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quilby

812 karma · joined June 4, 2008

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quilby··on The software development final exam: Algorithms and Data Structures
These questions are way too basic- the first 4 can be answered directly from the definition of each term, and there is no thinking involved. The 5th question can be answered with knowledge from 1 lesson in graph theory.
quilby··on Faking Human Input While Interfacing with X11 Applications
http://freddy1990.com/scar.php - Is a similar tool for Windows. It was originally built, and is wildly used today, to cheat on an online RPG called http://runescape.com/ (it does the boring, repetitive tasks of the game for you while your are sleeping).
quilby··on True Knowledge (AI question-answering platform) launches public beta
The NLP engine isnt god though: http://www.trueknowledge.com/q/was_jfk_killed_before_barack_...
quilby··on Valve Software Battles Video-game Cheaters
This is wrong. There are many 'cracked' (no-steam) servers for all valve games ( http://css.setti.info/ ) and even though Ive played many hours on these servers (CSS and TF2) I have seen only 2 cheaters.

Remember- you still have admins on these servers, and they can ban IPs...

quilby··on Valve Software Battles Video-game Cheaters
Obtaining working free wallhacks/aimbots for most games is pretty easy.

Right now I can only remember http://www.mpcforum.com/ .

I "tested" one of their aimbots (on TF2) and not only did it work, but I also did not get banned.

quilby··on Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_W6Qbob2mg#t=0m16s

Really?

Pagerank doesnt have anything to do with twitter and facebook.

Its a great idea, and its probably one of the major factors that made google a success, but today it is not a very important factor in google being a bigger company than fb and twitter.

quilby··on I am a guy who sold his startup and I have like $20M in the bank. AMA.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/azgs6/iama_guy_who_sol...
quilby··on I am a guy who sold his startup and I have like $20M in the bank. AMA.
If we assume that everything that the OP has said is true, I dont think that this is Joshua:

1. Joshua works at Google, OP says that he does not have a job.

2. It looks like Joshua isnt married.

quilby··on I am a guy who sold his startup and I have like $20M in the bank. AMA.
1. He said that it was sold between 1 year ago and 4 years ago. In addition, his company is still going.

2. He said that before taxes he had 30 million dollars, so the startup was sold for >=30 million dollars.

3. He is married and has an 11 year old daughter (and at least one more kid). Him and his wife are at least 30 years old.

4. At least one newspaper reported on him selling his startup.

I tried using CrunchBase to search for his startup but the list of companies sold in the last 5 years is huge...

quilby··on Apple Gestapo: How Apple Hunts Down Leaks
In Israel, because there is a fear from terrorists, before you go into any shop, restaurant, mall, or university, your bag is searched (for ~30 seconds) and sometimes a metal detector is used (a hand-held one). I know nothing about Apple HQ, but it would be trivial to set something like this up.

Unrelated, but they (Gizmodo) shouldn't have used the word 'gestapo' or anything else related to nazis.

quilby··on Google Goggles
Where does the info for the landmark recognition feature come from? Is it from street view?

I dont see how the landmark recognition feature could be useful. If you have a camera + 3g on your phone, you have a GPS.

quilby··on Google Goggles
Ive talked with one of the guys from face.com . They have put a lot of effort into making their system very fast and scalable.

He told me that they built it from scratch and did not use OpenCV. Some parts were even written in assembly.

Im pretty sure that this is the only web application that I use that has had major parts of it written in assembly.

quilby··on High Performance at Massive Scale: Lessons Learned at Facebook
A few days ago I sent a message to the FB developer that wrote the blog post about Haystack.

He told me that they are working on getting it open sourced and that it will be ready 'soon'.

quilby··on Chargify vs. Spreedly vs. Cheddargetter: Subscription-Billing Service Prices
Does anyone know of payment gateways that work with merchants outside the U.S.?

We are based in Israel and are going to launch a subscription based web app soon.

Right now it looks like the only option is to use Google checkout/ Paypal (the basic plan). Both of these send the customer off site and this makes for a slow user experience.

quilby··on The End Of The CrunchPad
I agree with this comment from http://styleguidance.com/the-life-and-death-of-crunchpad:

" Is the CrunchPad really dead? Honestly? I'd put my money on no. Arrington is way too "powerful", and did too much, to just roll over for a few bad apples. My guess, is that, at this very moment, his mailbox is exploding with tons of emails from Fusion Garage competitors, offering to finish the project for him.

And if they aren't...then their CEOs need to be kicked out.

Where else, will you find a partner, who has the connections to have a major retail chain(most likely Best Buy) who not only are willing to help you with shipping costs by letting you use their planes, but will also sell your product with zero margin and will pay upfront?

Where else, will you find a partner, who has the connections to get your people advice from the guys at Intel? And a huge discount on pricing?

Where else, will you find a partner, that already has investors lined up for the project?

Where else, will you find a partner, that already has brand recognition, with millions of people? "

quilby··on [dead]
Right, but while he still had money in Seesmic, there was a huge Seesmic widget on every page on TechCrunch.
quilby··on Poll: How many generations removed from immigration are you?
Because Israel is a pretty young country most people living here are <= 2nd generation immigrants. I'm a 4th generation immigrant. 5 generations ago my family immigrated from Russia and created at least a couple of cities, which still exist today.
quilby··on The Reality Of PR: Smile, Dial, Name Drop, Pray.
Arrington writing about how great Arrington's blog is.

We all know how successful Cuil is today after being mentioned on almost every major newspaper/magazine/blog in the world. http://siteanalytics.compete.com/cuil.com/

quilby··on Seesmic’s CEO: We built it, they didn’t come
Keep in mind that their widget has been on every page on TechCrunch for a long time (Arrington is an investor).

They really failed :(.

quilby··on Wolfram Co-Founder On Why Wolfram Alpha Doesn't Need to Kill Google
I don't see a product like Alpha succeeding all by itself. As he says alpha is made to answer questions that involve all kinds of 'primitive' calculations (I call them primitive because it can only use data that it already has in its DB). And out of the many queries that I use Google for every day how many are such? Close to 0.

Its still a nice product but its not much more useful than Mathematica right now. In my opinion their biggest competitor, True Knowledge, is moving in the right direction. They have a new Firefox addon which will add data obtained from True Knowledge to the results page of your Google searches. Thats whats going to succeed. A hybrid of a search engine and an answer engine. And maybe one day once answer engines get smart (not any time soon- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_answering#Issues ) we will be able to replace most of our Google searches with Alpha queries.

quilby··on Ask HN: What's the best way to register a foreign domain name?
Also, try en.wikipedia.com/wiki/tld to find the official registrars site.
quilby··on Ask HN: What's the best way to register a foreign domain name?
Do not buy from these guys or any other similar sites if you can find a person that speaks the language of the country you want to buy a domain from. For example they sell a .co.il for 65 dollars / year while you can easily find an Israeli registrar that sells for 18 dollars / year if you speak Hebrew. I also saw .co.il s selling for $200 + a couple of weeks ago on a similar site.
quilby··on Search Goes Real-Time With Scoopler (YC S08)
If you are having problems with time management why not try RescueTime? ;)
quilby··on Representing complex numbers as 2×2 matrices
There seems to be an isomorphism here :-)

The function he showed _is_ an isomorphism, but those 4 properties he showed above don't have anything to do with that (and they are also not used to prove that that function is an iso).

EDIT: Very stupid mistake, it is not a isomorphism because it is not onto. For example the matrix (a)ij = 1 for i=j={1,2} can not be obtained.

quilby··on CS123: Introduction to Computer Graphics
http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/courses/Computer-Graphics/09b/index....

Parallel course @ Tel Aviv Uni.

quilby··on Experimenting with the YouTube audio fingerprinting system
Does anyone know if YouTube actually removes clips containing parts of copyrighted films? I doubt it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_fingerprinting

quilby··on SEO Advice from Someone Not Selling It (Some Contrarian)
I am pretty sure that this is because Google sees different subdomains under the same domain (ie. a.example.com, b.example.com) as different websites, and so if you got a link to a.example.com, maybe a.example.com's pagerank would improve, but example.com's pagerank will not improve.

This is why choosing one main domain for you website (either www.example.com or example.com) and 301 redirecting all requests from the one not chosen to the chosen one is recommended.

quilby··on Adam Savage Reddit Interview
Towards the end of the third part he mentions that he reads news.YC . :)
quilby··on Ask HN: Should I outsource development outside the US?
This has been discussed many times. See:

http://searchyc.com/ask+outsource

quilby··on Poll: Where are you from?
tel aviv
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