HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

rberger

1,282 karma · joined January 22, 2010

Robert J. Berger CTO/Co-Founder of Runa Inc. http://www.runa.com President/Founder of Internet Bandwidth Development http://blog.ibd.com

Rob is a founder and the CTO of Runa Inc., an early stage start-up developing a Software as a Service for online merchants. Runa increases conversion of shoppers while on the merchant's site using real-time, individualized promotions.

At Runa, Rob is leading an agile development effort that is pushing the state-of-the-art in personalization, service scaling, statistical / semantic processing and ajax technologies. Our system architecture includes the use of HBase/Hadoop, Clojure, Swarmiji, AMQP/RabbitMQ, Redis and Opscode Chef.

Rob is also the President and Founder of Internet Bandwidth Development, a consultancy focusing on providing technology consulting specializing in backbone networks, access networks, wireless networks, and innovative Internet/Web applications and services. IBD has provided services to technology start-ups, top names in Internet hardware and software, as well as venture capital firms, including Panorama Capital, SkyPilot Networks, VISA, Cisco, Ascend, iPass, and Oki Networks.

Most recently Rob has been involved with software and web services development based on Ruby and Rails as a consultant or advisor at SkyPilot, TelTel, ZipDX and CloudScale.

Rob has been a principal or founder in several start-up network services and equipment companies including InternNex, MetroFi and UltraDevices. As an Internet pioneer in the early 90’s, Rob founded InterNex Services which was the first ISP to offer commercial ISDN Internet services, Frame Relay and higher speed business broadband services as well as one of the first o offer shared, dedicated and International Hosting Services. InterNex was later acquired by Concentric/XO.

Rob is a respected expert in IP networks and open source software and has been on the Advisory Boards of companies including Covad, Alteon Websystems (acquired by Nortel), AboveNet, WeFi, Boorah, GridNetworks, Cloudscale, Support Intelligence and Cosine Communications. He is a frequent speaker on Next Generation Networks at conferences including CTIA and APRICOT (Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies).

In 2002 - 2003 Rob was a visiting research fellow at the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM www.glocom.ac.jp) in Tokyo with a focus on Open Spectrum technology (Ultra-wideband spread spectrum, Cognitive / Software Defined Radios, Wireless Mesh Networks, expanded unlicensed 802.11 wireless) and how it impacts spectrum policy.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/robert_j_berger; my proof: https://keybase.io/robert_j_berger/sigs/R1Q1HT9k74LSBD18Hiq-SbT2t9sLEFiMLtyMnUmH88A ]

submissionscomments
rberger··on Ask HN: Is Substack the new Medium?
Allow us non-regular domain experts to easily post technical articles with pure Markdown, easy to make Medium one of the outlets I post to automatically along with Dev.to, and private blogs. Make it easier to have embedded code in the articles.
rberger··on GitHub Copilot
Assuming this is actually a useful and powerful addition to a programmer's quiver (which it looks like it will be if not already is). Then the tying it to Visual Studio is a variation of Microsoft's "Embrace and Extend" philosophy but for Programmers and open source in general.

It uses Open Source as its input but, as far as I can tell (and I would be pleasantly surprised if I was wrong), CoPilot itself is not Open Source.

It is also tied to Visual Studio, making Visual Studio, a Microsoft Product and on its way to monopoly position even more up the power law curve to monopoly status.

This would be much more interesting and less concerning if CoPilot was Open Source and designed to plug in to other Editors / IDEs like via lsp or something similar.

rberger··on Old Stuff That Rocks
Forgot - Lisp: 1958 - Emacs: 1976
rberger··on Williams tube – cathode ray tube used as computer memory
My first job was at the startup Micro-bit in the mid 1970's We were building Electron Beam Access Memory systems as a "Cache" memory between Core and Disk memory for mainframes.

It was an 18 bit wide memory so it had 18 CRT tubes and was leveraging electron microscope techniques to increase density. It had two steps of electron beam steering.

I remember the founder walking around talking about our main competitor "Bubble Memory" which also never got very far.

http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/co/1975/02/01649340.pdf

rberger··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2015)
Mist Systems - Cupertino, CA - Data Science / Engineering & CloudOps

Mist is an early stage, well funded startup, transforming the indoor WiFi experience by applying real-time big data scale statistics, signal processing and machine intelligence to process telemetry from our state of the art cloud managed Access Points, Network Elements and Client mobile devices.

Mist is hiring data scientists & developers that relish taking on a “Greenclouds” opportunity to help shape the culture, tools and implementation of a Machine Intelligence driven, CI/CD focused, lovingly monitored, scalable, realtime screaming/streaming infrastructure.

- Data Engineers - http://goo.gl/FuQWi5

- Data Scientist / Machine Intelligence - http://goo.gl/Azr31h

- Software Engineers - http://goo.gl/Ge5rtc

- Polyglot Tools / Ops Savvy Engineer - http://goo.gl/Q2EfPM

- Web UI Developer - http://goo.gl/w9z97E

Apply thru the links above or at jobs at mistsys.com

rberger··on Poll: Did you “drop Dropbox”?
Rice is a war criminal. The Government is full of war criminals. Both parties are led by war criminals. We don't need war criminals in tech. Its bad enough with all the brogrammers
rberger··on When Do We Get Robot Cars? Because Driving Really Sucks
I say this everytime I get in my car
rberger··on Mostly λazy v0.0.4 (Clojure podcast) on Pallet, ~Chef/Puppet for Clojure
There does seem to be a bit of a shift coming to Chef with the use of LWRP (Light Weight Resource Providers) as a way to have a library like interface to cookbooks. But its not as first class as a Clojure library.

There is also a new way of managing cookbooks more like the Ruby Bundler called Librarian https://github.com/applicationsonline/librarian

rberger··on A new lost decade leading to revolution
This is one of the most precise diagnosis / analysis of current affairs I've seen in a long time.
rberger··on We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future
Is this a bug or a feature? Shouldn't we be figuring out how to embrace this? Isn't this an symptom that the abundent future is arriving, but not evenly distributed? Is it not time to start figuring out how to create the vocabulary and institutions of modulating abundance instead of maintaining 19th Century institutions whose main purpose was to modulate scarcity?

The fact that "Finance" is now over 30% of the US GDP shows a major bug in the current set of institutions. That is where abundance is being dampened into wasted wealth for 0.1% of the population who are using it to maintain artificial scarcity. It needs to flow to help fund creativity, R&D, experiments that will blow the doors off of scarcity and allow abundance to be well, abundant.

And most people don't want JOBS, they want to live. But most of us have forgotten that and thus we keep trying for 100% employment when we should be working towards 100% UNemployment aka Living Life.

rberger··on Stop the Merger
The Video Paradies (http://attmobile.savetheinternet.com/video-vote) make you laugh and Cry at the same time
rberger··on The Day Comcast's Data Cap Policy Killed My Internet for 1 Year
The entity that controls content should not be allowed to own the transport. Transport is a Utility. We the ratepayers paid for it and we the Citizens of the towns and cities that the cable or fiber pass thru own the rights-of-way. The local physical plant of the Internet should be owned by the Citizens. The physical plant of the Internet must be open access with no restrictions on content.

A vibrant marketplace will emerge on top of the Internet Physical Plant if these basics are enforced, just like public roads, water and sewer plants enabled life as we know it.

rberger··on How to Subvert Democracy: Montesinos in Peru
In the US the corruptors don't have to bribe the Media. They OWN the media. And they are working to own and control the Internet. (See ATT/T-Mobile merger for the next step)
rberger··on Why Isn't the Price of Broadband Obeying Moore's Law?
The cost of digging up sidewalks and laying fiber are a fixed cost that can be amortized over 10 - 30+ years. Cost of bandwidth upgrades after that is almost purely semiconductors/photonics.