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skyo

52 karma · joined January 9, 2011

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skyo··on TeraWave Satellite Communications Network
It's one of the largest parking garages in the world
skyo··on Amazon Closing AmazonSmile
Exactly. It was also a way to train customers to navigate directly to Amazon instead of through search engines (where Amazon pays for ads).
skyo··on Apple’s next big thing: A business model change
The Dark Sky API is getting shut down in a few months: https://blog.darksky.net/
skyo··on 20 years after 9/11: Will we ever stop taking our shoes off at airports?
Right, TSA even refers to it as "TSA PreCheck" on their website: https://www.tsa.gov/precheck
skyo··on Full-Bleed Layout Using CSS Grid
Same. I stopped reading halfway through because I'm on battery and don't want to run it down just reading a blog post. Also I got tired of the fan noise.
skyo··on Disney+ fans without answers after thousands hacked
Probably the best way to check is https://haveibeenpwned.com/
skyo··on Little Snitch 3 – Protect your privacy
It's pretty good, but I feel like the screenshots don't really convey the app's value very well. Maps wants to connect to maps.apple.com? Of course it should. Itunes wants to itunes.apple.com? Well, yeah.

I'd much rather see a screenshot of some app trying to connect to a sketchy or surprising domain. I think that would really drive home the app's purpose and make it look less like nuisance that's going to bug me every time I launch Apple Maps.

skyo··on A Computational Approach for Obstruction-Free Photography [pdf]
This would be a lot like Google's how "artificial lens blur" feature works[1]. I don't think it would be too difficult to teach a user to move their phone a little to scan the scene.

[1] http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/04/lens-blur-in-new-...

skyo··on How to ask users for iOS permissions
Yes, it's a feature that was introduced with Mavericks.

https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifi...

skyo··on Scroll down and click Destroy this Site
Yeah, for some reason the link doesn't show up when searching the page. You can find it at the bottom of the page, under the header "Connect". It's between the links for "Become a Reseller" and "Privacy Policy"
skyo··on Amazon credit-card reader poses challenge to Square
You can always get transfers from your Amazon payments account to your bank account
skyo··on An Amazon Engineer Had a Little Idea That Turned Into a Billion-Dollar Business
I couldn't even get past this:

> On August 24, 2006, the public beta of Amazon's "Infrastructure as a Service" (IaaS).

How is that a sentence?

skyo··on Ever back out of a accepted Job?
Ha, my team in Seattle was going to get a new developer last week until he backed out at the last minute. That wasn't you, was it?
skyo··on Math Puzzle: Lion in Circular Cage Puzzle
Can you elaborate? I was wondering the same thing as yogsototh.
skyo··on Steve's Google Platform rant
Yeah, I've heard that some AWS teams can have heavy operational load. If it's important to you to avoid that, you could consider somewhere in WAP/BuilderTools. That's where I work (so yes I am biased), and in my experience the operational load tends to be pretty light throughout the org. On my particular team we almost never get paged. Plus we get to build neat things in this org (remember how Stevey mentioned that Amazon's "versioned-library" system is good?).

Silk is probably a neat team to look into as well. They're building a cool product, they're still a small team, and they have good leadership. The director in charge of it used to be the head of Builder Tools and he's great.

But yeah, talk to a lot of teams and ask them about the things that are important to you (operational load, current/future projects, code quality standards, whatever other things you can think of to ask) and see if any of those teams sound cool to you. I won't lie and say that every place in Amazon is perfect, but if you choose well I think it's possible to find a great team to work on.

skyo··on Steve's Google Platform rant
I did multiple internships at Amazon and now I work here full-time. I love it here. But, like other people have pointed out, your experience can be very dependent on which team you join. Personally, I wouldn't want to work full-time on the team that I did my first internship on. The work there just wasn't fun. But my internships put me in a good position to know which teams suck and which teams are great, and so I chose a great team to join. Hopefully you are in a similar place because of your internship. Did you enjoy your team? If not, did you see any teams that you would like to work on?
skyo··on Ml-class.org vs. real world ML class
I started watching the lectures at ml-class.org this weekend, and I found myself noticing the same thing. It's wonderful how quickly the professor goes through the introductory material so you can start learning right away. After only half an hour of watching, I had learned things I didn't know before (supervised learning vs. unsupervised learning, regression vs. classification, etc.). And after another hour he had covered all the way through a whole algorithm for solving regression problems. I'm finding this class to be much more efficient at teaching than a lot of my lectures in college were.
skyo··on Redesign.techcrunch.com
This is ugly, but at least it's not Gizmodo.
skyo··on BankSimple: We have cards
How about SimpleCU