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aba_sababa

624 karma · joined February 14, 2011

http://abe.is @abestanway
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aba_sababa··on Hidden Costs That Engineers Ignore
And then your teammate then takes a week to build an API that's only compatible with your hacked out code you wrote in twenty minutes. Now you've wasted both your time and her time when both need to be re-written.
aba_sababa··on US Links North Korea to Sony Hacking
I really don't buy this. Attribution of anyone is incredibly difficult. It's easy for the US to officially point fingers and turn it into a geopolitical play. There is every incentive to do so: it's plausible, the media buys it, and it buys major points in the Us vs. Them narrative.
aba_sababa··on SpaceX Will Announce Micro-Satellites for Low Cost Internet Within Three Months
Yep. Solar wind also contributes. It's possible to set the solar panels to be orthogonal to these forces which can induce maximum drag.
aba_sababa··on Distributed is not necessarily more scalable than centralized
I think the actual confusion is about a centralized distributed system vs a peer-to-peer distributed system, which is probably what (still totally wrong) PhD student meant.
aba_sababa··on Venezuelans turn to Bitcoins to bypass currency controls
I agree with you in that this is an excellent and demonstrably valuable use case for Bitcoin - we saw the same thing happen in Cyprus with the protests there.

I don't think I agree about this meaning there will be a bright future for it. Venezuela and Cyprus are unstable, extremely corrupt governments. Bitcoin thrives in that environment. A bet on Bitcoin seems to be a bet that those kinds of environments will endure and are inevitable, which is vaguely reminiscent of 2nd Amendmenters and the way they want their guns because it'll help them defend against the "corrupt, evil police state".

The problem is that America isn't actually a corrupt, evil police state and neither is it truly on the verge of imploding. I would bet against Bitcoin, at least in America, for this reason.

aba_sababa··on The End Of The Acqui-Hire?
It's pretty low to disguise "more money for investors" as a half-assed argument for better employee outcomes.
aba_sababa··on Packetbeat: Open-source application monitoring
An open source Boundary?
aba_sababa··on Paperpile
I prefer Papers 3 - would rather be in control of my saved papers than rely on a SaaS that could go out of business whenever.
aba_sababa··on Password Live
Ok, so you know that "facebook" is part of the original hash. Not following how you can also derive "mypassword" from it. If you have a good strong master password, rainbow tables won't be able to crack the hash.
aba_sababa··on Password Live
Compromising one of these passwords does not at all mean that all the other passwords are compromised. You can't figure out the original master password from a hashed, compromised password.
aba_sababa··on Password Live
As opposed to a password manager, where it's trivial to know every password within if you know the master password?
aba_sababa··on No Exit
Really? I find that most Berliners speak wonderful English.
aba_sababa··on Show HN: Phoenix – an ultra-fast SQL layer on top of Hbase
Is this an Impala competitor?
aba_sababa··on Gillette’s Razor = Everything Wrong With America
This is a narrative that I don't know how to evaluate. In this case, I'd agree that there's a lack of innovation, but to extrapolate that it is part of a larger narrative is something you can't do without actual data.

Ironically, the author shows that he is just as susceptible to marketing as regular consumers, because apparently innovation that is not well marketed might as well not exist, and deserves no role in his narrative.

aba_sababa··on Ask HN: Any philosophy grads who have turned into hackers?
I studied philosophy, and I also tacked on a CS degree. In retrospect, the CS degree wasn't necessary - all the programming I needed to know for a job I was able to pick up on the side and by going to hackathons. I really treasure my philosophy degree - it taught me how to think holistically and it trained me to find weak spots, poke holes, and strengthen, all of which come in handy in engineering and in broader thinking about the state of the world.
aba_sababa··on Spiped – symmetric, encrypted, authenticated pipes between sockets
Wondering - what's wrong with SSH? Is it considered insecure?
aba_sababa··on Brendan Eich Steps Down as Mozilla CEO
You realize that most of HN readers are engineers, and like most engineers, they are perfectly normal human beings without "antisocial beliefs"?
aba_sababa··on Brendan Eich Steps Down as Mozilla CEO
Short sighted? You think that being pro-gay marriage is being on the wrong side of history?
aba_sababa··on Ask HN: Unpaid job at a startup. What can be done to get the most out of the xp?
The most productive thing is to quit. Anyone who, in 2014, is still not paying interns is most likely not someone who can teach you anything. There is still plenty of time to find another internship for the summer.
aba_sababa··on We Built a Hacker News for Biotech
Datatau isn't doing too bad.
aba_sababa··on Ask HN: Best graphing/widget libraries for dashboards?
I usually go for DyGraphs. Simple + easy to use + lots of configuration + excellent docs
aba_sababa··on Ask HN: Quit my job for a year to write open source code, what should I work on?
You should help out on Skyline! github.com/etsy/skyline It's a real time anomaly detection system.
aba_sababa··on (Big?) Data Question: Searching in a large dataset
It also doesn't strike me as especially expensive. A dumb, brute force query (that is, something in 0(N^2)) wouldn't take so long with only a few million rows. So I would just try doing through each row, doing a full table scan to find meetings, and just let that cook for a little while.

It's not like you're ingesting gobs and gobs of data in real time :)

aba_sababa··on (Big?) Data Question: Searching in a large dataset
Hmm. How are you defining a meeting? Is a meeting a pair of mice? Or is it a pair of mice with a time component? So a pair of mice + the duration of time they were together?
aba_sababa··on (Big?) Data Question: Searching in a large dataset
How about having a table where each row corresponds to a duration of time?

time | total | mice_ids (a json string. or use mongo)

And then, run through all your data and assign each mouse to a certain duration (ie, minute one, minute two, etc), updating the total counts every time as well as the mice_ids. Then, you could query by minute and see which minutes had meetings in them (ie, select mice where total > 2)

aba_sababa··on Einstein and the Great Fed Robbery
Well, how do we know the Fed's clock was canonical?
aba_sababa··on Why Phonebloks Will Never Happen
It's also a bin packing problem :)
aba_sababa··on The realtime magic behind Moot and how we deliver all your instant notifications
The "Moot" brand is decidedly won by Chris Poole.
aba_sababa··on Pressure cookers, backpacks, and quinoa, oh my
Sorry, but that is misguided thinking. It is a misuse of resources. A death by terrorism is no worse than a death by cancer, and cancer deaths happen much more often than terrorism deaths. So, resources should be allocated accordingly.
aba_sababa··on The Physics Behind Traffic Jams
This is awesome. The problem is that no individual agent is incentivized to drive slower. I wonder if it'd be worth it to hire "stir-the-pot cars" whose job it is to drive slowly during rush hour and ease jams. Kind of like dietary fiber for the road.

Hey, doesn't Uber have a whole fleet of cars in cities around the world? It would be a cool $&@! project for them to be the all-wondrous curers of traffic.

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