Hacker News: joshaidan

New comment by joshaidan in "Listening for illegal logging chainsaws using TensorFlow"

joshaidan — Fri, 23 Mar 2018 18:42:43 +0000

While reflecting on this--and ethical issues aside--it did occur to me that there's probably a lot more data you could collect from the audio gathered in the rainforest, i.e. what animals are active in what areas of the rainforest and what times, weather data such as intensity of rain or wind, volume of animal activity in a particular area of the rainforest, etc.

New comment by joshaidan in "Listening for illegal logging chainsaws using TensorFlow"

joshaidan — Fri, 23 Mar 2018 16:23:06 +0000

Have the creators of this project considered the privacy implications of capturing, recording, or analyzing audio from the rainforest? What happens if people are walking near a microphone and a conversation is picked up by the microphones?

I realize that the audio is probably analyzed for the sound of chainsaws, and then thrown away, but there's still the potential that such a system could be misused. So just wondering what people think about the ethical issues related to this technology.

New comment by joshaidan in "How to Corrupt an SQLite Database File"

joshaidan — Wed, 14 Mar 2018 12:22:33 +0000

> There are many fraudulent USB sticks in circulation that report to have a high capacity (ex: 8GB) but are really only capable of storing a much smaller amount (ex: 1GB)... Internet searches such as "fake capacity usb" will turn up lots of disturbing information about this problem.

This caught my attention. Never heard of this problem before, but doesn't at all surprise me.

New comment by joshaidan in "Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?"

joshaidan — Mon, 16 Oct 2017 16:20:36 +0000

Stop blaming my feelings on other people. Always take ownership of how you feel; I'm responsible for my feelings.

For example, if I feel lonely because my friends didn't invite me to the party, don't blame them. Loneliness is my feeling, so I should do something about it. i.e. Go out and do something that I like, invite some other friends over, whatever... If I don't take any action, blaming other people for my feelings won't change how I feel.

Cell phone conversations being leaked to other callers in North Bay

joshaidan — Tue, 08 Aug 2017 19:33:03 +0000

Article URL: http://www.nugget.ca/2017/08/08/watch-what-you-say---until-the-phone-is-fixed

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14961643

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by joshaidan in "Raising a Truly Bilingual Child"

joshaidan — Sat, 22 Jul 2017 21:51:49 +0000

Bilingualism in Canada is very common among French-English languages, and depending on what part of the country you live in, your exposure to both languages can be fairly even.

My favourite bilingual situations is seeing a child "complain/whine" to their grandparent in English while the grandparent tries to soothe the child in French. Both understanding each other perfectly.

Something that blew me away once was this one kid at church who spoke with a British accent--I believe he lived in Whales before moving to Canada. A week later I heard this same child speak with a perfect Québécois accent. I later found out his mom was from Montreal.

New comment by joshaidan in "A collection of text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from DOS-era PCs"

joshaidan — Tue, 04 Jul 2017 14:57:41 +0000

It's like having a BBS in my web browser.

This does bring back a lot of memories of sitting in front of a 486 trying to get Commander Keen to load.

New comment by joshaidan in "Are cryptocurrencies about to go mainstream?"

joshaidan — Mon, 03 Jul 2017 14:53:24 +0000

To me, obtaining bitcoin (or whatever crypto-currency) has been one of the most challenging aspects of using the currency. It's too hard to obtain. Mining these days isn't that feasible, but even if I could mine bitcoin, I probably wouldn't be able to do it at a rate to fund whatever venture I wanted to pursue. The only alternative is to purchase a crypto-currency with another real world currency, which to me seems to defeat the purpose of not having to depend on central banks or real world currency.

If there was a way for crypto-currencies to handle credit, I think that would greatly increase it's likelihood of replacing real world currencies and central banks--going mainstream. The money we use nowadays is transferable credit and central banks can produce enough to meet the demands of the economy. Crypto-currencies on the other hand are more like gold: there's a limited supply that doesn't meet the needs or demands of the economy.

New comment by joshaidan in "Show HN: StockNerd – A community for index fund investors"

joshaidan — Fri, 02 Jun 2017 12:59:40 +0000

> The purpose of the app is to teach others about low fee index fund investing.

How does the app accomplish this goal?

New comment by joshaidan in "Just say ‘non’: The problem with French immersion (2015)"

joshaidan — Fri, 26 May 2017 19:33:02 +0000

I was enrolled in the French Immersion program. At my school, we had both English and French programs. One of my memories of being in French Immersion, which is likely of relevance to this article, is that I remember in the 7th and 8th grade one of my teachers (who was also the vice-principal) was concerned about the segregation between the students in the French program and the students in the English program. i.e. During recess the students French program wouldn't play with the students in the English program, vice versa. We may have had a name for students in the English program--but I can't remember it now.

The segregation in the older years wasn't as strong as younger years, but it still existed.

New comment by joshaidan in "A Case of Stolen Source Code"

joshaidan — Thu, 18 May 2017 04:43:55 +0000

I find this story pretty fascinating. First, it's interesting how a broad attack, such as putting malware into software used by a large number of people, suddenly becomes a targeted attack: the attackers grab SSH keys and start cloning git repositories. I'm assuming that there was a significant number of victims in this attack. Were they targeting developers? Or did they just happen to comb through all this data and find what looked to be source code / git repositories.

The other thing I find interesting is this comment:

> We’re working on the assumption that there’s no point in paying — the attacker has no reason to keep their end of the bargain.

If you really want to be successful in exploiting people through cyber attacks, I guess you will need some kind of system to provide guaranteed contracts, i.e. proof that if a victim pays the ransom, then the other end of the bargain will be held.

It might seem that there's some incentive for ransom holders to hold up their end of the bargain for the majority of cases if they want their attacks to be profitable.

New comment by joshaidan in "Rooby: a Ruby-like object oriented language written in Go"

joshaidan — Sun, 23 Apr 2017 12:12:12 +0000

I found the author posted this on Changelog:

Hi, Rooby is a new object oriented language I created recently (written in Go). It looks just like Ruby for now because it's mainly inspired by it. But I want it to be a new language and start developing its own feature when it gets more mature. So I'm looking for developers who also interested in this project, any help or idea will help me a lot.

https://github.com/thechangelog/ping/issues/698

New comment by joshaidan in "Lilium – Electric vertical take-⁠off and landing jet"

joshaidan — Fri, 21 Apr 2017 19:31:35 +0000

When I read the part about "Order your air taxi to the nearby landing pad," I immediately thought of the old Commodore 64 game SpaceTaxi.

`Pad 1 please` :)

New comment by joshaidan in "Jeff Bezos’ Annual Letter"

joshaidan — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 16:16:34 +0000

I encountered "process as proxy" today dealing with Cisco. We were requesting a replacement for a defective part, they asked us for our serial number, which we provided, but then responded to us that our serial number was invalid. Likely because it wasn't registered. We were told that we had to contact our sales manager, or open a TAC with a different department because they department only deals with technical issues.

Could they not have done something to help us, maybe forwarding the ticket to the department that could register the serial number, to help us rather than just leaving us stranded? It's as though they want to follow process rather than helping the customer.

New comment by joshaidan in "How I Used Twilio, Python and Google to Automate My Wedding"

joshaidan — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 03:12:53 +0000

I'm working on a check-in system for our reception using a Raspberry Pi, a RC522 reader and MIFARE RFID cards. Guests tap their card to check-in and the monitor displays their table number. I'll log their check-in time among other things. Is there a point to it? No, it's just to be fun and cool.

https://github.com/joshaidan/wedding-checkin

New comment by joshaidan in "The Town of Innisfil partners with Uber for transit instead of buses"

joshaidan — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 14:07:48 +0000

The Innisfil city website mentioned that there will be flat rate pricing to certain major destinations in town.

New comment by joshaidan in "The Town of Innisfil partners with Uber for transit instead of buses"

joshaidan — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 06:10:05 +0000

The public entity subsidizing your fare can use that leverage to make sure the rules are fair.

New comment by joshaidan in "The Town of Innisfil partners with Uber for transit instead of buses"

joshaidan — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 05:58:32 +0000

Since the city is subsidizing fares, I imagine they would have some influence into the service being delivered. (You can voice your complaints to city hall)

New comment by joshaidan in "The Town of Innisfil partners with Uber for transit instead of buses"

joshaidan — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 05:55:38 +0000

From my experience using public transit, there is a code of conduct which all riders must follow, and my understanding is that if you violate that code of conduct, you could either be fined, or if it's serious enough, banned from using public transit. (i.e. I think assaulting a driver or passenger could get you banned from using public transit) I imagine that if you were to behave on Uber the same way as you would on public transit, you wouldn't get banned (or rated low).

New comment by joshaidan in "Why Japan’s Rail Workers Point at Things"

joshaidan — Sun, 02 Apr 2017 02:56:46 +0000

I wonder if there's some way to apply this to coding. Besides annoying my co-workers, would verbally talking about what I'm coding improve the quality of my code, or productivity? What about physical gestures?