Hacker News: kevinnk

New comment by kevinnk in "A Founder Salary Calculator"

kevinnk — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 23:31:41 +0000

I think a total household income of ~150-200k is right around the cutoff for 4 people to live in Palo Alto together. You can split that up however you want though. In my case, that's 4 people earning ~50k rooming together. In the case of a family, one person earning 120k and the other doing a startup earning 50k (plus 2 non working kids) works too.

You're right that someone trying to support a family on a single income at 50k would have a tough time, but I think the range of people who can make it work is a lot broader than you're making it seem.

New comment by kevinnk in "A Founder Salary Calculator"

kevinnk — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 20:13:38 +0000

I rent in a house and split 4 ways. My share of the rent is a little over 1k.

New comment by kevinnk in "A Founder Salary Calculator"

kevinnk — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 19:49:11 +0000

I live in Palo Alto making about $55k and live fairly comfortably; my actual living expenses are probably closer to $25k. It would be hard to have a family, but I get by just fine having roommates.

New comment by kevinnk in "Missouri Attorney General launches investigation of Google"

kevinnk — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 22:10:57 +0000

Facebook and vid.me as well. And twitch for streaming.

New comment by kevinnk in "“We have obtained fully functional JTAG for Intel CSME via USB DCI”"

kevinnk — Fri, 10 Nov 2017 21:32:02 +0000

It's one thing to lie, it's another thing to lie about something that could easily be found out and possibly get them sued. The risk/reward ratio seems way too high for Facebook to lie (unless they were forced to.) That's obviously not proof, but it seems like pretty strong evidence.

New comment by kevinnk in "“We have obtained fully functional JTAG for Intel CSME via USB DCI”"

kevinnk — Fri, 10 Nov 2017 17:49:04 +0000

> A Facebook exec's claim doesn't count as proof.

How about an official statement from Facebook itself over a year ago[1]? If it was true, people could find out by decompiling the app and make Facebook look absolutely horrible.

[1] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/h/facebook-does-not-use-your-ph...

New comment by kevinnk in "Towards a more powerful and simpler C++ with Herb Sutter"

kevinnk — Thu, 02 Nov 2017 20:29:16 +0000

It's still up in the air I think - you can see from his blog[1] that others in the the committee prefer a syntax more like

    meta::type interface(const meta::type source) {
        // … basically same code …
    };

[1] https://herbsutter.com/2017/07/26/metaclasses-thoughts-on-ge...

New comment by kevinnk in "The State of Data Science and Machine Learning"

kevinnk — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 21:01:19 +0000

If I understand you correctly, the way you'd address this is by using counterfactuals. See this course[1] for an overview and this paper[2] which talks about the bias problem in the context of movie recommendations.

[1] http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs7792/2016fa/ [2] http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/tj/publications/schnabel_et...

New comment by kevinnk in "The Unforgiving Math That Stops Epidemics"

kevinnk — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 19:35:56 +0000

Communism is not authoritarianism (except maybe in practice). Lots of communists are essentially anarchists.

New comment by kevinnk in "The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech [pdf]"

kevinnk — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 18:45:23 +0000

> You genuinely think the type of people who subscribe to subreddits like coontown and fatpeoplehate are going to have their mind changed by people on the internet?

Yes, because I've personally met such people.

> I've had no success changing the minds of people who think that being trans is a mental illness despite citing numerous peer reviewed articles. Maybe I'm going about it wrong, but I'm not sure it gets more clear than pointing to a bunch of scientists that directly contradict their understanding.

Changing minds takes a lot of empathy and skill (and usually time) to pull off consistently in person, much less online; I'm not surprised that a strategy of throwing scientific articles in people's faces (which they will probably never read) would be unsuccessful. Regardless, even if you are successful, you will probably never know unless you have a long term relationship with the individual.

New comment by kevinnk in "The rich are hoarding economic growth"

kevinnk — Sun, 20 Aug 2017 23:48:16 +0000

"Real income growth" is the growth in income post inflation.

New comment by kevinnk in "The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013)"

kevinnk — Sun, 20 Aug 2017 22:16:30 +0000

Lots of clubs/community orgs are like this. The community soccer org for the city I grew up in had lots of turnover in the management due to voting.

New comment by kevinnk in "A CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate from the Bay"

kevinnk — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 18:04:00 +0000

A friend of mine got an offer from a startup in Palo Alto that he wanted to negotiate. He literally walked across the street to another interview and had a counter offer when he met with the founder of the first company the next day.

New comment by kevinnk in "A Solution of the P versus NP Problem?"

kevinnk — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 01:21:37 +0000

Actually, there was a bunch of blow back and the main researchers behind the result stepped down.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21656-leaders-of-cont...

New comment by kevinnk in "Launch HN: 70MillionJobs (YC S17) – Job board for people with criminal records"

kevinnk — Wed, 02 Aug 2017 18:44:56 +0000

> if these folks were earning more, someone else wouldn't be doing that job, so the overall earning that the set number of jobs would support wouldn't change one way or the other from the tax revenue point of view.

That's exactly what "zero sum" means.

New comment by kevinnk in "PyO3: Python Rust binding"

kevinnk — Wed, 26 Jul 2017 20:57:21 +0000

Very cool! Good binding libraries between C++ and Python have been super useful for my projects in the past, and I'm glad to see something similar developed for Rust.

For anyone reading the comments first, this is a fork of rust-cpython. The motivation for the fork is linked from the Readme: https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3/issues/55

New comment by kevinnk in "NIST Random Beacon"

kevinnk — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 08:52:17 +0000

You need a TLS connection to get the NIST beacon, which requires a seeded rng. That seems like a chicken and egg problem.

New comment by kevinnk in "Robust Adversarial Examples"

kevinnk — Tue, 18 Jul 2017 05:45:14 +0000

> IMO, what these adversarial examples give us is a way to boost training data.

That's basically the idea behind GANs.

New comment by kevinnk in "Research does not say that people produce more when working 40 hours per week"

kevinnk — Sat, 08 Jul 2017 19:18:55 +0000

I think the more fundamental connection is that when goods are perfect subsitutes for each other, under perfect information you always choose the "cheaper" good (where "cheap" is defined by whatever metric you're using).

Somewhat ironically, this fact actually has connections to the concept of dual variables in constrained optimization problems, the theory of which was largely developed in the Soviet Union for use in central planning.

New comment by kevinnk in "Nevada becomes fifth US state to allow cannabis sales for recreational purposes"

kevinnk — Sun, 02 Jul 2017 02:00:33 +0000

PORC is one of the largest police advocacy organizations in California state. SAM is funded largely by private individuals (yes, "individuals" not "individual", although its single donor is Julie Schauer). Notably absent is any "big pharma" or private prisons, in contrast to what the GP stated.