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wf

318 karma · joined July 8, 2011

www.williamflaherty.com
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wf··on My Father the Werewolf
Hijacking this to say-- this was beautiful, such an intense and satisfying introspection.

Although, the hopelessness in this: "As for depression, it’s the chasm that exists between. You build your bridge, don’t look down, and pray it never swallows you, because if it does, you’ll fall forever in that bottomless gulf, and die without ever landing."

I know you don't believe it's impossible to climb out of depression... so I guess I wish there had been something at least a little hopeful to round that out.

wf··on Deadmau5's mansion and its tech setup [video]
What does "the challenge is in the synthesis of it" mean?
wf··on Deadmau5's mansion and its tech setup [video]
Can someone explain the analog to digital thing he's talking about? Can digital software not reproduce any sounds his boards can make? If not doesn't he just lose all those sounds when he converts the sounds to a digital format, making it a mostly pointless exercise?
wf··on Facebook staff reject female engineers’ code more often, former employee claims
As it turns out women have barely had any time at all being afforded the same privileges as men[0], and that's just the United States, there remain cultures that are extremely oppressive to women. It also turns out we still tell women from a young age that "they can't".[1] It also turns out there are a ton of biases pushing women out of STEM[2][3][4][5].

So when you cite evidence that says men are smarter than women conducted by men standing on the shoulders of a society built for men, you can't be shocked when people question it.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_the_United...

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6323/389

[2] http://www.uchastings.edu/news/articles/2015/01/double-jeopa...

[3] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/12/4403.full

[4] http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full

wf··on Inequality and Skin in the Game
Looks like ~1% of US high school students had stats in 1990 and only ~11% in 2009. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=97
wf··on Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses
This shows a huge lack of empathy for addiction and big disrespect for the power of opioids.
wf··on The Elephant in the Smartwatch Room
Disclaimer: I work for Garmin, but not on smart watches.

This is exactly what I came here to say. On top of that I'm not sure how the data from the second chart got put together? It just says that the data came from their own site and IDC. IDC's report for the 3rd quarter puts three competitors above Apple in terms of market share, YOY growth, and unit sales.[1]

[1] http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS41996116

wf··on Show HN: Poets Know It – A literature network for poets to share and collaborate
I get the appeal of that. I wonder though if it make sense for a website built on collaboration to be exclusive? Not that those things are mutually exclusive, but it's similar to the right click to steal issue. If people want to steal something they will, so it's not worth sacrificing the user experience here (probably); similarly, if the exclusive feel prevents people from signing up there will be less collaboration.

I guess it partly comes down to what is meant by collaboration. Is it writing together? Is it just feedback like comments or Genius style annotations? I really like the idea of either. These questions and others the users had here could be answered on the landing page. If you guys are interested in more feedback as you progress feel free to hit me up!

wf··on Show HN: Poets Know It – A literature network for poets to share and collaborate
The signup page has a steep price to pay. Maybe just setup the login and then ask for profile information once users are in?

Asking for a specific date of when someone started writing is a little daunting. Maybe just have a year? Not sure what the information is for.

Also the terms of service I'm agreeing to leads to a 404 ;)

I've recently gotten in to writing some poetry so I'm super interested in this project! I hope you guys can really get this to kick off.

edit: I would add, you need a real landing page. Something that has examples of features or results of collaboration. This is pretty similar although a microcosm of HitRecord, so maybe check that out for some inspiration.

wf··on Credit-Card Debt Nears $1 Trillion as Banks Push Plastic
Yes, of course there are. But how would we buy things we can't afford now without a credit card?! /s
wf··on How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
>The morality in America has slipped precipitously since our heyday as a nation in the 1950s.

Yea, the 1950's were really America's heyday (/s), while the rest of the world was blown up. I wonder if people in the 1920's were sipping on illegal booze at Gadsby's party thinking "man, the morality in america sure has taken a dive since the gilded age". Is your view so skewed by the media portrayal of the Jones' and white picket fences that you think America was some bastion of morality then? The morals established then were that woman couldn't own credit cards unless their husbands deemed it so, gays should be sent to sanitoriums to prevent the spread of their disease by showing nude pictures to other boys (Lavender Scare anyone?); it took 10+ years for some states to comply with Brown v The Board of Education. So how about you get your kids a history book and let them read that so they don't have to see the world through rose colored bigoted glasses.

edit. The more I think about this the more upset I am. HUAC, being able to LEGALLY beat your wife, this isn't even touching on African-American trials of the time. America was a fucking mess in the 1950's.

wf··on How the New York Times Sandbagged Bernie Sanders
But I would say this falls under "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon". News pieces with large audiences being largely edited to deliver a different message after they've "gone viral" is similar to a high traffic website being hacked to deliver a message about something else.
wf··on Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets
This is a really cool idea. It's a really simple solution to the same problem that would be really beautiful and easy to use on mobile especially. It doesn't quite reach the same depth, but I think it's a good way to start.
wf··on The Amazon Whisperer (2013)
au contraire: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TQ5TDLC
wf··on The anonymous Silicon Valley satire that has stumped tech world insiders
It links to a copy in the article: https://fusiondotnet.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/iterating-g...
wf··on How to Ace a Phone Screen
Interesting, I didn't know Zenefits did phone screens, they sent me a ~3 hour coding challenge to do over... I can't recall the services name atm.
wf··on Jeff Bezos Says Amazon Won’t Tolerate ‘Callous’ Management Practices
Normally I would steer clear of interjecting in something like this, however, you know that's basically the opposite of what dignity means, right? Dignity is recognizing the formality of a situation and acting respectfully to yourself and others in it.
wf··on Ellen Pao: The Trolls Are Winning the Battle for the Internet
Reading all of this has given me the beginnings of an idea. Although I'm not a machine learning/NLP expert the idea is obviously non-trivial to an extreme (maybe impossible, currently): What if there were a forum similar in style to reddit that had a form of auto-moderation that identified logical fallacies and other irrelevant information and then highlighted those within arguments.

For example if there was an ad hominem attack "Fuck you Ellen Pao." The auto moderator would allow the post but would highlight the text red with a small bubble identifying it as ad hominem, users could react appropriately.

Or, maybe you have a long well thought out argument that has a straw man in it. The auto-mod could highlight the straw man to point out that it exists and maybe even format the post to show the point from which the rest of the position is based on that.

Maybe this wouldn't have to be actively presented but just a tool that comments were run through so users could be warned prior to their submissions. Obviously the complications with this would be ridiculous and you could never stop training the algorithm that was processing your text. But the implications of having such a thing seem pretty incredible.

wf··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2015)

    Location: Kansas City
    Remote: No
    Willing to relocate: Yes, to the bay
    Technologies: C/C++/Obj-C, Python/Django, HTML/CSS
    Resumé/CV: http://williamflaherty.com/resume_flaherty.pdf
    Email: william.flaherty at gmail
I'm looking for a position in San Francisco, ideally at a startup or small/medium sized company.
wf··on Facebook Starts Hosting “Instant Articles”
What? In my experience this has always been true on mobile. If something takes longer than a few seconds to load it gets closed or restarted.
wf··on Installing Apple CarPlay and Taking It for a Spin
Whoah, I had no idea that CarPlay was software. Does that mean it can be loaded onto any after market system with the right specs? How would they deal with the different hardware targets if that's the case?

Edit: On second thought, it looks like they're partnering with manufacturers so is Apple also providing their own version of the HW as well?

wf··on Halfbike
I also didn't realize I could scroll down and was thinking, this site kind of sucks. It doesn't help that the middle wheel click is broken.

I feel like from that sort of slightly bent standing position hills would be a nightmare to go up. I can already feel the burn.

wf··on Work Habits at Apple
Seems like it's time for podcast.genius.com, which would be amazing.
wf··on Show HN: CleverDeck – I built the spaced repetition app I always wanted
This looks really cool, definitely going to download it and give it a shot. (btw I didn't know what spaced repetition was and your wikipedia link is missing the colon on your about page)
wf··on PullClean: Door handles as sanitizers
I'm having a hard time remembering what it was but around this time last year I saw someone demonstrating a sort of gel like cover (similar to this http://www.amazon.com/Cyber-Clean-25055-Office-Pop-up/dp/B00...) at a startup weekend.

The idea was to cover door handles with it in hospitals etc and had received positive feedback from quite a few local hospitals if I'm remembering correctly. I'm not sure what happened to that project though. I like that solution much better than this though.

wf··on Facebook Takes Steps Against ‘Click Bait’ Articles
>Facebook says its algorithm will now consider how long users spend reading an article as a way of judging the importance.

Now the titles will be "[Number greater than 20] Things You Won't Believe About The 90's"

But seriously, I hope this has a meaningful impact. I despise the lists.

wf··on Polaroid Cube
Garmin has been competing with GoPro with the Virb action camera for a while, which in my experience has been really fun to use and produced really nice quality videos.

(I work for Garmin, but not on anything related to this.)

wf··on Snapchat Said in Funding Talks With Alibaba at $10B
It seems like Facebook had a relatively clear path with already having the news feed. Keeping users on a single page absorbing information with ads intermingled unobtrusively, but with Snapchat I'm in any of three views for just a few moments before I close the app again; all that to say, I just don't think it's a very good comparison.
wf··on Snapchat Said in Funding Talks With Alibaba at $10B
Alright, I really can't take it anymore. Is there any good literature explaining why users of Snapchat are worth this much? From my limited perspective it seems a lot of the services valued so highly for their user base have an incredibly hard time generating revenue from those users, particularly from short lived services like Snapchat. I keep seeing "promise" and "expectation" but what are those things when you're talking money? I read on NBC News estimates put the number of users at 50-70 million. What kind of ad revenue can you expect from that many users in an app where interactions are short lived on a single screen? What would be the conversion rate on IAP?

I'm extremely skeptical this company could be worth this much. 10 billion / 70 million is $142 dollars per user. (Supposedly this metric means something as FB paid $42 per user for Whatsapp?)

Not to mention, how does a company with the leadership this company has get valued this highly? I would think when the Controversy heading takes up 70% of your Wikipedia page that would negatively impact your business, obviously this is having the exact opposite effect though.

wf··on Show HN: Compete Hub – discover, share and manage your triathlon race schedule
Nice looking site! Just some things I noticed:

-when I search, it's not automatically filtered by date

-when I search "woodlands" I get 0 results but when I search "the woodlands" I get 85, none of which are http://www.ironman.com/triathlon/events/americas/ironman/tex...

-I have no idea what SPR, OLY, and CUS are and when I mouse over them it doesn't tell me anything

But, I'll definitely show this to my more active friends; nicely done!

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