m0hit's comments

m0hit | 4 years ago | on: Simple mathematical law predicts movement in cities around the world

Some of the specific examples in the article seemed off to me too. However, I did love the book Scale by Geoffrey West who is one of the authors of the paper discussed in the article.

At the very least, the book is a great introduction to the many different aspects that scale up with city size.

m0hit | 4 years ago | on: Launch HN: InstaKin (YC S21) - Help immigrants to manage tasks in home countries

Congratulations on the launch! I’ve hoped for a service like this to help with documentation related tasks, for simple things like delivering gifts and often timers to support friends and family in need.

One thing as a US immigrant I have to do pretty often is return to my home country for a visa renewal which includes various tasks including documentation collection, payments in home currency, transportation when I go back to the embassy, photocopies, printing etc. Supporting visa processes could be an good package to offer.

A few things I could not learn in my cursory look:

- How does pricing work? Given that being misuse of funds is one of the primary problems you’re solving I’d want to know how the payments process works, what is the platform cost, and how is misuse prevented.

- The top call to action on your website is “Post a request” which is great! The secondary action for me is “remember this website” for when I need it. Love the fact that I can install the app, but the ability to quickly add an email/WhatsApp number to my contacts is probably the best recall value for your service. Offering users a way to start a thread without needing to post a request would solve the same need.

Congratulations again! This is a great idea.

m0hit | 5 years ago | on: Launch HN: Stacksi (YC W21) – Doing Security Questionnaires, So Your Team Isn't

Wow! Looking forward for you to succeed. Filling out security and privacy questionnaires, especially when growing fast leads to so much wasted time.

More importantly, because of the rush the knowledge generated during the answering of questions is not captured in a reusable format.

I'm curious if could generate Security and Privacy white papers for companies that need to arm their sales/marketing teams using the information collected while fill out incoming questionnaires.

m0hit | 5 years ago | on: Show HN: Beeper – All Your Chats in One App

Thanks! This is the only piece of information I needed before giving Beeper a chance. I could not find it on the Beeper home page as a callout or in the FAQs, and it would probably be good to add.

Ideally I would not want to run the whole stack if I understand how the E2E encryption is managed.

m0hit | 5 years ago | on: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

Thank you for this summary.

A slightly tangential question I'd love to get more perspective on is the impact of the virus being "man made" on our current predicament. Even assuming that the virus was not naturally evolved, and its characteristics are partly caused due to human interventions we're still stuck finding a vaccine, medication and ways of reducing transmission.

Is there still a thread here that this virus is evidence that humans can possibly create chimeric viruses? In my limited understanding, using protein sequences to modify viruses is generally believed to be possible.

m0hit | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: Best practices for log format?

Have you looked into https://brandur.org/logfmt?

Having lived with various points between the 'awesome to read' and 'simplest to parse' I currently favor simpler parsing and investing in tooling that makes manual parsing of logs easier.

Of course the decision should include the scale of the microservices. There would be no benefit in optimizing too much for readability if the number of requests to your services is so high that you would need complex filtering before you can look at them.

Another way to cut down the bike shedding is to go with a library that wraps around the format you choose. We built GitHub.com/clever/Kayvee and have changed the format a few times. However since everyone uses the kayvee libraries at Clever it's not too crazy to change the format.

Hopefully this was useful. Apologies for the disconnected paragraphs - on public transit :)

m0hit | 12 years ago | on: Global land temperatures since 1900 visualized

Interesting idea, and great visualization. I do think that the timeline controls could be smoother (more refined).

Winters are more exciting imo - but there is no way to copy a URI for a specific time :(.

m0hit | 12 years ago | on: Show HN: a Node.js personal cloud you can hack, host and delete

I'm curious to look at how this compares the locker project[1] or the more limited (but actively developed) Singly Hallway[2].

The locker project had a very clear data model to share data such as contacts, statuses, links, places etc. But more importantly it was easy to sync data from existing cloud services. Looking briefly at cozy-data-system, it does not seem like it is designed for applications to easily share data.

In any case, this project and others like it are really interesting to me as a hobby developer. Having structured data that I create and consume on local systems makes it a lot more enticing to run continuous analytics on.

I've been building out some tools that pull data out of pinboard.in, twitter, facebook, last.fm, my past Google searches and then do some basic processing[3] to create a sense of what I'm doing, how ideas introduced to me, things I'm interested in over time etc. The locker project was a great help, because they can merge data from multiple services and then I can keep the data on my own servers. I would love to have all the data/applications myself, but do not want suffer with sub-par apps and use the best services available (as long has they have an API).

[1]: https://github.com/LockerProject/Locker

[2]: https://github.com/Singly/hallway

[3]: For now, it's a mess of python with some nltk.org, www.clips.ua.ac.be/pattern and recently pandas.pydata.org

m0hit | 13 years ago | on: Getting started with login verification

Seems like this is just an early run to test usage of 2 factor authentication. In my opinion, twitter has different access patterns than Facebook and Google especially with lots of company/product shared accounts.

Based on the "..much of the server-side engineering work required to ship this feature has cleared the way for us to deliver more account security enhancements in the future.." I'd expect support for an OTP client soon.

page 1