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txttran

119 karma · joined March 8, 2012

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txttran··on Ask HN: Have you lived abroad for an extended period of time? Was it valuable?
I'd be interested in knowing more about the limits you hit in Singapore, if you're willing to share! Singapore is a really interesting city and as someone who moved to Hong Kong a few years ago, I've always wondered what life in Singapore is like.
txttran··on How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Job Hunt
From: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

['1', '2', '3'].map(parseInt); // While one could expect [1, 2, 3] // The actual result is [1, NaN, NaN]

parseInt is often used with one argument, but takes two. The first is an expression and the second is the radix. To the callback function, Array.prototype.map passes 3 arguments: the element, the index, the array. The third argument is ignored by parseInt, but not the second one, hence the possible confusion.

txttran··on Upstart Gangs Filling the Yakuza Power Vacuum
I'm always interested in reading about the inner workings of gangs. It seems like these biker gangs are not particularly sophisticated nor well organized, though. The main one in the story immediately lost cohesion when their leader fled the country and were absorbed by the Yakuza. In many ways, they seem less robust and effective than biker/street gangs in America.
txttran··on Cutting your salary by 40%
You can! And usually with only a slight pay cut. There are a lot more remote-ok and remote-only companies now.
txttran··on Launch HN: Lambda School (YC S17) – CS education that's free until you get a job
Let's say I make $60k a year now in an unrelated field and I join your school, but after graduating, I was unable to find a job in software.

Would I still be on the hook to pay you 17% of my income despite not landing a programming job?

txttran··on Lessons from Outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines
This is what I don't understand about offshoring. People keep going to India and China to find devs when they can get very high quality English speaking devs from the UK, Australia, and Canada for about the same price (factoring in all costs).
txttran··on “A tale of lies and deceit” – GrabGas CTO let go by founders
What constitutes a startup?

Because they did have customers and revenue for the service that they offered. They had everything that is part of a business (albeit, a very slow and unprofitable one). They're missing the ability to scale since they had no tech stack to speak of, but their MVP did not really need one.

txttran··on Regulators Propose Banning Theranos Founder from Blood Testing
It says in the article that she has >50% equity.
txttran··on Foursquare Gets $45M and a New CEO to Build Out Enterprise Business
4sq has struggled mightily with traction/retention since the big change. Yelp is ubiquitous in the US and they are making strides into other countries.
txttran··on Top Chicago Startups
They said Groupon is one of the "examples of successful Chicago based startups". So it's no longer a startup. And it IPOed recently whereas Orbitz IPO'ed in 2003 so it's not a recent startup.
txttran··on How the Daily Fantasy Sports Industry Turns Fans into Suckers
I disagree on this. Casual poker players will just play his hand as he's not that experienced with reading people.

While you are right that there is no DFS analogy to 'playing the player,' advanced DFS players build complex models, hedge their bets, and write (or hire people to write) scripts that update their bets as their beliefs about that day's games changes. Different kinds of skills than poker, but not less skill.

txttran··on Inside Automattic's Remote Hiring Process
I love how he ignores the top response to his question: "If knowledge of a candidate's previous salary doesn't influence your offer, why do you ask for it and what do you do with it?"
txttran··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (January 2016)
SEEKING WORK

San Francisco, but remote preferred.

Full-stack LAMP Web Engineer (also proficient with node.js)

Five years experience in Silicon Valley at both Zynga and as engineering hire #1 at a startup working on point of sales. I lead development for our website component, which is a dashboard for our merchants, showing them their sales data, business analytics, inventory management, email marketing, and much more. I am happy to give you a demo of all the features I worked on over Skype or gChat.

I have extensive experience with both scaling problems and building and shipping a product from scratch. I can help you ruthlessly prioritize your features and build your product!

Please contact me at tom.tran at gmail.

txttran··on Snapchat Discloses $650M Private Placement
You could save a bookmarklet that allows you to bypass the header: https://gist.github.com/jashkenas/9a4d9e648eb11aab394e

Or you could just skip the article when you see it. I don't see why we'd ban wsj.com just because you have trouble reading it.

txttran··on Clinkle
What a disappointing product after such hype. Seems like a desperation pivot. I'd guess that the business partnerships didn't pan out and Apple supplants their proprietary technology with Apple's ecosystem. Given how crowded the rewards marketplace is, this seems like they're just throwing good money after bad.
txttran··on AWS Tips I Wish I'd Known Before I Started
What tools do you recommend for centralized logging?
txttran··on Warren Buffett offers $1 billion for perfect March Madness bracket
Probability is 1/2^63 (each match eliminates 1 team, 63 matches to leave one champ). Or 1/(9.22 x 10^18)
txttran··on Nmap team releases 5 gigapixel favicon map
I believe conduit produces one of those adware toolbar plugins that get installed when you install utorrent, etc. It will also attempt to change your browser home page as well. I'm assuming that very few hits to conduit.com are actually intentional.
txttran··on Coin: A step in the wrong direction
For everyone who is poo-pooing Coin because it's not a digital wallet, please answer this question: How long from now will most merchants that accept credit cards also start accepting an e-wallet of some sort?

I honestly would be stunned if this happened in <10 years. I think we very often underestimate how slow adoption rate is for new technology and how much money can be made by playing nice with the incumbent technology instead of trying to disrupt it from the onset.

txttran··on Occupy Wall Street activists buy $15m of Americans' personal debt
Most of the time, when your debt has been sold off to a collection agency, you can negotiate with agency to pay a reduced amount, since it's the easiest outcome for them.
txttran··on Silk Road 2.0 Launches
There was a reputation system on SR similar to ebay.
txttran··on Tesla lost $38M in third quarter, stock tumbles over 12 percent
A post-IPO, $21B company is still a startup?
txttran··on Use different DNS servers for specific domains
How does a DNS service like AdFree prevent non-subscribers from using their servers?
txttran··on From a Mailchimp email and Wufoo form to $25k in 3 months
Slightly off topic, but the website of the company being talked about in this article (https://ooomf.com/) take a REALLY long time to load on my computer.
txttran··on SoundFocus (YC S13) Launches With an App for ‘20/20 Hearing’
Ignoring the sound-loss test, I love this app simply because it's the only free equalizer for the iPhone that works with Spotify!
txttran··on Kipochi, a Bitcoin wallet service, now supports M-Pesa
1/3 of Kenyans use M-Pesa, a mobile money transferring platform. M-Pesa recently added support for bitcoin. So while 1/3 of Kenyans have a bitcoin wallet, most of them may not even be aware of this fact.
txttran··on D.C. Council approves ‘living wage’ bill over Wal-Mart ultimatum
CostCo and Wal-Mart have pretty different business models despite being competitors. It should be noted that CostCo's retail business, without the membership fees, is actually not profitable. It's the membership fees that put them in the black.

Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/26/why-can-t-w...

txttran··on D.C. Council approves ‘living wage’ bill over Wal-Mart ultimatum
Why is this targeted at large retailers? If the DC minimum wage is insufficient for "living", shouldn't it be raised, instead of a somewhat arbitrary law forcing only retailers to raise their wages?
txttran··on Anatomy of a pseudorandom number generator – visualising Cryptocat's buggy PRNG
I'm a complete noob when it comes to cryptography. I understand that having a PRNG that doesn't return numbers with even distribution across a range is bad. Extreme example would be something like http://xkcd.com/221/.

But could someone explain how an attacker can take advantage of the fact that 0 is returned ~1% more often than other digits? It this flaw alone sufficient to break cryptocat? Or does it simply make brute forcing easier when combined with other crypto flaws?

txttran··on Study: Reddit used by 6% of adult Internet users
reminds me of http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
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