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bartman

895 karma · joined January 25, 2008

Co-Founder of https://www.playtestcloud.com

Email: bart@hn.the-bart.org

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bartman··on Learning to Reason with LLMs
In ChatGPT for Business it limits sharing among users in my org, without an option for public sharing.
bartman··on Learning to Reason with LLMs
When you click on the image it loads a higher res version.
bartman··on Learning to Reason with LLMs
Like others here, it was just available on the website and app when I checked. FWIW I still don’t have advanced voice mode.
bartman··on Learning to Reason with LLMs
This is incredible. In April I used the standard GPT-4 model via ChatGPT to help me reverse engineer the binary bluetooth protocol used by my kitchen fan to integrate it into Home Assistant.

It was helpful in a rubber duck way, but could not determine the pattern used to transmit the remaining runtime of the fan in a certain mode. Initial prompt here [0]

I pasted the same prompt into o1-preview and o1-mini and both correctly understood and decoded the pattern using a slightly different method than I devised in April. Asking the models to determine if my code is equivalent to what they reverse engineered resulted in a nuanced and thorough examination, and eventual conclusion that it is equivalent. [1]

Testing the same prompt with gpt4o leads to the same result as April's GPT-4 (via ChatGPT) model.

Amazing progress.

[0]: https://pastebin.com/XZixQEM6

[1]: https://i.postimg.cc/VN1d2vRb/SCR-20240912-sdko.png (sorry about the screenshot – sharing ChatGPT chats is not easy)

bartman··on Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data
I have just set this up, pointed it at a internal Google Sites-based knowledge base, and made it available to my team through a Slack bot. It's really nice and easy to get started with and I love the self-hosting support.
bartman··on Superlinear Returns
I see, thanks!
bartman··on Superlinear Returns
Can you say more about the impact of SOC2 certifications? We’ve been selling to enterprises for years without any certifications, but with long and intricate security questionnaires needing to be filled out. Does that go away if you have a certification? Our sector isn’t very regulated (video games industry), but the question for SOC2 does come up regularly - however never as a blocker.
bartman··on Naked Mole Rat’s Longevity Gene Gives Mice a Longer Life
As a pet rat owner of over 8 years, medical research on rodents actually rarely results in benefits for pets of that species.

The main advantage we have found so far is that drug studies done on rats can serve as a reference for safe and potentially effective dosages, as there's very little veterinary literature on rodent care otherwise. All meds for rats are typically repurposed cat, dog or human meds and determining the dose needed for treatment is trial and error more often than not – even in the hands of an experienced vet.

bartman··on Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
Custom negotiated contracts (including NDAs), custom billing terms (although this is harder to segment on), advanced team management features that allow separate parts of an organization to use your tool (think sub-team management w/ individual admins and configurable visibility between teams).
bartman··on Ask HN: Do You Trust Grammarly?
We're mandating use of Google Chrome across the org and use the Chrome Enterprise features to force installing (ad blocker, 1Password) and block (Grammarly amongst others) extensions: https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/9296680?hl=en

I'm not entirely sure if it's a feature that only comes with Google Workplace, but as part of the Workplace admin interface we get a nice UI for managing all of this.

bartman··on Ask HN: Do You Trust Grammarly?
We permit use of Grammarly only using the stand-alone app or website, and only for content that doesn't contain any personal data & isn't security critical, e.g. blog posts, etc.

As others have said, the browser extension is an unmanageable security risk and we prevent its use and installation.

bartman··on Selling to the Fortune 500, Government, and Other Lovecraftian Horrors
What reading about Enterprise sales has not prepared me for is months-long legal negotiations, and there is very little writing on this topic out there.

Whereas you can pretty much agree to any terms that don’t misrepresent how your product works when you’re just starting out, there comes the point of wanting to spend a lot more scrutiny on your contracts without having in-house legal yet.

If you’re a founder, that probably means you will be sending redlines, thinking about indemnities and warranties and handling other wonderful aspects of doing business internationally (privacy terms, jurisdiction, insurance, …).

While true that price discrimination helps to make these cases mostly worth it, they are still a crazy time suck and finding a savvy lawyer to take it off your hands may or may not be easily possible (lawyer fees for one such deal once ended up being 50% of the whole deal value - we raised enterprise prices after that).

Watch out especially when you’re in an industry going through lots of M&A activity as your self-service customers may suddenly be part of large Fortune 500 organizations, and despite all advice to the contrary, stakeholders who know your pricing already do balk at your 5-10x Enterprise prices.

I do wish there were more stories of how the legal side of these deals is dealt with, what sticking points in contracts take up most of your time, and what „hacks“ you found.

(One hack that saved me a lot of time: Treat your terms like you would any other part of your product. Iterate, work on the UX, remove barriers to adoption. After a bunch of gnarly negotiations over things that matter to your client, but not usually to you I compiled a list of changes and had our lawyer revise the terms to avoid the need to negotiate those parts moving forward. Alas, it’s a moving target and we’re in the midst of another iteration like this.)

bartman··on Launch YC: 3D Web; Training; Child privacy; Pregnancy; Life science; Desk rental
Great to see innovation in this space. How does your service compare to offerings like those from PRIVO? Something we get a lot of value out of is their review of whether our practices are compliant (and if not, how to achieve it - all done in the design phase of new features etc) on top of offering a widget for verifiable parental consent. Is this something you also offer?
bartman··on Heroic rat retiring from detecting land mines
None of which sadly make it into routine vet practice.

I’m keeping rats of over 5 years now, and even the treatment options at one of the most experienced rat vets in the area feel just above medieval.

There are basically 5 medications that are tried (NSAIDs, antibiotics, bronchiodialators and diuretics, cortisol) based on the presumed diagnosis, and easily located tumors can be operated on (depending on the skill of the vet).

Our vet aptly described the state of the art in veterinary care for rats as knowing the LD50 dose of all medications for rats, but there being nearly no literature or experience on therapeutic doses. Through trial and error vets have developed therapeutic protocols for rats over the last decades, but the speed it’s been going at is slow and availability of medicine in the right dosages scarce (rats are tiny after all). Just now we’re going through treatment of a respiratory issue where the medicine of choice is no longer being produced, and our main option after the vet uses up her remaining 2 vials is to start experimenting with dosing for a yet unknown in rats (aside from LD50) replacement medicine.

For what it’s worth, the rats in this article are gambian pouched rats which have life expectancies of around 5-7 years, vs. 1.5 - 2.5 years for domestic fancy rats.

bartman··on Bob Cassette Rewinder: Hacking Detergent DRM
My recently bought Miele dishwasher has such a compartment (DE). They’re even labeled as I and II.
bartman··on Ask HN: What entry-level telescope should I choose?
I second the recommendation for the Cloudy Nights forum.

Secondly, I‘ll go against the grain and suggest you don’t start with a binocular or manual dobsonian, but with a motorized goto telescope. They come in many varieties and for a start, pretty much all of them are good. Celestron has a series of telescopes called Evolution and if it’s in your budget, an Evolution 6 will be a good scope for a long time. They also have smaller & cheaper scopes with Go-To that will work well too.

What’s Go-To? You tell the telescope what you want to look at, and it drives right to it and keeps the object centered within the eyepiece. The last part is quite important as even at average magnifications, objects tend to move out of the center (where it’s sharpest) quite fast. Many scopes can also be controlled via your phone with an app such as SkySafari - sometimes that requires an extra adapter for the scope though.

Why this path? I followed the usual advice of getting a binocular, then a small dobsonian and barely ever had the drive to use them due to finding objects to observe in city skies being hard. The scopes just collected dust for the majority of the year.

I just made the jump to a bigger scope with Go-To to a) make visual observations more interesting for me (more observing, less searching), and b) pursue a newly discovered interest of mine called Electronically Assisted Astronomy. Think Google‘s night photo mode but for a telescope, allowing you to see galaxies and nebulas in all their glory from home!

bartman··on Apparent hackers behind Kia ransomware attack demand millions in Bitcoin
Yes, exactly. I‘m very happy my Hyundai has this feature as city parking more often than not means walking a few minutes to my car. Being able to pre heat, check the battery level, etc remotely is a feature I would not want to miss.
bartman··on Ask HN: Predictions for 2021?
* EU-based SaaS will become more popular due increased difficulty in working with US-based SaaS companies in a privacy compliant way

* Remote work will stay mainstream in tech, with most employees working at least a few days remote per month

* HN will get a dark mode

bartman··on The Dec 21, 2020 Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn
Take a look at https://skyandtelescope.org/wp-content/uploads/3-scopes.pdf for a good overview of 3 typical entry level suggestions. I have the Onesky (or rather it’s European sibling the Heritage 130P) and enjoy it. It doesn’t have any fancy features, but is easy to move around, doesn’t take up much storage space and still has plenty of power!

If you’re willing to spend some more, the Celestron NexStar 5 and 6 are solid telescopes that can automatically move to specific objects in the sky (this is called GoTo) which is really nice if you want to focus more on viewing objects rather than finding them. They’re low on maintenance too and work well for showing others objects in the sky as they can keep whatever you look at centered in the eyepiece.

bartman··on Gmail and Google Drive Outage
Was greeted by this just as we started work. Observations so far: Reading and receiving emails via the Gmail web UI works, sending emails via the web UI doesn't work, sending emails via SMTP works.
bartman··on Surfboard: Audio Feature Extraction for Modern Machine Learning
Github: https://github.com/novoic/surfboard
bartman··on Append-only backups with restic and rclone
Great service, especially with the addition of the monitoring features.

How do you store the data on your end?

bartman··on Chinese sci-fi writer Liu Cixin wins Arthur C. Clarke award
This is totally OT, but your name rang a bell. Have you been active in the PSYC/Pike communities many many years ago by any chance?
bartman··on Chinese sci-fi writer Liu Cixin wins Arthur C. Clarke award
What other space dramas would you recommend?
bartman··on Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests
This could have been a big factor.

I live in Berlin and have not followed this topic closely, and only heard about this not being a typical Google office days ago when Google changed plans. The talk on the street over the last months was always centered on Google wanting to create a big office and the residents not wanting any big corporations there.

bartman··on Does Clean Laundry Have Germs?
Should be fine with clothes. My Siemens has a cleaning reminder that turn on after a month or so unless at least one wash with 60C or higher has been done.
bartman··on Facebook Dives into Home Device Market with Video Chat Product Named “Portal”
Heh, the difficulty in remembering the wake word actually rings true. We tried it with „Alexa“ first which is somewhat difficult to pronounce for a German speaker who doesn’t known any English. „Echo“ however worked well and she had no problem remembering it.
bartman··on Facebook Dives into Home Device Market with Video Chat Product Named “Portal”
I gave my 90 year old grandmother an Echo Show for Christmas and she loves it. My main goal was video chat (which she can also initiate herself), but she’s actively using it as a radio, weather station and calendar for the trash pick up.

To help her remember the commands I made a reference sheet with the most common phrases, but what mainly helped her was to think of talking to Alexa as if she was talking to a dog: Giving clear, loudly spoken commands.

bartman··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2017)
PlaytestCloud | Full Stack Developer | Potsdam, Germany (Berlin Area) | ONSITE | https://www.playtestcloud.com

Work on a great product being used by game studios like Ubisoft, ZeptoLab, Wooga, and many, many more.

* We‘re looking for a full stack developer keen to learn new things & technologies.

* Join a growing, highly motivated team of 8 people wanting to change the way video games are tested.

* Both founders have a tech background and we are proud of our engineering culture.

What we‘re looking for:

* 3+ years of development experience (in university or in the industry)

* Fluent in English

* Quick learner aiming to deeply understand the whole stack

* We DO NOT require any prior experience in the technologies we‘re currently using, but here‘s a list: Ruby on Rails, AngularJS, Java (Android), Objective-C/Swift (iOS), CoffeeScript, JavaScript/ECMAScript 2015, ReactJS, C++14, PNACL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Heroku

About PlaytestCloud:

PlaytestCloud is the premier provider of user testing for game studios. We run an online platform where game designers can upload their in-development iOS, Android or browser games, let real players try them out and get feedback in form of summaries, surveys, and in-game video recordings.

Perks:

* Our office in the quiet and beautiful Potsdam Griebnitzsee area is easy to reach with the S-Bahn train from Berlin

* You‘ll get a MacBook Pro for work

* We offer free drinks, snacks, and coffee in the office

bartman··on Caught for the First Time: The Early Flash of an Exploding Star
Looks like this is the public repository of all lightcurves recorded by Kepler: https://archive.stsci.edu/kepler/publiclightcurves.html
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