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pulakm

284 karma · joined June 17, 2013

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pulakm··on Machine intelligence, part 1
Why do you not see this as being a problem? The sequence of events Sam sketched out is pretty logical. It hinges on machines being able to optimize for "survive and reproduce", which feels very plausible to me.
pulakm··on Forbes 30 under 30 2015
Forbes has a number of such 30 under 30 lists - each one linked in the blog post (Consumer Tech, Enterprise Tech, Food & Drink, etc) is a separate list of 30. So the number of people named to Forbes 30 under 30 this year is greater than 30 total.
pulakm··on Why C.E.O.s Are Growing Beards
The Wikipedia page on Presidents of the US shows a timeline that matches the one in this article nicely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_the_Unite...
pulakm··on [dead]
we've been asked to keep this video private (within the fb group/mailing list) until it's approved by Airbnb. Please remove this link!
pulakm··on Not sure what to do with my startup idea
Sam has a great blog post about this: http://blog.samaltman.com/non-technical-founder-learn-to-hac...

The title says it all - learn to hack.

pulakm··on All links are unclickable on the State of Delaware's website
Inspect element reveals that there is a div:

<div id="forceDOMredraw"></div>

that seems to prevent one from clicking any of the links. Makes filing taxes somewhat difficult.

pulakm··on How Meetup Onboards New Users
Only according to the dictionary. It's pretty common parlance in this context. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onboarding
pulakm··on NYTimes's Pogue going to Yahoo
Yes, definitely. Google gets over a million applications per year as of 3 years ago [1]; it's feasible that Yahoo would get half of that now.

[1]

pulakm··on PennApps Final Demos Livestream
The list of teams demoing is at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aha_Rxus9XXSdER...
pulakm··on PennApps Final Demos Livestream
Action is starting in 10 minutes, and demos themselves should be starting in 20-25
pulakm··on An Inventor Wants One Less Wire to Worry About
Mirror: http://www.columbusceo.com/content/stories/apexchange/2013/0...
pulakm··on Reshaping New York
Fair point. Perhaps some labels on the images, at least, would make it clear what they were trying to point out. The Times Square picture in particular was confusing because I saw the pedestrian mall, but thought that the point was about bike lanes which a pedestrian mall isn't.
pulakm··on Reshaping New York
New York Times has been killing it with their visualizations. It would have been nice to have 2013 pictures overlaid on the 2003 pictures though, to really understand what the changes were. In some pictures, like Times Square, I had to flip back and forth a couple of times and still wasn't sure what exactly the changes were (can't see any obvious bike lane in that image, which is supposedly what it's representing).
pulakm··on Ask HN to review: app to save files from web directly to your Dropbox
What exactly is the intended use case? On my home computer, it's faster for me to right click, save and my Dropbox opens up.

On other computers, I have to remember to go to your website (and thus remember your URL) and sign into Dropbox. I might as well download it to a Downloads folder and then upload it to dropbox.com.

pulakm··on Show HN: Do you read on the toilet? This web app is for you.
The comment mentioned extended bathroom breaks, as in, when someone stays on the toilet for longer than necessary due to having a smartphone.
pulakm··on Prism: Create and explore personalized infographics of your SMS history
This looks awesome. Does Android offer access to text messages the way iOS does through iTunes?
pulakm··on Ubuntu Edge funding level over time
Sorry about that - I tried Googling but was unsuccessful!
pulakm··on Ubuntu Edge funding level over time
It would be pretty interesting to see what the funding progress chart was for other large crowdfunded projects (Pebble, Double Fine, etc) for comparison. If we assume that the rate of funding will not increase beyond the current rate, the project will not meet the goal. I don't know how valid that assumption is, though -- intuitively it makes sense, but it is possible that other projects have challenged that assumption. Especially possible if they managed to get a further round of press midway through the campaign.
pulakm··on Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight Blog Is to Join ESPN Staff
Nate Silver's background is in sports - that's really where his statistics-magic got started. I imagine sports is one of his passions, and he's now gotten to a point where he can combine that with his skill in statistics at the same scale as he was with politics.
pulakm··on Show HN: Emulos records how people use your app
Awesome concept. Couple of issues/questions:

-The gray text is hard to read on my screen. It does make the black text stand out more, but it's at the expense of readability for the rest of the content.

-This looks like it's solely for mobile, but you don't mention that anywhere on the page (I suppose "app" sort of implies that).

-Is this opt-in for users? Is it even opt-out? That's a big question I would want the answer to, and the "See how Emulos protects users' privacy" link appears to be broken.

pulakm··on Ask HN: What do business people do at hackathons?
Learn how to code!