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Sticks and Brains - Palo Alto - iOS Engineer - Remote Possible

Looking for an experienced iOS engineer to help us iterate on Lynk Messenger (http://lynkmessenger.com), a messaging app that enables people to connect or start groups with anyone in the same room.

Current team has years of experience growing one of the biggest messaging apps on the planet. We're iterating quickly and need help speeding things up further. Remote OK, local preferred.

Sticks and Brains - Palo Alto - iOS Engineer - Remote Possible

Looking for an experienced iOS engineer to help us iterate on our bluetooth-powered messaging application: Lynk Messenger (http://lynkmessenger.com)

Current team has years of experience scaling one of the biggest messaging apps on the planet. We're iterating quickly and need help speeding things up further.

Remote OK, local preferred.

SEEKING FREELANCERS -- Remote OK (We're based in Hong Kong, something within a few time-zones is preferable)

We're a mobile communications startup based out of HK (both founders are technical guys from the valley, though). We launched an iOS app called Lynk Messenger in September and our Android version is on the way. Looking to hire freelancers with iOS or Android experience to help us accelerate development on both platforms.

Contact: [email protected]

Lynk is a messaging app that uses Bluetooth to identify all other users around you and lets you direct message them or create group chats of any size.

It's not anonymous or mass group like Firechat, so you can tune in to trust-worthy sources of information and keep track of your friends or people you meet at the protest.

Does not use GPS to identify your location, and all traffic is encrypted over the wire. Does require a network connection, though.

Disclaimer: I'm co-founder of Lynk and was at the protests in HK last night. Happy to answer any questions for anybody interested in the tool.

http://www.lynkmessenger.com

edit: anyone in Hong Kong right now and interested in getting in touch, my email is in my profile

This article does nothing to convince me that singing or playing math games with my young kids has a causal link to better math, science, or reading performance. Those both seem like signs of parents who are generally involved and likely correlate with lots of other constructive activities throughout the child's life (like caring about how they're doing in school) that could be the real reason for why the kids do better at a later age.

The article you link to and quote, while saying grades are less important than Google thought, goes on to say that progressive Google after doing this study and at least partially implementing its new system "Last week...hired 6 people who had a below 3.0 GPA." 6 out of an estimated 200 weekly hires. That's a far far cry from D student = A student and nobody can tell the difference. Also, all of the direct quotations from Google people in the article talk about years spent in academia, degrees like doctorates, and interviews being the poor predictors. Some of the best programmers I know dropped out of high school. Doesn't mean I couldn't tell apart a room of A students from D students or that I couldn't use the A students better for many jobs I might need to fill.

Any citations for this? I can buy that this is the case for some jobs, from some school districts, for many students, across a certain distribution of grades, some number of years after graduation. I have a hard time believing that a D student who barely passed college will do just as well in a new consulting job as an A student, simply because the A student probably has actually learned a hell of a lot more useful information.

Same with the iPhone 4s, though it tried to download the .js file first and didn't start working until I hit back. Load time was also much longer on the iPhone 4 over the same connection. Low framerate is hard to play through :/

I built a somewhat similar product http://www.dexy.tv but it only links to 'legit' content (netflix, hulu, amazon, etc).

nddrylliog, send me an email if you're interested in potentially collaborating so you can list both kinds of content. Really like what you've done on the UI side.

Without patents, drug research and development would have to be nationalized. The costs are enormous and drug prices drop 90% in the US after patent expiration. I would rather have new drugs and high prices for a few years than no new drugs at all or nationalized drug r&d.

I think the HN community's approach is wrong: patent abolishment isn't optimal, heavy patent reform is. Patent terms should be regulated and adapted in each industry like the Fed Funds Rate, not like the 10 commandments. Software is definitely an example of where they should be abolished, though.

Is it just me or does an inflatable space station sound terrifying. It seems like it would be very fragile if it collided with any fast-moving debris.

> Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

This clearly states that the powers must be explicitly vested by the Constitution. They can't be made up out of thin air. The state governments != the Government of the United States nor are they Departments or Officers thereof. This passage clearly requires that all federal powers be explicitly granted in the Constitution, though they need not only come from Article 1. Either I'm ignorant of some amendment that grants the powers you're talking about (like the power to have an FDA) or you inadequately understand the meaning of the phrase "vested by". At the end of the day, all of this stuff is stuffed under "regulate interstate commerce" and it's clearly a bastardization of both the word and spirit of the law. If you want broader federal powers, you must amend the constitution, period, and congress has deceitfully snaked its way out of that over and over thanks to the "legislation from the bench" at the Supreme Court that has backed them up at the expense of our constitution's integrity.

Additionally, if you want to learn about all of the ways the FBI has broken the law throughout its existence, I'm talking about stuff outside of any conceivable constitutional allowance, I highly recommend reading this recent book on its history (http://www.amazon.com/Enemies-History-FBI-Tim-Weiner/dp/1400...)

I'm not sure if I exactly understand your solution. Would you be lightly squishing the contents of the bag with the spring plates while sealing the front?

It also seems possible that manufacturers wouldn't want chip bags to look comparatively "deflated" when sold in a same-pressure environment (and thus stand out less on the shelf compared to competitors'). Also, maybe bags rupture for reasons other than pressure change and thus a stronger seal is still desirable. Just guesses, though I know the article didn't make mention of any of those reasons.

The article didn't actually give any evidence as to why Opsware was a bad purchase for HP, and according the comments in the article the product still exists and has simply been rebranded.

I suppose I was trying to imply with the $1.6bn price tag that clearly HP thought the product was immensely valuable and I thought "who is the author to say that they were so wrong without a shard of evidence?" Admittedly, I failed to actually draw this line of reasoning in the post at all and have no reason to suppose others would infer it as well.

Netscape's core was reborn as Firefox. Netscape invented the image tag, along with much of what we consider essential to what the internet is today. Most here would probably attest that it was also the superior product in its day, only losing out to IE thanks to questionably legal monopoly muscling from MS.

Opsware was purchased for $1.6bn by HP, hardly a failure...

Andreesen has a strong history of execution and value generation and Netscape was a pioneer, not a cheap shareholder exploitation vehicle. This article is grasping at straws.

Edit: Clearly HP the thought Opsware was extremely valuable at the time of purchase and the author provides no evidence to support his claim that it was not a good purchase for HP. According to comments on the article, Opsware's product still exists and has simply been rebranded.

Some jobs are better suited to learning than others. Whether it's working at a public library, being a night-shift security guard, or any other job that would allow you access to a computer (having persistent internet isn't even necessary). What you can get away with is different at different jobs. If you're motivated, you'd be amazed how much you can learn on top of having a full time job--often much more than the average full-time student absorbs. Are you leaning more toward redirecting your learning toward something you can pick up more easily or toward giving up on higher education in general?

This may seem like another one of those trite responses you mentioned, but I would second the notion that "you can do anything you put your mind to" and that you should keep up the program, or at least keep learning CS on your own. If you look to put degree notches on your belt and list languages you know on your resume, you're looking at things the wrong way. Build things! Get excited about what you can build--anything! The more CS you know, the faster you can learn more. If you want to be inspired by some of the applications out there for your talents, try taking one of the awesome free courses at Udacity (or Coursera) and add Python to your list of known languages while you're at it. You can do them at your own pace (I would lump together 3 or 4 classes and just muscle through them when I had a free weekend) and learn from some of the smartest teachers out there.

Even in an elite university, programming isn't something that's taught to you. You teach it to yourself by doing and digging. What university can do is give some structure to what material you get through and ensure a higher level understanding of some of the concepts (and it's probably a better environment for learning the math and statistics that are useful for any computer scientist).

Anyway, don't defeat yourself and don't underestimate how critical this knowledge will be in 10, 15, 25 years when the world will be a whole new place filled with much much more software. The human mind is incredibly plastic and with the proper enthusiasm can be melded to serve nearly any purpose :)

I don't mean discussing it, I mean that doing it would be. In particular, it seems like a dramatic length to me because an outside entity would never be able to tell the difference between your theoretical swap and a 'standard' upload/copy in terms of the resulting individual. The only difference would be that the person would go into it perhaps more confident that his ego wouldn't 'die'.

But no, I don't agree with you that humans' desire to live is any more real or special than a lizard's, or a tree's, or a rock's desire not to break apart for that matter. It's a natural extension of physical laws combined with the circumstances of our evolution as a system--in this case linked directly to our basest subconscious instincts. To say that your desire to live is fundamentally stronger or more complicated than that of a deer reeks of geocentrism of the ancient world to me.

It's all pretty theoretical at the moment, as is all of quantum computing. No quantum computer with more than a few qubits has been made, and none that are actually faster at any given task than a standard cpu.

It seems that practically this could offer somewhat faster transfers, less packet loss and thus less transfer-time variance, and less bandwidth consumption. This would all be a long way out though, and would require quantum computers in all the routers.

This news is really only interesting insofar as it's one more step toward quantum computing and mastery of the qubit.

You can use fewer photons/electrons/etc to transmit the same amount of information. A qubit's state is a continuum (a superposition) instead of just on or off. If you can entangle qubits with just one photon, you're effectively transmitting a large amount of data with just that one photon plus a little bit of extra information about how Alice's qubit collapsed. This is my understanding of it at least.

It also allows for a much more natural networking quantum computers and synchronization of quantum computer state, without requiring constant translation to-from ordinary bits.

Here's a quote from the Scientific American source article discussing the uses: "Researchers hope that entanglement can be harnessed to circumvent the photon losses that come from passage through optical fibers. In a proposed application called a quantum repeater, a series of nodes, linked by entanglement, would extend the quantum connection down the line without depending on any one photon as the carrier."

Nothing that you would consider usable information, referred to as 'classical information', can be transmitted via quantum entanglement. There is 'quantum information' in the state of the entangled particles that can be transferred instantaneously over infinite distance, however attempting the observe this information by any means will destroy it (ie cause the wave function to collapse).

If it was possible to transmit classical information faster than light, this would violate causality as we understand it (you could receive a message that you had been shot before you actually experienced being shot, thus allowing you to prevent yourself from being shot). It's a bit difficult to understand why this is true without a solid understanding of relativity, but you can read up on it a bit here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity#Causality_an....

This is all heavy stuff and very non-intuitive, but if you're curious about it and eager to learn I'd highly recommend this tome: http://www.amazon.com/The-Feynman-Lectures-Physics-boxed/dp/...

The article may be misleading to those not familiar with quantum teleportation. It doesn't have anything to do with instant messages across the galaxy.

"That means it would be possible to build a network of 'quantum repeaters' that use quantum teleportation, rather than photons, to transmit information between different places."

You cannot convey information over distance faster than light using quantum teleportation. You simply ensure that both entangled atoms' wave functions will collapse in a way that's correlated.

Wikipedia has a nice explanation: "Assume that Alice and Bob share an entangled qubit ab. That is, Alice has one half, a, and Bob has the other half, b. Let c denote the qubit Alice wishes to transmit to Bob. Alice applies a unitary operation on the qubits ac and measures the result to obtain two classical bits. In this process, the two qubits are destroyed. Bob's qubit, b, now contains information about c; however, the information is somewhat randomized. More specifically, Bob's qubit b is in one of four states uniformly chosen at random and Bob cannot obtain any information about c from his qubit. Alice provides her two measured classical bits, which indicate which of the four states Bob possesses. Bob applies a unitary transformation which depends on the classical bits he obtains from Alice, transforming his qubit into an identical re-creation of the qubit c."

What's cool about this experiment is that it shows you can transmit a qubit's state over distance in a quantum way, which could be useful for a network of quantum computers, which themselves are only useful for a small subset of problems--most involving cryptography. The quantum-repeater application may also be useful in reducing packet-loss-induced error, though it seems to be an incredibly impractical method of doing so for most applications.

You're perfectly entitled to feel that way. There's no objective set of human incentives/desires and everybody is entitled to his/her own utility function. For me, I'm too curious about what the future will bring to die now or any time sooner than is necessary. Learning, satisfying my curiosity, and gaining new experiences have thus far provided me uncapped positive utility and I expect to continue to feel that way into the indefinite future. If I didn't have that love for science and technology, I could expect that long life would become monotonous. The only opinion I won't abide is that of someone who not only doesn't want to live longer, but also doesn't think I should be allowed to.

Amazing the lengths we'll go to just to satisfy our simple evolutionary incentive to live, no matter how ludicrous from an outside perspective :)

The notion of so-called uploading is an interesting one. From a philosophical and practical point of view, I think it's actually pretty simple. If you uploaded my brain into a robot and we both woke up, he'd say he was the real me and I'd say I was the real me. An outside observer could not tell the difference--it would be theoretically impossible to. If you killed one of us, one of use would feel like he died, the other wouldn't. Both of us would feel like we'd lived an entire lifetime before this moment because we'd share the same memories. This is the farthest one can ever dig into this problem. An ego is a side-effect of a functioning mind, it's not something with a unique physical location or material continuity. I think it's highly unsatisfying from our ego's perspective to think of uploading like this, but our ego also wasn't designed to think of itself in these terms any more than it was designed to visualize 4+ physical dimensions.

If you become an unproductive drain on society, yes that would be bad. Otherwise there's no such thing as 'spots'. The whole point of extending human life is to maintain youth-like or better functionality. If you can't think of a way to enjoy an unlimited lifetime filled with exponential technological innovation and scientific progress, I suggest spurring your imagination a little.

I highly recommend anyone who is interested in this subject read Aubrey de Grey's book on the current state of the science of biogerontology: http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthrough...

It's interesting, thorough, and optimistic. I also recommend donating money to SENS, as this cause is dramatically underfunded relative to its realistic potential to save and enhance human life for everyone. http://sens.org/