trxblazr's comments

trxblazr | 12 years ago | on: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link

A decent number of Stanford CS undergrads/grads end up there.

trxblazr | 12 years ago | on: What We Don't Know About Spying on Citizens: Scarier Than What We Know

So realistically, what can we, the populace, do?

absolutely not. Just forge the referrer header.

trxblazr | 13 years ago | on: Stop working so hard

ASKING FOR HELP:

hi HN, I'll take the opportunity of this thread to ask for some advice. My current employer (a billion $ startup, ~200 employees) is asking all of us to work Saturdays (on top of the 12-13 hours I already work daily).

I value my weekends, a lot. It's not that I don't want to work. I love work and on weekends, I still do. I have spurs of intense creativity and code productivity, but I want to keep those weekends for myself.

How do I tell my employer that my weekends are not for sale? What should I expect from them if I say no more?

trxblazr | 13 years ago | on: Announcing Sift Science: fight fraud with large-scale machine learning

hint hint hint: echo 'am9icytiNjRAc2lmdHNjaWVuY2UuY29t' | base64 -D

trxblazr | 13 years ago | on: Announcing Sift Science: fight fraud with large-scale machine learning

I sat in your ACM presentation the other day at Stanford. It was really awesome. Thanks for coming by and best of luck!

trxblazr | 13 years ago | on: Show HN: Submit your ideas for improving HN

sub HN, like subredit.

trxblazr | 13 years ago | on: How I spend my first 5 minutes on a server

I think the author meant for this to be a simple set of security guidelines for beginners. But yeah, any reasonably large prod stack should probably be deployed and setup with puppet and what not. It's DRY and less error prone than a human low on sleep.

trxblazr | 13 years ago | on: Business in a Box

i wonder why that Chinese restaurant went out of business...

trxblazr | 13 years ago | on: In China, Betting It All on a Child in College

"Youths from poor and rural families consistently end up paying much higher tuition in China than children from affluent and urban families. Yet they attend considerably worse institutions, education finance specialists say...The reason is that few children from poor families earn top marks on the national exams. So they are shunted to lower-quality schools that receive the smallest government subsidies. The result is that higher education is rapidly losing its role as a social leveler in China and as a safety valve for talented but poor youths to escape poverty."

So that's certainly true in America, and perhaps even more so in China. I think platforms like Coursera/Udacity can start leveling the playing field again for two reasons: first, if the technology is good enough (from personal experience, I would say so) and remains free, the studying-resources gap between rich and poor shrinks; second, even if you can't squeeze your way into a top school, you can still get a top-notch education for free. At the end of the day, i'm grossly oversimplifying things (i.e. the weight of credentials in Chinese society probably still far outweight actual demonstrated skill-set; or consider for a moment whether a family that lives on rice and a few vegetables a day can realistically afford a computer+internet-connection for their kids...), but i still think there's a sizable impact in here somewhere.

trxblazr | 13 years ago | on: In China, Betting It All on a Child in College

Not really. There's an education bubble: too many applicants; not enough resources. Coursera/Udacity...etc may change that significantly over time. This may significantly impact the very people this article talks about. I think it's good for HN to perceive from time to time the tangential impact of technology on everyday life.