Hacker News Reader

jerryliveson How to Determine If Candidates Will Thrive in a Remote Work Environment

The new thing to do is put employees on a contract agreement for 30 days such that even IF you complete the ridiculous interview gauntlet, you are still a "tentative" employee and have to prove yourself. I did this for a YC company this spring and it was awful.

jerryliveson Ask HN: Seriously, How Can We Begin to Make AI Safe?

Seriously, how can we make matrix multiplication and gradient descent safe?

jerryliveson The Internet Archive has digitized 25,000 78rpm Gramophone records

You should see the amount of esoteric knowledge on the reviews of Grateful Dead shows hosted on the Archive. It's impressive.

jerryliveson How to Pick Your Life Partner (2014)

They literally just made up a random number

jerryliveson How to Pick Your Life Partner (2014)

Cool citation

jerryliveson First Evidence That Social Bots Play a Major Role in Spreading Fake News

> Apparently more people were watching Yogi Bear reruns than CNN in the US a few weeks ago during prime time.

lol fake news much? You got that from Sean Hannity's tweets. Cable news are reporting huge viewership

http://variety.com/2017/tv/news/cable-news-ratings-cnn-fox-n...

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/sean-hannity-mocks-reruns-...

jerryliveson Proof of Work Without All the Work

https://www.cs.umd.edu/~elaine/docs/permacoin.pdf

>Bitcoin is widely regarded as the first broadly successful ecash system. An oft-cited concern, though, is that mining Bitcoins wastes computational resources. Indeed, Bitcoin’s underlying mining mechanism, which we call a scratch-off puzzle (SOP), involves continuously attempting to solve computational puzzles that have no intrinsic utility. We propose a modification to Bitcoin that repurposes its mining resources to achieve a more broadly useful goal: distributed storage of archival data. We call our new scheme Permacoin. Unlike Bitcoin and its proposed alternatives, Permacoin requires clients to invest not just computational resources, but also storage. Our scheme involves an alternative scratch-off puzzle for Bitcoin based on Proofs-ofRetrievability (PORs). Successfully minting money with this SOP requires local, random access to a copy of a file. Given the competition among mining clients in Bitcoin, this modi- fied SOP gives rise to highly decentralized file storage, thus reducing the overall waste of Bitcoin. Using a model of rational economic agents we show that our modified SOP preserves the essential properties of the original Bitcoin puzzle. We also provide parameterizations and calculations based on realistic hardware constraints to demonstrate the practicality of Permacoin as a whole.

jerryliveson On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

> But the truth is that there are far less women than men who are like that, and that this will never change because of biological factors.

What about all the women through the 40s up until the 80s who worked as computer programmers? For a while it was a seriously female dominated field. A woman wrote the first compiler. A woman wrote the code to help get us to the moon. A woman taught my CS courses in high school and i had two female CS professors in college (and just about half my graduating class in that major was female).

Did biology change? Where's the science that says women as a whole don't enjoy IT as much? You crow on and on about science but provide no citations, no logical coherent argument.

When I see posts like this on HN, it makes me think you haven't worked closely with women. Or even know any lol

jerryliveson New York’s Subways Are Not Just Delayed, Some Trains Don’t Run at All

Well, we had Robert Moses and look how that turned out

jerryliveson On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

These two instances are not at all remotely comparable lol

jerryliveson On managing outrage in Silicon Valley

Have there been any articles / pieces about it from women working at Google? I'd be interested in hearing that perspective.

jerryliveson 1950s New York City’s ‘Mad Bomber’

Uh like none of this happened when the dumpster bombs went off in Chelsea last year. They closed the streets for the investigation and to look for more bombs but it wasn't even close to a "lockdown of all public buildings", I'm pretty sure they just halted traffic. You could even - yes- walk around the area where the bomb went off the next day. It was a block from my office.

jerryliveson The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

So reading the article above it didn't make clear - are these memes generated by AI or is it just an internal meme creation / sharing site?

jerryliveson The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

> internal meme network

i really want to believe that at Google there is a massive distributed cluster dedicated solely to facilitating meme throughput

jerryliveson The hazy issue of weed and work

The issue gets even more interesting when you factor in working from home.

Is it wrong to smoke weed while "on the clock" in your panties on the couch? Perhaps if it compromises the deliverable but if the employee is productive, efficient, and timely - should it matter if they are st0ned or not?

jerryliveson Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?

This book is amazing. Thank you for this

jerryliveson Roman Ruins Found in France Are Called ‘Exceptional’

It was a war started to invade a nation with whom we made a treaty (Treaty of Fort Laramie) to respect their sovereignty. So, we broke the treaty which is illegal and then we proceeded to plunder their sacred lands in the name of God and gold.

jerryliveson Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream

Does Trump still use an Android as POTUS? Any info on what make, OS?

jerryliveson Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation in Human Embryos

I don't think it's worth the time to argue with these people who conceive of the human body as a "turing machine" and that genes are as simple as "config file".

This is also the guy who says that "Activism does not work. Grand social movements do not work." But I guess the Civil Rights Movement, women's liberation, and the LGBTQ movement don't count?

This is a serious problem I see with many tech / CS inclined people: in which useful abstractions become the map in which they see the territory.

jerryliveson Scientists Edit a Dangerous Mutation in Human Embryos

What's the gene for racism you plan on editing?

The human body isn't a config file

jerryliveson What I've Learned So Far as a Programmer

I think there's more wisdom to be found in the error page than the original article

jerryliveson SoundCloud's Collapse

How about this for inspiring? https://daily.bandcamp.com/2017/01/24/everything-is-terrific...

Bandcamp, with its "Courier New" interface, has delivered hundreds of millions of dollars in value to its users and artists. And it's still growing.

That's cute that soundcloud made a bunch of blog posts about their super elite containerized microserviced architecture. How's their business doing? Who's making money on there besides industry plants?

jerryliveson Inside Andy Rubin's Quest to Create an OS for Everything

https://hackaday.com/2014/04/04/sql-injection-fools-speed-tr...

jerryliveson Inside Andy Rubin's Quest to Create an OS for Everything

>Light is not just on/off, it's a million different shades and intensities, some more appropriate depending on the time of day.

Yea so you install one of these http://www.homedepot.com/b/Electrical-Dimmers-Switches-Outle...

>Try to imagine a house where there's a thousand different machines just there to make your life nicer.

Now try to imagine all the gaping security holes emanating from your house. And oh man it's gonna suck when the remote server goes down and your thermostat can't phone home so you're stuck at 55F during the winter

jerryliveson Flush times for hackers in booming cyber security job market

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd91c5ZwSf0

Excellent talk from last year's HOPE about the vulnerability of medical devices - he even connects to some live

jerryliveson SpaceX Is Now One of the World’s Most Valuable Privately Held Companies

lol want to make a bet on that?

jerryliveson Pseudo-public space in London

Lol yea I forgot that just paying out money solves all injustice and policing issues

jerryliveson Norway, where no salaries are secret

> it encourages competition, just like in nature.

you know that cooperation occurs in nature too?

jerryliveson 153k Ether Stolen in Parity Multi-Sig Attack

Apparently it's an issue with the initWallet() function which is used to set the owner of the wallet

jerryliveson How a Reddit forum has become a lifeline to opioid addicts in the US

>You can only fight ideas with better ideas. Kicking them out and silencing them, says to them you can't compete.

Lol okay dude hop onto stormfront and engage in some civic discourse, offer some arguments, see how that goes.