peterldowns

4,423 karmajoined 16 лет назад

https://peterdowns.com

https://github.com/peterldowns

https://twitter.com/peterldowns

Always happy to meet a stranger, please reach out any time: hn @ peterdowns.com

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/peterldowns; my proof: https://keybase.io/peterldowns/sigs/9N-85LOZH1eJMXHLR70WroivxJB1is_s3ye5IT5xzxs ]

comments

позавчераdiscuss

quote:

> One health problem has me hitting 75% of my full-price, high deductible... and this doesn’t even include my much more intensive second surgery yet.

> The cost for all this will be thousands upon thousands of dollars. It will easily wipe out my health savings account and likely wipe out my regular savings as well. And this is for one eye. Can you imagine if it were something far worse?

I may be misunderstanding something but isn't hitting your deductible quickly a good thing? After the deductible you generally have to pay a much lower share of the cost of treatment — that's how it functions as insurance, downside protection from rare events.

Not claiming that anything here is good, genuinely asking to make sure I understand the blogpost.

Hope op recovers quickly.

19 дней назадdiscuss

Always wondered this. Must have been tried and not worked?

26 дней назадdiscuss

Keep following this line of thought and you'll end up in the same territory as Nick Land. If you haven't read already, the xenosystems blogs would probably be quite interesting to you.

26 дней назадdiscuss

"completely" in my experience

в прошлом месяцеdiscuss

Yes, we know. Good teams increase the likelihood of success with AI code generation the same way they increased the likelihood of success during hypergrowth: better infra, better devops, better internal abstractions/frameworks/building-blocks/golden-path-tooling that make the "easiest" way the "best" way to do antyhing. Otherwise, you get bogged down in garbage and everything breaks and catches on fire forever.

I'm a huge fan of Charity Majors and the quoted line in the next tweet in the thread is one of our team's rules, too:

> Every AI output has to have a human owner. If you don't want your name on it, it's probably not good work.

в прошлом месяцеdiscuss

What kind of cpu/memory do the vms get? Is there a way to define the template that's used, so I can say to a new team member, log in to boxes.dev and all the repos and tools are already there for you? And where do you get the machines, can we bring our own? The orchestration layer and product experience ticks all the boxes for me but where Codex, Claude, and Cursor have fallen down for me in the past is:

- slow and outdated vms

- horrible/no way to standardize environments for my team

- no way to bring our own compute to help resolve these issues ^

в прошлом месяцеdiscuss

I've decided to no longer post here after the incredible amount of spam I started receiving, both in terms of direct email submissions as well as unqualified and outright fraudulent applications to my application tracking system.

By fraudulent I mean: fake resumes, names stolen from real developers who work at well-known companies but either don't have a linkedin/portfolio or do have a linkedin/portfolio without a profile picture. So easily impersonated by a scammer.

It is a real shame, but this thread is now being scraped by plenty of other sites and bad actors.

Inbound hiring for remote teams is basically cooked at this point, signal is completely hidden in the noise. Curious if anyone else has had this experience or if it's just me?

2 месяца назадdiscuss

Judson sounds a lot like Henry, my twin brother, in terms of his abilities and profound autism. Growing up I learned to say that Henry is “autistic retarded” but I am sure that’s out of date. Anyway, God bless Judson, his family, and especially his caretakers and teachers. It is a special form of selflessness required to help the severely disabled and I am forever in awe and forever grateful to anyone who does so.

2 месяца назадdiscuss

Yes. This is partially why other ecosystems don’t see as many supply chain attacks.

2 месяца назадdiscuss

Neutrino research is so cool. SNO+ is entering a new phase this year, with a new scintillator fluid that might allow us to determine their Majorana status. Always cool to realize how much is still unknown, and how tenuously we “know” anything.

2 месяца назадdiscuss

This is really good, particularly the async tasks part. Hadn't thought about that. We'll be thinking about these lessons for the next version of our agent CLI.

2 месяца назадdiscuss

Oh sweet, thanks Mitch! I was a customer of Buildkite a few years ago, looking forward to working together again.

2 месяца назадdiscuss

Founder is active on HN and the service is high quality. Support is reasonable. Machines are fast and work well. There are a bunch of alternatives, the switching cost is extremely low, pick whatever you'd like.

2 месяца назадdiscuss

Yup! Still haven't switched off of Github, but considering it at this point. If you're in my shoes, here's some tools we use that help:

- https://github.com/sethvargo/ratchet for pinning external Actions/Workflows to specific commit hashes

- https://www.warpbuild.com/ for much faster runners (also: runs-on/namespace/buildjet/blacksmith/depot/... take your pick)

- soon moving to Buildkite for orchestration of our CI jobs

I still just need a reasonable alternative for the "store our git repo, allow us to make and merge prs" part of things. Hopefully someone takes all the pieces that the Pierre team is publishing and makes this available soon. The Github UI and the `gh` cli are actually really nice and the existing alternative code storage tools are not great IMO.

3 месяца назадdiscuss

Agreed! Been working on infra for an early-stage company recently and it's been awesome using OIDC and IRSA (or WIF if you're on google) for as many things as possible. Basically, there are no permanent keys for anything.

Slightly annoying to have to wrap some clis in scripts that generate the short-lived token, but it feels really magical to have services securely calling each other without any explicit keys or password to even store in our vault.

Lots of cool benefits --- for instance, we ran the compromised Trivy github action a few weeks ago, but our Github Actions had 0 keys for it to leak! Also really great that I don't have to worry about rotating shared credentials on short notice if an engineer on my team decides to leave the company.

3 месяца назадdiscuss

Would make way more sense to just use verification claims backed by government issued IDs, rather than relying on a third party like World(coin).

For instance, something like https://self.xyz. It's strictly better than the alternatives:

- already works with existing government-issued ids

- doesn't require submitting scans of your ID to third parties that can then be stored and leak

- allows privacy-preserving verification like "is this person older than 18" without requiring sharing of the person's exact age

3 месяца назадdiscuss

I see it the same way. Interesting times…

3 месяца назадdiscuss

Ah ok thanks very much!

3 месяца назадdiscuss

Oh no not in the public domain, I better not build something cool!

3 месяца назадdiscuss

I've been meaning to build ~exactly this experience, but for the 1952 Encyclopedia Brittanica Great Books of the World collection and its experimental index Syntopicon [0]. Would love to know more about how you OCR'd or otherwise ingested and parsed the raw material. I have a physical copy of the books, and I found some samizdat raw-image scans and started working on a custom OCR pipeline, but wondering if maybe I could learn from your approach...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Syntopicon