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rjvir

1,023 karma · joined September 24, 2009

http://rjvir.com - @rjvir - raj@rjvir.com
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rjvir··on Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
Sure, online polls have obvious flaws (non-response bias, how many people actually saw the poll, who was motivated to actually respond to the poll, did voters actually understand the protest would last more than 1 day, should logged out lurkers have any representation, etc)

But beyond that, shutting down a subreddit for multiple days is such a drastic action, it should require more than just a simple majority in a quick online poll.

For instance, to amend the Constitution, you typically need a supermajority (2/3 or 3/4 of different parts of the government). To convict someone guilty in a trial, you typically need evidence beyond reasonable doubt and a unanimous jury verdict.

The burden of proof that users want to shut down the subreddit should be overwhelming.

rjvir··on Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
> Next, they'll hand over fan-built communities to the entities that own the IPs they're dedicated to. Eg. r/starwars to Disney, r/startrek to Viacom/Paramount, etc.

This isn't an accurate extrapolation. In fact it's extrapolating in the opposite direction.

The moderators are taking a moral stand against an API policy. But the the actual users of the subreddits never consented to this moral stand. By removing these moderators that are working against the users, reddit is giving the subreddits back to the users.

rjvir··on Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
The users of a subreddits drive all the value, not the handful of moderators.

If a competitor magically got the support of all the moderators, that wouldn't get them very far.

rjvir··on Reddit is removing moderators that protest by taking their communities private
Spez is CEO because the board and investors deem him to be the best person for the job. Of course, he founded Reddit, so he has a strong case on merit for why he is the #1 person on the planet to run the company.

The process for selecting moderators is way less meritocratic or democratic than this. They merely got there first, finders keepers. The analogy for landed gentry is accurate.

rjvir··on Adobe to acquire Figma for $20B
There are use cases where Figma and Adobe already directly compete:

- Product wireframes/mockups

- Memes/social media posts

- Simple vector creation/editing

And that list is only expanding.

rjvir··on Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the internet
It's merely an informative blog post on a topic many people are interested in. I see nothing wrong with Cloudflare just explaining what happened, even though they had nothing to do with it.
rjvir··on Apple Delays Rollout of Child Safety Features
I think it's plausible that they'd offer E2EE for all of iCloud.

They already do it for iMessage, and it makes it easier to turn down subpoenas if they can credibly claim that they can't even access the data themselves.

Likewise, offering an explicit choice also seems plausible. The full E2EE flow might have UX downsides (for example, the user might need to write down a recovery seed phrase on paper), so they might not force all users into that flow.

rjvir··on Moderna mRNA sequence released to GitHub [pdf]
Done, load it up!
rjvir··on Moderna mRNA sequence released to GitHub [pdf]
This should be an NFT, I'd love to own an NFT of the RNA sequence of the Moderna vaccine.
rjvir··on Show HN: Plant-based flavor enhancer – hack your tastebuds to eat healthy
I tried Wozi, I heard about it through Pioneer.

I really enjoyed it. Once I applied the powder, everything in my fridge tasted like candy - fruits, yogurt, etc.

Now whenever I'm hungry for a snack, I quickly apply some of the powder, and have a delicious, healthy snack.

rjvir··on Show HN: I built an online interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
Looks like "vimtutor" is primarily text explaining the hotkeys.

For me, the bottleneck to picking up vim has not been merely knowing the hotkeys, but more internalizing the commands and building muscle memory.

The interactive game format of this website could possibly solve that, so it appeals to me.

rjvir··on Introduction to Support Vector Machines in Machine Learning
Different people learn in different ways, but personally I’ve had more success with the opposite approach, ie “top-down”.

As in, rather than learning in depth all the low level parts then finally putting it together at the end, start with a surface high-level understanding of a working prototype then expand into the details of how everything works inside.

In the case of ML, this could mean starting with a 5 line SciKit-learn prototype of a random forest model, seeing some working predictions, then expanding knowledge from there - what data is going in and what is coming out? What’s a classifier? What’s a decision tree? Etc

rjvir··on AngelList lays off a number of staff and cuts executive salaries
A pandemic is indefinitely shutting down most of the country. This is hardly evidence that the economy is "fragile".

That would be like calling your iPhone fragile if it breaks after throwing out the window of a skyscraper.

rjvir··on Zoom meetings aren’t end-to-end encrypted, despite marketing
If the article is accurate, this is clearly not "end-to-end" in the way that most people believe it. If Zoom was considered "end-to-end" encrypted, then any site that uses HTTPS should be able to claim so as well.

I interpret end-to-end encrypted to mean only the participants have access to the content, the intermediary couldn't spy on my calls even if they wanted to. This appears to NOT be the case with Zoom.

rjvir··on It costs $10k to ‘own’ a Chick-fil-A franchise
It's possible to be predatory without holding people at gunpoint.
rjvir··on Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet
It's a money sink right now, but has an obvious path to becoming a juggernaut.
rjvir··on What Netflix’s ‘Great Hack’ Gets Wrong About Cambridge Analytica
Many factors can influence an outcome. But it's reasonable to focus on the illegal (or just shady) ones.

For instance, if a team loses a sporting event by 1 point, and their Gatorade was poisoned, it would be understandable to call out the Gatorade poisoning. Of course, many other things could have swung the outcome as well (random variance, wind, poor effort, etc).

rjvir··on Tumblr
> If I bought Tumblr in a $3 million fire sale, I don't think I'd keep 200 employees on the payroll

Keeping most of the 200 employees on payroll may have been a condition of the $3m sale price.

rjvir··on Swift for Tensorflow 0.3.1
I think this article by Jeremy from fast.ai lays out a compelling case:

https://www.fast.ai/2019/03/06/fastai-swift/

rjvir··on Launch HN: Dyneti (YC W19) – Helping apps stop fraud and process payments faster
What happens if a user's card can't be scanned? For instance, bad lighting conditions, or an unusual card format?
rjvir··on Nuclear – Popcorn Time for music
One way this better than Spotify & Apple Music - it contains user-created remixes and mashups that aren't available on the streaming platforms.

But for users who are interested in that content, I don't know how this is much better than just browsing the songs directly on YouTube.com.

rjvir··on Popular iPhone apps caught sending user location data to monetization firms
I bet Apple will crack down on these location tracking SDKs, but it likely wouldn't eliminate this type of tracking.

The main reason these apps are getting caught is because they are blatantly including the SDKs of the monetization firms in their client apps, and transparently sending data directly to the servers of those firms.

But what's to stop a weather app from just doing it server-side, so it's undetectable to third parties?

For instance, a weather app must send location data to some backend, in order to fetch weather data. That backend could send the location data to these exact same monetization firms. It would be difficult for Apple to detect and block this behavior.

rjvir··on A Popular Mac App That Sent Users' Browsing History to China Has Been Removed
Security for the normal user is a nice benefit of having an App Store.
rjvir··on Show HN: I'm 12, learning JS, and wrote Wolfram's cellular automaton in Node
Everything being in 1 commit seems perfectly normal for this situation.

He likely wrote the entire thing without Git (because he's the only one working on it), then decided to push it to BitBucket when he wanted to publish it.

rjvir··on Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash
It's interesting how so many techies initially had the knee-jerk reaction of "well, despite this accident, I bet these Uber autonomous cars are still safer than humans".

It seems like all information available to us suggests the polar opposite.

rjvir··on Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
> the self-driving car was, in fact, driving itself when it barreled through the red light, according to two Uber employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they signed nondisclosure agreements with the company, and internal Uber documents viewed by The New York Times. All told, the mapping programs used by Uber’s cars failed to recognize six traffic lights in the San Francisco area. “In this case, the car went through a red light,” the documents said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/technology/anthony-levand...

rjvir··on Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
The goal is to use the best set of information available to us. I merely cited the normalized numbers because it's been asked various times in this thread - questions along the lines of "how does this rate compare with human drivers?"

The purpose of the extrapolation was to get a (flawed) approximation to that answer. By itself, it doesn't say much, but all we can do is parse the data points available to us:

- Uber's death rate after approximately 3 million self-driven miles is significantly higher than the national average, and probably comparable to drunk drivers.

- Public reporting around the Uber's self-driving program suggests a myriad of egregious issues - such as running red lights.

- The company has not obeyed self-driving regulations in the past, in part because they were unwilling to report "disengagements" to the public record.

- The company has a history of an outlier level of negligence and recklessness in other areas - for example, sexual harassment.

rjvir··on Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
Scaling those numbers paints a poor picture for Uber. Assuming 3 million total miles autonomously driven thus far from Uber's program:

- Uber autonomous: 33.3 deaths per 100 million miles

- Waymo: 0 deaths per 100 million miles

- National average: 1.25 deaths per 100 million miles

Of course, the Uber and Waymo numbers are from a small sample size.

But there's also the bayesian prior that Uber has been grossly negligent and reckless in other aspects of their business, in addition to reports that their self-driving cars have had tons of other blatant issues like running red lights.

It seems reasonably possible that an Uber self-driving car is about as safe as a drunk driver. DUIs send people to jail - what's the punishment for Uber?

rjvir··on Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
Why would Uber agree to such regulations?

They were unwilling to legally obtain a self-driving license in California because they did not want to report "disengagements" (situations in which a human driver has to intervene).

Uber would just set their self-driving cars free and eat whatever fine/punishment comes with it.

rjvir··on The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)
This strikes me as an area where distributed apps on a blockchain could have a big impact.

Currently, top piracy options like torrent websites and Kodi addons constantly get taken down by the government (through methods described in this article).

But what happens if a distributed YouTube exists with every movie in pristine 1080p quality, that lives on a blockchain so the government can't shut it down or issue DMCA takedown requests?

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