mecredis

Author here. I quickly thought of the title for the article and shipped it. I agree it's clickbait-y and apologize to SendGrid (and any confused readers) but yes, as you say it's _technically_ correct in a very narrow sense – SendGrid's infrastructure and users are sending these emails, it's just that they're fraudulently associated with SendGrid the company.

In any case, I revised the title to "SendGrid isn’t emailing you about ICE or BLM. It’s a phishing attack."

Maybe someone can edit the title of the submission on HN accordingly?

Hi! Author here. I don't actually think they're deliberately doing this, hence my choice of "perverse incentives" vs. something more accusatory. The issue is that they don't have a ton of incentive to fix it.

Agree with you on all the rest, and I think writing a post like this was very much intended as a gut-check on things since the early days are hopefully the times when things can get fixed up.

You’re making a lot of assumptions about what was happening behind the scenes with a payment processor agreement you weren’t privy to. Kickstarter was always and devoutly uninterested in medical fundraising, so missing out on GoFundMe’s growth was a feature, not a bug.

It's kind of wild that these tools just transfer a copy of these models every time they're spun up (whether it's to a Google Colab notebook or a local machine.)

This must mean Hugging Face's bandwidth bill must be crazy, or am I missing something (maybe they have a peering agreement? heavily caching things?)

Thanks – I'm the one that picked The Nix for the list (I work for YC on their admissions team).

One reason I picked it is that is indeed a great book that I have been recommending plenty to friends.

Another is that I do think it's incredibly important to be able to enjoy and indulge and make time for fiction, especially when you work in tech. It's too easy to "read for facts / information / theory" and forget the joy that good writing can bring.

It took me some reflection to realize I heavily bias towards non-fiction unless I make an effort. But when I do get the chance to read a great novel, it tends to affect me more than reading non-fiction.

The world needs more literature, poetry, and art, so I also like supporting authors who ship that product too :)

(FWIW, the book probably isn't for everyone, but I think reading great literature is – give it a shot if you haven't in a while!)

Artists have depended on public support for generations (if not longer) and that support does not artificially prop up its value. In some cases artists and their work can languish for decades until publicly supported exhibitions choose to highlight them. Only then does "the market" value their work, and only sometimes does it do it properly.

And that's not to mention the value art plays in civic life and its contribution to society: markets can frequently fail to properly support artists when society needs them the most (during political strife or civil unrest.)

I never really seriously considered it. Made the book and the page before this was really all that common online. Maybe I'll A/B test it to see if it generates more sales :)

Author of Emoji Dick here. The $200 price tag is that high because its a one-off print-on-demand of an 800 page color laser hardcover book. I would LOVE to find a way to produce these cheaper (even do another edition) but haven't had the time to get a publisher / deal / etc. together.

From the post:

Since emojis often bear graphic resemblances to our real faces, the understanding has often been that there would be no problems in interpreting them, and that the sender and the recipient would agree on such interpretation.

As someone fairly immersed in the emoji community, this is a strawman argument (i.e., no one really tries to argue this).

People love and use emoji not in spite of their ambiguity but rather because of it.

Even Unicode encourages emoji to have multiple meanings:

http://unicode.org/emoji/selection.html

Does the candidate emoji have notable metaphorical references or symbolism?

And from their FAQ:

http://www.unicode.org/faq/emoji_dingbats.html

Do emoji characters have single semantics?

A: No. Because emoji characters are treated as pictographs, they are encoded in Unicode based primarily on their general appearance, not on an intended semantic.

Many people want to think there are some folks out there like myself who are seriously arguing Emoji are a language, but this isn't really true. And I say that as the author of a book called "How to Speak Emoji". The thing is, it's a humor book designed to be sold in Urban Outfitters. It's not a real language guide.

If you're curious about more nuanced takes on how emoji are actually being used, here are some good resources:

Tyler Schnoebelen's talk at Emojicon: http://www.slideshare.net/TylerSchnoebelen/emoji-linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch on how Emoji aren't really threatening English: http://the-toast.net/2016/06/29/a-linguist-explains-emoji-an...

The tl;dr: journalists / bloggers would love to get someone to argue that emoji are a language so they can "Well, actually" them, but the truth is this isn't really happening much.

However, some of us are deeply curious about whether our usage of emoji are evolving language-like characteristics and grammars. See this recent research on whether emoji have their own syntax:

https://makingnoiseandhearingthings.com/2016/12/07/do-emojis...

Note that a distinct syntax is probably necessary but not sufficient for emoji to be considered a language.

Hi there! I was Kickstarter employee #2 and my unofficial (which briefly became my official title) was "R&D", so I think it was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time and for me, realizing that the most effective way I could be valuable for our small team was to dig into the data and do the research to answer all the questions popping up day to day. Sometimes that was writing queries for our Year in Review posts, other times it was figuring out the best ways to mitigate payments risk.

At first we were just using Google Analytics and SQL. A couple years into it I deployed Mixpanel, and eventually we built our entire analytics infrastructure from scratch and used Looker to expose it to the rest of the company.

Here's the 30,000 foot view of how that worked:

https://www.kickstarter.com/backing-and-hacking/this-is-the-...

I was at the company for over 6 years and by the time I left, my data team had people working on data science, machine learning, traditional BI, and of course infrastructure.

I wrote about that experience here:

https://medium.com/@fredbenenson/on-to-the-next-2-271-days-3...

Spoiler alert: I'm now at Y Combinator working on data science with their admissions team, so things have come pretty full circle :)

Our average pledge is actually closer to $75 and the median pledge varies between $25 and $30.

Source: https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats

Indeed, but he does mention it briefly in the beginning of the video!

We've sent an email to all affected users. They're just taking their time to arrive across the net.

Thanks for the good wishes.

Yes, we're hoping to do a post-mortem soon on our engineering blog, so that others can learn from our experience.

Hi, I work at Kickstater. When communicating with millions of people its important to balance technical explanations against the desire to communicate your message in common sense terms.

That said, we're being very public with how we hashed them: older Kickstarter passwords used using SHA-1 digested multiple times. More recent passwords are encrypted with bcrypt.

sillysaurus2: We used SHA1, see my comment above.

We have reset all Facebook login credentials.

Hi! I work at Kickstarter. To answer everyone's question regarding the encryption used for our passwords: old passwords used salted SHA1, digested multiple times. More recent passwords use bcrypt.

The only definition of big data I've thought was remotely insightful is "too large to process with one machine."

Note (as the example in the Wired article indicates) that the converse isn't true: just because you are using multiple machines to process data doesn't mean it's big.

Thats me with the Rubik's cube -- I also submitted the link to HN, and FWIW I don't consider myself a hipster.

It is a category mistake to expect a TV appearance to acutely drive views of an online video.

This is because TV is analog and there's no link to click on when PSY is on Ellen. This also means that the ratio of people who are driven to watch his video online because he was on TV is very small.

Of those people who end up watching the video because they saw him on TV, their views are likely dispersed over a long period of time rather than at a single moment like they might be when an article on a very large web portal like Yahoo directly links to the video.

I have found turning my brightness all of the way down (more accessible by double clicking the home button), and turning on white on black text in Settings > Acessibility helps. It inverts the color palatte but produces less light so it's easier to read in the dark.

New York City, Rails, Full time

I work at Kickstarter we are looking for more Rails engineers that want to write mission critical code that enables thousands of people to realize their creative dreams.

Features are developed by small groups of engineers, designers, and product managers. Some of the projects we’re working on right now include: tools for Kickstarter’s project creators, payment processing for millions of dollars in pledges every week, and new ways to discover projects through social recommendations and data analysis.

We deploy daily for features big and small, and encourage contribution to open source projects. Everyone in product and design commits code, so expect to work closely with people up and down the stack (right now we're 7 engineers with another 5 or 6 committers). We develop in Rails and JavaScript/jQuery, host on AWS, and manage code in git — but we’re not dogmatic about it.

You can checkout some of the projects we've open sourced on our github organization page here: https://github.com/kickstarter

So if you’re interested in helping us build a platform that is changing how culture gets made, get in touch -- jobs [at] kickstarter.com. We’d love to see your favorite work, whether it’s a side project or your github profile.

Good catch. I definitely meant it in the sense that I doubt anyone would currently argue such a thing.

But the same historical twist applies to photography, albeit a century earlier -- whether copyright should be extened to photographs was a hotly debated issue in the courts.

It wasn't until 1865 that copyright was extended to photos, almost 100 years after copyright itself was instantiated.

More details: http://www.copyrighthistory.org/cgi-bin/kleioc/0010/exec/aus...

A lot of these are simply private places that prohibit photography -- it doesn't make sense to say the place itself is copyrighted since the term copyright refers to the right to make a reproduction a work, not a physical location.

Additionally this really seems like a list of places or things that iStockPhoto won't allow as sources for royalty free images, which is even more narrow.

In the US it's legal to take photos anywhere in public, even federal buildings, and there have been several cases establishing this right:

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/see-officer-i-can-t...