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imack

631 karma · joined April 28, 2009

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imack··on Show HN: Stingray Security – In-browser AI checking for phishing and scams
It's triggered on certain events, like a download or rendering a password field. First off it checks if you're on a domain thats "green" (safe/popular). for the top 100k domains (should be about 90% of browsing) that's just locally loaded and the page doesn't do anything. From there, there's a bunch of heuristics to see if it's on a flagged page. If it's not, so "unknown" a local ML model will run against the text of the page to see if it fits the patterns of a phishing page.

It was training on available datasets and shipped with the extension, so it does the checks in-browser against what it sees in an unknonwn situation.

imack··on Ask HN: Does anyone else have problems with Instagram API OAuth2?
'twas definitely worth a shot; no worries
imack··on Ask HN: Does anyone else have problems with Instagram API OAuth2?
Ditto here, it comes and it goes, but I can see this switch doesn't help our overall fail rate.
imack··on The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (2010)
War will not happen between the US and China (2 economies which are inexorably intertwined) for no other reason than it will be exceedingly bad for business.
imack··on Why Startups Should Choose Canada Over Silicon Valley
On the main point of the article, I do agree that a lot of ideas fly higher in San Francisco than other parts of North America. I see "Highlight" as a good example of this where an app finds a lot of early adopters in a small area but it becomes harder for that kind of ubiquity to happen somewhere people aren't as fascinated by new technology like people outside of the valley are.

I believe that a number of communities like this end up being "geek ghettos" on account of this.

imack··on Hacking the <a> tag in 100 characters
Chrome 25, I got sent to Paypal.
imack··on Objective-C in The Cloud
For native iOS it's required.

*edit - my bad, it looks like that's not the primary use.

imack··on Ask HN - Where do you look for jobs?
I haven't used it personally, but Angellist jobs looks interesting: https://angel.co/jobs

I like that they have to disclose ballpark salaries. Makes it easier to get a sense for how the company values developers.

imack··on Why Bitcoin lives in a “legal gray area”
So Disney Dollars are illegal?
imack··on Mobile app startups are failing like it’s 1999
You do have some options though. We use http://www.crittercism.com for bug reports in both Beta and live versions. Testflight also has introduced its SDK for live apps, which also and for our app we user Both do symbolication of crashes so you can find out what breaks.
imack··on Canada’s vanishing tech sector
Victoria "booming" is a pretty extraordinary claim. I'm in Vancouver, and there is at least some startup activity, but I can't think of much in Victoria. Maybe from a non-tech perspective it looks that way, but look at the companies in both locations and see which are hiring. It's probably the most objective way of finding out which is "booming".
imack··on Canada’s vanishing tech sector
Renting in Vancouver is generally cheaper than SF. Buying a place may be a different story, but rent is reasonable in Vancouver.
imack··on Canada’s vanishing tech sector
I'm actually surprised that the article didn't touch on how the rules have been loosened so that American VCs can play in Canada a lot easier.
imack··on 50 bucks gets me further than a "business-guy" co-founder
You're absolutely right. My business co-founder also does QA, can help with some front-end coding, gets feedback from every single one of our users, and is a lightning-rod for time-bandits who want to take us to coffee.
imack··on Summify acquired by Twitter
I don't think this goes against the efforts to build a community in satellite locations. The reality is that there aren't many potential acquirers in Vancouver (virtually nil for consumer internet), so one takes an exit where one can get it. The community is helped by the fact now that when startups are raising in the Bay Area we can point to a company that was in the same geography that made a return for their investors.
imack··on What Canadians can do to fight SOPA/PIPA
My first instinct was similar to yours, but Canada is one of those "foreign countries". Sorry, from the hearings, you need to lean into that word more; foreign countries.

Thus, it would probably be more expedient to block a Canadian operation. To say nothing of the integration that already exists. My (Canadian) startup is dependent on playing by Apple's rules from California and exists on a couple Amazon servers in Virginia, so it's not like I can really thumb my nose at US law just because I'm incorporated and operate in BC.

imack··on The Invention of Waterloo (Canada’s Technology Triangle)
Tuition was de-regulated in the 90's and went up 15% a year through most of the 2000's. I'd say it's doable but not a given.
imack··on Lone Yelp review dogs business owner
I'm on it, I'm on it....(http://www.placeling.com).
imack··on Twitter: From Ruby on Rails to the JVM [video]
I'm actually really glad to hear it. Though, I wonder about the "rails doesn't scale" mantra, is that really more for active record? In your experience is active record the biggest out of the box bottleneck?
imack··on Ask HN: What has been your least profitable side/weekend project to date?
My iPhone app Freakr: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/freakr/id434088944?ls=1&m...

An app that game out of a drunken discussion with some gay friends about how to establish boundaries with a random hookup. I mostly made it as a gag, but I guess it does solve a real world problem. Irony is that it is the least profitable (free, adless), but has more user engagement than anything else I've made and it hasn't been out a week yet :-P

imack··on NoSQL is a Premature Optimization
Definitely agree. Getting Rails up and running on MongoDB is a lot faster than with ActiveRecord on top of some SQL. Especially when your data format is changing quickly, it's nice to just make a few changes in the model rather than having to track migrations.
imack··on The End of the Engineer
"As China and India continue to evolve, their supply of engineering talent is likely to outpace demand"...Spoken like someone who has never tried to outsource a development project.

I've been hearing this since I started my CS program in 2001, back then I was worried that by the time I graduated the whole north american industry would be hollowed out and I'd have to go to law school. If the engineering sky was falling, it would have collapsed by now.

He is, however, correct about the importance of customer understanding, but that is not at the expense of engineering in any way.

imack··on Scaling with MongoDB (or how Urban Airship abandoned it for PostgreSQL)
This reminds me of a video I saw about scaling with ruby on a niche social network (http://zenbach.com/scaling-fetlife-com-with-ruby). It was an interesting talk, but they also tried MongoDb and moved away from it, though, they were also using an older version.
imack··on Yes, it is possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub
It really says something about Dublin that the path avoiding pubs passes right by the Guinness brewery.
imack··on It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
Honest question: what happens to developers after they are no longer "Developers"?

As a 29-year-old I'm kind of freaked out by the fact that I'm on the older part of that distribution.

imack··on Announcing BlogFire - new from Notifo (YC W10)
I'm definitely one of that core group, but since the twitter app started doing push notifications on mentions the only notifications I get from Notifo are ones I send myself from my webapps.

Grantit, I've found those insanely useful, but can see how that's only getting so big.

imack··on China Builds Its First Aircraft Carrier
An open war between China and the US would not happen. Killing your customers is exceedingly bad for business.
imack··on 8500 Startups vs Skype
While it might be more successful to have 8500 (fairly large) seed investments, Microsoft is not a venture capital firm. If one were an investor in MS, I'd would wonder why they were using my capital for other companies and why I shouldn't just invest in them myself?

Companies that have their own VC arms tend to be very focused on a vertical where synergy can exist (ie. Intel). For MS to make 8500 investments they'd have to spread their money so wide that there would be no focus in the portfolio.

Whereas with purchasing Skype, they can roll it into existing platforms and conceivable increase the value of it.

imack··on Google acquires Postrank.com
It's especially unfortunate since there is a Google office in Waterloo. I know it's probably pretty complicated, but I feel like this isn't really a benefit to the Canadian startup ecosystem.
imack··on Those annoying “Rate this app” dialogs
"Normally I'd just ignore or delete the app if it's bad"

I think the popups are counting on this. People who have used an app "n" times probably have a favourable view of it, which is why they are being prompted to rate it.

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