firasd

35 ms·

421.
by firasd 8y ago
Interesting. Although the mobile gold-rush is considered over, I think there's still real potential in 'hyper-local' realtime information. There are some examples of this--Waze for traffic, the 'Citizen' app for cri
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by firasd 8y ago
I finally 'got' the concept of hypotheses after a couple stupid public policy experiments here in India. The 'Odd-Even' car rationing experiment in Delhi to reduce pollution was praised because it reduced traffic. Then t
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by firasd 8y ago
I think Vitalik (the author of this piece and co-founder of Ethereum) in particular thinks differently than Bitcoin creator Satoshi. Vitalik doesn't think there are any easy answers to things like how to incentivize mining and so forth
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by firasd 8y ago
Embedded images? I don't think the big weakness is lack of tracking, really, I think the big weakness is consumer adoption. The average person (outside of the journalist/influencer-types that continue to bemoan the loss of Google
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by firasd 8y ago
Product Recommendations. Trending Items (Top items being sold this week as opposed to last week, while filtering out items that are generally popular.) Much easier with Elasticsearch than SQL https://www.elastic.co/blog&#x2F
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by firasd 9y ago
Really interesting article. Weird thing is that in the social media era, humans ourselves seem behave in algorithmic ways. My Twitter feed is full of Beyonce worship every few months even though I've been mostly-indifferent to her musi
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by firasd 9y ago
I think Youtube creators aren't drawing the connection between media criticism of YT and the collateral damage to their earnings. It's easy to get mad at Youtube execs making policies, but Youtube is just reacting to bad PR. Youtu
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by firasd 9y ago
My general feeling about all the 'Uber-for-X'/food-delivery-startups that launched circa 2015 and mostly fizzled out is that the bottom line was (a) Unit Economics is an unrelenting problem, as Sam Altman describes here and (
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by firasd 9y ago
I've thought a WhatsApp equivalent for just families or even for specific events (like a wedding) would be cool. In addition to the regular chat window, there would be shared photos and so on. But I think the challenge is not the finan
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by firasd 9y ago
Um... if there's a social network based on Ethereum you can just scrape all their user data and not need an equivalent of the Facebook third-party developer platform at all.
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by firasd 9y ago
Right. The blog post is a good narrative over time but isn't super clear about how they solved the problem. If I understand correctly they broke down the big MySQL query into separate queries that the Go service processes/caches?
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by firasd 9y ago
One of the top comments suggests that there's a problem with the fuel switches in this model of helicopter that makes them prone to being accidentally moved. The surviving pilot says that's what happened here: http://ww
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by firasd 9y ago
Ghost in the Shell (1995) takes an interesting path away from the usual 'Frankenstein'-type AI narratives .
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by firasd 9y ago
Yes, I explained the similarities. Aadhaar is a core part of the 'India Stack', which is closely connected to the 'cashless' propaganda during the demonetization disaster. Aadhaar was already flawed as a concept when it
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by firasd 9y ago
I was very let down when I watched it some years ago--I was like, 'where's the climax?' But I've watched a few more arty ambiguous movies lately ('Under the Skin', 'The Neon Demon', 'Mother!&#x27
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by firasd 9y ago
Yes, even the very poor in India have voter IDs and the schemes in question already require a ration card. You started off by asking about how to reduce corruption (and I answered that as long as there are subsidies there is going to be lea
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by firasd 9y ago
The money goes into people's bank accounts which already have many know-your-customer ID requirements. If also requiring Aadhaar for bank accounts was the limit of its mandate there would be a lot less outrage. The creeping, maximalist
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by firasd 9y ago
First of all, Aadhaar is not just being used for welfare schemes. It is a giant database getting linked to everything. I wouldn't be surprised if it will soon be mandatory for booking flights. Plus much of the database has leaked. You
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by firasd 9y ago
As a tech professional, it's extra disturbing the way the government pushes these harebrained schemes by marketing them as 'Digital India', 'India Stack', etc. thus getting visiting dignitaries from other countries
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by firasd 9y ago
I think part of the solution here is going to need to be social. We need to move beyond the Gawker-like era where if there's an awkward photo of you out there suddenly there's perpetual mass shaming about it. As we grow to know mo
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by firasd 9y ago
I think by now many HNers will have grasped the idea behind "The core premise for React is that UIs are simply a projection of data into a different form of data", but here's a related good read from around the time this was
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by firasd 9y ago
The sad thing is that while the Indian government has all these regulations to prevent you from holding $2,000 of Bitcoin, or goes on adventures like demonetization disaster which affect ordinary working people, giant scams and irregulariti
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by firasd 9y ago
The New York Times has newsletters. They are 'promoting' their content by sending you email updates, but that doesn't mean they are equivalent to ICO scammers. Here's a response from MailChimp to a nonprofit educational
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by firasd 9y ago
The whole business model of MailChimp is to get people to pay to send emails, so obviously they are not averse to marketing per se. The reason people are unhappy is that if I can send "MySQL news this week" updates to my hypotheti
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by firasd 9y ago
> What collateral damage is being done? The damage is that if you're writing about cryptocurrency as a topic, the same way any media publication would (rather than trying to scam anyone or sell anything) you're still getting sh
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by firasd 9y ago
Barring egregious criminality, it doesn't make sense for someone who took a company from nothing (well, maybe a concept pioneered by Friendster and its antecedents) to $500 billion in market cap to suddenly resign. I feel this Cambridg
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by firasd 9y ago
In a nutshell, they come in handy when your 'Vanilla JS' involves a lot of changes to the DOM in response to user interactions or other events, and there are many such events.
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by firasd 9y ago
I think real ubiquitous computing will require a different technological approach. These Wi-Fi enabled devices that you can access with an app on your phone are clearly not working out too well. I look forward to tech like smart contact len
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by firasd 9y ago
Yeah and that's the problem. Gold bars haven't solved the problem of e.g. banks taking multiple days to clear deposits (not counting holidays and weekends!), or credit card processing fees, and I'm hoping Bitcoin provides com
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by firasd 9y ago
I'm glad to see the adoption of such changes. The 'hodl' crowd have changed their talking points to 'Bitcoin is an asset, not a currency' but as far as I'm concerned, if that's how it ends up--if you can&#

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