dsukhin

Marketing your product that helps people be more productive in an unfortunate situation is not unethical or taking advantage of anyone. Every business needs a catalyst for people to realize you are solving a genuine problem for them. Embrace your established position with a functional product and solution and become a market leader by solving the current problem of the day better than anyone else! Good luck!

Great work creating a vibrant community in just a short couple of years! This is certainly a space that's only going to grow and you have positioned yourself well.

As someone deeply interested/involved in the area, I have a few leading questions and a shameless plug:

- From the description of your pivot, it seems that you plan for this to become a job board/professional profile/LinkedIn/Behance of AR. Did I understand that correctly? What do you consider to be the main source of revenue in that case?

- Do you feel that the simplification of your stack from JS to PHP helped you be more agile for 2.0? This is a tangential question but the answer is likely an interesting one given the choices and current web dev trends.

- Can you share some of your most successful SEO/Traffic tricks with the HN community? What worked the best? We love to hear a great creative/innovative bootstrap story.

- Do you miss working in AR dev itself given your background in the space or do you feel the most value comes from empowering other creators in the AR community?

- Shameless plug: https://pinealeye.co/adkitxr/ We are working on 3D native ads for AR/MR/XR. Check us out, let me know what you think, and let me know if there is a potential/interest for a partnership. I see a big synergy between building a community of creators who want to get their creations known, and our technology.

This was a very exciting title but a very dodgy article. It references two independent areas of active research but concludes one doesn't work in practice yet and the other (which is buried in this report [0] from Columbia from 2013) works only in rats with stem cells and growth factors. So surely, either the title is misleading about this being viable for humans yet, or there is more progress on the subject beyond what is here and there is a better and more recent source available. Either way, an exciting topic I've also been wondering about for a long time.

[0] https://techventures.columbia.edu/news-and-events/latest-new...

The search term you are looking for is Shannon Entropy [0]. That should set you in the right direction.

Put in layman terms - your best possible entropy is a case where every allowed character appears with roughly the same chance (i.e. there is no super common or super rare characters). The most extreme low entropy case is where only one character appears all the time so the password is completely predictable if you know how long it is.

I would recommend you run two tests. One with the same video over and over video and one with 5 or so videos filmed under similar conditions to measure how much of the randomness actually comes from different videos vs. your algorithm. For your videos genererate 100k+ passwords and count the number of times each character appears to get the probability of each character. Then use what you learned about Shannon Entropy (using the probability of each letter) to determine how much entropy your passwords have.

[0] https://planetcalc.com/2476/

> It records a short video of you and then transforms that raw video data into an array of 8-bit unsigned integers. Then it randomly selects an integer from that array and transforms it into its corresponding UTF-16 character. If that character is a lowercase letter, uppercase letter, digit or special character it will be used for your password.

This is an interesting idea but have you conducted any entropy tests by generating a class of passwords from a family of videos and seeing how different they really are (e.g. character freq)? Without any hard numbers I can pretty confidently assume that the colors (8 bit unsigned perhaps mean R, G, and B pixel values) in a video are not uniformly/randomly distributed in the color space and subsequent frames of the video are also highly correlated. Not to mention you specifically throw away any non ascii character so a large portion of the UTF-16 space is not even allowed). Unless by chance, those you throw away happen to also be the super common int values, I feel that it's likely the entropy of these passwords is going to be surprisingly low.

What do you think? The entropy test would make a great blog post.

This is a nice idea - it brings focus to the job process especially for people who are just getting started and can get overwhelmed by all the options on a standard job board.

I have two comments though from a practical perspective:

1. If this one job (with a very specific team and requirements) is being advertised and your site gets popular enough, thats 100s of applications for one hiring manager to go thru in one day rather than a trickle over a few weeks. On one hand that might be appealing but from a practical perspective, that means most resumes won't get a fair shake or it will take forever to get back to everyone (if it all). This feels like a strictly worse user experience for both sides in terms of backlog, time to feedback, and fairness of evaluation. Not to mention the backlog of jobs itself waiting to be featured means most jobs will get 0 applications from you while they wait in line and that does nothing to fill the role.

2. If the job has some nuanced attribute to it like a foreign language requirement (current post requires Japanese) or an untenable relocation requirement, the subset of jobs that are even a possibility to a typical visitor is highly reduced. If that's 1 in 10 jobs that work from a skills and logistics perspective for a given applicant, that's on average only 1 option every 2 weeks which could really slow down a sensible job search process. From a product perspective, this will lead to high bounce for first time visitors - Perhaps you could mitigate this by showing the last 5 days of jobs if someone wanted to see them and that might motivate them to sign up for the daily recurring email if they see more potential for value. But that still doesn't solve the impractical nature of only seeing 1 tenable option every couple of weeks for someone genuinely trying to find a job quickly.

I understand the concept is one a day and this can be expanded by creating some more relevant tracks but it feels you may just end up converging on a standard job board :)

In my opinion, the biggest problems in job search are relevancy for applicants (as you say, you just need one hyper tailored job) and triage for hiring managers (what's the best way to screen a huge set of people on items that are (1) easy to gather (not a ton of open ended questions) and (2) hyper relevant to your specific position. Would love to hear your thoughts.

If you have a range (-inf, inf) and you split it at some random C, even though there are still infinite values on either side, the probability you choose another number on the left side of C is (p) and on the right side is (1-p) regardless of how you choose the next number. That's what makes these probabilities finite and makes the math work out.

This is a super facinating observation. At first it does seem very counterintuitive but after a little examination, the resulting probabilities make a lot of sense.

For sake of easy math, pick C, your threshold, to be fixed at 0, which is halfway between -inf and inf.

Now there are 4 scenarios. The numbers player 1 chooses, A and B, can be both above or both below C with probability 1/4 each. In both those cases, you have a 50/50 chance of being correct on which number is larger depending on which number you chose to see.

Then, with the other 1/2 of the times, one number will be above and the other will always be below C. In those cases, the selected strategy will have you always choose the correct highest number.

All together you are right 1/2 + 2 * 1/4 * 1/2 = 3/4 = 75% of the time. Simple probability but totally counterintuitive from the onset.

Now what if C!=0 or numbers are not being selected uniformly by your opponent? You can replace the 1/2's with (p) and (1-p) in the right spots without making any distributional assumptions and it seems (without doing the math out fully) that things cancel nicely and show that you always have a strictly greater than 1/2 chance of guessing right no matter what. Exercise left for the reader :P

Your intuition is correct. The Merkle root (hash of the root node) is only useful as a summary of the whole hash tree structure. The clever idea here is not that the tree itself is encoded in the Merkle root but rather that the root is a unique id of a whole unique tree and all the data. Having the hash tree available (which is much smaller than the data itself), you can validate any leaf node's (1) integrity and (2) membership in the set much quicker than a full scan by calculating the tree.

Merkle trees are also used in Bitcoin and similar protocols to find if a transaction is present in a block. This may be a another useful link to help understand the concepts: https://hackernoon.com/merkle-trees-181cb4bc30b4

I would venture a guess that even the most technically savvy users who could set up their own mailsever now, still flock to "Big Mailer Corps" for the easy to use mail client filled with useful AI features, etc. and that even in the presence of an easy alternative to set up their own, will end up forwarding to their "Big Mailer Corp" of choice that offers them the most efficient user experience for their workflow.

IMHO, the most important thing missing right now to promote more decentralzied mail is a cometivtive open source mail (web) app, with a simple UI and a vibrant plugin system for every use case.