brandon_wirtz's comments

SESTA FOSTA is heavily criticized because people are worried about keyword based censorship. The Recognant API doesn't use keywords, it use NLU, and so it is much less likely to flag a post that is about the sex of a litter of puppies for sale, and much more likely to flag an ad looking to trade rent money for a hand job.

Yeah, actually they will. It isn't in xls, it is typically in an XML format.

and since google provides the info to the NSA on demand does it matter which of them does the collection?

I was feeling sentimental on Thanksgiving, but I also think it is important for younger entrepreneurs to see that startups aren't something you build over night, and many don't start when they are founded, many start decades earlier.

Finding the prime factors of large numbers is hard. Cryptography is almost exclusively about picking two Large Primes, Multiplying them, and then using that very large, very hard to factor number as a key.

This is overly simple, but it is the very core of every modern crypto. So understanding it is the best place to start.

Your enthusiasm as great. But be aware by saying you think this is something you can do in a week you are telling the world you think programming is a semi-skilled job.

I learned to weld when I was 7. I can make art or patch up a broken plow. A real welder can make a boat because all his seams are water tight, and cam patch body work because his seams are so smooth. 27 years of welding as a hobby or for bits of maintenance and I am not a welder.

Picking a name that conflicts with a major trade mark seems like a bad idea.

If this is the case then every developer working at a 12 hour a day Start up, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (who all are anti-moonlighting) are bad developers.

I don't have side projects. My one main project is all consuming enough that side projects would be distractions. The only distractions I can afford are enough to keep my live/work balance so I don't burn out.

Natural Language Understanding is how we talk to our devices, and while the tech savvy interact with phones like they learn commands for a programming language, the majority of people want to interact with their phone in a more natural way.

While many people don't want to "talk" to their phone the truth is the ability to give commands quickly via voice can be a huge advantage over touch interfaces. It is much easier to say "I ate a banana" rather than open a calorie counting app, select the banana, and exit the app.

As Google starts to get creepy hardware companies are looking to provide the same functionality with out all of the big brother built in to the phones. This is creating a gold rush for the human resources to make this possible.

This has been going around along with the Chemo Therapy doesn't work thread.

The problem with people like the author is they think all cancer is the same. They try to apply information about Hodgkins to non-hodgkins. They think "Breast cancer" is a disease, not a symptom. There over 40 different cancer causes for breast cancer. And the treatments that work are primarily based on the cause not the visible symptom.

This makes studies hard. Most people never learn the cause of their cancer. We are not fortunate enough to always have a single known cause that says "yes you worked in a nuclear waste plant for 6 years" and know that was the cause.

Chemo for example in Hodgkin's Lymphoma increase your 5 year survival chances by 45%. But if you have Smoking related Lung Cancer it is less than 2% difference.

Nature.com rarely produces articles that are informed. They push an agenda of Holistic medicine at the expense of scientific research. I am all for non-traditional medicine, but I don't discount the advances from University and Clinical research.

Was this in English? Maybe that would help explain how the author got so much wrong.

I love API's. I love sharing API's with others. I might have even gone along with the article if it said that API's were the best way to show that you have a technology that isn't patentable and enforce a measure of control over it.

You could write a TOS that says that users of the API can't reverse engineer, compete with for a period of one year, blah, blah, blah.

As such you could rope some companies which would do some "build or buy" research in to using your API and then not being able to not use you after.

I don't really believe that, but I could at minimum not faulted the author for this belief.

This article is just a piece of marketing filled with misinformation and poorly written. Don't take any legal advice from it, and don't take any business advice from it.

The author doesn't understand copyright. There is a difference between Legal, and beyond prosecution.

You as an individual living in a far off land (Australia) can't be prosecuted in Australia for copying a copy you legally obtained in the US. There is no extradition that will allow for the US to come get you in Australia. So if you copied, and you never visited the US you would be Safe from prosecution. You would not be legal. (There is a difference)

If you were Amazon. You have locations in the US and Australia. You are an international entity. You can not distribute Gatsby in Australia, because you are violating the copyright of the country of the original copyright, and you have presence in that country.

So the author's headline is wrong. You aren't "Legal" you are just beyond prosecution.

This isn't to say that I think Gatsby shouldn't be public domain... Just that the author is wrong.

I do this with Squid, or Fiddler depending on platform.

I have done a similar trick for the entire lan by doing port forwarding on DD-WRT and similar.

I pretty routinely highjack ports as domains for doing local testing. If I want to make sure that I'm hitting my own cached version of an API that I need to consume from a third party I just serve it from local. That way I can dev offline, or guarantee that I will always get the same response, or a much faster response. I could Mock it, or do a number of other things, but it is often nice to be able to see what is going over the wire, and using a proxy to handle the redirect and port change is one of the best ways to do so.

If only it were so simple. And if you think it is that's probably because you don't understand.

Frontend often is WAY more than UI. When you are building a client/server application frontend can be far more than UI. Take Call Of Duty for an example. UI is not appropriate for all of the Client side development.

Take Google Now as an example. While most the heavy lifting is on the server, the Frontend is also doing data gathering, and calls to the Database on the phone that stores contacts. So a lot of the frontend is not UI.

For our TLDR Plugin for chrome we started out using Readability.JS and when that needed tweaks we ended up moving to server side readability. But before that, much of the Backend logic that we had been using for our search engine was being put in to the client ported from Python to JavaScript. That was not UI, but was very much frontend.

I think the people who want to name Frontend developers UI Developers tend to be the people that think that Building HTML is development rather than Design and Implementation.

True Frontend is about making appropriate decisions about which things live on Client and which live on server.

My company's core product (http://www.stremor.com ) is designed to take unstructured data from text and convert it to structured data. But also look at qualitative factors from language and assign them quantitative values.

In working on a "detector" to determine if an author was paid to write an article about a company which we got working most of the time. I discovered something else we could detect.

Only in women bloggers I noticed that every so often after profiling how the author writes that suddenly I'd get a whole bunch of false positives for "paid shill" detection.

Turns out we were detecting a change in optimism. Which was what we were trying to detect, but that wasn't because of monetary incentives to appear optimistic, it was because the women had learned they were pregnant.

I also did analysis to see if I could detect bloggers that were turning suicidal and could actually. But I would get false positives for things like "was diagnosed with a terminal illness" or "Lost a parent or spouse".

While I wasn't detecting exactly what I was looking for, imagine the possibilities of being able to know when an employee had a life changing event, and be able to offer them the help they need.

Going through the corpus of Enron Emails I can detect when employees started to know when they were doing something wrong.

I don't know that all of this data is "good" or that I would want an employer to have all the metrics I can extract, but for things like scouring the Enron emails for witnesses that would be sympathetic and willing to testify it could be amazing. For monitoring people with depression to make sure they aren't getting worse it seems like it would be worth the privacy invasion.

I also think I might be willing to let a machine do things that I wouldn't let a human do.

You can trademark anything that isn't already trademarked, but you have to defend the trademark if you want to enforce the trademark.

Trademarks are a lot like patents, the due diligence when filing is on the filer for the most part. The agency only checks against the filings. So you can get a trademark for Hackathon, but if you tried to enforce it you would lose if there are prior uses by others.

You could get a Trademark in an alternate context. Like if you decided to combine a marathon with a machete and have a run through the jungle. That could be a new use for Hackathon that would be unlikely to cause confusion in the market.

That said I'm sure they will send some C&D's and scare some people in to not using the term.

The "Hon" trademark for a Baltimore restaurant springs to mind. Where the owner tried to extract money from the city of Baltimore, but she ended up dropping the trademark after community backlash.

I am the lone Windows user in my office. I could use a post on how to go from Mac Development to Windows. Only half kidding.

I don't want to make this a Win vs. Mac thread, but I think it is important for both sides to understand there are things that are good about each.

The Mac guys get a closer to Linux environment, which makes much of the stuff that is happening on Web servers behave more closely in dev to the way they do in production.

Windows has a long history of dev tools, so there are some really great Large File (>4 GB) editors, memory inspectors, inspection proxies (Fiddler for example) which make my Mac devs jealous from time to time.

But I am routinely jealous of how easy it was when I was on a Mac to do installs of Libraries using Yum and such. Plus since we are a mostly Python Shop that is quite a bit easier on a Mac.

I am a long time user of Visual Studio, but there are a lot of great IDE's now so you do have choices, and because many of those are Multiplatform you do have more choice, even if your team mates don't share that choice. (Sublime, Pycharm, Eclipse)

I think most the people who write these posts are clueless as to what burnout is. You can give people money, pats on the back, pizza parties but if you run them hard enough they will burn out.

I have been working without rest for a year on a project (http://www.stremor.com) that has had huge amounts of progress. It pays well enough, I like the people I work with, we have achieved great things, and we have gotten recognition. So by all these measures I should have no burn out.

I have been burned out several times. You can't do genius level work 40 hours a week for 52 weeks and not burn out. The Addiction to progress I have had me doing 80 and 100 hour weeks. I was burning my self out. Not because my needs weren't met, but because the brain just can't do that much work for that long.

I would sleep through an entire weekend after 2 weeks of 100 hours. But the addiction to progress and the excitement of the work meant that I didn't want to "go play".

What it really comes down to is people have limits. Those limits are additive. If you are at 40% of your financial stress limit, and 40% of your relationship stress limit, and 40% of your Micro-Manager driving you batty limit, then you are at 120% of your limits. And you can run for a while at over 100% but not indefinitely.

Even when all my Career, financial, physical, sexual, and other limits are at 5% if my Hours of intense concentration limit has been hit I will burn out. And so will employees.

The task of a good manager is to run an employee up to the point of the Mental limits and make sure all those other limits are at 5% so they can maximize the employee output. Every time you push the employee at 150% for 2 days, you need to let them recover at 75% for 4 days.

Burn out isn't a bad thing as long as you can refuel and keep going. It is about managing the sprints, and preventing the burn out from causing failures.

Disrupt has always been a strange name for the conference since almost every startup showing there has been a clone of another larger more popular startup.

I have literally had conversations with founders there that went,

"So tell me how you are different from Facebook,"

"Well we built our entire platform on node so it is infinitely scalable"

"Is that a problem with Facebook now? That it doesn't scale?"

"Well no, but we also re-imagined the interface"

"It looks like facebook, if Facebook was done in Twitter Bootstrap"

"That's exactly Right!"

"Did users ask for that?"

"Well No, but we also added support for sharing code snippets"

"That's interesting, so it is really a Facebook for Developer communities"

"Well No..."

"Do you think most people's mom and 4th grade english teacher want to see the code snippets in your timeline?"

"We don't really have a timeline, everything shared happens in realtime like the front page of hacker news"

"So if my friends want to see the pictures I took last week of my trip to Belize they can't see them?"

If you want to be disruptive you have to do something truly new. Something that will change the way everyone else does things. You also have to be prepared for all the knock-offs that might have better marketing, or better connections, so you should also have a bit of something no one can duplicate in your core.

The Disrupt conference has always been a showing of MVP's and betas that aren't even an MVP. But disruption occurs when you have something that is more than an MVP it is a Product no one can live without afterwards.

Law dictates that information on the breech must convey the type of data that was breached and the format which the information was stored in. If you say encrypted, legally it must be.

Reputation.com has an affiliate program they therefore have a presence in all states.

As a noted hacker, security expert, SEO, and Analyst. Short of posting the place to buy it. Yeah, I am the definition of a credible source. There is a reason I speak to the ACLU on such matters. And yes I already reported the where to law enforcement.

My understanding as explained to me by CERN, You can build a Time Crystal but it is tough to observe it after. The object don't so much spin through infinity, as infinity spins through them. Building a Time Crystal changes how it moves through Space-Time. Since we are moving through Space-Time really quickly if you change for lack of a better word the inertia of matter by changing how it moves through Time it won't stand still for very long, (well not relative to you) this makes observation nearly impossible.