10,495 karma · joined October 30, 2007
By doing that I not only ensured they were up and running in good shape, but I learned what it's like to be the person installing and maintaining them. We have an installer in town who made the intro to that customer, but for this new product it was a big learning experience to be there, doing it myself.
Also it's been done before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_reserve
But this kind of attack is just a classic cheap shot. If the argument was accompanied with evidence that it was feasible and economically optimal to build the infrastructure (transportation, retail, local services) in Atherton that could support a dramatic increase in the number of residents in the area, then sure, you could have a reasoned debate about it. Without that it’s just a sneer, and it does nothing to refute Andreessen’s argument that there should be more development in areas where it is logistically and economically practical.
But I have had complete temporary relief for a few days at a time that coincided with other signs of healing in my body, which hints at what could bring about permanent abatement.
I’ve had mild tinnitus since I was about 12-13yrs old (I’m in my 40s now).
It’s never been especially debilitating; it doesn’t impair my hearing or diminish quality of life, it’s just always there in the background.
Since about the same age I’ve had signs of inflammation in the digestive system/respiratory system and other mild/moderate symptoms that research suggests are related to microbiome issues - EBV, CMV, etc. at its worst it’s been like chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia, though not always and not these days.
I’ve tried a lot of things over the years to try and resolve these issues - diet/nutrition, detoxing, cleansing, infrared, occasionally more extreme things I won’t mention here. On a few precious occasions everything seemed to click into place and I just felt a really pleasant, energized feeling through my body, the signs of inflammation went away, my digestion improved and the tinnitus abated and my hearing was completely clear.
Every time however, the baseline symptoms, including the the tinnitus, returned within a few days and remain to this day (though probably at a milder level than a few years ago).
I don’t have any definitive takeaways from all this, but it suggests to me that if there’s a way to fully resolve chronic inflammation and microbiome issues (which are quite common), it may bring about a complete abatement of tinnitus.
(You can Google for CMV tinnitus/EBV tinnitus to find research papers and articles/discussions on correlations between these conditions).
It was always privately owned: built by Labtam (I guess they saw it as a complementary service to their X terminal product), then acquired by Solution6, then OzEmail, then UUnet. I think they had some government clients though. Certainly Australia Post was one.
For some reason I can see the Labtam logo in my mind's eye, but I can't remember why I know it. We used a lot of JTEC gear in the olden days. Did they end up buying Labtam maybe? I have no idea any more!
They had a big business in the 90s selling X terminals (see my root-level comment). I'd guess that's most likely where you saw the brand. After that subsided it looks (from the Wayback machine) like they just did general electronic devices design/manufacture, before eventually going out of business in about 2016.
I'd forgotten something else till I read one of their work bios: I'd just thought OzE bought AOne for the corporate/govt customers (who included Coles Myer and Aus Post), but they also bought it because the AOne network was a more robust network than OzE's. Those Labtam guys were just very good engineers.
Edit: Oh you were there too. Awesome. Malcolm Rd represent.
Co-founder Jeremy Howard is now a leading educator on AI, as seen here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37631089
When I started there in Feb 1999, the highly-publicised acquisition by MCI WorldCom had just been completed and staff with earlier employee stock allocations were receiving their payouts.
At some point the signage out the front was changed to UUNet, and that was the brand promoted to Australian business customers. A major project was undertaken to transition customers over to UUNet's "DAN" (Dial Access Network).
Sadly that was the beginning of the end for the OzEmail brand. UUNet soon set about trying to offload the OzEmail consumer-focused business whilst also trying to make such a deal a bigger wholesale contract for use of the DAN [1].
Those attempted sales in 2000 didn't eventuate, then with the bankruptcy of MCI WorldCom, everything there just went into a holding pattern; there was no solid strategy or investment to keep growing the customer base and embrace the consumer broadband era that started taking off in 2001 (I'd moved over to another ISP that was very early to market with ADSL offerings to small business then consumers, and we watched on with bemusement as OzEmail just seemed largely dormant).
Meanwhile, the little-known Perth-based ISP iiNet moved very aggressively to capture the consumer ADSL market, and blew us all out of the water in that segment.
iiNet acquired OzEmail in 2005 [2], for about a third of the best offer price in 2000. I once heard iiNet named conference rooms after all the companies they'd acquired, so if that's still true, that's about all that's left of the OzEmail brand, along with a few old email addresses you occasionally see in the wild.
It's a shame; it was such a strong brand and presence in the Australian internet scene in the mid-late 90s, which is why I was so excited to be able to work there.
[2] https://announcements.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20050215/pdf/3pqz6tg...
Just 6 years later, when I started university (in a course I didn't much care for as no profession or career seemed of much interest), as I sat at a computer lab PC and started perusing the Windows 3.11 desktop, I saw the Netscape icon, clicked on it, started browsing - finding music lyrics and chat boards, and sporting results and transgressive humour, and thought "OK, this is exciting". Pretty soon I was building webpages and thinking about how to turn this into a career.
The first internet-related job I got was for OzEmail, in 1999, in the building that was previously occupied by corporate-focused ISP Access One (OzEmail had acquired it from Solution6). Access One had been founded by Labtam, a company that was formed in 1972 making/importing scientific instruments, then made PCs in the 80s, then in 1989 developed a world-first RISC-based X terminal and started exporting it globally [1][2]. Once I was chatting with a guy I'd gotten to know at OzEmail, who'd started as an Access One phone support rep then learned about Cisco routers and soon became a network engineer, and he pointed into the server room at the rack where he'd installed the first Yahoo mirror in Australia. All this was going on in a nondescript light-industrial area of Braeside in outer south-eastern Melbourne. There was still a Labtam office in that street when I worked at OzEmail, and old X terminals lying around the office. They let me take one home once and I tried to connect it up to my home network. I didn't get very far, but it was a bit of fun. These days I live past Braeside and occasionally drive down that road and reminisce, lamenting that the people working for the construction and import/export companies occupying those buildings now would have little knowledge or care for what feats of innovation and commerce that had happened there in decades past.
I once had to email Robert Elz in order to apply for a .org.au domain name for a community group I was in. He was cranky that my DNS records weren't set up right, but we got there eventually (he must have been extremely busy and it could often take a long time to get a response; someone once told me gifts of good Scotch could help move things along). I've often wondered what he thought of the way control of the .au tld was given to Melbourne IT, and privatised in a way that enriched the University and also established clients of their IPO underwriters, JB Were. It really didn't seem much in the spirit of the early internet, of which he was such a champion.
Sometimes I think it would be fun to do a bunch of interviews with the people making everything happen back then and make a podcast or video series about it. It was such an exciting time and I feel lucky to have been there when it was just taking off. I'd love to help document it for posterity. (If anybody reading this happens to know of anyone who was at Labtam in the early 90s I'd love an intro.)
[1] https://techmonitor.ai/technology/sun_endorses_labtams_x_ter...
[2] https://www.afr.com/politics/labtam-receivership-after-slow-...
Whether those reasons are reasonable is separate; it's just the way most people act, and it's hard to imagine what will cause enough people to change that will make things better for developers.
Better for developers to find ways of monetising via "pro" features, commercial support, etc, as it's easier for people/companies to justify paying money if they feel they're paying for a product or service.
But a lot of what has attracted Starbucks' huge audience has been their very milky, sweetened, flavoured beverages that end up not being much of a coffee by the time they're consumed, and I think when people scoff at Starbucks, that's a big part of what they're reacting to. But I do think people who just have very milky coffee like cafe latte and flat white but then diss Starbucks are mostly just being snobbish.
I'm from Melbourne Australia, which several people in this thread have commented about, and I know what people are talking about, both those who talk about the good coffee here and those who talk about the superiority complex we have developed about it. I can see it both ways. Starbucks didn't take off here, not because people thought it was "bad"; we just didn't need it, as people already had favourite cafes serving coffee they really liked, so there was no need to change.
But the modern-day, 3rd-wave coffee snobbery thing arose a few years after that. On the one hand, like everything Melbourne claims to be better at, it can be a bit eye-rolly. On the other hand, my favourite coffee these days is long macchiato (I developed the taste for it when spending time in Italy and marrying into an Italian-Australian family), and even in Melbourne it can be hit-and-miss finding a cafe that does a long-mac "right"; I don't mean to be snobby about it, it's just about how I like it having developed a taste for it over several years. But it does make a difference that cafes here do try very hard to achieve very high standards in the coffee they serve, and people here really appreciate it.
I'm not about to say it's been transformative or profoundly enlightening, but I do consider it to be useful and valuable to be able to know these things when working on projects where large data sets and performance issues are involved. I'm no longer able to nod along when people go on those rants about how LeetCode and whiteboard tests are just testing for conformity and obedience; I can now see how these concepts are important for people to know when working in the kinds of roles that the major tech companies are hiring for.
I think the bigger realisation I've had is that academic Computer Science and contemporary software development are just quite different fields, and it's non-obvious until you make the effort to bridge the gap, just how little in common they have, at least until you become more advanced as a software developer.
I agree that it's mostly due to the fact that many/most software developers these days are self-taught or taught in bootcamps or "IT" courses that just don't teach much or any fundamental CS. And I agree it's probably not a bad thing on the whole, but I also think it would be better if self-taught software developers were encouraged to believe that learning these concepts at some point is achievable, worthwhile and possibly quite satisfying and confidence-building.
"With the major rains at an end for now, potatoes are returning to the shelves and frozen food section."
https://theconversation.com/what-was-behind-australias-potat...
Short version:
We have a short-term need for one or more contractors who can help us with circuit board design and C firmware programming for IoT data monitoring/control devices for agricultural applications, using Nordic SoC/SiP devices.
The devices need to support cellular communications (LTE-M using the Nordic 9160) and Bluetooth (LE and mesh, using the Nordic 5340).
The initial engagement would be as a contractor on hourly rates or retainer whilst we get some initial projects completed. Permanent or co-founder roles may be available in the future.
Detailed version:
We're a vendor of data monitoring and automation technology for small-to-medium sized agriculturalists - mostly growers of wine grapes, fruits, vegetables, grains, pulses, etc. Our predecessor companies (which go back as early as 1982) have supplied technology to some of the world's leading food and wine producers, research institutions and agri-business brands.
Our main products are:
- A data monitor that reads soil moisture and other environmental metrics, and uploads data to the cloud via Cat-M1, and a partner web app that displays data on maps+graphs and manages the devices.
- A webapp that displays data from a network of 70+ weather stations across some major growing regions of Australia, and displays weather data updated every 10 minutes and long-term historical graphs
We're looking for people with the following skills:
- Electronics engineering - designing circuits and circuit boards for IoT data monitoring/control applications, using Nordic SiP/SoC devices or comparable components. Experience with contemporary cellular data networks (Cat M1, NB-IoT) very welcome, as well as other radio data technologies, e.g., LoraWAN, DigiMesh, ZigBee, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi.
- Programming for above hardware platforms, ideally very experienced with C and the Zephyr platform. Knowledge of Mororola/Freescale assembly language a big advantage, for the purpose of porting functionality from a legacy device.
This would be particularly interesting to someone who wants to go deep developing a new hardware/firmware architecture for this industry; something like what Cisco IOS is to networking, but for agriculture data monitoring/control. We’re also considering offering the circuit board as a barebones/OEM product, a-la “Raspberry Pi for agriculture”, so it would be a great opportunity for someone who want to be a part of that.
We’re a new, “clean slate” company being established by people with decades of industry/product experience and solid relationships and reputation. We have several significant sales opportunities waiting to be fulfilled. And as a newly founded company we can offer substantial “ground-floor” equity allocations to the right people.
For more info, contact: tom+jobs at taindata.com.
I’ve been doing these practices consistently now for about 11 years. Even after all that time, I’m not at all free of emotional attachments; I’m working through some very deep career-related ones right now. But that’s by the by.
One of the things you start to learn when you spend enough time doing this work is that people’s emotional attachments are way more powerful than people’s ability to reason and see logic.
One you see it, you can’t unsee it. I now notice it all the time, in journalism, on Twitter, on podcasts, here on HN, and anywhere contentious topics are being discussed, people who are regarded as being as “rational” and “scientific” in their worldview will routinely argue positions that are logically absurd but they won’t be able to see it, due to their emotional attachment to the conclusion. And often their interviewer or debating parter – even if they’re somewhat in opposition – won’t notice and call them out on it because they have the same attachment to the position.
I’ve come to believe that science and logic really doesn’t hold much sway in society at all; we have positions/conclusions that are largely predetermined via people’s egos and emotional attachments, then scientific data is cherry-picked to form a "rationalisation" that feels just valid enough to pass under people's radar.
Email me if interested (address in profile).
The HN guidelines specifically state that "comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive" and ask us to "eschew flamebait" and "avoid generic tangents".
With that in mind I don't want to perpetuate the flamewar but will try only to correct the record:
> Even at the ABC, hardly a workplace where you'd intuitively expect the kind of behavior I'm referring to, it's rampant https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-63699881
The article you linked makes absolutely no mention of the kind of behaviour you described in your earlier comment as being "rampant" at the ABC; it's about reactions from some audience members to Stan Grant's (and other presenters') comments during the introductory coverage of King Charles' coronation; it's a complex topic and one worthy of contemplation and earnest discussion, but it has no relevance to your original claims.
> Another famous example would be AFL ... It would not be tolerated ... But Australia and Australians get a pass because "it's Australia"
In no sense are any occurrences of racism "tolerated" or is anyone getting "a pass" for anything; the whole reason you know about them is they attract widespread condemnation and meaningful action.
All of these cases date back a significant amount of time, pertain to a small segment of the population, have attracted widespread condemnation, have led to major investigations, sanctions, reforms and broad progress in the way these issues are understood and handled, and instigated ongoing discussions and programs to continue to improve the way issues for indigenous/PoC players are recognised and accommodated.
Issues like this are not isolated to Australia, and these occurrences in Australia have somewhat mirrored the way issues of race in sport and politics have become prominent in the U.S. and many other parts of the world in recent years.
None of this is to say that occurrences like those you originally described never happen, nor that "maybe [our] country has some work to do". I didn't and don't dispute that, but the work is being done (going as far as a planned referendum for a constitutional amendment to give the indigenous population a formal voice to parliament, which has strong popular support) and meaningful progress is being made, just as it is in many places in the world that still have "work to do".
Anyway, I literally had to check the title of this article to remind myself that the topic is Are you a late bloomer in work or love? Maybe you’re right on time - i.e., nothing to do with this nationalistic flamewar.
So I'm certainly out of this discussion.
But if your ultimate point is "your country has some work to do", well, sure, of course.
Sure, Australia may have been slower to catch up than the rest of the world; it's a small, isolated country. But it's all changing very quickly now, and indeed has been for a long time.
I grew up in Melbourne in the 80s surrounded by many different cultures, and spent time living in Sydney in the 00s. Sure racism existed but has been increasingly unacceptable ever since I was young and is not tolerated among anyone I know of now. "Gay" as a pejorative has been unacceptable among anyone in inner Melbourne and Sydney since the early 00s - i.e., for at least 20 years.
No doubt you'll find exceptions and segments of the population that are slower to reform, just as you do in all places/cultures. Most of that is circumstantial; reform happens when people are exposed to people from different walks of life they become aware of them and more tolerant of them. That's how it's always happened, everywhere. Moralising about these kinds of things really serves only to feel morally superior in yourself, rather than understanding the society you're critiquing.
To slur the whole country with your observations of a particular region/cohort at a particular time is to succumb to the same kind of failing of which you're accusing others.
(It was an acquaintance's 21st birthday party on a Mon or Tues night in the front room, attended by about 50 people, and I was terrible. The friend I was helping became a pro DJ a bit later. I certainly didn't).
Great days.
https://www.platinumaccounting.com.au/blog/melbourne-lockdow...
> You won't find this on HN because signal to noise ratio is low in such discussions and you will get downvoted.
Over the years I've had several comments that I consider "something that's true, that almost nobody agrees with [me] on" that attracted many upvotes, good replies, and emails from people interested to know more.
It took quite a bit of practice to learn how to phrase things in a way that could meet people where they're at and take them on the same kind of journey of realisation that I'd been through. The requirement to do that applies to any topic that almost nobody agrees with you on; that is not a particular aspect of HN's culture, it is inherent to the way broader society functions.
If you want to change people's minds about something on a topic where almost everyone holds a particular belief or assumption, it's going to take some effort and care.
The OP's comment that they’re complaining about isn't about something that "almost nobody agrees with [them] on", it's a pretty standard talking point right now and throughout the history of technologies that displace human labor.
It's fine to post comments like that, and I agree with them that the discussion it initiated is worthwhile, but if people downvote that kind of comment, it's probably because they find the point repetitive and would prefer to see comments that introduce new ideas.
That said, if anyone ever sees a comment that's really solid but that they think has been unfairly downvoted, they can always email hn@ycombinator.com and ask for it to be reviewed.
[1] To be clear, I have doubts about just how far LLM's can continue to improve and how much they will really transform the world; but the influence of OpenAI so far is plain for all to see.
We don't know what 70s AI and ChatGPT will evolve into. That's why everyone keeps debating and prognosticating about it, because nobody actually knows. But whatever people mean by AGI, we don’t know if it will or can evolve from the AI platforms that have come before.
We do know that the thing that evolved into ChatGPT is entirely different from primitive cellular life, so there's no reason to believe that ChatGPT will keep evolving into some kind of humanistic, self-aware intelligence.