is at Disneyland Paris, so if I'm ever in France I'll have to make a stop to see it!
mattmillr··on A teen who built a prosthetic arm for his dad
When I was using an early Makerbot (wow, seven years ago now) the preferred materials for extruder-based 3D printers were ABS, which toys are made of, and PLA, which is used for food-safe cups and utensils. I'd imagine they're OK.
mattmillr··on Show HN: Self-generated custom art for your home or Airbnb
I love the idea, and I'd be interested in buying with a few tweaks.

- I tried both a high-density (Manhattan) and a low-density (Very small, rural town) location. I had trouble finding a good balance between the zoom level on the large and small maps for both. For the dense location, I'd like the option to remove the smaller map and just have a big map of the immediate neighborhood.

- The numbers for locations across the street from each other overlap and one isn't readable. I cant' choose between suggesting the best brunch nearby and the best chocolate chip cookies in the whole city!

- Landscape mode would be a huge improvement.

- It looks like numbers are assigned to the small or large map without considering the zoom level. When I zoom in on the small map, numbers that move outside the boundaries should show up on the large map, not just dissappear.

- I can't change the section titles. For example, I'd like to change "My Favorite Places" to "Our Favorite Hangouts"

- For the rural location, only the first color option draws the roads correctly in the big map. The other three themes omit the roads!

mattmillr··on I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant on TripAdvisor
Google cache at #263: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:V5owX0...
mattmillr··on Flat Pack Chainless Bicycle from IKEA
In Brooklyn, I got rid of half a bike (missing front fork and seat) by setting it outside for about 20 minutes.

I guess you could say I got rid of the first half by setting it outside overnight, poorly locked to a post, but it was unintentional.

mattmillr··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2015)
New York City, NY, USA - Various engineering positions. - Full time.

We're growing our NYC team with open front-end, back-end, devops, UX, and leadership positions. Our stack is mostly LAMP (PHP) with some Python-powered APIs. MySQL, Redis, Solr, Aerospike, and Scala are also in use.

See all the positions and apply here: https://boards.greenhouse.io/refinery29#6048

A bit about the company:

Refinery29, the fastest growing independent fashion and style website in the United States, is a lifestyle platform that delivers nonstop inspiration to help women live a more stylish and creative life. It connects over 21 million monthly visitors and 1.9 million email subscribers with 24/7 programming covering everything from shopping and beauty to wellness and celebrities, giving readers all the tips, tricks, and tools they need to live a more beautiful life — and share it with the world.

mattmillr··on How tall can a Lego tower get?
It's ABS, the same plastic that some 3-D printers use, so they should be able to just chip it up and feed it right back into the hopper for the molds.
mattmillr··on The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’
In the transcript of the June 2011 meeting between Schmidt and Assange, Schmidt also makes a reference to 'The Banality of Evil' (http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt.html)
mattmillr··on Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps
> "Instead of the romantic illusion of film, we see the sets and makeup for what they are. The effect is like stepping into a diorama alongside the actors, which is not as pleasant as it might sound… Never bet against innovation, but this debut does not promise great things to come." – C. Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune

As a fan of the off-Broadway immersive theater production, Sleep No More, I have "stepped into a diorama alongside the actors" several times in the last year. It is a phenomenal experience.

Artistic expression does not require "romantic illusion", and even if it did, heightening the audiences sense of realism doesn't preclude it. I haven't seen The Hobbit yet, but I welcome the innovation.

mattmillr··on Viacom pulls “The Daily Show” offline as a result of contract dispute
You can close the popup after the announcement finishes and watch the excerpt videos, but if you go to the Full Episodes page, there is a notice that full episodes are not currently available.
mattmillr··on Cloud9 IDE lets you code together in the Cloud. And offline. And in Ruby, PHP…
Would love to try it, but wondered if it supported the language(s) I want to use first. I gave up trying to find the list of supported languages. Consider making the text "and 23 other languages" on the home page a link.
mattmillr··on Show HN: I'm building a social network around hiking and backpacking
I like it. I'm going backpacking tomorrow, and would love to discover new trails.

I had trouble with the signup/login process.

* After I registered, it showed the form again instead of a success message or the homepage.

* So I filled it in again, thinking I'd done something wrong. The error "already taken" that popped in under my email address could be improved "It looks like you've already created an account with that email address, do you want to reset the password?"

* The registration and password reset emails went into the spam.

* When I got my password reset (I guess I fat-fingered it twice on the first signup form) and logged in, I got a login form under the "welcome" message. I hacked the URL to get to the homepage.

Great concept though, and you're off to a great start. I'm looking forward to seeing what all you do with it.

mattmillr··on Larry Page on Charlie Rose
That might get you an IDE plugin for working with Java VAMPIRE tools for Bayesian statistical analysis of gene expression array data.
mattmillr··on Is there a point to paginating articles online?
Short of reading the source code for the plugin, you can't know for sure. That's why Chrome just warns you that it can access your browsing activity, that's all you can know. You have to decide whether or not you trust the plugin author with that access.

Assuming (a) the plugin can access your data and (b) the plugin can communicate with some external system, there is no way* to either prohibit the plugin from sending your data to that external system or universally detect that it is doign it.

* No technical way. Of course you can use contracts, TOS, & other legal methods.

mattmillr··on The Most Awesome, Least-Advertised Fedora 17 Feature
One advantage to using a multi-seat solution is the same reason virtualization in datacenters works so well. One user isn't going to maximize resource usage at all times, so my spare CPU cycles are available for you when you need to run a bursty CPU-intensive app and vice versa.
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