firasd

33 ms·

391.
by firasd 8y ago
I was also suspicious of MBS' 'anti-corruption' drive last year. There is no doubt that there's corruption among the rich and powerful but a sudden purge seemed more like a power consolidation move https://en.
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by firasd 8y ago
I think it can be useful for communicating emergency location... but yes it seems like you would need your GPS on in which case it's better if your phone just texts or otherwise shares the location with whomever needs it. Maybe it&#x27
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by firasd 8y ago
I think the Delhi metro is a good example of appropriate contemporary usage of brutalism: https://imgur.com/a/oJm9qHy If the concrete was plastered and painted it would look bad after only a couple months in the sun an
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by firasd 8y ago
I think for IF you'd want to be fat-adapted/low-carb. I don't know what IF practitioners recommend in general, but I don't think feeling hungry all day is 'doing it right'.
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by firasd 8y ago
I don't share most of the concerns people have about Facebook (including Om's here about sharing inauthentic life through photos)--I mostly just post text updates--but I wonder if their efforts over the last few years to move from
396.
by firasd 8y ago
Yeah, I wonder to what extent this dovetails with things like sexualization being reduced in American media... but that said I don't think the reduction in sexualization should be dismissed as 'prudery'. For example, air host
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by firasd 8y ago
Also, at least in the last couple centuries, the most famous 'nudes' in Western art depict women. The gender disparity suggests to me that sexuality and nudity is not completely separate...
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by firasd 8y ago
Fair enough, but China's main growth strategy was exporting manufactured goods. I'm not sure it is repeatable...
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by firasd 8y ago
Yeah. Many countries do that sort of thing, like the US imposing tariffs on car imports unless a some of the assembly is done domestically. I wouldn't necessarily endorse too much protectionism either—India has a clear example of the b
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by firasd 8y ago
We know the NSA sucks up a ton of internet traffic but what I'm referring to under the umbrella of tech debates is, for example, the wide availability of encryption (so random traffic cops can't unlock your phone), which is an ong
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by firasd 8y ago
Right now if the government wants some information from Facebook they have to go through a whole process... if the info is duplicated on a server hosted by a subsidiary in India, we don't have strong protections where you can just send
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by firasd 8y ago
As an Indian I'm not sure I endorse all this as 'anti-colonialism'. This is a bunch of government bureaucrats who want e.g. data to be stored in the country so they can access personal info more easily...
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Enhance.Computer, “a cyberpunk game you play by yelling at your computer.”(enhance.computer)
3 points by firasd 8y ago|0 comments
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by firasd 8y ago
Oh, very cool! My app is actually meant to be like a 'newsfeed for tweets' that shows the top 10 tweets of the day engaged by people you follow, so it vacuums up a bunch of tweets (from tweets engaged--liked, retweeted, etc--by fr
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Browsable Database of Russian Agency-Bought Facebook Ads(russian-ira-facebook-ads.datasettes.com)
3 points by firasd 8y ago|4 comments
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by firasd 8y ago
I've been building an app that (among other things) can kind of generate this for Twitter--if people are discussing a link, it finds tweets about that link, quote-tweets of tweets about that link, and replies to tweets about that link
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by firasd 8y ago
Seems at least from social media discussion that people are less inclined to seek their fortune on the 'open market' nowadays, since Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft are paying so much, and startup equity has become even more o
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by firasd 8y ago
Reminds me of a quick, classic read from GK Chesterton: "A Piece of Chalk" https://www.chesterton.org/a-piece-of-chalk/
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by firasd 8y ago
What I've realized over the past couple years while working on my own projects is that I always could use a 'platform'. I wrote a new article? Would be nice to get it to an audience. A social media campaign? Would be nice to
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by firasd 8y ago
Yes I'm talking about victims being jailed for not co-operating as witnesses. Here's an article about it: "Across the country, domestic violence victims who turn to law enforcement for help can be punished if they later decid
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by firasd 8y ago
Something that makes me uncomfortable which is not directly touched upon on this article: in America, being a prosecutor is often a stepping stone to being a politician. Which (among other career imperatives) is an incentive to be a 's
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by firasd 8y ago
It makes me profoundly sad how the world (or at least my world, mostly far left, liberal, educated, etc.) has turned so hard against Julian Assange. He's a hero in every sense of the word. If this Assange guy hadn’t gone all-in on s
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by firasd 8y ago
Here in India, Netflix costs ₹500/mo. Amazon Prime costs ₹999 for the whole year. Both are much pricier compared to regular cable TV, which gives you hundreds of channels for a few hundred rupees per month. So there's a saturation
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by firasd 8y ago
As a developer I'm not too happy about the trend I've seen in the past couple years of 'monolithic' WordPress themes with tons of JS and other code, because making even simple changes to them can get extremely complicate
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by firasd 8y ago
Interesting work. I wrote a bit about optimizing WP here: https://hackernoon.com/dont-brake-for-fonts-3-web-performanc... The most interesting thing I learned is that the number of HTTP requests (not just the total file s
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Story behind Digg v4's 'catastrophic launch'(lethain.com)
2 points by firasd 8y ago|0 comments
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by firasd 8y ago
Nice work! I feel like it can provide some perspective about things like nationalism, etc. Like a minor version of the 'overview effect'.
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by firasd 8y ago
Interesting comments about a similarly famous study with a similar gist, the Milgram experiment: "Many other studies, such as Soloman Asch’s famous experiment[1] demonstrating that people will ignore the evidence of their own eyes in c
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Sorting function that only works when you're looking at it(twitter.com)
3 points by firasd 8y ago|0 comments
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by firasd 8y ago
The fact that these 'sting operations' by private agencies were intended for planting in newspapers is an interesting issue. Reminds me of an article about how a BBC report about language tests for immigrants caused the UK governm

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