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jamesvnz

96 karma · joined January 15, 2021

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jamesvnz··on Show HN: Paca – Lightweight Jira alternative for human-AI collaboration
I make decisions on implementation and payment for our Enterprise use of Atlassian today (mid 6 figures per annum of spend) - and I'm definitely shopping for alternatives!
jamesvnz··on Launching the Claude Partner Network
You joke, but that does seem to be happening from what I've seen - Agile Coaches are rebranding to become "AI coaches" or "AI Enablers".
jamesvnz··on Show HN: Artifact Keeper – Open-Source Artifactory/Nexus Alternative in Rust
Nice work.. I'm building the same thing right now. Partly because we need this and don't have the budget for Artifactory etc., and mainly to test out largely hands free, agentic development.
jamesvnz··on The Hawai’i Seaglider Initiative: A new approach to travel between the islands
Considering Cook Strait is one of the most dangerous and unpredictable waters in the world - I think I'll pass on flying through it! I've had some dodgy passages through the Wellington harbour entrance - as much as this should fly above it, I'd be feeling rather nervous.

That said, given how much the current ferry has issues - maybe this is just as safe.

jamesvnz··on Tech workers remain some of the highest paid in New Zealand
> The survey was conducted in January and February 2023.

As an NZ based CTO - I feel things have slowed quite a bit since the start of the year. That said, the market is more buoyant than the US based on comments from others here. I think things will pick up in the new year again.

jamesvnz··on Microsoft Teams Premium: powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5
Based off examining the HTML recently when I was trying to diagnose a problem the other month where teams refused to pay a video - no.
jamesvnz··on Explaining the global chip shortage
It's an interesting article overall - but it seems to be half written now, and half written earlier in 2022. There's no publish date on the blog article that I can see.

Google seems to think it was posted 3 days ago - but in the article you have sentences like "However, some of the most in-demand phones are expected to become more available by February 2022." Which adds to the confusion of the currency of some of the statements / observations.

jamesvnz··on New Zealand passes legislation banning cigarettes for future generations
Big news? It's certainly not a topic of active conversation in NZ.

It was talked about for a day or two when it was announced a while back - I haven't seen a single news article about it recently, nor has anyone talked about it. The opposition political parties haven't made a big deal out of it either that I've noticed.

I don't think anyone really cares. With vaping still being allowed - it's all a bit moot. Anyone born after 2008 is going to be buying a vape.

jamesvnz··on Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points
Oh - I misread the comment. It's not fixed - they're all digital.

Apologies.

jamesvnz··on Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points
The majority of New Zealand petrol stations display the fractional cent too. Same in Australia from memory.
jamesvnz··on New Zealand admits it has access to Facebook takedown portal to censor content
Agreed. I have zero concerns that the NZ government is censoring content that it shouldn't.

If that ever changes - we'd notice - and we'd make people aware of it.

jamesvnz··on The Economic Organization of a POW Camp (1945)
Interesting read. My grandfather was the "cigarette officer" in Stalag Luft III (the Great Escape PoW camp). His duty was the distribution of the incoming Red Cross cigarettes. The job was his due to the fact that he didn't smoke (at least that's what I was told).

He was also on the list to get out in the Great Escape - but was far enough down the list to never make it out of the tunnel. His job during tunnel construction was sand dispersal - socks down trousers that were released in the middle of a game of football.

jamesvnz··on Ask HN: Has anybody had luck making Webflow work behind Cloudflare?
I have - but did so by putting a Cloud Run nginx proxy between Cloudflare and Webflow.

I haven't had issues with Cloudflare blocking IPs - however the site in question is rather low traffic, so we probably don't pop up on their list.

Main reason for doing this was having routing control. We also had a long list of redirects to manage from an old site, and it was easier to do this in an nginx config.

jamesvnz··on Podman Desktop: A Free OSS Alternative to Docker Desktop
huh, so that's what's happening to me. I was wondering what the likely cause of the kernel panic issue might be. This might be the impetus I needed to try one of these Mac docker alternatives.
jamesvnz··on New Zealand plunges into recessionary spiral
That's a rather sensationalist headline. Written by an Australian looking at graphs, rather than having a feel for what's going on.

I'm sure he's a capable economist, but based on what I see, New Zealand is not "plunging". There's definitely a slow down - but I think most businesses are expecting a relatively soft landing.

I guess time will tell.

jamesvnz··on Ex-UK pilots lured to help Chinese military, MoD says
I know a guy doing this - ex-Typhoon / Tornado pilot, retired. Went over there earlier this year.

The lure to fly fighter planes again was a big draw - plus the massive sack of cash.

He said it wasn't weapons training or even tactics training - really just training them in how to run effective training exercises.

I told him I thought it sounded like the start to a bad 80s action movie plot. He'd been told it was something innocent and then he'd discover he was planning an attack on Taiwan. He and his aging western fighter buddies would have to fight their way out of China with the full might of the China military forces chasing them...

jamesvnz··on Project Starline expands testing through an early access program
My understanding is that it could be made to work, but Starlink came along and clearly solved the problem of delivering high speed internet to remote areas better.
jamesvnz··on CISA: Election Security Rumor vs. Reality
New Zealand does not require ID at the voting booth. We would generally be considered to be near the top of the list for "remotely democratic countries".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_identification_laws#New_...

Australia doesn't require ID either.

jamesvnz··on Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
Angular was a reasonable choice - it's well suited to "enterprise" web applications as it has standard ways of doing things the Angular way in contrast to React which has 3 - 5 options for different things. Certainly back when it was chosen, there's no issue in this choice.

Mulesoft, personally hate it - but it's definitely an option if you're trying to abstract out a whole bunch of legacy systems into clean APIs. Personally, I'd probably create some lightweight integration components in custom code (whatever language you like) deployed in containers on some scalable cloud platform over buying a chunk of enterprise middleware and trying to find the skilled resource to configure it. But, I don't think Mulesoft was a death knell here - merely a bit of a money pit. Same thing for AEM.

Overall, it doesn't look like they were choosing unreasonable tools to do the various things they wanted. e.g. they weren't trying to use Salesforce as a transactional database platform.

You could definitely pick a better stack, largely from open source, and deploy to the hyper-scale cloud provider of your choice - but I don't think the tech stack that's what screwed this project up overall.

jamesvnz··on Microsoft top cloud – 14.4% of the market share vs. 13.7% that of AWS
Not sure these "market share" competitions are very useful.

Includes SaaS cloud revenue for MSFT - which is the largest portion - an area where AWS doesn't compete (well, not meaningfully).

Also, in the past didn't MSFT include AWS cloud Windows and SQL Server license charges in their "cloud revenue" - not sure if that is still the case.

jamesvnz··on The giant hangar poised for an aviation revolution
Assuming these airships are VTOL and can land on non-runway surfaces (e.g. large open fields) you'd think this would beat airplanes by a lot more than 20% overall as you wouldn't have the additional costs of getting the heavy cargo to the final destination, it could be taken straight where it is needed.

So the optimum load would be the long distance delivery of a large, heavy single item in an undeveloped inland area.

jamesvnz··on The Unreasonable Math of Type 1 Diabetes
That was a detailed post. Fellow kiwi and parent of a T1D diagnosed at the same age. Our kid is now 16, so I'm pleased to have the toddler years behind us. That said, teenage years bring different challenges.

I wish we'd had the option of a CGM at diagnosis - despite the various challenges they simplify so much. We were early into pumping - around age 4. Now using closed loop CGM + pump.

There's a good T1D subreddit for tips and advice. My one bit of advice, is that if you're having issues with bolusing before a meal and the kid then doesn't eat, is to bolus after or split bolus. It's not ideal, but it's massively better than cranking them full of insulin for them to then refuse to eat.

Good luck!

jamesvnz··on Migrating from App Engine to Google Kubernetes Engine
Good point on the sustained usage changing the economics at the scale they're at, I didn't really factor that in.

The pricing calculation is even more complex than it seems. Cloud Run doesn't charge per request if you have "always allocated CPU" (a new feature). Also, instances can handle up to 1000 concurrent requests. So, we'd need to know processing time and work out how many instances would need to run concurrently. There's also committed usage discounts for Cloud Run.

Another factor to consider is operational cost - Cloud Run has a lower ops burden than K8s - particularly if you wanted to run multi-regional instances.

But you're right - at the sustained usage they have, the infrastructure cost of Cloud Run would almost certainly be worse than VMs in GKE, particularly if they could run on a decent percentage of preemptible instances.

jamesvnz··on Migrating from App Engine to Google Kubernetes Engine
Rather surprised they didn't migrate from App Engine to Cloud Run. This would seem like the simpler and more direct migration path.
jamesvnz··on Show HN: Generate shared 2FA codes for your entire team
It looks like with this service the user who can generate a TOTP can't see the backing seed. Therefore, if they leave, and get removed from Slack, they can't generate a code. If you just shared the seed then everytime someone left the team you'd need to regenerate.
jamesvnz··on AWS's Egregious Egress
Agreed... GCP isn't perfect by any means, but I find it much better than AWS, and miles better than Azure.
jamesvnz··on Show HN: Leapp – Multi-cloud credentials tool for developers
I happily stumbled across Leapp a few months ago - such an improvement for AWS SSO.

Really looking forward to GCP support when it's ready.

jamesvnz··on Stripe Payment Links
Pleased to see this feature.

The one feedback I'd give is that it's hard for a user to know they can adjust the quantity on mobile. You have to click the "Details" link in the top right, and it's not really obvious to a user this is where they should go do this. (i.e. they may well think that they can't update the quantity).

jamesvnz··on Microsoft says mandatory password changing is “ancient and obsolete” (2019)
This is why many systems - I've seen it with Microsoft and Salesforce - set a "minimum password age". Which is usually a minimum of 1 day.

This way, you can't change your password more than once a day. This makes quickly cycling through to get back to your original password hard.

jamesvnz··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
Sounds great - but maybe a simpler first step would be just estimating the carb content. This way you'd get type 1s interested too. It would be the first step before insulin/carb ratios and glycemic index become factors.