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valisystem

285 karma · joined May 12, 2010

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valisystem··on The Silicon Valley paradox: one in four people are at risk of hunger
> I think EU should make it easier for US citizens who get any job here to move over.

I'm pretty sure that any employable american can achieve that without hard efforts, and AFAIK most welfare is granted to salaried people, except for unemployment allowance. Same with education, some countries are equal (very low) tuitions no-question-asked.

For hardly employable 'hard worker' american, I'm pretty sure that are plenty of hard working immigration candidate to fill that. And there's no reason that low wages jobs will end better life condition for americans than others, and end up to the same problems that often comes with poverty : crime, social resent and injustice, just like home. If you think that americans will work harder and paid better that an struggling immigrant, I think you are highly delusional, low wages hard just enough to live, and nobody will pay more for the same job.

valisystem··on He Always Had a Dark Side
I don't read long content on lcd screens, I really wish for a (paid and proper) ebook release. Is it possible? How could I be notified?
valisystem··on Generating Captions: Describing Videos with Neural Networks
I've very mixed feelings with all the craze around deep neural network and learning. On one side, some results brings so much magic it's astounding and really looks promising. On the other side, anything that is not a use case of convergence from general to specific, like hand writing recognition, but general to general, like qualifying pictures with vocabulary, fails miserably (in a very entertaining way).

And the slip from neural networks to artificial neural networks to artificial intelligence we see on the broad news, really make it look like expert systems all over again. At first, it's said that it can solve any kind of problems, and then, we end up with a very narrow set of problems it solves reliably.

valisystem··on A cartoon guide to Flux
To those who don't want to be tied to a specialized library, you can architect an app like that way (unidirectional data flow) quite easily if you use KVO properly.
valisystem··on The Value of Content
> However, it's a fact that they lead to more conversions, more signups and more sales.

I wouldn't jump to conclusions. Maybe you have expertise on this, I don't, but I've seen nothing that could make me lay a definitive conclusion like this.

The article incision is on the fact that some people needs analytics to back up evaluation of the web site trying to know if it's doing good or not, regardless of revenue. So you end up to those techniques that drives irrelevant numbers up, that can even damage potential revenue, but it's ok, you're doing the right things, look at those good numbers. You can't test such things with A/B testing or anything else, it's long term relationship with the audience, and those analytics are not measuring this.

valisystem··on Stripe Raises New Funding and Partners with Visa
Can't find source but I remember reading here the story of a payment business that competed with VISA and was taking off until VISA started threatening his client, making them fear that their payment wouldn't be processed at some point, and they would be subject to fines, if not worse.

I remember reading other stories on the same line, about visa using shady approaches to frighten people to preserve their monopoly, but a quick search can't bring any up. Search terms are too generic.

valisystem··on The easiest bug bounties I have won
I deeply agree for the facebook case, I just wanted to point out that there is no known general solution for a centralized resource access control for web backend that will fit all use cases properly.
valisystem··on The easiest bug bounties I have won
Well actually you can look at it exactly like a kernel, where the backend is the kernel and http clients are the processes, and access control is done at resource level access, by the kernel. The things is, you couldn't even model facebook access with unix perms, and if you've played with acl, I think you realize that the problem is not solely due basic soft architecture.

That said, Facebook should have addressed this problem seriously by now.

valisystem··on Plex: a parser and lexer generator as a Rust syntax extension
There's also rustlex [1] that have been around for a while and provides rust stable v1.0 support through syntex [2]. I use it for a handlebars implementation [3].

[1] https://github.com/LeoTestard/rustlex

[2] https://github.com/erickt/rust-syntex

[3] https://github.com/nicolas-cherel/rumblebars

valisystem··on Why doesn't Windows recognize a USB device plugged into another port? (2004)
I don't see why this could not have been done in a invisible fashion for the user.
valisystem··on Anti-Patterns Every Programmer Should Be Aware Of
To me, the problem in choosing the "better" way of doing something is that I can't stop comparing diverging design choices.

I like to think that the best way to choose between seemingly equally advantageous designs is to start with the one whose first step(s) is(are) the most straightforward. The thing is, while I prepare myself for implementation of that first step, I've a background loop in my mind that constantly checks against other implementations choices. What I am losing here, what I would gain otherwise.

In the end, I never really make definitive decision before starting. I start with that background brain noise on the “most simple first step design”, and when the background noise stops and the raw pleasure of coding kicks in, I known I'm on a good track.

valisystem··on Typedrummer
brilliant. http://typedrummer.com/ovzx48
valisystem··on Obsessive Efficiency Disorder
Oh, yes yes, I can relate so hard that I actually have to take care of not getting mad after my SO when she breaks in those optimized routine she can't possibly have any clue of.
valisystem··on Watch Four Years of Oil Drilling Collapse in Seconds
My favorite hypothesis is that the saudis want to punish the US for investing (and subsidies) too much in oil production. It put them in debts, and destroys their margins, but they can afford it, while the US cannot really afford to invest in oil rigs that have a too long ROI.
valisystem··on A Developer’s Guide to Growth Hacking
> "It’s really about science."

Where all samples are unique and uncontrolled, no matter what you do, any consistent results are basically meaningless.

Once you've got samples size big enough to be statistically relevant, well, your growth problem is probably already solved.

valisystem··on How Google Inbox shares 70% of its code across Android, iOS, and the Web
Break it down to small, high level abstractions for properly crafted, high yield components.

It requires experience, vision and talent. It's perceived as very difficult because it's basically the same approach as academic research, but instead of being applied to general problems, it's a general approach for a set of very specific technical constraints.

Oh, and most people screw it up badly on most occasions.

valisystem··on Connecting an external video card to a notebook
Intel refusal to license thunderbolt external GPU is infuriating, and the sole rationalization I can see is that they are blocking it to protect premium price on their high end integrated GPUs. It really feels like a big let down.

(edit: bit->big)

valisystem··on To elaborate on why open-source hardware is hard
> Openness for me is first and foremost ideological, not practical, and certainly not just about the results.

The problem is openness took off in software because it's very practical for some kind of developments, and IMHO, this tremendous success wrongly suggests that it could be applied elsewhere. I'll back that statement by pointing out that very little open software had organic success among consumers (products like firefox and VLC), other are either backed by big tech companies (android, Java), many times with the open source software having a closed development process.

valisystem··on Firefox for iOS on GitHub
Your version is out, their is not, it's whole lot of a difference. Thanks a lot and I'm installing it right away !
valisystem··on Drug addiction: The great American relapse
This explains those kind of behaviors :

http://np.reddit.com/r/Drugs/comments/1rhn38/heroin_users_of...

valisystem··on Principles of Rich Web Applications
Just to nuance your 1) points about server side rendering, with pro-points :

• you only need html and css loaded to show content to your user, and js loads while the user is watching content, js has some time to be ready on first interaction.

• still feels slower than showing stuff with only html+css

• for pages content that changes a lot, if you rely on cdn for html pages, you need to update content with js on page load and you either ends up with a splash wait-while-we-are-loading or a blinking christmas tree.

• if your html is small enough, the cache checking round-trip is not that faster than loading content, while a JS rendering will need cache round trip AND data loading round trip. You can eliminate some html round trip with cache expiration, but at the expense of reliable deployments.

• still, JS rendering/update can be slower than server side CPU, especially on mobile devices.

valisystem··on W3C declares HTML5 standard complete
> the Oligarchy of popular browser implementers

In the past, only Mozilla cared about what the W3C said, and they built Firefox on the idea that interoperability by following the standards is the way to go. Not that long after Apple initiated Safari, and led Google to their own browser initiative.

All this because Mozilla, the insignificant actor of the all IE time, decided to follow W3C.

You're not totally wrong telling that W3C doesn't mater that much, but browsers are what they are today because of W3C for a good part, and it still have a very important place in the browser game.

valisystem··on iMac with Retina 5K display
> In other words, buy a Retina Cinema Display, get the computer to power it for free.

Funny thing, it was also the case for the first 27" imac

valisystem··on Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one
The mental energy needed to suffer ads is far from zero for many people.
valisystem··on Static Web Apps – A Field Guide
I once did a website exactly like this. Nothing required a web application server to run, and I was building the (quite simple) thing from the ground up.

Once my build environment was set up, the dev cycle and experience was stellar. Fast, on change, builds, lighting fast local page reloads.

Deployment was just pushing static files on the http server, that served only statics files, like the good old days.

Once that was done, a problem remained: since it was a one shot experiment, with something quite simple, I had only one dev environment for that thing, and I did not document how I did it.

My conclusion was : part of apps that serves dynamic page are kind of build environment that can't pre-built the artifact. But the build environment is part of the code, just like a Makefile would.

It's probably possible to build and serve static page with a good experience as a whole, but your tool quality (easy to deploy and reliable) for building must be great.

valisystem··on AppleDoesntGiveAFuckAboutSecurity iTunes Evil Plugin Proof of Concept
It seems that the only real issue is that it circumvents keychain, that would normally prompt before giving any protected value to unknown code (not signed or already prompted). So a plugin can access to protected data that iTune can fetch from keychain silently.

I don't know if there is other ways to achieve that with local attacks, but it looks like a middle of the road issue. Quite serious, but also requires the target system to be already compromised.

valisystem··on Tim Berners-Lee: We need to re-decentralise the web
Not only easy, but also fast and reliable enough to compete with centralized services.
valisystem··on Ask HN: Have your parents done anything to make you interested in Science or IT?
My father bought an Amstrad CPC to learn computing when he got in charge of supervising IT deployment in the company he worked in. I was around three by then, and they let me play a little to a game [1]. I developed a fascination to all electronic device, especially ones with screens. My father did not need the CPC for very long, and sold it. We did not have another computer at home until I was 14, not long after Internet could be reached with RTC dialups. Needless to say, I got completely hooked on this machine.

[1] probably this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrier_Attack

valisystem··on Nvidia submits patches to open source driver
For what I see, future is bright on AMD side for those features. I don't follow the news closely, but phoronix reports on the subject have change from a long string of steady bad support and performance to a seemingly constant progress since last year.
valisystem··on Why are US corporate profits so high? Because wages are so low
> Business income is volatile.

Yet, a very few concentrates a bigger share every year.

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