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drpancakeon Why Silicon Valley Can’t Find Europe

"50 different markets with 50 different legal systems"

The EU mitigates this somewhat, but you do have a point. You can run into the same problems with US states too though; obtaining a license to become a money transmitter is one example that I can think of.

drpancakeon Show HN: I built a platform for scripting your own Bitcoin trading bot in Python

Hey, thanks for checking it out.

How long is it between ticks?

This will be customizable with values in the region of 5 mins, 10 mins, 30 mins etc. We'll be experimenting with this in the beta.

How easily will it be to get money in or out of your system?

We don't hold any funds. Your exchange gives you API keys that you configure with us, so that we can make trades on your behalf.

Is there any long term storage assigned to the bots?

Yes, we plan to persist all the necessary state in case the server goes down.

The 'storage' variable is just a reference to a subclassed dict with some extra functionality like dot-notation. We'll probably pickle it (or something similar) for persistence, which should mean that it can handle a fair amount of data thrown at it.

drpancakeon Show HN: I built a platform for scripting your own Bitcoin trading bot in Python

Thanks. The plan is to support most of the main ones (Mtgox, BTC-e, Bitstamp, etc).

drpancakeon In London 'Guardians' live in empty office buildings

This is common in Amsterdam too. I have a friend in this situation and she has had to move 10 times in 7 years. The rent is damn cheap though; something like 150 EUR/month.

drpancakeon Reverse Engineering a Furby

From the Wikipedia article: "Furbies were banned from the National Security Agency of the United States due to concerns that they may be used to record and repeat classified information."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furby

drpancakeon NSA phone surveillance program likely unconstitutional, federal judge rules

I too interned at a telco and I was given free reign over this kind of data -- and more. As were some external, temporary contractors.

I wrote a little about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5969957

drpancakeon High Frequency Dating

I'm reminded of a story told by Tim Ferris about outsourcing his dating for a bet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eim8J0NIpQ

drpancakeon TWTR

It's a hangover from the dot-com bubble.

drpancakeon America knows everything

I wasn't playing shows, just road tripping.

drpancakeon America knows everything

Not defending these immigration officials by any means. It's just a timely and mildly interesting anecdote.

drpancakeon America knows everything

Well I'm glad this didn't happen to me. I travelled to the US in very similar circumstances a few weeks ago: European, carrying a guitar, visiting the South, previously stayed in the US on a J-1 intern visa. The only difference being that I had a one-way ticket.

I didn't even go through secondary at customs. No issues.

drpancakeon Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

Take a look at my edit above - I'd be happy to share more about this stuff.

drpancakeon Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

Thanks for your encouragement, I put up an email form if you're interested in reading more about this: http://theoreticalblog.launchrock.com

drpancakeon Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

Pretty accurate. But you can mitigate this by 1) sticking to the kinds of locations where you know you'll find a decent connection, e.g. Thailand, and 2) pausing when you find a good setup and working for extended periods to make up for poor conditions later on.

drpancakeon Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

In this case I have to disagree, as these positive replies are removing any concerns I had about nobody reading this hypothetical blog :)

drpancakeon Ask HN: How much recurring income do you generate, and from what?

I'm making roughly $300/month from three iPhone apps. They're all quite simple and I'd estimate that I've put in less than a month's actual work building them; although as a disclaimer, this is my day job so I can put these together relatively quickly.

My fourth app was a larger time investment and gets quite a lot more downloads. It makes no income now, but I'll add In-App Purchases soon.

I'm freelancing for ~45 hours a month to fund this while backpacking all over the world. I should blog about it.

---

Edit: I put up a LaunchRock page, if you would be interested in a blog about this stuff, leave me your details: http://theoreticalblog.launchrock.com

drpancakeon How to Raise Money

I agree with you actually, but this quote was just too apt to miss.

drpancakeon iOS 7 before and after screenshots

On the contrary I think we're entering a temporary period of apps looking closer to each other than they did pre-iOS 7. Hardly any apps used the stock controls anymore as they looked so stale, whereas many of the new designs are taking Apple's lead, at least for now.

I can imagine that the same process will begin to repeat itself as we get used to this new style.

drpancakeon How to Raise Money

Essentially, they lead you on. They seem like they're about to invest right up till the moment they say no. If they even say no. Some of the worse ones never actually do say no; they just stop replying to your emails.

drpancakeon Now is the time to do a startup

Try to keep in mind that the generally accepted wisdom that you glean from regularly reading HN comes from a very narrow segment of the population. That's not a negative criticism; in fact that's probably why it's such a good source of curated tech news. But trust your own instincts on what you should spend your time doing.

Personally I find the average work-life balance to be a little out of whack here.

drpancakeon Edward Snowden’s Email Provider Shuts Down Amid Secret Court Battle

The measures you describe are not exactly trivial.

drpancakeon Steps To $5,000 In Monthly Recurring Revenue

I'm not an expert, but it's also better to use something like /blog rather than a subdomain, for SEO reasons.

http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain

drpancakeon The San Francisco Rent Explosion

Here's my ill-informed take on the dilemma (I no longer live in SF):

* More high-rises means that SF loses it's charm

* The technorati are cash rich so they'll keep on coming anyway

* Soaring rents are forcing out those who make SF the desirable, culturally rich place that it is

* Eventually this corrects itself and Oakland becomes the desirable, culturally rich place (already happening)

* Rinse and repeat

drpancakeon San Francisco to L.A. in 30 Mins. With Proposed New Transportation System

I can't find evidence for any link between Musk and ET3. The article states:

"ET3's Hyperloop-like project already has a number of schematics and plans already in place."

Which doesn't suggest to me that they're affiliated.

drpancakeon Tell-all telephone – Six months of phone metadata visualized

Yep, we effectively did this. But as my comment alludes to, it doesn't really matter. You have enough to uniquely identify someone.

drpancakeon Tell-all telephone – Six months of phone metadata visualized

All the telcos collect this data as far as I know. They're allowed to for the purposes of improving and maintaining their network. A few crunch it for marketing purposes but this has to be opt-in (not that customers would have any idea what that might entail, even if the privacy policy describes it broadly). I can't comment on the legality of the project I worked on, but I assume it was checked out by legal counsel.

I personally wouldn't want my data mined in this way. I don't retain any brand loyalty, lets put it that way.

drpancakeon Tell-all telephone – Six months of phone metadata visualized

You can infer some amazing things from simple metadata. I spent six months in an R&D team at a large mobile telco, with the task of trying to infer as much as possible from anonymous customer data just like this.

Figuring out where you live and work, to a reasonable accuracy, is quite easy; you simply look at where the most outgoing calls/SMS originate from at certain hours of the day over an extended period.

We built up our own social graph. You treat calls and text messages as directed edges and phone numbers as nodes. These were fascinating to look at.

You can even try to guess when someone gets off a plane. When a plane lands you'll suddenly see lots of incoming undelivered text messages as people turn their phones back on. If a node was last seen in a far away cell, but then reappears in this group, you can cross-correlate with arrival times and make a reasonable guess.

drpancakeon Fertile Ground

I disagree with the significance being given to these UI changes. Many App Store niches are dominated by incredibly ugly apps that are functional and get the job done. Take a look at WhatsApp for a prime example.

drpancakeon iOS 7

I'm not sure if flipping through 3D browser tabs mimics a real-life affordance.

drpancakeon Getting a job in San Francisco

Interesting read. Does anyone have recent experience in obtaining a Green Card? I'd be interested to know how long it takes on average, transitioning from an H1-B visa.

>Mecca for Software Engineers, the only place in the World where the guy in front at Starbucks has big chance to be Software developer.

I'm a iOS developer and I love software, but this was one of my main reasons for leaving SF.