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sadkingbillyon Venture Capital’s Answer to High-Priced Housing: Dorms for Grown Ups

A Corporate Republic (from Civilization: Call to Power, one of the government types available in the Genetic Age).

"The Imperial Trading Companies such as the various East India Companies should possibly be considered corporate states, being semi-sovereign with the power to wage war and establish colonies."

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

sadkingbillyon If you invested $1 a day, starting when you were born

Instead of $1/day, do $365/year to limit transaction fees.

You could even offer to let them withdraw the dividend each month as an allowance or let it reinvest.

sadkingbillyon Show HN: Standup Jack – A Slack Bot for Your Standups

I was thinking the same thing. Who is really going to read these updates? If I was forced to do this at a company, I'd probably automate responses with a bot of my own. I'd call it the schitt-bot.

sadkingbillyon Show HN: I've made a tool to generate beautiful gradient background images

It could be worse: PayPal and their 3.1 MB Child_Snowflakes_8_V2.mp4

sadkingbillyon Why 2015 Was a Breakthrough Year in Artificial Intelligence

Not really. One could be deaf or blind from birth, yet fully intelligent. It's more a matter of getting sensory from the world into the brain. That sensory may be visual, auditory, touch, etc. The brain is very plastic in this manner.

sadkingbillyon The day I did something

It seems a lot of consultancies follow this pattern:

    1. Hate permanent job.
    2. Start consultancy.
    3. Spend half the day finding work/collecting bills; other half programming.
    4. Eventually find reliable client with long-term project always pays on time.
    5. Cancels all other contracts to focus on reliable client.
    6. Go to step 1.

The way to break free from this is to scale the consultancy by hiring developers and profiting on overhead. This was not mentioned in the post, but if you neglect the scale factor, it will be very difficult to break past a typical employee salary. There are only so many hours in the day. The alternative is to sell a product.

sadkingbillyon How I Quit My Job and Built My First App

In reality though, I'd like to know what the author did for health insurance when he quit his job weeks/months after having a baby. Medical risk is very high during this period.. looks like he is based in Canada (not US), so I guess that answers it.

sadkingbillyon Extracts passwords from a KeePass 2.x database, directly from memory

One of the features of KeePass is that you never see or type an actual password. You simply hit CTRL-C to copy the pw to memory and paste into the form. This is a guard against key loggers and visual snooping.

sadkingbillyon Extracts passwords from a KeePass 2.x database, directly from memory

What does this mean: "extraction of KeePass 2.x password database information from memory"?

When is KeePass data held in memory? When the program is simply running or only when you copy a password to the clipboard?

KeePass shows accounts in a ListView type of control and in a dialog, both of which probably store the data in memory. I'm just wondering if this tool can snatch accounts just from simply having KeePass running, in which case this could be bad for malware/spyware. Picture a malware program running, waits for KeePass to show up in the process list, grabs all your accounts and sends them to a remote site. Yikes.

sadkingbillyon Why I Left the .NET Framework (2013)

I've been on two interviews recently, and both saw experience in .NET as a negative. I found myself having to down-play experience in .NET in both cases, in order to guide the discussion toward more applicable skills for the role. Even when you may be a polyglot programmer, interviewers tend to label you as .NET or Microsoft. Which, has apparently become a bad thing. Unless you're interviewing with a Fortune-100 company, in which case, .NET is still somewhat popular.

sadkingbillyon PayPal does not know how to detect fraud

Agreed. Sellers and buyers of domain names (or web sites) selling for at least $300 should use an escrow service. The fee is around $25 and can usually be split between parties.

Just think about the price you're paying/selling the site for. If the amount is more than you're willing to lose, use an escrow service.

sadkingbillyon Oil Falls Below $40 for First Time Since 2009 as Glut Grows

That's the problem with oil and gold. No dividends. So you sit on it for a couple of years, earning nothing. Still, oil is a finite resource and is very sensitive to world events, war, etc.

sadkingbillyon Did technology kill the book or give it new life?

Audio books has made "reading" a hobby for me. I never thought I was the type that really enjoyed reading a good book. After switching from radio to audio books while driving, traffic has almost become enjoyable (not quite, but you get the idea). I've read so many books the past few years, it's amazing. It feels like it increases your brain's learning rate, or at the very least, it gives you some very interesting topics to talk about.

sadkingbillyon Ask HN: How do you stay sharp?

What if you're the smartest person in the room and also highly paid? It may be more strategic to stay put, save as much as possible, and spend your time getting intellectual stimulation outside of work.

sadkingbillyon Coursera is phasing out free certificates

Same. Even if they did, just take a screenshot of the "Course Records" screen that proves you took the class and the grade. Besides, you can still download the Statement of Accomplishment.

sadkingbillyon Oliver Sacks on learning he has terminal cancer

I just finished this book a couple weeks ago. It was definitely a great one. Although, a difficult book to read, purely from the perspective of the topic. Growing old and/or dying are both topics people tend to ignore.

I also hadn't fully grasped the condition of growing old, itself. No one wants to die, but growing old and losing your independence is a disease all to its own, described in vivid detail in the book.

(I also appreciate that the author was so honest about mentioning taking antibiotics before drinking water from the Ganges [and still getting sick!]).

sadkingbillyon Bitbucket Embraces the Cloud IDE

Being able to edit files from any physical location is nice. Although you already get this from just using github/bitbucket, for the most part.

I think the biggest drawback to an online IDE is the development box itself. Are you comfortable developing with just 256mb - 1024mb of RAM? For some web apps and low-CPU projects, this may be fine. Otherwise, you're going to lack that processing power and speed.

sadkingbillyon A Brief Overview of Deep Learning

"so I implemented a small neural network and trained it to sort 10 6-bit numbers, which was easy to do to my surprise"

Does anyone know what the inputs and outputs of a neural network that sorts numbers would look like?

sadkingbillyon Node.js in Flame Graphs

Yes, but their original bug was from dynamically loading routes from an external source. I don't see how Express is to blame for this. Moving to Restify is not a solution, but they state having different reasons for moving (support for bunyan logging? But Express already supports this too).

sadkingbillyon We Can Eradicate Malaria Within a Generation

Mosquitoes are a food source for many animals, including: fish, birds, spiders, and bats.

Maybe those animals could find something else to eat, but there sure are a lot of mosquitoes - imagine how many get eaten.

sadkingbillyon A Neuroscientist’s Theory of How Networks Become Conscious (2013)

"But a malformed packet could also be an emergent signal. A self-created packet."

If a program sent out a malformed packet, this would indicate an error in the sender's program. Let's assume that a receiving program reads the malformed packet and is able to process it. It results in something favorable (no clue how this would be determined, but let's go with it) and so the receiving program repeats whatever it originally did to get this malformed packet sent to it, so that it gets another malformed packet. Multiply this by thousands of other programs doing similar things to "hack" other programs into sending malformed packets to perform useful functions, and maybe you have something happening here.

The above process basically describes a genetic algorithm, which I don't think the Internet is. It also assumes that most programs are flexible enough to produce bugs like this - creating malformed packets. Does this mean we should stop unit testing code to allow more freedom from the programs? Plus, the above also assumes there is some way of ranking an outcome from a malformed packet as "favorable". Maybe that would be humans?

sadkingbillyon Show HN: Battleboat.js – A robot that plays Battleship

The probability grid is very neat. One question though, it looks like Ship.DIRECTION_VERTICAL and Ship.DIRECTION_HORIZONTAL might be flipped. It seems consistent, so it's ok. Just the label "vertical" actually means "horizontal" and vice-versa.

  for (var i = 0; i < this.shipLength; i++) {
  if (direction === Ship.DIRECTION_VERTICAL) {
				if (this.playerGrid.cells[x + i][y] === CONST.TYPE_SHIP ||
					this.playerGrid.cells[x + i][y] === CONST.TYPE_MISS ||
					this.playerGrid.cells[x + i][y] === CONST.TYPE_SUNK) {
					return false;
				}
  }

sadkingbillyon Show HN: VidFall – Pay with time, not your wallet

How does this not violate the terms of your affiliate agreements?

Are the video ads from direct clients of yours or through a general affiliate program?

sadkingbillyon Introducing Heroku Button

Or replace writing to the file system with storing as a json object on one of many online (eg. cloud) providers.

sadkingbillyon Ask HN: Object you'd like to see connected to the internet?

A sump-pump that sends an email when it detects water and/or runs. Would be great if it included a humidity measurement too.

sadkingbillyon Europe's Rosetta probe goes into orbit around comet 67P

If a comet breaks up into several pieces, will those pieces continue to travel next to each other in the same direction, maybe re-combining via gravity back into a single rock? Or will they just drift apart?

sadkingbillyon Ask HN: How do you sell the software of a failed business?

Flippa is probably his best bet, but you'll usually only get a couple hundred, depending on the site's ranking and traffic. Better than letting the domain just expire though.

sadkingbillyon Level-Up Your Machine Learning

I also watch at 2x speed. I do the same for audiobooks. Your brain adapts. Sometimes I play them in 1x speed just for a bit and it sounds like extreme slow motion, and I think, people really listen to this?

sadkingbillyon The AI boss that deploys Hong Kong's subway engineers

I feel the same way about machine learning algorithms and even deep learning. The more you learn about how the algorithms work, the more it seems like just simple averaging of numbers. I think this is a good thing though, because it removes the mysticism behind it.

sadkingbillyon Robinhood: $0 commission stock brokerage

TradeKing has no minimum balance, $4.95/trades, and it was fairly painless to sign up http://bit.ly/19JPLlS

Sharebuilder is ok too, but more expensive. I think bitcoins are actually more complicated to trade.