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scorpion032

1,518 karma · joined January 25, 2008

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scorpion032··on Google's Street View computer vision can beat reCAPTCHA with 99% accuracy
That is much more accuracy than with which humans can crack recaptcha.

I'd estimate my own accuracy rate to be 90% or less.

scorpion032··on Laverna – Store your notes anonymously and encrypted
A good start. But...

The USP of Evernote isn't that you can take notes from anywhere as much as anything can be a note (An audio clip, your current location, a picture etc) and that can be very well organised, grouped and saved in the cloud and offline on demand.

It's basically a "database" for the non techies: Save everything in there and query by tags, organise by books or search in the content and meta data.

scorpion032··on Google’s indoor maps arrive in India
There seems to be a large team of Google Maps based in Bangalore. Probably one of the reasons why India went first, for the Indoor Maps.
scorpion032··on GitHub's new text editor leaked on Twitter
coffeescript and cson, specifically.
scorpion032··on Atom
Sublime is written in Python.

I'd imagine, all of this is written in Javascript and compiled/rendered with v8.

scorpion032··on Atom
Github folks are awesome mostly. I'd have imagined they would have made it a liberal license if they could.

But they are the venture invested company now. Need to show returns 10 to 100x the investment in a few years.

scorpion032··on Elasticsearch 1.0.0 released
If for storage of data, I'd use and only use a RDBMS like Postgres. Not Mongo.
scorpion032··on Git Cheatsheet
I used to use SourceTree. I moved to using GitX: http://rowanj.github.io/gitx/ and seem to prefer it much more. SourceTree feels too cluttered. Gitx has better UX and appeals to me as someone that prefers to view more relevant content on the screen.
scorpion032··on Fury at Facebook as login requests “Government ID”
The same argument could be made for house hold locks.

An experienced lock smith could open an average house hold lock in probably minutes. (not to forget most people are neither skilled lock smiths nor photoshop editors)

That doesn't mean a locked home isn't secure. Most people would never think about breaching such a social contract and breaking in locks.

If one wants to break in or if one wants to lie, one can always do. Most people would never do; for the rest, it is a different problem really.

scorpion032··on Big Data at Khan Academy
Do you anybody else that uses Google App Engine?
scorpion032··on Y Combinator Opens A Satellite Office In SF
Where does Alexis work out of, if they don't have any space in The Real City.
scorpion032··on MongoDB Raises $150 Million at $1.2 Billion Valuation
Cannot be emphasised enough. Less than 1% of Oracle's market cap; and pretty sure they could complete their offering with a NoSQL database.
scorpion032··on The Future of AngularJS
Looks like that.
scorpion032··on Lanyrd: From idea to exit – the story of our startup
It is an engaging story; a real account of a startup's successful exit explained very keenly, containing a lot of valuable advice.

Great read!

scorpion032··on SICP translated to JavaScript
"An invasion of armies can be resisted; an invasion of ideas cannot be resisted" - http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Victor_Hugo_quote

This generation is going to be rewrite in Javascript/v8, everything that can be written in Javascript.

scorpion032··on Automating Microsoft Office with Python
Just as interesting are some of the visualisations, the author (of this ipnb) has done for some of the media houses in India. Done using powerpoint, but for a print publication, as good as it could be.

(which are linked within this ipynb.)

scorpion032··on Wozniak Says `Lot of Things Wrong’ With Jobs Movie [video]
A "polymath" is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas.

Greeks celebrated such great thinkers. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Galileo Galilei, Nicolaus Copernicus, Francis Bacon and Michael Servetus were all amazing polymaths. - They had expertise in Math, Engineering, Philosophy, Art, Finance. (Perhaps not marketing because such a thing didn't exist back then.)

There have been such multi disciplinary experts in the world and I'm sure there continue to be. But they are rare and often found pursuing interest in one of the areas.

If you can understand tech there is no reason you cannot understand sales and vice versa. - In fact being blind to an alternative point of view isn't even a feature of a man of class. And if you can understand it, why can't you think the same way.

scorpion032··on Tools used by influential developers and designers
The "should" use was meant for the general populace, those that adopt something, after the tipping point in a bell curve, to give a sneak peak into what hackers use today. - Not to hackers, who can themselves choose what they want and who form the initial part of the bell curve.
scorpion032··on Tools used by influential developers and designers
Thats actually 5 people of the interviewed-analysed 373. (And not 5%)
scorpion032··on Tools used by influential developers and designers
- I did not create a test group. I did a statistical analysis of all the interviews on The Setup: http://usesthis.com/

- Among this group, the number of people who were tagged linux was about a fourth: https://github.com/becomingGuru/usesthis_analysis/blob/maste... I did not do a distro distribution. That is good feedback. I will find out.

Since designers hardly use linux, and since half the people are developers, it may be safe to assume half the developers interviewed by The Setup use Linux.

scorpion032··on Tools used by influential developers and designers
“When it comes to computers, what hackers are doing now, everyone will be doing in ten years. Almost all technology, from Unix to bitmapped displays to the Web, became popular first within CS departments and research labs, and gradually spread to the rest of the world.” - PG

I am saying you should rather already be using this now, than doing it later, given you'd be doing it anyway. (from PG, above.)

scorpion032··on Tools used by influential developers and designers
The analysis is entirely available here: http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/becomingGuru...

Perhaps there are other slugs "gvim" and the like, which also have a 2 each users.

I will verify this and let you know. Meanwhile pointing to any 3 vim users would help me debug this.

scorpion032··on Tools used by influential developers and designers
Hey, I am the author of the post. Here are some clarifications:

- None of the values are the %. They are the actual number of people that said they use that ware. About 70 people said they use iphone 4 and about 40 people said they use the apple keyboard.

- "keyboard" is a slug used for the Apple Keyboard. Half the people that were interviewed wanted to explicitly mention that they use that keyboard.

- No one provided the interviewees with a set of names to tick if they used that hardware or software. In that case you'd have a comprehensive set of user-wares from which you could get the accurate info. I'd detest such an interview. I can not imagine why all of these people wouldn't.

- What we have is a free form text where in the interviewee says whatever he's allowed to. When he says he uses a Mac, there is no reason why he'd also say he uses osx. - That would be redundant.

- If people are asked what they like to consume, no one mentions water or cereals or vegetables, even though everyone has it. What is mentioned is the particular dish or a cuisine that they actually want you to know that makes them feel better. Likewise here, google reader actually helps a lot of these people and they want to share it with the readers.

- It is much more what people like themselves to be associated with. Seth Godin has written a lot about it. People say Google reader much more than mail because they want to be associated with using it. "mail" here, btw is the slug to the actual Apple-Mail client.

Hope it helps set a perspective on how this should be read.

scorpion032··on Tools used by influential developers and designers
I'd like to think of it as "Tools we love to use"; or "Tools I like so much, that I want to tell others about it".

Clearly Google docs solves the problem of versioning and sharing quite well and that probably resonates with a lot of folks in stark contrast to how they have to share a excel or word document and struggled to keep the versions updated.

scorpion032··on Tools used by influential developers and designers
I am the author of the post and happy to answer any questions.
scorpion032··on Goldman Sachs sent a computer scientist to jail over 8MB of open source code
Justice as it was meant to be (John Rawls, Kant, et all): "Entitlement to legitimate expectation."

Justice as it is practiced: "Legitimising the expectations of the entitled."

scorpion032··on SlidePay (YC W12) Tries To Be The “Android” of Payments
I'd guess that they wanted to say "Stripe for Android"; but didnt want to mention Stripe, so ended up suggesting that.
scorpion032··on Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?
An individual can lead a comfortable life. But you probably can't afford a family, says this answer on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Silicon-Valley/Whats-the-dark-side-of-S...
scorpion032··on Poll: Full-time software engineers in the Bay Area, what's your annual salary?
The net pay will be lesser considering the taxes.
scorpion032··on How to Learn Emacs: A Hand-drawn One-pager for Beginners
http://www.quora.com/Sublime-Text/Why-is-Sublime-Text-2-so-p...
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