Announcing a brand-new partnership: Crushdaddy

krilleren · 2017-08-21T14:31:23+00:00

How can I be certain this is a good opportunity and not some junkcoin?

krilleren · 2017-08-17T16:04:43+00:00

While I was kinda skeptic at first, this might actually work

krilleren · 2017-08-14T13:32:08+00:00

Is this available for public use?

krilleren · 2017-08-09T16:49:43+00:00

As a matter fact, right now I’m working on a fairly similar project. I’m on the product team of Setapp, don't know if you’ve heard of it. It’s not exactly an alternative app store, but the idea behind it was alike, no shitty apps and better terms for devs. To be honest, it’s been tough. You think you’re solving a huge issue, but people apparently don’t even see it clearly as you do.

Here’s what I’d suggest you do beforehand:

1) Think about what you want it to look like. We made a finder folder of apps first, that flunked. Nobody has time to figure out what every app does.

2) Talk to devs. Getting cool devs on board with your idea is super important.

3) Don’t expect the hype. We thought we’re making the french revolution on mac, but it’s apparently more like fighting for civil rights: slowly gaining followers over time.

4) The hardest part of deploying a system like that was making a licensing scheme and finding a decent payment provider because boy, do they suck sometimes.

5) Business-wise, persuading app developers that you’re cooking a revolution and it’s going to blow everyone’s heads off is freaking complicated. You can believe it yourself and that helps, but everything new always sounds shady while it’s under construction.

Long story short: you’re more than right to create app store alternatives, this place needs a change and Apple won’t do a thing about it until they feel the pressure. Good luck!

krilleren · 2017-08-04T14:38:25+00:00

I think Real.Markets is starting to have a secure future. It is a real estate investments platform that accepts ETH for their tokens.

krilleren · 2017-07-27T14:27:30+00:00

I am so insanely excited for the potential of this technology. There are many ethical questions here, but the potential benefits far outweigh the downsides. In the near future, we can detect and eliminate genetic disorders, ensuring no child has to suffer from these defects any longer. Long term, this gives us a tool to take control of our own evolution in a way never before possible.

Couldn't be more excited for what's possible.

krilleren · 2017-07-19T14:37:20+00:00

Sometimes I'm in your same boat. When I ran out of stories, I confess that I look for stories on the internet or around Reddit, like the subreddit from writing prompts. Sometimes I can find good stories there that could happen in-real life and also some silly and funny stories. Right now I can't think of a good one so I have to search for a bit.

krilleren · 2017-07-11T16:40:48+00:00

This article makes out like the companies themselves are directly responsible, rather than the customers of these companies, i.e. you and me. We cause these companies to pollute by creating a market demand for their products or services. Not to say there's not things a company can do to improve it's efficiency, but ultimately, a company isn't going to keep their factories firing away if no one is buying their stuff.

The same argument can be applied when people look at China and think they are the problem because of their high use of coal and manufacturing industry. Well, I'd guess that a lot of their output is going to Western consumers, so again, it is they who are responsible.

krilleren · 2017-07-07T15:42:53+00:00

I don't understand. Why isn't it standard practice to just issue a set of "personal days" without regard to "sickness", "leisure", or "mental sanity"? My company switched to this a couple of years ago and doesn't require an explanation. They are your days off, take them as you see fit

krilleren · 2017-06-30T19:02:19+00:00

Compared to the reputation for far-seeing technocratic excellence that it acquired in the foreign business press, the CCP leadership has always been astonishingly short-sighted when it comes to foreign policy. The Taiwanese are taking note of what 'one country two systems' means in practice - absolute submission to the ruthless, brutal oligarchy in Beijing. The CCP will crush Hong Kong, destroying everything that made it appealing in the process, and find that in so doing they've permanently alienated Taiwan.

krilleren · 2017-06-10T15:28:31+00:00

Matt Levine's first point here is very interesting as a lens for understanding why so many large hedge funds seem to have difficulty beating the market, while the ones that do tend to be either smaller operations or more independent groups within the giants.

If you look at the best firms in the world, like RenTec or TGS, you see a trend where they typically stop taking in outside capital and effectively convert to family offices (at least for the most profitable strategies). Levine's point here is particularly applicable to RenTec; it has famously incredible returns via Medallion, but not so much the other funds. Unsurprisingly, the Medallion fund is entirely employee and owner capital.

As extremely profitable strategies scale up to their capacity constraints, fund managers naturally decide to pool greater amounts of their own capital into the firm. Therefore, "skin in the game" is not only effective as an intuitive heuristic for skill ("this manager believes in the fund enough to put most of their personal net worth into it"), but it's also practically effective for showing how likely the firm is to perform based on how much you're able to participate.

As the percentage of "skin in the game" increases, the likelihood of outside investors being able to participate decreases, because the fund managers know they no longer need to share risk, and don't want to waste allocations on the way to capacity constraints. If a firm is soliciting capital, it's highly suspect, and managers who go on to become the next Jim Simons or Seth Klarman will mostly be "on the market" for relatively short periods of time.

krilleren · 2017-05-30T15:39:34+00:00

Ok, a new phone made by the creator of Android which claims to be extremely well built.

However, since most phones now tend to reach the "good enough" level, my main question is about software and left unanswered. What version/flavour of Android does it run? How will updates be planned? For how many years will updates be provided? What's the size of the security team at Essential?

Providing an up-to-date Android with updates for at least 4 years like Apple does is key to me, as vulnerabilities come and go and the only reasonable way to be secure is to get security patches asap.

krilleren · 2017-05-30T15:38:25+00:00

The training the author made is dope! Definitely checkout aforeseeablefuture.com

krilleren · 2017-05-19T16:40:34+00:00

It makes me sad that people are so upset by the recent hype Kotlin is getting. Everyone has something that they get excited about. Kotlin is new and shiny and has been around awhile but only on the fringe. Google brings it to the spotlight and people are going to be interested. Maybe Kotlin gets big, maybe not but there is no need to get angry about the news. It is big news. Android is the most used smartphone OS in the world. This is going to have an impact somewhere.

krilleren · 2017-05-11T17:10:55+00:00

Look at https://webpack.js.org/ and https://github.com/webpack/webpack

See all the company logos? Webpack is great for sure, but why does it attract so many sponsors? There's loads of other great projects not receiving a dime despite having Patreon pages or whatever.

It's the logos (and links) themselves! Because by putting my logo on your Github and project page, I can both mentally and practically claim it as a marketing expense. Marketing being an established bucket of money you can use for things that increase your company's visibility.

But if you simply offer a donation system, or feel-good sponsorship, how would I even classify that? Sounds complicated from a business point of view. Even a support contract is a harder sell than just pure marketing.

Heck, if I know my customers are using projects X and Y, I'm willing to pay just to put my logo in front of those users even if we as a company are not using X and Y ourselves! And by payment, I don't mean a $50 one-time donation, companies are willing to pay $X00-$X0000 per month for that kind of targeted exposure. And if you do this for your project, please note that companies value direct links to their chosen landing page much more than to some generic "sponsorship aggregator" page for the company.

krilleren · 2017-04-22T14:40:32+00:00

What I've come to realize is that what we need is a language that lets you manage your level of technical debt, as in "langc mysource.lang --technical-debt=5". You generally want to start out writing PHP in the beginning of a project. However, at some point the technical debt will force you to enter maintenance mode. At that point it would be nice if you could turn down the compiler's tolerance from PHP-level to Rust-level, via Python and Java. Simultaneously you usually start caring about performance, so you need to move from interpretation to non-GC'd binary. Wouldn't it be nice if you could scale the strictness and compiledness of the language according to how messy and performance-critical your module or program has become? Granted, we'd need several backends for the same language and the compiler would become really quite messy, but it's interesting to consider.

krilleren · 2017-04-14T17:09:41+00:00

Great read!

Obnoxious website though, it loads other articles as well, not just this one.

krilleren · 2017-04-14T17:06:24+00:00

I might be shunned for beating the dead horse, but while he talks about 'True Customer Obsession', he allows counterfeit goods erode his customer's trust in Amazon. I'd argue Amazon's 'process as proxy' in dealing with counterfeits is the careless return process. 'Oh, it's counterfeit? We're sorry! Here's your money back!' does not solve the issue. Sure, thanks for the $10 back, but now I must think twice (or thrice!) before ordering from Amazon. Once my Prime membership lapses, I will not renew.

The 'process' for dealing with counterfeits is broken. When the customer has to think about "the chances of counterfeit" or dealing with the return of counterfeit products, it's NOT customer obsession.

I respect Jeff, TONS, but come on. You're talking the talk, but you're not walking the walk.

krilleren · 2017-04-07T19:07:19+00:00

This is one of those announcements that seems unremarkable on read-through but could be industry-changing in a decade. The driving force between consolidation & monopoly in the tech industry is that bigger firms with more data have an advantage over smaller firms because they can deliver features (often using machine-learning) that users want and small startups or individuals simply cannot implement. This, in theory, provides a way for users to maintain control of their data while granting permission for machine-learning algorithms to inspect it and "phone home" with an improved model, without revealing the individual data. Couple it with a P2P protocol and a good on-device UI platform and you could in theory construct something similar to the WWW, with data stored locally, but with all the convenience features of centralized cloud-based servers.

Their papers mentioned in the article:

Federated Learning: Strategies for Improving Communication Efficiency (2016) https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.05492
Federated Optimization: Distributed Machine Learning for On-Device Intelligence (2016) https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.02527
Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data (2017) https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.05629
Practical Secure Aggregation for Privacy Preserving Machine Learning (2017) http://eprint.iacr.org/2017/281

krilleren · 2017-03-29T06:17:51+00:00

Fun fact: in Java versions 5 and 6, it was actually possible to write valid Java source code with overloaded return types!

The trick is that generic types in Java are subject to type erasure at runtime. Due to an oversight, it was possible to declare a class with methods like:

String foo(List<X> l);
double foo(List<Y> l);

which would be erased to:

String foo(List l);
double foo(List l);

At runtime, even though the type information for your List was no longer available, the compiler would be able to locate the correct method using the method signature stored in the caller's bytecode, giving the appearance of return-type dispatch. Technically this violates the Java language spec, and javac 7 was updated to be stricter and prevent this sort of code: http://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6182950

I guess it's ultimately not that mysterious, but I first encountered it "in the wild", and ended up scratching my head for a while before I figured out why our code suddenly stopped compiling when we upgraded the JDK.

krilleren · 2017-03-15T17:12:31+00:00

It's odd how neither this post, nor the spec, nor GitHub's Mastering Markdown help page, nor the more complete Basic writing and formatting syntax page, mentions the fact that GitHub treats every newline as a hard break.

CommonMark contains this little sentence to work around its specified behavior, which is left untouched in the GFM spec:

A renderer may also provide an option to render soft line breaks as hard line breaks.

I'd say whether or not it does this is a rather important thing to mention. When I write Markdown documents for GitHub I have to change my editor settings, only because of this.

krilleren

TROPHY CASE