mastermojo's comments

mastermojo | 2 years ago | on: Extinct goat was cold-blooded (2009)

Looking at only what you presented, it seems like Endothermic/Homeothermic share a lot of overlap (hot blooded) and Ectothermic/Poikilothermic share a lot of overlap (cold blooded)?

mastermojo | 2 years ago

I’m part of the team at Sapling AI (YC W19).

We offer a no data retention option for all teams. If a business wants to try us out for free I’m happy to set something up.

We also offer our application self-hosted/on-premise/cloud-premise. We have single-tenant (separate data) options as well. These options have a higher deployment cost so they may not make sense for teams under 10.

mastermojo | 2 years ago | on: Why you must not use Auth0/Okta for login/pass solution

Migrated from Auth0 to Firebase because it was 2 orders of magnitude cheaper.

After explaining that we didn't need any fancy features, just OIDC+SAML sign-in they proposed a number that was a little over $1/user/month ($30,000 a year for 2500 seats). This was after multiple rounds of back-and-forth, sitting through custom decks and sales pitches around "you aren't paying for SSO, you are paying for an increase in conversion and revenue".

Firebase is self serve for ... $0.015/user/month (or $450/year for the same 2500 seats)

https://cloud.google.com/identity-platform/pricing

https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth

mastermojo | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Why are so many PHP projects moving to Node?

I think at this point we can all roughly agree on what makes code well-written?

1. Stylistically consistent for things like format, naming, control and logic flow

2. QA: linted, unit tested, code reviewed

3. Design: Modular, scalable, future proof, secure, stable, reliable, performant etc.

4. High adoption implies testing/verification of above design attributes

5. Follows (or establishes) best established practices for interfacing with platform APIs etc.

6. Keeping complexity low enough that a junior engineers can contribute

7. Descriptive commit messages

etc. etc.

mastermojo | 3 years ago | on: Emergency SOS via satellite is included for free with iPhone 14 Pro for 2 years

My read of the marketing materials is that it supports the "Find My" feature which you can use to share locations with friends/family?

This is really a killer feature for me as an outdoor enthusiast who hangs out in places with no reception every other weekend. I'm also a weight weenie and really care about how heavy the stuff I carry is. I'm going to keep an eye on how well this works in the field for sure.

I've been considering a Garmin InReach Mini, its roughly $350 for the device and $300 for a satellite subscription for 2 years.

If the satellite messing works well, this phone just added $650 worth of value for me on top of a regular iPhone. Basically, it doesn't matter how much a continued subscription will cost after year two. I'd be completely happy to buy a new phone in two years just for this one feature.

mastermojo | 3 years ago | on: Coinbase does not list securities. End of story

I don't view it that way.

I think the fact that Coinbase does not deny that their employee acted wrongly is a good thing.

Their stance is that cryptocurrencies aren't securities to avoid ("unfair") SEC regulatory capture.

mastermojo | 4 years ago | on: Is Grammarly a keylogger? What can you do about it?

I'm on the team at Sapling Intelligence, a deep-learning AI Writing Assistant. A lot of privacy and security conscious folks don't like the idea of a keylogger, so we have self-hosted/on-premise/cloud-premise options for businesses. We have a list of available offerings here: https://sapling.ai/comparison/onprem. Sapling deployments can also be configured for no data retention, sacrificing some model customization.

Cost-wise, it doesn't make sense for individuals to host a neural-network based grammar checker, though some of the rule-based options may work. There's a future where if we can maintain some sort of Moore's law scaling we will be able to run these language models on individual computers as opposed to the cloud.

mastermojo | 4 years ago | on: Coinbase slammed for terrible customer service after hackers drain accounts

This kinda sucks for all parties involved.

1. Funds from an individual Coinbase account are transferred off of Coinbase onto another Bitcoin wallet.

2. The owner of the Coinbase account claims they were hacked.

Obviously I like the idea of Coinbase making account holders whole, but that creates a moral hazard and also incentivizes account holders to commit fraud themselves. What if I give my friend my credentials and he drains my account? On the other hand if I lost money on Coinbase I would be complaining all the way until I got my money back.

There are controls that can minimize damages but sacrifice usability (make withdrawals whitelist only etc). I think they have a "Vault" product that has multi-sig and time-delay options for users.

Reminder to use hardware multi-factor (like yubikey) if you own a lot of cryptocurrency on an exchange. An authenticator app is the next best option.

mastermojo | 4 years ago

I don't think (in my lifetime) I've heard anyone discuss buying or selling a stock in the context of a Dividend Discount Model.

This observation isn't really in support of Bitcoin, it's more of a depressing thought that our stock markets are closer to a Keynesian beauty contest. (GME, AMC, etc).

I don't personally own stocks or real estate for cash flow purposes. I own them with the expectation that I can sell them for more money down the line.

mastermojo | 5 years ago

I think I would agree that cryptocurrency is probably a less worthy allocation of energy than keeping homeless people warm or something. However, money/energy are finite resources allocated based on free market mechanics. People use energy/money how they want.

It's not a very constructive use of time to criticize how the free market allocates resources. People are going to buy and run basketball teams, Ferraris, bitcoin mining rigs whether you yell at them or not.

mastermojo | 5 years ago

Interesting. I found out about Bitcoin in 2012, took a distributed systems seminar in 2013 covering byzantine fault tolerance, paxos etc and at that point Bitcoin metaphorically blew my mind. I feel like anyone who understood how seminal Paxos was could easily draw parallels to Bitcoin.

Despite all of Bitcoin's shortcomings, I'm a strong believer in the technology and the protocol. If we compare it to the internet and TCP/IP it is pretty designed. In real life its not necessarily the perfect protocol that wins. Sometimes a "crappy" one gets a head start, but it's good enough, and people will patch it along the way. The network participants will also end up using the network in novel ways that were not designed for originally.

mastermojo | 5 years ago

Well I definitely have some mild environmental allergies (some cats & rabbits) but nothing life threatening. This somewhat reminds me of 23&me, except with some obvious potential quality of life improvements.

Ordered an Allergy Test kit.

Will update everyone in 5 years if it was worth it or not! :)

page 1