HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

wamatt

2,899 karma · joined February 21, 2012

username at Buchheit’s beta bunker
submissionscomments
wamatt··on Reddit removed NSL canary from 2015 Transparency Report
Serious question, what's to stop the NSL including language along the lines: 'Any warrant canaries need to remain in place'?
wamatt··on The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment
Small quibble. To me, that spelling of Bitcoin signals a speaker's lower familiarity with the bitcoin community and subject matter. Akin to using the word "CyberSpace".

It's Bitcoin or bitcoin.

[1] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=bitcoin&oq=bitcoin

wamatt··on Economic Inequality: The Simplified Version
I think for me a large part missing from the discussion is power inequality.

Which, as it happens, nearly always is entwined with wealth and income inequality.

The ultra-rich get to have a megaphone for their agendas, ideologies and opinions, with a level of political influence none of us will likely ever come close to seeing.

wamatt··on How I Created a $350M Software Company Knowing Nothing About Software
I'd love to see someone make a device that's sort of the opposite of this.

Compact in-ear selective audio filtering. For example, block all noises except human voice.

Or a simple noise attenuation mode that can be controlled from a smartphone.

wamatt··on How DEA Agents Took Down Mexico's Most Vicious Drug Cartel
>"The government of Mexico is among the most corrupt and least trusted in the world" That is an extraordinary claim that demands evidence.

Sure GP's comment reads a tad hyperbolic. However, Mexico is certainly perceived to be fairly corrupt.

It appears in the bottom half of the 2014 Corruptions Perception Index (CPI), ranked at Rank 103 out of 174 countries.

https://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results

wamatt··on Mozilla Will Stop Developing and Selling Firefox OS Smartphones
It's a shame really, but as an outsider, it wasn't clear that Persona was even given a chance to fail.
wamatt··on 2,000% price hike for infant seizure drug called 'absurd'
Comcast and Ticketmaster execs would heartily agree with that opinion
wamatt··on Google engineer writing Amazon reviews on USB-C cables that don't work
Haven't tried their cables, but I switched to Aukey's chargers some time ago. In particular, the 4 port 9.6a/48W car charger is an engineering delight.
wamatt··on Theranos Trouble: A First Person Account
> the concentration of red blood cells and platelets is not affected by what you had for lunch

Sure. Except I never said or meant to imply RBC's and platelets change on the same day. Part of the context of the comment, were my own tests.

So the question is, why wouldn't one want to remove as many confounding factors as possible?

wamatt··on Theranos Trouble: A First Person Account
As someone that's used Theranos a few times, I too have wondered about the accuracy and contemplated doing something similar.

However, if one is going to make comparisons, I think it's better to use the same draw of blood for both lab companies. Or at least within an hour of each other.

There are too many variables at play, and numbers can change between morning and afternoon even on the same day depending on the test.

Repeated tests and obtaining standard deviations would also be a good idea.

wamatt··on Drool: automated memory leak detection in JavaScript
I found the author's reason for making this quite interesting

After running perf/memory tests across multiple todomvc implementations, I found that almost all implementations have significant memory leaks on the most basic of tasks. Worse yet, most of these leaks were introduced at a framework level, or were introduced by "expert/(framework authors)". The question arose in my mind, if people who authored a framework are introducing leaks in the most trivial of applications, how can users be expected to create non-leaking implementations of much more complex applications.

wamatt··on Even the LastPass Will Be Stolen
It's probably worth noting, this exploit requires the user to save their master password locally.

While it's not obvious from the blackhat blurb, it's stated by the author in their more detailed blog post [1]

Additionally, this behavior is something that LastPass advises against:

"Are you sure you want to have LastPass remember your password? This will significantly decrease the security of your LastPass account!"

[1] http://www.martinvigo.com/a-look-into-lastpass/

wamatt··on The Unicorn Club 2015: Learning from Billion-Dollar Companies
While there may be some value in dissecting failed startups, are both sides are equally illuminating?

Thinking of the possibility space, it seems to me, there exists more ways to fail, than to succeed.

On the other hand, some people suggest in order to win, know what actions lead to failure, and avoid doing those.

wamatt··on Outlier Detection at Netflix
Regarding devops alert spam, on the one hand it's possible to setup rules and filters and tweak notifications just right, but that is often an initial hassle.

Possibly a startup opportunity to offer an easier option with error logs + machine learning.

wamatt··on Fireside Chat with Paul Graham [video]
Nice one. Oh and here's a random thought, you might want to try including the transcripts. This may help with increasing Google organic traffic.
wamatt··on Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo Is Stepping Down
uBlock is your friend

https://github.com/chrisaljoudi/uBlock#getting-started

wamatt··on Hello World
I like roachDB.

It sounds a little more palatable, whilst still keeping the spirit of the original.

wamatt··on Will Computers Redefine the Roots of Math?
This line of reasoning feels similar to that which says AGI will never be possible.

It's also a bit unclear to me, how one can justifiably hold this position with such confidence?

wamatt··on Unless You Are Spock, Irrelevant Things Matter in Economic Behavior
Maybe, though I'm pretty sure it's also about reducing cognitive load for the user.
wamatt··on New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
This comment brings to mind the concept of the the steel man [1][2].

Steelmanning an argument means to go one step further. In addition to selecting the most charitable parts of another person's argument, one seeks to improve on it, by making it the best possible representation of the other persons position.

From there, one can offer their own counterpoint, to this improved version.

[1] https://themerelyreal.wordpress.com/2012/12/07/steelmanning/

[2] http://lesswrong.com/lw/85h/better_disagreement/

wamatt··on Slack Chats
Maybe this is a silly question, but how do you login?

If one needs to be invited, is that a standard process the visitor can initiate?

wamatt··on Google, Our Patron Saint of the Closed Web
The article comes across quite ranty. This is rather unfortunate because it may distract, from an otherwise important message:

Why should corporations be granted permission to carve off valuable and generic domain mindshare for their own agendas?

One could argue "You couldn't register .blog or .dev before, and now you can't either, so whats the problem?"

Well, the issue would seem to be that it's reducing the possibility space for everyone. Indeed, there are other competing applications that would in the future be open to all, but will not come to pass, if this closed corporate capture goes ahead.

One last point to consider, why can't Google apply for .googdev or .googblog?

wamatt··on What interests Reddit? A network analysis of 84M comments by 200K users
if you set tag coloring to "% answered", an interesting pattern emerges

http://i.imgur.com/ZLmWHrq.png

responsiveness of the community in order of most to least

- oldschool hacker (c/c++,bash,perl,regex)

- web dev (jquery, javascript, html, css)

- app dev (ios, objectivec, android, java)

wamatt··on Olark – The First Three Years
Thanks for sharing, really interesting approach.

BTW, Olark is a great product, and you deserve every bit of success!

wamatt··on Joyent Moves to Establish Node.js Foundation
Ahh, that makes more sense, tnx for clarifying (:

I had no idea that's how GH designed the commit history UI.

Also, it might be a nice bonus, if there was an indication of the fork, somewhere on the graph timeline.

wamatt··on Joyent Moves to Establish Node.js Foundation
Clicking on those links, I was surprised to discover io.js commits from as early as 2009.

Some of us not following too closely, may have been under the wrong impression about io.js being a new initiative.

wamatt··on How startup Fab died
> "I need to pour millions into this idea to make a single dollar back", I start questioning whether it's a viable idea in the first place.

In the late 90's, Google had tens of millions of dollars in funding, and took 3 years before it started making revenue, with the launch of Adwords in October of 2000.

wamatt··on Apple's original business plan
Those are valid points, albeit somewhat far out there.

Closer to home, in a somewhat ironic twist, my previous comment was downvoted to oblivion. My first thought was to give the critics the benefit of the doubt, and assume they were not intending to be mean.

That said, after I had taken time to give a thoughtful and respectful response (there were no personal attacks, or snark) aimed to give another moral perspective, you have this knee jerk downvoting occurring.

So while on the one hand "it's internet points and who cares, right?". And yet, I'm an actual human being here on the other side of that browser with my real username. Not a hypothetical possibility. It still feels crappy and like you've been judged by the community and found wanting. Thus to me, in my bubble, it feels mean spirited, even it was not.

Thus, it begs the question, why shouldn't our focus be on how the receiver of an action is affected?

wamatt··on Apple's original business plan
Sure, while I agree it's nice to give strangers the benefit of the doubt, how 'mean' can one really be, to a deceased public figure?

Or to take a sillier example: You could certainly act mean to a stone, but would it care?

Personally, I tend to view the term as having more relevance in the interpersonal domain, where one would try to avoid unnecessarily hurting someone else.

wamatt··on Apple's original business plan
Sometimes I do wonder about the double standards involved in characterizations of certain people.

Like if it's someone we like, then that person "embellished" their record, but if it's someone we don't then, they "lied".

So thinking aloud, does that mean I can go crash some courses at Stanford too, then put it in the pitch deck as "Attended Stanford". Knowing full well, physical access, is not what is meant by the use of the term and that investors may be misled?

It seems to me, this might qualify as evidence of the reality distortion field at work.

← PreviousPage 3 of 16Next →