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microsage

283 karma

Developer, from the United States originally, now based in Shanghai, mostly.

Posts18
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news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: As an engineer, how can I volunteer in the developing world?

microsage
6pts3
qz.com 8y ago

The ethereum world is now obsessed with breeding cartoon cats

microsage
9pts1
www.fastcompany.com 8y ago

This New Hotel for Activists Encourages Community (And Pampering)

microsage
1pts0
www.bbc.com 8y ago

Blue quarry water dyed black to prevent swimming (2015)

microsage
2pts0
dri.freedesktop.org 8y ago

The linux kernel's “no stable api nonsense” document

microsage
2pts0
www.antipope.org 9y ago

Shaping the Future (2007)

microsage
1pts0
www.wired.com 9y ago

The Epic Saga of the Well (1997)

microsage
1pts0
mashable.com 9y ago

Thirsty Google dips back into China with Translate app

microsage
1pts0
www.sciencealert.com 9y ago

A 100 ton pile of waste has washed up on an island in Shanghai

microsage
1pts0
github.com 9y ago

Mayor of Boston Joins GitHub

microsage
1pts0
en.wikipedia.org 9y ago

Wikipedia:Lamest edit wars

microsage
1pts0
sanctum.geek.nz 9y ago

Vim Anti-Patterns

microsage
458pts238
fusion.net 9y ago

Kansas couple who live in a ‘digital hell’ sue mapping company MaxMind

microsage
62pts20
www.newyorker.com 9y ago

What Jane Jacobs Got Right and Wrong About Cities

microsage
3pts0
en.wikipedia.org 10y ago

Legislating the Value of Pi

microsage
2pts0
www.nytimes.com 11y ago

The best book covers of 2014

microsage
1pts0
www.newyorker.com 11y ago

The Socialist Origins of Big Data

microsage
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 13y ago

Yahoo.com redirects to mobile site on linux chrome

microsage
2pts2

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how this has anything to do with "cracking" the algorithm, or really with cracking anything.

YouTube openly admits to having a metric for scoring videos, which, of course they do. Then they accidentally, seemingly, leak the scores of videos. It turns out that content that is really successful on YouTube has a really high score. Meaning the score... works.

I suppose there's the question of whether the score is the cause or an effect of the success of these videos, though it's almost certainly a bit of both, since that's how virality and feedback loops work.

I know you didn't ask for suggestions, but here's mine: the one thing I care about a CRM doing really well is pipeline / funnel management, i.e, the ability to define a set of stages that a contact goes through to close a deal or reach some other desired result and track contacts as they move through the pipeline(s).

For example: unqualified lead -> qualified lead -> responded to email -> discussion with sales rep -> made purchase

Being able to organize my contacts in this way and quickly see which contacts are at which stages and easily move them between stages (ideally with an API endpoint) is a super powerful way to drive day to day workflow (and automations like follow up emails, assuming there's an API endpoint for querying).

I very much agree with this, particularly the part regarding having active social media profiles. I can see the practicality of using active social media as a heuristic for "realness", but I'd go so far as to say that this is a borderline unethical hiring practice. When companies systematically preference candidates with active social media profiles they're applying a market force that literally coerces remote workers into being active on systems that we know for a fact use psychologically manipulative practices to drive addictive behavior (not to mention the privacy and potentially negative psychosocial implications).

I don't want to have a big debate over what will and what won't happen in China in the future as I see you and I are working from very different assumptions and have very different approaches for extrapolating into the future. I'm just taking issue with the form of your previous comment, which took your personal fear of a Chinese policy that has not been suggested by the Chinese government, any China scholars, or even the most fearmongering clickbait hungry US reporter, and stated it as fact like so:

"Extreme claim not based in fact, stated as fact"

[link, implied to support the claim but doesn't]

When you do this, some percentage of people are going to take what you're saying at face value and believe that this is actual policy, especially since you seem to have provided a source (even though clicking on that source reveals it to be a paper thin cnet article that provides no support for what you're saying).

Frustratingly, you're doing it again here - you say "purchases for mobility and communication are restricted by social credit scores", and then you provide two links - one for cellphones and one for trains - that just say you need to use IDs to sign up for mobile plans and to buy train tickets in China, describing policies that existed long prior to social credit scores and have nothing to do with social credit scores. Those are also policies that exist in a lot of other countries, the first link you provide even says this in the first sentence:

"...joining many European and Asian countries in curbing the anonymous use of mobile technology."

Also, at least in my personal experience, you need an ID to buy a train ticket in the US as well. Also your source for that is a comment in a trip advisor thread about needing an ID to buy bus tickets, not train tickets, and consists entirely of people speculating and things they've heard second hand - a truly horrible source if ever I've seen one, and not in support of what you're saying even if it was a good source.

Without going through it, as I think it's pretty clear at this point that you're being very sloppy with your sources, that business insider article doesn't say what you're saying it says either.

Even looking past the many false claims here completely unsupported by the links you're providing, you can't just list a few things you don't like that seem "unfree" to you and then say you think that predicting keeping people that don't use an app regularly enough from buying food is a reasonable prediction. Or rather, go ahead and say it if you want but please just make it clear that it's your prediction rather than a fact like you did above, and be careful that the links you provide as supporting sources actually relate to what you're saying.

And please, please, please, be careful with how you summarize linked content - the way you do it here and appear to be doing it in your previous post is so inaccurate and so mixed with your own predictions and fears that I'm giving you a lot of benefit of the doubt by saying it's "sloppy" rather than "intentionally deceptive".

This is completely unfounded speculation not found in that article or in any other writing on the topic(s) (of social credit scores and the study the great nation app). Or possibly it's an attempt at some dark humor through hyperbole. Either way, I see a lot of these sort of extreme claims on HN whenever China comes up, and I think we'd all do better to discuss what's actually happening rather than our wildest fears. This type of speculation really muddies the waters and makes it hard to have a thoughtful discussion about anything China-related on here, and China is a big, complicated, important topic right now that deserves careful consideration. It also risks undermining legitimate criticisms of Chinese policy, or at least making them less believable, which I assume is the exact opposite of the intent of the poster here.

For what it's worth, I just tried opening the supposedly blocked site using Wechat, in China, on a Chinese phone (xiaomi) with a Chinese mobile plan (China unicom) and it works fine. Not sure if that's because it was never actually blocked or because they realized blocking it was a bad move and rolled it back.

No particular preference - I'm fairly comfortable in South East Asia already, so that would be slightly easier - but anywhere would be fine - Africa or Central America seem like good options as well. I just can't seem to find any established programs that let me donate my skill set anywhere. It's really surprising. I'd be happy to pay airfare and, assuming it's affordable, my own room and board.

The language in the indictment about BTC-e’s “criminal design” mimics the indictment against Liberty Reserve — an anonymous currency service taken down by law enforcement in 2013 — which also accused the online exchange of having a “criminal design” and a system “designed so that criminals could effect financial transactions under multiple layers of anonymity.”

Basing the indictment on the intent of the design - something hard to prove or reason about objectively - seems like a very slippery slope. Couldn't a similar statement be made about almost any system that protects user privacy? Or maybe they're referring to specific legal requirements not being conformed to rather than a general "criminal design"?

I'm also in Shanghai, on a China Telecom hardline, I get nothing from 1.1.1.1:

PING 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data.

--- 1.1.1.1 ping statistics --- 80 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 79915ms

What mobile network are you using?

This would be a great product for a non-profit to improve on. Some of the restrictions (only 7k characters stored, consumption of expensive resources like paper, ink ribbons, correction tape, etc) could be fairly easily and cheaply fixed by making a dedicated word processing machine instead of a typewriter out of something along the lines of a raspberry pi and a cheap low res display. Assuming there's a way to print from USB in prisons, or access to computers with email periodically (big assumptions that I haven't verified beyond what I've seen in popular media) this could provide an affordable lifeline to a lot of people.

I think this is a pretty distorted worldview. I'm confident most brick-layers would be happy to be taken for this kind of "complete ride by employers" in exchange for the cushy offices, offsite retreats, snacks, beer, endless perks, and $100k+ USD/yr salaries that software engineers tend to get in exchange.

>> I guess there's only one way to find out: try.

I like the lending library / coffee shop notion as well, and if you don't have a lot of runway to try this, you might be able to put out a signup sheet asking people to pre-commit to a multi-month membership up front - if there's not enough interest there to keep you afloat (or get you close), try something else. Should serve to at least get baseline validation on the concept before you sink any real time / money / effort into it.

Unless I'm misreading the question, it's actually a good deal trickier than FizzBuzz - the difficult part isn't computing the "sustainability scores" from the input strings, but in maximizing the combination of product offers across the set of offers and customers. It's actually analogous to a rather well studied combinatorial optimization problem (that I won't call out by name here so as to avoid letting potential job applicants look up the answer too easily) that has a fairly non-obvious pseudo-polynomial time dynamic programming solution. The naive solution is exponential time (and still a bit tricky for a novice). I suspect the intent of the question is to find applicants that give the optimal solution rather than the naive one (and to weed out applicants that can't give any correct solution), but I could be mistaken.

Even after applying your patch I had a little trouble getting everything to link properly on x86_64 Fedora (14). I ended up manually tweaking my make files after running qmake.

Changed the LIBS line (in MLDemos/Makefile, _AlgorithmPlugins/<n>/Makefile.<n>, _IOPlugins/<n>/Makefile.<n>) to:

LIBS = $(SUBLIBS) -L/usr/lib64 -L/usr/local/lib -lhighgui -lcv -lcxcore -lQtGui -lQtCore -lpthread

I suspect there's an easier way, but this at least allowed me to build and everything seems to work properly.

The concept is great. Love the low friction of the free form input as well as the public/private dichotomy.

One minor bug I encountered: If I enter "I like #foo" and save it, it is filed under the tag #foo. If I then edit that item to be "I like #food" it stays filed under it's original tag, #foo, rather than being moved to #food.

Edit: edited to clarify bug description.