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amitparikh

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Amsterdam / Northern Virginia / Washington, D.C.

Cross Media Analytics @ Comscore, Inc.

BSc.EE from the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland.

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For what it's worth, I find third-party logins (e.g. Spotify via Facebook) to be a nice convenience feature that I use quite often.

The real evil here is that the surcharges are "all on top of the price that regulators have agreed customers should pay for their electricity service."

Utilities support basic human necessities. We need power for light and heat. When the base cost for these necessities rises (to subsidize infrastructure projects), the poor are the hardest hit. And the fact that these governments are essentially "hiding" taxes inside of utility payments is outrageous.

Why are human missions so much more costly than robotic missions? Answer: Life Support.

If our (very) long-term goal is to stake humanity's claim on other planets/asteroids/etc., then it makes sense to work on improving and expanding Life Support capabilities in harsh environments. I see it as an investment in the future -- it may not seem to have immediate benefits, but these are key milestones and steps for reaching the ultimate goal.

"The Sola TS became concerned about the situation. However, because the Ingstad wasn’t showing automatic identification system (AIS) data, initially neither the Sola TS nor the traffic station on shore could identify the frigate to warn it of the imminent danger."

To add to this (and to refute a specific example brought up in the blog post): "learning ops" is not a way to reduce the complexity of software deployment. In fact, Docker exists specifically to solve that exact problem -- in net, it reduces the complexity and challenges of deployment in distributed systems.

Some complexity is unavoidable due to a project's scope and requirements -- introducing new complexities can oftentimes reduce the overall complexity of the system.

This reminds me a lot of a thesis (sort of) from Peter Thiel's "Zero to One". He calls it The Contrarian Question:

    What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
The question asks us to escape from the mental confines of the past and present to be able to "predict the future" as it were.

I still believe that COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act) is, overall, beneficial legislation that puts in place the minimum rules for protecting children's PII. As the Internet becomes more accessible to a younger audience, we should be considering the societal benefits of such legislation and how it should evolve with the technology. It's shortsighted to fault Google for complying with the law.

This quote was not about the reporter or the news outlet. Michael McSwain was the FBI agent in charge of the case, and the reporting seems to suggest that having 'subversion' in Sergey's Web history was a component of building probable cause.

There is no prerequisite to have a "stable tech infrastructure" -- shoot, there's no prerequisite to even have an actual product! -- for admission to YC. pg has made it pretty clear that YC selects founders, not necessarily ideas.

And for those that have a proof-of-concept running on some other provider(s) (AWS/Rackspace/Google), it would be a huge boon to be able to migrate and scale using Azure and the $500k credit.

I agree. Additionally, the words "distinct" or "cardinality" don't appear anywhere in this article, which is a major omission when discussing HyperLogLog. The primary use of the algorithm is to provide a cardinality estimate.

Apple Pay 12 years ago

The Verge (among others) is reporting that the antenna is located along the top edge of the phone [1]. Photos of the Apple Pay gesture in action on the slides seems to corroborate this.

And my gut tells me that this is a secondary reason for why they moved the power button over to the right side of the phone (primary reason being to accommodate smaller hands with the larger screen sizes).

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/9/6107091/apple-watch-iphone-...

Don't be a jerk 12 years ago

In general, I agree with you. The nature of internet commenting is such. There should be no expectation that the parent comment will continue to live -- the comment itself should be considered "owned" by the original poster, who has the prerogative to delete it.

But that shouldn't be an excuse for any of us to refrain from providing feedback, insight, and advice online. In fact, we should continue to do so with the understanding that our time in producing that comment/content is volunteered.

And of course, on the other side, we should strive to retain the record of the communication chain if we are the original posters. Deleting a comment is your choice, but it's probably good practice and behavior not to.