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tathastu

119 karma · joined June 8, 2012

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tathastu··on Ask HN: Words of encouragement for someone lost in life?
First, talk to a trained professional.

https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/national-helpline might help.

No matter how permanent they feel, feelings are temporary. The short-circuit can and will get fixed.

May you be well.

tathastu··on Tesla issues strongest statement yet blaming driver for deadly crash
Tesla's autopilot page (https://www.tesla.com/autopilot) says (as of today):

Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars

All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.

tathastu··on India’s Space Agency Hits New Milestone With Satellite Launch
Non-paywalled stories:

http://spacenews.com/indias-pslv-launches-7-satellites-in-a-...

http://www.firstpost.com/india/isro-successfully-launches-ps...

tathastu··on Apple Event on September 7th
Still can't develop apps for iPad Pro on an iPad Pro.
tathastu··on One-third of SF Bay Area residents hope to leave soon, poll finds
Great, we'll have 1/3 less traffic and more housing space soon!
tathastu··on Hillary PAC Spends $1M to ‘Correct’ Commenters on Reddit and Facebook
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/386/
tathastu··on Brazil arrests Facebook executive in row over police access to data
Brazil may be shooting themselves in the foot -- they're trying to create an innovation industry around Sao Paulo and these things will just create a chilling effect that chases a huge bunch of industries out of the country.
tathastu··on Yahoo to cut 15 percent jobs, close several units
Try search from Google, then open resulting link in a private / incognito window.
tathastu··on Stop Buying Real Estate in SF
The article is comparing median income (of all residents) to prices that home-owners pay which is pretty much apples to oranges.

Fewer people are buying houses in the Bay Area right now already which causes the disparity in the house-price-to-income ratio: Most folks who can afford a house worth 1M (and prove it to a lender) are probably earning dual-income in the tech sector and 330K (which would make the ratio 3x, same as the national average) is not too much of a stretch between two technology jobs.

tathastu··on How to Pick a Meditation App
The Insight Meditation Center has a ton of introductory talks and guided meditations available for free: http://audiodharma.org/series/1/talk/1762/ for example.

All you need is a timer which is already built in to most phones; if you want a slightly better timer that has a soothing chime, use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.xipa.medigo... which is also free (and has no ads, social networking features or other annoying stuff).

tathastu··on Linus meltdown on a Git pull

  ...anybody who thinks that the above is
  
  (a) legible
  (b) efficient (even with the magical compiler support)
  (c) particularly safe

  is just incompetent
If that isn't a criticism of the person, I don't know what is.
tathastu··on Uber Plans to Go Public in 18-24 Months, According to Leaked Presentation
Bookings are 10B, not revenue -- that's what the passengers pay; stated revenue from the doc was 2B, which is what Uber keeps (rest goes to drivers). But your larger point is well-taken, even at that number, the valuation of Uber is not that surprising.
tathastu··on Singapore Rising: The Plot to Be the Next Big Tech Hub
I worked (and studied) in Singapore for a while. As an engineer for a tech company, you get paid very little compared to cost of living.

In my graduating class, most EE+CS folks I know who are still in Singapore became bankers, government employees or consultants. Most engineering talent left because the salaries were barely enough to pay rent.

Edit: spelling

tathastu··on Calvin and Hobbes embodied the voice of the lonely child
C&H is about imagination, not loneliness.

Imagination is an intrinsic and essential part of the human experience, especially in childhood, and to call it a 'coping mechanism' is completely missing the point.

Bill Watterson's genius was showing that there's a magic world in all of us; not that the world outside was not oppressive or unpleasant.

tathastu··on Startup tsunami in silicon valley
I think it's important to separate out two things -- the startup boom vs the housing boom.

The startup boom in some sense has always been there. There is a bubble-like environment but I don't think it equates to 1999 -- most of the high-value companies are doing fairly well, having either good exits (Whatsapp, Tumblr, Etsy), or raking in decent revenue (AirBnB) or having marketing executives fight over the chance to advertise (Snapchat, Pinterest).

As other folks have pointed out, VC firms have gotten rich and there is money to go around so the amount firms are being offered is a little higher than normal especially for late-stage rounds when it looks fairly sure that the company is on solid ground.

The housing boom on the other hand is simply an effect of not enough housing. Startups aren't the major employer in Silicon Valley. The major employers are Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, LinkedIn etc -- all employing thousands of people, all generating loads of profit and they aren't shutting down anytime soon; nor are they going to relocate anywhere in the near term. These people need places to live, but SV suburbs don't want to authorize extra housing, leading to the spike in prices. Even San Francisco they city has had way lower housing built than a city like Seattle over the last few years, though the demand has been far higher.

The housing boom / bubble will burst if there is a sudden, huge surge of new housing projects; but I doubt it.

tathastu··on Google Vietnam Is Hacked by Lizard Squad
It seems the attack was on an ISP's DNS server rather than Google.
tathastu··on Ask HN: How do I learn C and C++ when I love high-level languages?
I think to learn C/C++ it's helpful to have a mindset of wanting to understand the machine rather than build code. It's of course great fun to use Python's built in maps etc (and C++ has equivalents) but what you can do in C/C++ that you can't in Python is create the raw data structures down to the exact memory locations where they'll be used. One of the ways to learn C++ is make a relatively complex data structure (red-black tree, or bloom filter) and then throw as much data as you can inside it, see when you cross a threshold of memory usage -- then see if you can improve on that.

Having said that, C++ has come a long way, despite what haters say. I program primarily in C++ and very rarely have to use pointers. C++11/14 has excellent features (lambdas, initialization lists etc) which can make programming almost seem like writing a Python or Ruby script.

You may also have some luck with Bjarne's smallish "Tour of C++" book -- http://www.stroustrup.com/Tour.html

tathastu··on The Great Chinese Exodus
I think these articles are kind of missing the main point. I don't really care who buys the multi-million dollar houses since I'm never going to be in that market anyway.

The issue that we are seeing is investors (Chinese and otherwise) who are just plonking money in the real-estate market for normal homes. The homes we are seeing right now are pretty basic in the sense that a first-time home buyer would not be considering them if they had a million dollars cash in the bank. Yet these homes are going for all cash or 50% down -- I think the main reason is people with extra money have few options to park their cash; since asset prices across the board (and across the globe) are at all-time-highs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/08/upshot/welcome-to-the-ever...

tathastu··on Bold Ambition and Our Core
Microsoft: Stop talking, start doing.
tathastu··on Ask HN: What's the best programming book you've read recently?
Computer Systems: A programmer's perspective

Great look at under-the-hood of what happens when a program runs.

tathastu··on New podcast analyzing every minute of Star Wars, individually
...just in case reading HN doesn't waste enough of your time.
tathastu··on Why the Fuck?
It actually takes a lot more to have a career in the sciences; the field is extremely competitive. More so than getting a job at Google or Facebook. I applied for a lot of computational biology post-docs (having a PhD in the field), and because I wasn't from a big-name university, didn't get anything, and wound up working for one of the so-called "WTF" companies.
tathastu··on Moravec's paradox
This may also be an artifact that in terms of "intelligence" we have focused mostly on supervised learning as opposed to unsupervised learning; recent reversals in this trend have been shown to be surprisingly powerful [1].

Consider this: While reading, most humans use a different part of the brain to register consonants and vowels [2]. No matter how much we like to think we learn language in an orderly fashion, that is not the case. Our reading and speaking skills are simply built over time and experience by having neurons connect as we experience visual words and other people talking; formal language instruction probably plays a secondary role of attaching labels to already built neural networks.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/science/scientists-see-adv...

[2] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v403/n6768/full/403428a...

tathastu··on Google launches 18 new Google+ features
Sadly, none of them is starring / saving a post for later.
tathastu··on Isaac Asimov - The Foundation Trilogy
This is a dramatized version of the books. It is not an 'audiobook' version. I just started listening to it, and it has the Encyclopedia Galactica entries -- but other than that, seems to have no other narrative -- it's just the dialogue between people.

Still sounds great, though I'm not sure it'll be easy to follow for someone who hasn't read the book.

tathastu··on My favorite regex of all time
Also it's more interesting to put unprintable characters on a t-shirt.
tathastu··on Thanks Mr. Jobs, But it Seems I Can Use a Linux Laptop Now
Sophos had a false positive bug today: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/09/19/sshupdater-b-fsop...
tathastu··on Dalton Caldwell: Announcing an audacious proposal
Precisely why I like pinboard.in so much, and why I love the idea of app.net.

I, as a consumer, don't want a service that I rely on to be heavily VC-funded in this day and age, because it means they will have unrealistic expectations to grow revenue phenomenally, which means they might screw the service with ads, or choke the data that the service collects; which means it is likely that the starting point of any new Web 2.0 product is awesome but it only gets worse after that, with ad and feature-creep.

We keep hearing that the cost of computing is coming down and yet the cost of a service (in terms of privacy lost, irritating ads shown, or restrictive API terms) seems to be going up and up.

[Edit: grammar]

tathastu··on Yahoo Voices Hacked, Usernames and Passwords Posted Online.
I presume that means also that the passwords could be different from the actual yahoo account passwords? Of course people might have kept them the same...