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benwen

539 karma · joined March 28, 2012

Husband, Dad, Geek. Recovering programmer after crossing over to marketing. I like Emacs and Clojure.
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benwen··on AI vs. Human Songwriter
https://archive.is/9mk5f
benwen··on The Network Always Beats the Castle
"AI will enable a switch from what is essentially circuit switching today, in all kinds of organizations, to something that will look and feel a lot more like packet switching."
benwen··on Collection of Digital Clock Designs
Love this! Thanks for making and sharing.

Worth a mention: John Maeda “12 o’clocks” https://codingtrain.github.io/12oclocks/

https://ems.andrew.cmu.edu/2016-60212/lectures/lecture-09-09...

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/102219

His 1996 work made me appreciate how time is expressed graphically. The smooth motion ones made me disfavor stop second analog clocks so much so that I’ve replaced all the movements in the clocks in our home with sweep second hands.

benwen··on For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides
Obligatory reference to Kuhn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift
benwen··on Robert Schiller: This Doommaxxing Has Got to Stop
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/ai-doom-jobs-econ...
benwen··on Berkshire Hathaway invests extra $10B in Alphabet, deepening bet on AI
WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/google-seeks-to-raise-80-billion...

Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/alphabet-raise-8...

benwen··on Reimagining the mouse pointer for the AI era
Beat me to it! Back in 1980. Here’s the official link https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/put-that-there-voice-...

And the paper https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/uuid/8e6d934b-6c6f-48e4-b0a1-...

benwen··on China blocks Meta's acquisition of AI startup Manus
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/business/china-meta-manus...
benwen··on First and Lego Education Partnership Update
Maybe this: https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2026-03-12/dean-kamen-resigns-f...
benwen··on Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations
Obligatory link to Suasn Calvin, robopsychologist from Asimov’s I, Robot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Calvin
benwen··on What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation
“ This also has the reputation of being terribly impractical, which is always a selling point for me.”

That was truly LOL. Thank you.

benwen··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2022)
Tallyfor - Better Software for Tax Professionals | Remote | Full or Part-time | Senior Clojure/Clojurescript | SF, US

“nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” -Benjamin Franklin [0]

Tallyfor is working on the second of those certainties (taxes). Our values are “Be right. Have fun. From anywhere.”

We are a small team and we are winning customers with a modern cloud approach. Taxation in the US is strangely complex and could use a little help.

Right now we, Tallyfor, could use a little help. We’re looking for expert Clojure/Clojurescript programmers who are wanting to join a small team. Re-frame, mostly. Remote hires because that’s one of our values... from anywhere.

Founded by a programmer (me) and a CPA-turned-product-person-while-at-Xero.

No recruiters, please.

jobs@tallyfor.com. Thanks for reading.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_taxes_(idiom)

benwen··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2021)
Tallyfor - cloud tax software | Remote | Full or Part-time | SF, US You: a Clojure/ClojureScript programmer looking for a small team to join. Curious. Capable. Kind. Us: A small team. Using Clojure (Re-frame and friends). With customers, angel financing, and a set of values that includes "Have Fun" as #2. careers@tallyfor.com for the curious. No recruiters, please.
benwen··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (January 2021)
SEEKING FREELANCER | Tallyfor - Better Software for Tax Professionals | Remote | Full or Part-time | Senior Clojure/Clojurescript | SF, US

“nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” -Benjamin Franklin [0]

Tallyfor is working on the second of those certainties (taxes). Our values are “Be right. Have fun. From anywhere.” We are a small team and we are winning customers with a modern cloud approach. Taxation in the US is strangely complex and could use a little help.

Right now we, Tallyfor, could use a little help. We’re looking for expert Clojure/Clojurescript programmers who are wanting to join a small team. Re-frame, mostly. Remote hires because that’s one of our values... from anywhere.

Founded by a programmer (me) and a CPA-turned-product-person-while-at-Xero.

No recruiters, please.

jobs@tallyfor.com. Thanks for reading.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_taxes_(idiom)

benwen··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2021)
Tallyfor - Better Software for Tax Professionals | Remote | Full or Part-time | Senior Clojure/Clojurescript | SF, US

“nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” -Benjamin Franklin [0]

Tallyfor is working on the second of those certainties (taxes). Our values are “Be right. Have fun. From anywhere.” We are a small team and we are winning customers with a modern cloud approach. Taxation in the US is strangely complex and could use a little help.

Right now we, Tallyfor, could use a little help. We’re looking for expert Clojure/Clojurescript programmers who are wanting to join a small team. Re-frame, mostly. Remote hires because that’s one of our values... from anywhere.

Founded by a programmer (me) and a CPA-turned-product-person-while-at-Xero.

No recruiters, please.

jobs@tallyfor.com. Thanks for reading.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_and_taxes_(idiom)

benwen··on A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
Borland Turbo Lightning, TSR (terminate and stay resident) spell checker for the lowly 8088-based IBM PC.

https://winworldpc.com/product/turbo-lightning/1x

benwen··on MIPS R3000
Maybe Computation Structures by Ward? Lecture notes for the class from which it was born show a two-stage Laundromat model (with snarky MIT/Harvard humor) https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...
benwen··on Microsoft turns two-factor authentication into one-factor by ditching password
This seems to be _less_ secure. I noticed yesterday that my iPhone's Microsoft Authenticator app emitted at least three notifications to "Approve sign-in request...ABCDE".

I almost never log into my Microsoft LiveID account, the only identity that uses that app for 2-factor. I thought it was a little screwy, so largely ignored the first request. By the time the second and third notifications came in I had read the news about MSFT's move to go to a simple "Approve/Deny" single-factor. An attacker could just go through a list of LiveID's and try and authenticate. With a large enough list, a few folks will just hit "Approve", I'd wager. I doubt the app use any other factors like GPS or IP address. NB: There does seem to be a timeout.

Or am I missing something here?

benwen··on Apple's New Market
Apple Pocket Phone

http://blog.benwen.com/opinion/product/2015/01/29/apple-pock...

benwen··on If a monkey takes a selfie in the forest, who owns the copyright?
Also, makes one wonder about copyright ownership of the random strings and sonnets produced by those infinite monkeys typing [0].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

benwen··on If a monkey takes a selfie in the forest, who owns the copyright?
Anyone else reminded by this NYT Magazine article about a legal team suing on behalf of a chimpanzee for his freedom?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/magazine/the-rights-of-man...

http://www.nonhumanrightsproject.org

Maybe after Lessig is done with the Mayday PAC he can opine on non-human IP rights?

benwen··on 3D Object Manipulation in a Single Photograph using Stock 3D Models
Reminds me of the Running Man (1987) scene where, in supposed real-time, a video production editor synthetically composes Arnold Schwarzenegger's and Jesse Ventura's characters together in a deathmatch. One would have to go from rigid-component origami birds on static frames in this CMU paper to semi-solid human figures on moving frames in the movie. 3D models of famous actors' bodies are already made for special effects, painstakingly rendered and composited together in batch mode.

(Personal recollection: there was a solid model Shaq's head at 3d modeling company Viewpoint Datalabs back in the day. His head is huge.)

Stills from Running Man taken at about 01:19 - http://imgur.com/rQlxigG

benwen··on Recommended Reading List for Developers [pdf]
Looks like C++ got a bit of an upgrade in the canon...

The Programming Language Bjarne Stroustrup

ISBN 9780321563842

benwen··on Real-World Concurrency (2008)
"This article is half stern lecture on the merits of abstinence and half Kama Sutra."
benwen··on IronMQ Push Queues - Reliable Message Delivery for the Cloud
Nice.
benwen··on 100M Messages a Day Milestone for IronMQ
Cool!
benwen··on MongoHQ (YC S11) Raises $6 Million For Database As Service Engine
MongoLab: yep, we have a similar (I'd imagine) license to the trademark.

10gen: they are awesome to work with as they know they are in for the long game - building a full ecosystem.

Congrats to the HQ team! Always good to see further evidence that the DBaaS market is generating healthy capital interest. Game on!

benwen··on Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
Just got out of the first half of the Meet Azure prezo. Pretty slick integration of PaaS and IaaS. Git, Linux, Node.js, MongoDB, but also .Net, Team Foundation Server (ok, I had to look up TFS) and RDC. Has SQL Server as a managed service. Website hosting also: Wordpress, Drupal, etc. Caching (memcache-compliant) and Blob storage. Lots o' data centers. Identity management.... yeah Active Directory. They have multi-tentant (lower $) and reserved VMs (more $ and perf, tho not clear if everything runs exactly like on reserved VMs). Sounds like they've been hard at work. It'll be interesting to see how it works outside of a scripted demo. http://meetnodejs.azurewebsites.net/ is the node.js and mongodb demo they ran. Still seems to be up.
benwen··on Logging-as-a-Service with logentries
Cool!
benwen··on The new emberjs.com
Ember makes me think of longer burning coals at the end of a bbq. Maybe better to call it "Lighter Fluid"?