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bfungon Ask HN: I’m an FCC Commissioner proposing regulation of IoT security updates

> there is a startup hidden in the midst of all of this

There are already some companies that do this, but obviously adds to the cost to making these iot devices.

Ex: balena.io, and even AWS iot management does this.

Maybe there’s someway to get the AWS iot gorilla in the room the weigh in?

bfungon Geo Guesser identifies the location and seat number from an aerial shot

Not that impressive. The post has flight # (you can lookup seat map, direction of flight), and wing photo.

Ask anyone who’s been in consulting (like big4) and they’ll all have a good chance of getting it right.

bfungon Tech workers now doubting decision to move from California to Texas

Ditto. Though I had the chance to live in Austin for 2 weeks for work in the early 2000s to know what to expect.

Being employed in tech AND Bay Area (therefore California) leaves one pretty spoiled for pay, perks, diversity, activities, etc.

Even moving out of Bay Area, like to SoCal, the tech quality of life is just not the same.

bfungon It’s lambdas all the way down

objects are a poor man’s closures…

bfungon It’s lambdas all the way down

closures are a poor man's objects…

bfungon Toki Pona: an attempted universal language with only ~120 words

Lol nice. Reminds me of that one HN post a few years ago… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31840331

> grug brain developer not so smart, but grug brain developer program many long year and learn some things although mostly still confused

bfungon Toki Pona: an attempted universal language with only ~120 words

So fun!

Seems like it’d be way easier to parse/AST Tokki Pona than many natural languages we have.

Is there some translation website built for it?

(I see some chatgpt attempts at this in this thread)

Very cool!

bfungon Why Host in Kosovo?

Looks like this post is related to another high ranked front page post atm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36837273

In the other post & comments, they mention hosting things in Kosovo after the person who ran a tor exit node was tried by not convicted of child porn.

bfungon AWS networking concepts in a diagram

I think the mindmap drawn can be simplified further down into a couple of networking concepts, then most of the relationships and arrows go away, and the AWS concepts can be mapped to other clouds, and even your own home network.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18925350 is an excellent visualization of the basics. Start with what a network is, what’s inside and what’s outside, and the mental model becomes way easier. Then the AWS features make a lot of sense even w/o all the details.

bfungon If PEP 703 is accepted, Meta can commit three engineer-years to no-GIL CPython

Python 5000, why not.

bfungon Gorilla-CLI: LLMs for CLI including K8s/AWS/GCP/Azure/sed and 1500 APIs

Yep, some google cloud server:

    SERVER_URL = "http://34.135.112.197:8000"

bfungon We raised a bunch of money

Let’s hope someone doesn’t put the backup/replica in different region, the one big instance gonna be tough to restore!

bfungon We raised a bunch of money

Stateless compute is relatively simple to be region-less, but even fly’s homepage has a map of regions.

When state is introduced, then CAP/PACELC distributed systems issues arise, and figuring out approaches to deal with them are a must. Read fly’s Postgres docs, and regions come right back in.

bfungon NHTSA: Car crashes cost Americans $340B

Your other comment about “accidents and deaths per mile driven.” is likely the right metric of the idea I was trying to convey!

bfungon NHTSA: Car crashes cost Americans $340B

Random thought:

> But, 5x the traffic accident and fatality rate of other comparable developed countries

Are there actually other comparable countries in terms of the quantity of roads and the car & driving culture of the US?

I don’t know nor experienced of another country (developed or not) where a majority of people have cars and where road-trips are a thing. Most places live more densely and have fantastic public transit.

Maybe the quantity of accidents reflects what actually happens with car culture at scale.

bfungon Maps distort how we see the world

Use a globe.

It’s 2023 and we have computers at our fingertips everyday, use a virtual globe.

Flat maps are cool and work well on paper, but you’re not likely going to need a map of a country on paper for travel.

bfungon Hurl, a terrible (but cute) idea for a language

Fun experiment, but feels like a miss not to then explore the Optional type ideas and eliminate ‘catch’ all together.

bfungon Theseus DHT Protocol (2018)

That’s also only the specification release/revision dates.

Digging into the GitHub repo: “The implementation is not yet complete.”

https://github.com/wootfish/theseus.dht

bfungon GPT-4 apparently can't recite the litany against fear from Dune

    I must not recite.

    For reciting verbatim a passage is the commercial killer, the little lawsuits that brings total obliteration.

bfungon Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)

> speed is about 2 things: more smaller iterations, confirming you're working toward a desired outcome.

Well put. Too many managers and execs use the word "speed" but never define it for others to make actionable.

Scenarios in real life:

    Coder: "what's important while we're working?"
    Exec: "Speed." _feeling_cool_
    Coder: "I authored features a,b,c,e,..x,y,z ~ already working fast, gimme a raise!"
    Exec: _realizes none of those features were desired objectives_ ...
    
    Or

    Senior software engineer: It'll take 9 months, 5 devs, and $200k to run...
    Everyone else: ... not even sure business will be kicking in 9 months ...

bfungon Ask HN: code we write today will be thrown out in the next 30 years

Depends on the industry and the tech you choose.

Wordpress started in 2003 and if you chose it back then, it's still kickin'.

I just checked the website of the first job I had out of college, in 2004, for a niche tech company in the auto industry. The java-based central auth system I put in is still in use (I can tell by view-source). If it's lasted this long, another 10 years shouldn't be too hard.

bfungon NIH restarts bat virus grant

The death rate per capita seems to suggest Florida probably could’ve done better. 20th highest death per capita out of the 50 states.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/covid19_mortality_...

bfungon Htmx Is the Future

The article reminds me of the early 2000s when we were all rolling our own XMLHttpRequest and replacing dom elements with html rendered from a java servlet.

The more realistic and practical read is https://htmx.org/essays/when-to-use-hypermedia/#hypermedia-n...

bfungon AI could create religions to control humans, warns Sapiens author Harari

Too late, what's new? Already got Trumpers and woke mind virus from the social (neural) network.

bfungon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2023)

From having scraped HN job posts before, I’ve observed that it does take the full 2 weeks for these job postings to come in. I’d wait awhile before drawing any conclusions from today’s post.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33773972

bfungon U.S. SEC sees decentralized crypto platforms as exchanges

So how does one get a token on one of these platforms?

I certainly won’t pay cash for a token!

bfungon The company behind Stable Diffusion appears to be at risk of going under

Interview 7mo ago w/CEO of StabilityAI.

https://youtu.be/YQ2QtKcK2dA

Not too surprised about funding issues from the casual answer.

I’m not saying it was bad to self fund a project, but having to choosing between your life and fun (and potentially very profitable) projects is not easy.

bfungon Ask HN: Is it appropriate to ask a startup to let me see their cap table?

Similar to other comments, you can always ask.

Maybe the line items of the cap table have sensitive info, so if you ask cap table directly, they’ll say no. But asking summary level questions about the cap table relevant to you may give you the info you’re looking for.

For example, you probably don’t care if VC#1 has X shares and VC#2 has Y shares… you only care:

* how many shares there are

* what percentage have Preference (founders, VCs, investors)

* employee pool / your offer

bfungon Segment Anything Model (SAM) can "cut out" any object in an image

Def. cool demo.

As a polished product & ease of use, still has ways to go.

Apple’s cut&paste of subjects in photos, while lacking SAM’s generality, is masterfully executed - even my 70yr old mom can use it.