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comatose_kid

5,068 karma · joined February 22, 2007

Product @ Google. Before that, product @ Netflix, Bump Technologies (YC S08) topcolor: 005599

Contact me: akapal@gmail.com

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comatose_kid··on Ask HN: What was it like to use BBS?
The coolest thing about bbsing in the 80s was a side effect of running the over phone lines: because long distance charges were expensive, you ended up dialing local bbses and organizing meetups with other local users. That was fun and feels like something important that is lost with current social networks
comatose_kid··on Ask HN: How to build “minimum-value” MVP?
not sure if thinking of the solution ('advancing the state-of-the-art) is appropriate yet. Two questions to ask yourself:

1)how well do you understand your customers (are you your customer)? Have you talked to at least 10-20 potential customers to understand what their big problems are?

2) Why do you believe that 'advancing the state-of-the-art' is needed to solve a meaningful problem? Maybe there's an easier problem you can solve for them, use the opportunity to learn and iterate.

comatose_kid··on An Interview with Andy Hertzfeld
I liked this quote - "I think the essential way to do anything great, you have to have some incremental development philosophy because you're just going to be wrong with your grand design that you don't iterate on."
comatose_kid··on [dead]
Where does this man-child get off building these kinds of cynical products? As if border crossings are the largest threat to American security.

It's technology without any sense of history, humanity, or culture.

comatose_kid··on A Silicon Valley down payment could buy you an entire house in much of the U.S
It's surprisingly hard to beat investing in real estate in growth markets like SV because of the leverage afforded by the ratio of down payment to home price....

For example in Los Gatos, appreciation has been 5% on average for many years, and so the 200k you put down on a 1m house will typically appreciate by 50k. 25% roi in year 1, increasing each year. Of course, property appreciation doesn't happen in a straight line, and houses cost money to maintain (property taxes, etc) but the larger point is valid.

comatose_kid··on Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?
That's awesome! Keep it up :)
comatose_kid··on NASA Data Shows Toxic Air Threat Choking Indian Subcontinent
Traveled to India ~2+ years ago. Landed in Delhi - couldn't make out the city at all from the air due to pollution. We drove to Agra (3 hr drive) and there was smog pretty much the entire way there.

This seems like a promising opportunity for startups to tackle...I wonder if there are any out there, would love to hear more.

comatose_kid··on The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months
"Oil, coal and gas received more than four times the $120 billion paid out in incentives for renewables including wind, solar and biofuels"

source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-12/fossil-fue...

comatose_kid··on Show HN: Tabli – A Tab Manager for Google Chrome
This is amazing, thank you. For those of you who didn't read the Usage guide: "Use the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-. by default). It’s worth memorizing this."

btw, I'm not sure why but Tabli isn't searchable on the Chrome store for me.

comatose_kid··on Emacs maintainer steps down
You beat me. MicroEmacs on an Amiga....
comatose_kid··on Show HN: Stock recommender system using hedge fund data and machine learning
The second sentence doesn't necessarily follow from the first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Superinvestors_of_Graham-a...

comatose_kid··on Nuon, the gaming chip that nearly changed the world but didn’t
I worked there in 2000 as a graphics engineer - it was an interesting tech, lots of bright people.
comatose_kid··on NVMe, the fast future for SSDs
Didn't ATM use 53 bytes/cell?
comatose_kid··on Poor Kids of Silicon Valley
Empathy vs problem-solving is a false dichotomy. Having empathy helps to better understand the problem, and this understanding can lead to better solutions.
comatose_kid··on Standard Cyborg (YC W15) sells artificial limbs
Jeff - Congrats!!!

I clicked on the link and hoped this was your company (we met at Startup School).

Great press, looking forward to seeing your company own this space.

comatose_kid··on Mark Zuckerberg Answers Q&A in Mandarin at Chinese University
why do you think data was the only or largest driver?
comatose_kid··on Web-Era Trade Schools, Feeding a Need for Code
What do people think about an alternate path - read a few good books, create something useful on a github page?

My hiring bias skews towards people with a good engineering background or concrete examples of meaningful contributions to non-trivial coding projects.

Sure, vocational school is fine while demand for programmers is outstripping supply. But those who lived thru 1999 and the resulting downturn have seen that these things can turn on a dime and a 6-month certificate may not provide much job security.

comatose_kid··on Losing 58.3 Lbs for Science
Awesome article, especially regarding your relationship with food. Way to go zt. If you haven't seen this TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/sandra_aamodt_why_dieting_doesn_t_u...) about why dieting doesn't work, do so - the speaker talks about being intentional with what you eat.

Also: Manresa is a great reason to skip out on a diet!!

comatose_kid··on Big Banks Face Another Round of U.S. Charges
That reflects popular sentiment, but it's not correct:

http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/06/23/a-list-of-the-bigg...

comatose_kid··on Yahoo Close to Investing in Snapchat at $10B Value
It's not clear how much Yahoo is investing at that valuation, but I hope that the stated reason of re-creating an Alibaba type investment is not the primary driver. Despite the success of Alibaba, a single data point is not a trend (even a spectacular one like Alibaba), and I'm not sure that Yahoo's core competency is/should be picking winners.
comatose_kid··on Practical Lessons in Peer Code Review
My recommendations when checking in a new feature or substantial change:

1. Meet in person

2. The coder should print out copies of the diffed code for each attendee

3. Have roles in the meeting - someone to read the code, someone to capture bugs + severity, and the rest are there to review the code

4. Coder takes documented defects, fixes them and reports back to the group with diffs.

5. Metrics can be kept, used as feedback to improve process.

Usually 4-5 people are sufficient for a large chunk of functionality.

Is this process slower than gerrit? yes. Do you get better feedback, and better understanding (at a team level) of the code base? yes.

I haven't seen software that really emulates this experience - there is an interesting opportunity here.

comatose_kid··on Apple Watch: Initial Thoughts and Observations
Older models become collectible, like other luxury watches?
comatose_kid··on How to Start a Startup: Fall 2014
This is great. Someday if/when the lectures are streamed real-time, consider a reddit group for remote students to ask good (upvoted) questions to the lecturer.
comatose_kid··on iPhone 6
"Between big phones (even the small iphone 6 is bigger!), the watch and NFC, Apple is clearly repositioning themselves as fast followers and letting Samsung et. al. foot the bill on R&D"

Just like Apple let Creative Labs foot the bill on R&D and market building with the Nomad before the iPod was introduced?

comatose_kid··on RISC creator is pushing open source chips
David gave a nice lecture on RAID over a decade ago when I was taking a computer architecture class at Stanford.

Perhaps the next edition of his textbook (bible for computer architecture) should use RISC-V, it would probably help as a learning aid and spread the gospel about RISC-V.

Of course, it's possible that the current edition of the text already does this.

comatose_kid··on 2014 Fields Medals announced
Amazing group of people. Manjul is my wife's cousin so I have heard of a few examples of his brilliance (like the time he corrected his mom, a Math prof, during one of her lectures - he was a middle-schooler at the time).

Here's a nice piece NPR did on him: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4111253

comatose_kid··on Ask HN: Do bootstrapped billion-dollar companies exist?
I believe Mu Sigma qualifies.
comatose_kid··on Amazon Fire Phone
Multiple cameras are interesting. It would be neat if the phone could use eye-tracking to auto-scroll content as your eyes reach the bottom of the screen (books would be good use-case - perhaps they are already doing this)
comatose_kid··on The SSD Endurance Experiment: Casualties on the way to a petabyte
I wonder if you can draw meaningful conclusions about the reliability of a given brand of SSD with such a small sample size?
comatose_kid··on Dragon’s Lair – An Arcade Story
First game that I bought for my Amiga 2000. Single disc drive was torture
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