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JosephRedfern

2,180 karma · joined November 2, 2011

meet.hn/city/53.1402995,-4.2644108/Caernarfon

Socials: - josephredfern.at.hn - joseph@redfern.me - github.com/josephredfern - linkedin.com/in/josephredfern - reddit.com/user/j03

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JosephRedfern··on Logo Programming Language
I had a great teacher in primary school who introduced us to programming with Logo. We ran a variant called MSWLogo - it was my gateway drug, and how I learned what "paisley" was. Good times!
JosephRedfern··on Cherenkov Radiation
It came of kinda passive aggressive to me, to be honest!
JosephRedfern··on Audacity 4.0
This doesn't feel like very constructive feedback. Have you actually tried 4.0 yet, or were you too put off by the Discord link to proceed?

IMO Audacity has never been particularly native-feeling, and I don't buy the McDonalds analogy - this release is still lightweight. It'd be a fair comment if they'd e.g. move to Electron, but Qt 6 is hardly that.

JosephRedfern··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2026)
Runway | Trust & Safety Engineer | London / NYC / SF / Seattle / Remote (US + Europe) | Full-time

We're hiring a Trust & Safety Engineer to join Runway's AI Safety and Responsibility team. Runway builds AI world models - general-purpose simulators for robotics, science, and storytelling — and this role exists to keep that safe as it reaches millions of users.

Stack: TypeScript API on ECS/Fargate, Python/PyTorch inference backend, Claude + Gemini for safety/moderation, ClickHouse for abuse signal detection, AWS + GCP, Terraform, Prometheus/Grafana.

It's a generalist role, hands-on across the full engineering lifecycle - from model pre-training through productionisation. We're looking for 3+ years production Python or TypeScript, comfort across the stack, and experience with data pipelines (ClickHouse a plus).

Apply here: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/runway-ml/c3ebd871-ea78-4b71-80a2-7..., or feel free to reach out with any questions (info in bio).

We're also hiring for a bunch of other roles, across Engineering, Research, GTM, Marketing, Finance, Legal: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/runway-ml?utm_source=kW6D9goed3

JosephRedfern··on Gyroflow: Video stabilization using gyroscope data
Out of curiosity - how do you sync gyro data with video timecode?
JosephRedfern··on Show HN: 30k IKEA items in flat text
I've heard that LLMs can perform worse with these more efficient representations compared to e.g. JSON, because they've seen far fewer examples of them during training. Do you know how true that is?
JosephRedfern··on Raycast for Windows
I think you're being oversensitive, especially in the context Raycast adding support for Windows.

The whole purpose of Raycast is to improve productivity and UX, be that under macOS or Windows. It'd be a pretty shitty launch announcement if the blog post didn't mention the problem that they're trying to solve.

Edit: I'm not sure if the post was edited after my reply, but ATM there's no mention of BSODs - the closest I can see to a dig at Windows is:

> You know the feeling. Search that can't find your files. Apps buried in menus. Simple tasks that take too many clicks. Your computer should be faster than this. It should feel like everything is at your fingertips. That’s why we built Raycast.

JosephRedfern··on Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts
> live video on the self checkout screen with the notice "Monitoring In Progress"

That really winds me up too - it shows such contempt for legitimate customers.

JosephRedfern··on Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?
I imagine it may not be a proxy in the true sense, but a headless browser that's "proxying" the application process rather than the network traffic itself.
JosephRedfern··on High-severity WinRAR 0-day exploited for weeks by 2 groups
There's a really interesting article from Tavis Ormandy about the instruction set and virtual machine used in RAR: https://blog.cmpxchg8b.com/2012/09/fun-with-constrained-prog....

The docs for the toolchain he implemented (https://github.com/taviso/rarvmtools) allude to a number of bugs, but doesn't sound (??) like they're related to this vulnerability.

JosephRedfern··on PostgreSQL Anonymizer
There's a write up from Alexey of different approaches considered for clickhouse-obfuscator here: https://clickhouse.com/blog/five-methods-of-database-obfusca....

The summary is pretty funny:

> "After trying four methods, I got so tired of this problem that it was time just to choose something, make it into a usable tool, and announce the solution"

JosephRedfern··on Ask HN: How are you using LLMs for traversing decompiler output?
These guys are building foundational models for this purpose: https://reveng.ai/. The results are quite compelling, and they have plugins for your favourite reverse engineering tools.
JosephRedfern··on The longest straight line in Great Britain (without crossing a public road)
It'd be interesting to learn more about how this line was identified - was it by eye, or is there some neat analysis that was (or could be) performed to find it?
JosephRedfern··on Bluesky is breaking the rules in the EU
Yeah, this feels like a non-story.
JosephRedfern··on Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset
Because they're interesting?
JosephRedfern··on Boeing 787s must be reset every 51 days or 'misleading data' is shown (2020)
Nitpicking here, but you mean DHCP rather than NAT, right?
JosephRedfern··on A new JSON data type for ClickHouse
Perhaps this: https://event.cwi.nl/lsde/papers/p215-dageville-snowflake.pd...
JosephRedfern··on I spent 5 hours learning how ClickHouse built their internal data warehouse
It's linked to at the end, but I'm surprised that this article didn't feature/mention ClickHouse's own write-up of this undertaking. Part 1 here: https://clickhouse.com/blog/building-a-data-warehouse-with-c..., part 2 here: https://clickhouse.com/blog/building-a-data-warehouse-with-c....

Aspects of the post seem to borrow quite heavily from the original write-ups, which are worth a read.

JosephRedfern··on Hetzner introduces GPU server for AI training
That's not a like-for-like comparison, though. ~2TB local NVMe storage included here, 10 (70%) more CPU cores, and more than twice the RAM.
JosephRedfern··on Winamp Legacy player source code
There is some pretty creative swearing throughout this codebase - very entertaining!
JosephRedfern··on Show HN: Container Desktop – Podman Desktop Companion
+1 for OrbStack, it’s one of the few software subscriptions I pay for, and is worth every penny. Leagues head of Docker Desktop.
JosephRedfern··on What happens when you touch a pickle to an AM radio tower
I'm curious as to how much paperwork was involved here. Was the pickle grounding out the transmitter and (presumably) interrupting the broadcast not an issue?
JosephRedfern··on JPlag – Detecting Software Plagiarism
Is this also effective at detecting code duplication within a codebase?
JosephRedfern··on Show HN: Browser-based XSS scanner
I don't think OP is suggesting that the payload list is the interesting thing here, rather the overall approach
JosephRedfern··on Apple Maps on the web launches in beta
I thought the same, until I realised I still had `/unsupported` in the URL. Spoofing a Chrome UA and dropping that path from the URL let me load (and use) Apple Maps fine under Firefox.
JosephRedfern··on When are SSDs slow?
Maybe slight off topic, but does anyone know what the deal is with the NVMe K/V command set spec? There was a fair bit of noise made about it at the time, but I’ve not seen any drives that support it (despite a few enquiries)
JosephRedfern··on Driving forward in Android drivers
I remember some crazy insecure drivers on Android drivers back in the day (2012-13 or so) -- stuff like `/dev/fbN` and `/dev/input/eventN` being world read/writeable, allowing unprivileged screen and input capture from any application.

It was far more basic than what's described in this blog post, but really good fun to poke around at.

JosephRedfern··on 'Supercharger on wheels' brings fast charging to you
That's what breakdown companies (like the AA and RAC in the UK) do. It's slow enough that you'd only want to use it to get just enough juice to get to a proper charger, though - they use 3.5kW or 5kW chargers: https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/rac-news/rac-begins-rolling....

I'd imagine it's way less efficient and way more polluting than using the national grid, too.

JosephRedfern··on Intel's Thunderbolt Share lets two PCs control each other over a USB cable
It's a little janky (you have to boot to recovery mode), but you _kinda_ can with modern macs by using Target Disk Mode.

The drive appears as a network share, but it's not bidirectional, in that you can read/write from/to the target device, but the target device do the same to you.

JosephRedfern··on Optimizing ClickHouse: Tactics that worked for us
Thanks for sharing! I'm curious as to your approach to changing the ORDER BY key for such large tables without significant downtime, since AFAIK this can't be done in place (see: https://kb.altinity.com/altinity-kb-schema-design/change-ord...). Are you able to share any details?
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