smanek

44 ms·

241.
by smanek 17y ago
Probability. Drake's equation suggests there are millions of intelligent species in the universe (assume 1,000,000). Thus, the chances of us really being the first is only 1 in a million. Taking into account that the Earth was a relatively
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by smanek 17y ago
It might not be a terrible deal ... There are programmers I would have paid to watch work when I was starting out. There are still people I'd work for for free, if I got to observe them first-hand and listen to their thought process. It all
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by smanek 17y ago
if you plot track record vs. productivity you'll end up with a (largely) normally distributed curve Are you saying people with great track records are likely to be very unproductive? That seems unlikely ...
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by smanek 17y ago
Yes. If they aren't profitable, I would hesitate to pay them for my backups, since I might doubt they would be around N years from now.
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by smanek 17y ago
Pretend I donate a hundred dollars to NPR. I get a tote, mug, and some other stuff that I might value (i.e., otherwise purchase) at $50, but is nominally valued at $10. I then get to deduct $90 from income on my tax return, and assuming I'm
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by smanek 17y ago
writing the same language server and client is obviously easier (fewer context shifts, smaller code base, etc). It's also asynchronous (non-blocking) so you can run thousands of connections out of a single thread (instead of RoR's silly 1-c
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by smanek 17y ago
Well, I think it's still a little too early to tell if you blew it ;-) Raising capital != successful company, so we'll have to wait a few more years to see if I can make something of the opportunity. There were some significant problems wit
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by smanek 17y ago
My company was rejected from YC W09, but raised $1.5M in VC 2 months later. We just buckled down, and launched anyways (ahead of schedule!). Once you get users and have some promising data, raising money is definitely doable.
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by smanek 17y ago
Nice - I thought you were being sarcastic! I don't know if I can make it in person, but I sure hope they tape it and put it online :-D
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by smanek 17y ago
If you set up your own CA and you distribute a CA keyring with only that CA key, you avoid the what-about-China problem. But you still have a heck of a lot of moving parts which can break. It's not fun - but I have done it before. I would
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by smanek 17y ago
What's wrong with using client-authenticated SSL with predistributed keys (and only trusting the pre-distributed keys)? I trust a well-tested TLS implementation more than I trust whatever crypto I can manage to write myself. Also, to provid
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Spark Capital backs Postabon (Lisp-based startup)(pehub.com)
1 points by smanek 17y ago|0 comments
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by smanek 17y ago
This has got to be the worst tech news article I've ever read. "Math is hard - but it sounds cool." This one gives a much better explanation, while still being accessible: http://www.hpcwire.com/features/IBM-Invents-Short-Cut-to-Ass... Ro
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by smanek 17y ago
Stupid question - but how does one go about becoming a what.cd member?
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by smanek 17y ago
Searches are likely done off slaves - I suspect that is not presented properly because of the oversimplification of the diagram. You can just use a few bits from an MD5 hash to decide server as long as you know how many servers you're going
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by smanek 17y ago
The Google blog says: The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police. What more can you reasonably expect them to do?
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by smanek 17y ago
I probably should have been more clear - I was more curious about why he felt the need to bring up genders.
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by smanek 17y ago
What's your point? Granted, I have no idea what they're doing that requires 7 people (and only 2 coders ...).
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by smanek 17y ago
In my experience the cost (in terms of engineering time, if nothing else) of supporting degradable javascript is rarely worth it for a consumer facing startup. The extra "N" hours it takes to support something that a fraction of a percent o
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by smanek 17y ago
Do you have a source on Twitter disabling basic auth in June? That would be pretty huge, and the API documentation says: While we have no plans in the near term to require OAuth, new applications should consider it best practice to develop
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by smanek 17y ago
Yeah, except YC takes ~5% while the annoying business c-founder type take ~80%. And I'd argue YC even provides considerably more value than most 'business' co-founders.
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by smanek 17y ago
Just go with Compass and be done with ;-) It admittedly makes deploys a little more annoying though (particularly if you aren't already using Ruby).
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by smanek 17y ago
As far as I know, it is supported (get it here: ftp://ftp.clozure.com/pub/release/1.4/ccl-1.4-windows.zip). Never personally tested it though (Mac + Linux guy), so take this with a grain of salt.
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by smanek 17y ago
I'd be very surprised if Apple constituted a monopoly in the phone (or even smart phone) market.
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by smanek 17y ago
I attended the last OAF in LA, and highly recommend it. I got to meet lots of interesting entrepreneurs and angels - several of whom had great ideas for our company that we'd never considered. One of the startups (not mine, unfortunately ;
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by smanek 17y ago
My company ( http://postabon.com ) is hiring 1-2 great programmers in NYC! These are our first technical hires, so you'd have a huge impact early on in a growing startup! Experience with Git, Linux, a dynamically typed language (Python, Rub
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by smanek 17y ago
Right you are. I've worked in 3 states, and they all work that way, so I mistakenly generalized. Some research suggests that it really varies state by state (even the states that are generally 'at will' each have different exceptions) - so
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by smanek 17y ago
Ah, fair enough. I (mistakenly) assumed it was in the US - it sounds much more reasonable if it took place elsewhere.
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by smanek 17y ago
That anecdote was worth it just for 'Johnny von Neumann' ;-) I've generally heard that most scientists of the day considered von Neumann the smartest man in science (he'd have to be - he single handedly revolutionized several branches of CS
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by smanek 17y ago
I have trouble believing your story (assuming it takes place in the states ...) - do you have any more details? It's (thankfully) really hard to win an unfair dismissal suit since we're all 'at will' employees by default. You can fire someo

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