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SeoxyS

4,633 karma · joined April 9, 2009

Find me online at https://angel.co/kb, or email me at kenneth@ballenegger.com

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/kballenegger; my proof: https://keybase.io/kballenegger/sigs/UfzTOkIvh3FvCMYhNoVcw1iSG0wgqqLE_KA8JOPj6oA ]

Verifying my Blockstack ID is secured with the address 1L36qbQZxJun4qB4Q4Jf6Srd2B3noQXPX4 https://explorer.blockstack.org/address/1L36qbQZxJun4qB4Q4Jf6Srd2B3noQXPX4

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SeoxyS··on Ask HN: When is federation a better solution than decentralization?
Stellar is this
SeoxyS··on Assessment of life on Earth reveals humanity’s disproportionate impact
The article doesn't make it clear whether it's 83% of biomass that went extinct, 83% of individual animals, or 73% of species.
SeoxyS··on Vim 8.1
I'd love to see you swap the implementation two methods efficiently without vim. For me, just a few keystrokes: dim]mvimp2[mP and about 3 seconds. For you: a bunch of clicking and selecting, I imagine.

This is just one example of many I could come up with. Code is text, and vim can easily be made to understand that text well.

SeoxyS··on How to Make $80,000 per Month on the Apple App Store (2017)
Re-posting old things that are interesting is not OK? It was tagged as being from Jan 2017
SeoxyS··on TorchCraft – StarCraft: Brood War AI
This type of cheap humor doesn't really add much to the conversation. I presume you don't actually believe that to be true, and are just trying to bring up Facebook's entirely unrelated privacy issues (which have already been discussed on HN ad nauseam).

How about discussing interesting AI tooling and research instead?

SeoxyS··on Finding the longest straight line you could sail without hitting land
If your plane flies the shortest great-circle path, you'll fly over the arctic sea, which is definitely water, though sometimes solidified. IAH or DFW would be better examples :).
SeoxyS··on T-Mobile seals merger deal with Sprint
There is no world in which the government should be able to force a private company to give something hugely valuable to, of all possible options, Comcast (one of the worst companies in America).
SeoxyS··on 1.1.1.1: Fast, privacy-first consumer DNS service
My main problem with these DNS services is that they often break gated wifi networks that require a login page to access. It's horrible that it has become standard practice to take over DNS to redirect to a access gate — but as users, your choices are either: suck it up, or no internet.

Does anyone have a better solution for this?

(Also — why no IPv6 DNS?)

SeoxyS··on Omaha man ‘liked’ a tweet, then lost his job
The rational and nice thing to do for Marriott is to fire the guy, give him a nice severance and a wink-wink apology, and hook him up with a gig at Starwood Hotel & Resorts.
SeoxyS··on Show HN: Emacs Anywhere
NeoVim is the better (best) vim! Fixes a lot of the problems with vim while still staying true to its spirit.
SeoxyS··on Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
The longest path I was able to find is this 5-step path:

https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Red%20Solo%20C...

SeoxyS··on The Lawyer, the Addict (2017)
Well worth reading, considering the Ask HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465762
SeoxyS··on The random walk of cars and their collision probabilities with planets
Plates a few suburbs away don't exert massive gravitational pulls on their surrounding.
SeoxyS··on Launch HN: CoinTracker (YC W18) – Cryptocurrency portfolio and tax manager
Also very much second the request for Stellar support. Stellar is fast becoming an ICO platform of its own, has a decentralized exchange built in. Most of my crypto activity is in stellar.

Disclaimer: I run a crypto business / compliant fundraising platform.

SeoxyS··on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy successfully launches
From wikipedia

> Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes space warfare, melodramatic adventure, interplanetary battles, chivalric romance, and risk-taking

> A science fantasy is a cross-genre within the umbrella of speculative fiction which simultaneously draws upon and/or combines tropes and elements from both science fiction and fantasy

Star Wars is 100% science fiction.

SeoxyS··on Why it's hard to quit Amazon Prime, even if maybe you should
Times Amazon has shipped people counterfeit eclipse glasses: more than zero is too many.

I love Amazon … but the quality issues lately have been somewhat problematic.

SeoxyS··on Why it's hard to quit Amazon Prime, even if maybe you should
Pro-tip: write in to United any flight you have where something goes wrong. They'll usually reply with a travel certificate. They almost always have something wrong (broken wifi, in flight entertainment, delays, missed connections, etc.). Each time, it's an opportunity to score.

I write this from the airport lounge after getting off a $260 flight, which I paid mostly with a $200 certificate with the last flight's issue, and landed to a new $175 certificate for broken wifi. I'm up to over $5000 in such compensation in the past couple years.

One thing worth being strategic about.

SeoxyS··on Startup Investor School: The Basics of Seed Investing
Doubling down on your winners can exponentially lift your returns. When you're an investor at an earlier stage, you have the best information and insight on how the company is really doing (information asymmetry) and have access to deals you would have no access to otherwise. (An angel doesn't get to invest in a good hot Series C unless they're already on the cap table.)
SeoxyS··on Strava heatmap can be used to locate military bases
Wow, I found quite a few very obvious ones in Syria. Are these locations supposed to be entirely secret?
SeoxyS··on Cape Town could be the first city to run out of water
The apartheid government no longer exists because (1) open racism was no longer tenable in the face of an evolving society, and (2) the worldwide sanctions placed on it became too great.

That's fine, but that's also completely orthogonal to the point, which is that:

1/ By most standards, the effectiveness of government has plummetted since the end of apartheid. Crime is up; corruption has increased; resources are running out (nation-wide electricity blackouts last decade, now water); etc.

2/ Open government-sponsored racism still exists today, but most of it is considered to be commendable under the banner of affirmative action.

If we were to take race entirely out of the picture, the apartheid regime would be considered far more effective than the ANC regime. That, of course, is neither realistic nor fair… But we should aspire to a post-racial world where we race is no longer relevant, where both apartheid and affirmative action are considered revolting abominations, but also where we judge governments based on their net effectiveness.

SeoxyS··on Cape Town could be the first city to run out of water
Government corruption and incompetence is 100% responsible for this, not climate change.
SeoxyS··on Cape Town could be the first city to run out of water
Agreed entirely. Used to live in Durban and left >10 years ago now with zero confidence in the nation. I won't be surprised to see the whole country descend into chaos soon.

The apartheid government may have been morally reprehensible, but at least it knew how to run a country. Either option is kind of shitty…

SeoxyS··on DHS weighs major change to H-1B foreign tech worker visa program
For what it's worth, as a fellow immigrant on a work visa (O-1 here… wasn't eligible for H-1B), the stress around a visa status is nothing new. It's been a constant struggle since I moved to the USA in 2009; and all 8 years of Obama were pretty bad too. Trump might be bad, but the immigrant struggles are nothing new, and won't change regardless of whether the administration is blue or red.
SeoxyS··on Ask HN: What did you work on in 2017?
I let a close friend recruit me, after over a year of trying, and have been working on a new project that took on a life of its own. I've been more productive and happy in the past few months than I have been in years. 2017 was the best year ever. Before that, so was 2016, etc., every year better than the last. 2018, I'm sure, will be another new all-time high.
SeoxyS··on Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal
The 787 has a significantly longer range than the 767/330. That fact alone a very large impact:

1/ It is much heavier than those, and costs a lot more in fuel on takeoff and landing, which makes it a bad choice for the short-but-heavy-load routes that the 767 and 330 excel at (HKG-TPE, CTS-HND, etc). So it's a bad replacement and competitor in those markets.

2/ On the other hand, it opens up ultra-long-range point-to-point flights that weren't quite possible before without a jumbo (e.g. UA on SFO-SIN, or routes to secondary Chinese cities like XIY, CTU, CAN, etc.)

SeoxyS··on Airbus ready to axe A380 if fails to win Emirates deal
LHR has more than one runway.
SeoxyS··on Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans
At this point, couldn't you just arbitrage it, and take out loans / mortgages / cash advances / credit cards just to pay off student loans and back taxes, after after which you'd actually declare bankruptcy.
SeoxyS··on Bitcoin boom may be a disaster for the environment
American Express is a full-stack institution with its own processing network, own bank, own card issuance, own customer service, etc. It also serves a ton more people than Bitcoin does. If the comparison is unfair, it's in Bitcoin's favor as Amex does significantly more.
SeoxyS··on Bitcoin boom may be a disaster for the environment
That's fair, but if you were to say, American Express and count its entire energy usage across all sections of the company and its entire business, it'd still surely use orders of magnitude less than BTC while processing orders of magnitude more transactions.
SeoxyS··on Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?
"Balances" are stored on every block. If you threw away the beginning of the chain, you could keep generating blocks, but you couldn't spend any transaction outputs that are stored in the thrown away parts of the chain.

Unless I'm missing something something pretty big about how Bitcoin's blockchain works.

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