Author here. I quickly thought of the title for the article and shipped it. I agree it's clickbait-y and apologize to SendGrid (and any confused readers) but yes, as you say it's _technically_ correct in a very narrow sense – SendGrid's infrastructure and users are sending these emails, it's just that they're fraudulently associated with SendGrid the company.
In any case, I revised the title to "SendGrid isn’t emailing you about ICE or BLM. It’s a phishing attack."
Maybe someone can edit the title of the submission on HN accordingly?
Hi! Author here. I don't actually think they're deliberately doing this, hence my choice of "perverse incentives" vs. something more accusatory. The issue is that they don't have a ton of incentive to fix it.
Agree with you on all the rest, and I think writing a post like this was very much intended as a gut-check on things since the early days are hopefully the times when things can get fixed up.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about what was happening behind the scenes with a payment processor agreement you weren’t privy to. Kickstarter was always and devoutly uninterested in medical fundraising, so missing out on GoFundMe’s growth was a feature, not a bug.
It's kind of wild that these tools just transfer a copy of these models every time they're spun up (whether it's to a Google Colab notebook or a local machine.)
This must mean Hugging Face's bandwidth bill must be crazy, or am I missing something (maybe they have a peering agreement? heavily caching things?)
Thanks – I'm the one that picked The Nix for the list (I work for YC on their admissions team).
One reason I picked it is that is indeed a great book that I have been recommending plenty to friends.
Another is that I do think it's incredibly important to be able to enjoy and indulge and make time for fiction, especially when you work in tech. It's too easy to "read for facts / information / theory" and forget the joy that good writing can bring.
It took me some reflection to realize I heavily bias towards non-fiction unless I make an effort. But when I do get the chance to read a great novel, it tends to affect me more than reading non-fiction.
The world needs more literature, poetry, and art, so I also like supporting authors who ship that product too :)
(FWIW, the book probably isn't for everyone, but I think reading great literature is – give it a shot if you haven't in a while!)
Artists have depended on public support for generations (if not longer) and that support does not artificially prop up its value. In some cases artists and their work can languish for decades until publicly supported exhibitions choose to highlight them. Only then does "the market" value their work, and only sometimes does it do it properly.
And that's not to mention the value art plays in civic life and its contribution to society: markets can frequently fail to properly support artists when society needs them the most (during political strife or civil unrest.)
I never really seriously considered it. Made the book and the page before this was really all that common online. Maybe I'll A/B test it to see if it generates more sales :)
Author of Emoji Dick here. The $200 price tag is that high because its a one-off print-on-demand of an 800 page color laser hardcover book. I would LOVE to find a way to produce these cheaper (even do another edition) but haven't had the time to get a publisher / deal / etc. together.
Since emojis often bear graphic resemblances to our real faces, the understanding has often been that there would be no problems in interpreting them, and that the sender and the recipient would agree on such interpretation.
As someone fairly immersed in the emoji community, this is a strawman argument (i.e., no one really tries to argue this).
People love and use emoji not in spite of their ambiguity but rather because of it.
Even Unicode encourages emoji to have multiple meanings:
A: No. Because emoji characters are treated as pictographs, they are encoded in Unicode based primarily on their general appearance, not on an intended semantic.
Many people want to think there are some folks out there like myself who are seriously arguing Emoji are a language, but this isn't really true. And I say that as the author of a book called "How to Speak Emoji". The thing is, it's a humor book designed to be sold in Urban Outfitters. It's not a real language guide.
If you're curious about more nuanced takes on how emoji are actually being used, here are some good resources:
The tl;dr: journalists / bloggers would love to get someone to argue that emoji are a language so they can "Well, actually" them, but the truth is this isn't really happening much.
However, some of us are deeply curious about whether our usage of emoji are evolving language-like characteristics and grammars. See this recent research on whether emoji have their own syntax:
Hi there! I was Kickstarter employee #2 and my unofficial (which briefly became my official title) was "R&D", so I think it was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time and for me, realizing that the most effective way I could be valuable for our small team was to dig into the data and do the research to answer all the questions popping up day to day. Sometimes that was writing queries for our Year in Review posts, other times it was figuring out the best ways to mitigate payments risk.
At first we were just using Google Analytics and SQL. A couple years into it I deployed Mixpanel, and eventually we built our entire analytics infrastructure from scratch and used Looker to expose it to the rest of the company.
I was at the company for over 6 years and by the time I left, my data team had people working on data science, machine learning, traditional BI, and of course infrastructure.
Hi, I work at Kickstater. When communicating with millions of people its important to balance technical explanations against the desire to communicate your message in common sense terms.
That said, we're being very public with how we hashed them: older Kickstarter passwords used using SHA-1 digested multiple times. More recent passwords are encrypted with bcrypt.
Hi! I work at Kickstarter. To answer everyone's question regarding the encryption used for our passwords: old passwords used salted SHA1, digested multiple times. More recent passwords use bcrypt.
The only definition of big data I've thought was remotely insightful is "too large to process with one machine."
Note (as the example in the Wired article indicates) that the converse isn't true: just because you are using multiple machines to process data doesn't mean it's big.
In any case, I revised the title to "SendGrid isn’t emailing you about ICE or BLM. It’s a phishing attack."
Maybe someone can edit the title of the submission on HN accordingly?