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jhinra

57 karma · joined June 29, 2018

Brian Copeland - data scientist at Target.
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jhinra··on Let yourself fall down more
I'll join the chorus of saying that falling down at age 40 means my skinned knee is still healing three weeks later. I'm very risk tolerant, but it's striking how the tides have turned on healing.
jhinra··on We Kind of Suck at That Right Now
This seems like a situation where the adage "praise in public, criticize in private" would have helped.

It's important to have hard conversations about a team's ability - if for no other reason than expectation setting - but maybe in front of the entire team is not the right place.

jhinra··on Paint Drip People
This analogy seems like a stretch. An artist that has paint dripping from their strokes strikes me as sloppy. Is this analogy really tied to a single specific type of painting?
jhinra··on Governor vows criminal prosecution of reporter who found flaw in state website
I know, right? By that logic, I've just decoded your comment by reading it.
jhinra··on Why “Idea” People Are Risky and What to Do About It
I really enjoyed this satire from reddit a few years back:

> I would prefer them to have no business or coding skills of any kind, so they'll be free to express their unbridled, uncorrupted creativity. I would also like massive underestimates of the worked required to implement their idea and no concept whatsoever of the time it take to fulfill their ambitions. I would like for their creativity to be unencumbered by concepts like "reality" and whatnot.

Link to full post: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/7o6p7v/looking_for_...

jhinra··on Don't Create Chaos
> whether that leader is deemed to be in the first case or the second case will be a matter of opinion mostly.

Respectfully, I disagree. One scenario results in a plan, one doesn't, and that's a core distinction between the two scenarios. Whether it's a good plan or not is a subject of opinion, but its presence or absence is not.

> you’ll be internally persecuted for saying so, no matter how diplomatically.

That's not true in my experience. It sounds like you've worked in some pretty rough places!

jhinra··on Don't Create Chaos
The 11th hour change was just one example of causing chaos provided by a leader, but for the sake of argument, let's focus on it. Let's imagine a hypothetical situation where a product does ship next week, there are some pretty critical flaws, and we're doing some final review with leadership. I think we can still raise red flags and follow the author's advice. The author of this article is suggesting there's a good way and a bad way to handle this.

Bad way: "Back to the drawing board, we can't ship, this is garbage."

Good way: "I see some serious errors here, let's outline them and make a plan to address these specifically."

I really like article's litmus test because of this - "Any room that you enter should have more certainty and a firmer plan by the time that you leave it." That's not suggesting that there can't be a change of plan.

jhinra··on Gadgets That Refuse to Die
Sadly, no - there's no wifi option. Peeks were (seemingly) hard-wired into a T-Mobile network that is no longer operational.
jhinra··on Gadgets That Refuse to Die
Reading this article got me wistful for my Peek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peek_(mobile_Internet_device). You can do so much with email (todo lists, news, etc) and the device just felt good. It had a physical keyboard (!) and a real scroll wheel on the side.

Peek was also created by a small company but doesn't have the community support that the Chumby or Pebble has now. Maybe that's a product of being connected only to a cellular network?

jhinra··on Ask HN: Which charities do you donate to?
Wikipedia, it's essentially a modern day library, and amongst internet resources, it might have had the biggest impact in my life. It's always been there for me to look up a concept, settle a bet, or to explore when I'm bored.

The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom [0], because it's bizarre what is still illegal in the United States between consenting adults.

[0] https://www.ncsfreedom.org/

jhinra··on Preserving Laptop Stickers on MacBooks
But that's almost a harder decision - you can certainly buy a bland colored skin to put stickers on, but if you're going to the effort of skinning your laptop, why not pick an interesting skin?
jhinra··on The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks (2015)
I loved this article; I used Karpathy's tutorial to imitate a local burger reviewer: http://brian.copeland.bz/2018/12/16/the-burger-hunter/
jhinra··on Ask HN: How do you store photos and videos?
Dropbox has treated me well. I think it hits all the boxes you're asking for. The app automatically backs up my photos from my phone, but because it's not photo specific, I'm able to backup all my other files (music, documents). I've also not hit a video limit.
jhinra··on Topology of Numbers
I'm impressed how many people are here to say, "Oh, Allen Hatcher!" I did the same. It certainly says a lot about Hatcher as a textbook writer.
jhinra··on A blogging style guide
Indeed! CirclMastr (someone who leveled up to 99 in the very first portion of Final Fantasy VII over the course of 500 hours) puts it even better:

> It is because nothing has meaning unto itself that we are free to create meaning, to make metaphor, and in doing so reflect on ourselves and our world.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2017/4/11/15255852/final-fanta...

jhinra··on Bringing transparency to ER prices, one hospital bill at a time
I love that Kliff gives a shout out to Kaiser Health News’ Bill-of-the-Month feature (https://khn.org/news/tag/bill-of-the-month/), which is a really similar project. I wonder if these two projects were independently inspired? Either way, totally a good thing to get more public visibility into medical billing.
jhinra··on The Marvel API
The Test Calls page (https://developer.marvel.com/docs) shows a list of end points.
jhinra··on 'Super Mario Bros.' speedrunner hits nearly inhuman 4:55 world record
Ditto! pannenkoek2012 is operating at a level that every hacker should aspire to. Piecing together that solution for that star in 0.5 A presses is a thing of beauty.
jhinra··on IRS: Review of the System Failure That Led to the Tax Day Outage [pdf]
Call me sick, but I really love reading post-mortem reports I wasn’t involved with. I feel like you can learn so much from other people’s pain.

...it’s almost like watching the TV show Jackass

jhinra··on How to create an OS from scratch – tutorial
“Once you pass college, excessive theory is worse than no theory because it makes things seem more difficult than they really are.”

About every third minute I’ve changed my mind about this quote. I think that means it’s a good quote.

jhinra··on The regress argument against Cartesian skepticism (2012) [pdf]
I'm with you. Replace "the external world exists" with some logical tautology such as De Morgan's Law (not (A and B) <=> not A or not B). Formalism has all sorts of gotchas, so I'm going to assert that it's possible to be skeptical of De Morgan's Law being a tautology...

...which - as the author describes - implies I can go down that infinite spiral of regressive speculation. But this is not the reason that De Morgan's Law is a tautology.

Even worse, the author's argument really let's us assert anything, doesn't it? I've read the paper twice and I can't see any protections from using this argument to assert a contradiction.

jhinra··on Hackers account for 90% of login attempts at online retailers
I think 90% is high for a few reasons:

1) Rate limiting of login attempts takes a bite out of the large numbers you're talking about. If we are only looking at retail companies without rate limiting, well, duh, I guess >90% makes sense, but I expect a large portion of the global e-commerce retail segment _does_ employ rate limiting of logins.

2) The report lists, "Averages derived from customers’ login traffic before Shape Enterprise Defense was deployed on login applications" - so this is absolutely a biased sample. These are clients that signed up for help stopping this problem.

3) It bugs me how ambiguous the report is about how they aggregate to 90%. I worry it's a simple [total fraudulent logins] / [total login attempts] across all their client retailers, which will be heavily biased by the retailers that don't have login limiting, and doesn't really describe the situation. A much better number I'd like is the median percentage of fraudulent logins attempts across retailers.

jhinra··on Hackers account for 90% of login attempts at online retailers
I don't buy these numbers at all. 90% seems stupid high for retail. From the report,

"[...] we rely on data from the Shape Network. Across the US, Shape’s customers represent: [..] 40% of Mobile Retail (by in-store payments)."

"We estimated the number of credential stuffing attacks using the total number of credential stuffing attacks observed on Shape’s US customers and the total proportion of the US industry our customers represent."

I'm really wracking my brain how they're measuring their marketshare of retail. Mobile retail as measured by in-store payments? Can someone explain that to me?

Bottom line, this data comes from a company whose value proposition is that they sit between your company's servers and your clients and filters bad requests for you.