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ntaylor

295 karma · joined July 25, 2012

Software engineer working in Los Angeles
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ntaylor··on Study reveals mammoth as key food source for ancient Americans
BoulderDash, maybe?
ntaylor··on Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit – and why users revolted
The truth is that there are many, many niche communities where this is simply not true. Whole sections of reddit will die off due to lack of moderation and people will be forced to go elsewhere. This may not be a killing blow for reddit, but it will be devastating to the communities that it impacts.
ntaylor··on Google's infamous internal 2010 “I just want to serve 5TB” video now public
diversity & inclusion review
ntaylor··on Show HN: Turn any website into an API (for those who miss Kimono)
Kimono was cool, nice to see another option. I still have a Kimono t-shirt in a drawer somewhere.
ntaylor··on New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking
Somewhat more sinister, I think, is that they added a TTL on the Amazon Smile opt-in. Now, you must re-opt-in every 90 (I think) days.

Fair bet that this small change substantially hurts the effectiveness of this charity and drives a whole bunch of money back to Amazon.

ntaylor··on El Fuego Viviente Chili Sauce
A recipe without 10 pages of useless, boilerplate SEO content?
ntaylor··on Tesla sues ex-employee for hacking, theft, and leaking to the press
He allegedly transmitted photography of Tesla's internal manufacturing systems.

For a company that prides itself in it's manufacturing process (even if it isn't as-promised), it seem like this could even be perceived as IP theft.

ntaylor··on Evolution of <img>: Gif without the GIF
> Patents help pay for research and keeps a lot of smart and hard working tech people employed.

Maybe when used correctly. In the tech space, it seems like they hardly are, anymore.

ntaylor··on Bitcoin ‘Ought to Be Outlawed,’ Nobel Prize Winner Stiglitz Says
His argument seems willfully ignorant, at best.
ntaylor··on Tesla Model 3 Delivery Event Livestream
:\

Definitely was not necessary to provide payment info to view.

ntaylor··on Tesla Model 3 Delivery Event Livestream
It required only name and email to access the livestream.
ntaylor··on Tesla Model 3 Delivery Event Livestream
3x the Super Chargers, as well.
ntaylor··on Escaped inmate may have used wire cutters delivered by drone
A company called Skysafe released some press in 2015 (nothing since), which showed them taking control of a DJI Phantom 2. It should definitely be feasible to intercept and take over many consumer drones, with the right hardware, but there may be some FCC limitations to consider.
ntaylor··on Escaped inmate may have used wire cutters delivered by drone
There seems to be some inconsistencies in this article- wire cutters, or bolt cutters? Big difference.
ntaylor··on Verelox Wiped by Ex-Admin
Seems like nothing short of a felony. I can't conceive why someone with half a brain would do this.
ntaylor··on Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support
> Headless mode allows running Chromium in a headless/server environment. Expected use cases include loading web pages, extracting metadata (e.g., the DOM) and generating bitmaps from page contents -- using all the modern web platform features provided by Chromium and Blink.

Practically speaking, software developers will use headless Chrome to automate testing of product functionality. Today, developers use systems like Selenium or PhantomJS to accomplish this feat, but it's a painful process to maintain these headless browser execution engines. Adding headless support into Chrome means that developers can count on the presentation of their application on a given version of the Blink engine run within Chrome.

ntaylor··on Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications
This may be a shortcoming of the UI, more than anything else. There's definitely room for improvement here as I often miss updates to threaded conversations even as I'm looking for them.
ntaylor··on Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications
It seems to me that Slack could position itself to provide free and open access to certain types of communities like open source projects, charities, etc. Enable the "pro" features so long as the community follows the rules.

The value of synchronous communication is very real and it should not be precluded, but the points are totally valid. Slack is a closed-garden and it does not contribute to the global conversation if the access and historical record is controlled from within.

ntaylor··on Airbnb Bans Host Who Dumped Guest Because She's Asian
But really, $50 a night on Big Bear, in mid February? That's a steal!
ntaylor··on Noiszy – A Chrome plugin that creates meaningless web tracking data
Distributed caching is challenging enough to get right when you know the segmentation parameters; inferring these accurately from any old website would be incredibly difficult.

Still, it's a neat idea.

ntaylor··on Good News on the California Drought
I've only been living in SoCal for 6 years. This is the first year I've seen any greenery since I got here.
ntaylor··on iPhone 7 “Product Red” Special Edition
The Product Red designation usually indicates that the revenues will be contributed, at least in part, to AIDS/HIV awareness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_Red

ntaylor··on The Document Which Used to Be Called the MIT Lockpicking Guide (1992)

  The big secret of lock picking is that it's easy. Anyone can learn how to pikc locks.
There seems to be a large number of spelling errors. Not sure if it's indicative of anything other than lack of editing.
ntaylor··on NASA budget would cut Earth science and education
It's worth noting that the actual impact to NASA's budget is relatively small. Down to 19.1bn from 19.3bn.
ntaylor··on Steve Wozniak Was My Computer Teacher in 1995
From what I saw, he's really a fun-loving person. His stories are as much inspiring as they are amusing. Success found him, and helped provide him with the resources to do more of what he already loved to do: tinker with gadgets and teach.
ntaylor··on Steve Wozniak Was My Computer Teacher in 1995
I was lucky enough to meet Steve at Xamarin Evolve, this year. He is incredibly friendly, and one of the most fascinating people I've ever had the chance to hear speak.
ntaylor··on An account of a serious medical emergency on a transoceanic flight
They surely do.
ntaylor··on Being sued, in East Texas, for using the Google Play Store [video]
> I'm also curious why numerous developers have not demanded an Insurance Protection Product / Plan that would take a premium in return for subrogation (defense) if a frivolous Patent Suit is filed. I'm rather certain the market exists and while it may be for larger businesses or players, developers forming a Mutual Company and writing on some big name AM Best A paper (or even going to Lloyds) could be helpful.

I suspect part of the problem is that the monetary and time costs of litigation could not be easily measured. Every case would be, effectively, unique. Not insurmountable, but I have to imagine that the premiums would need to be very high.

ntaylor··on Non-obvious indicators that a transaction might be fraudulent
Fraud is an always-changing landscape and the only way to stay on top of it is to rapidly and continuously adapt. Simility uses machine learning to derive and apply models in real time, which is huge for any-sized business.
ntaylor··on Xamarin now free in Visual Studio, and Xamarin SDK being open-sourced
As a Xamarin developer for the past year, I don't want to use Visual Studio, I want to use Xamarin Studio.

Visual Studio is slow and doesn't work near as well as Xamarin Studio for many core development tasks. Not to mention, it's completely hamstrung by its dependency on a Mac build host. VS integration needs to step up, dramatically.

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