HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ben-gy

153 karma · joined December 16, 2013

Hi, I'm Ben (http://ben.gy) - CEO/CTO, Board Member, Founder, Speaker, Aerospace Engineer (https://linkedin.com/in/benrichardsonco)
submissionscomments
ben-gy··on Show HN: GeoChess – open-source geography strategy game
Nice one - my experimental AI factories are here https://lab.benrichardson.dev
ben-gy··on Show HN: GeoChess – open-source geography strategy game
This is interesting - I’ve been messing around with AI generated games - I get about 50% out-of-the box ready to play intuitively now but it took a lot of refinement of the prompt to get there - I’ll tell my ai to have a go at this one and see what it produces (will credit op for the inspiration).
ben-gy··on Fable 5 Is Back
I would say this is an important part of the product-market-fit discovery process. Sure, your comment holds true for well established products with a loyal customer base, but for an earlier stage product this rapid iteration process is quite important, especially from an onboarding and ease-of-use perspective.
ben-gy··on An Ohio Valley 100k-Watt FM Signal Is Severed in Broad Daylight – Radio World
This feels like force majeur from a contract perspective…
ben-gy··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
Niiice - I thought my Mac one was good (https://ben.gy) - this takes it to a whole new level!
ben-gy··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
Homage to OG Apple with some functional games/apps - https://ben.gy - there’s a few Easter eggs in there as well if you can find them ;)
ben-gy··on Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
Opus 4.5 got released ~3 months ago - Claude Code started using it automatically (for me anyway) - I also tried iOS prior to that and had a similar experience to you
ben-gy··on Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
https://apps.apple.com/au/app/events-canberra/id6756598656 - you can access the other ones by clicking the developer name in the listing
ben-gy··on Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
Max
ben-gy··on Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
Very few - the only manual things I do are; - clicking the distribute button to push the bundle to the App Store - filling in the compliance survey and App Store listing content - linking some components together e.g. for creating a VPN installer and tunnel i had to click some things in the Xcode UI I automate as much as possible; -“create 12 app icons for this in SVG and present them to me in a HTML page so I can choose one and then use that for the app icon and splash screen” - “create a demo mode toggle in settings and populate the app with fake data and then open up simulators for the correct image dimensions for the App Store listing so I can crate screenshots” - sometimes it tell me I have to other things like set up the entitlements to which is say “no - you do it and don’t forget to fill in the description that gets shown to the user so the feature actually works” I knew very little about Swift or Xcode profile to this and TBH I still don’t know that much about it, but I’m experienced enough to know when I’m being fed something that doesn’t look or feel right programmatically or architecturally.
ben-gy··on Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
I second this article - I built twelve iOS/Mac apps in two weeks with Opus 4.5 - four of them are already in the App Store - I’m a Rails Engineer and never had the time to learn Swift but man does Opus 4.5 make that not even matter - it even handles entitlements, logo & splash screen generation, refactors to remove dead code, edge case assent and hardening, Multiplatform app design, and more - I’m yet to run into a use case it can’t handle for most general use cases - that said, I have found some common mistakes it makes (by common I mean almost every time); puts iOS line list line items in buttons making them blue when they should not be, doesn’t set defaults for new data structure variables which crashes the app when changing the data structure after the fact, design consistent after the first shot (minor things like white background instead of grey background like all the other screens already, etc) - the one thing that i know it cant do well (and no other model that I know of can do this well either) is ASTM bi-directional communications (we work with pathology analysers that use this 1995 frame-based communication standard), even when you load it up with the spec and supporting docs - I suspect this is due to a dirty of available codebases that tackle this problem due to its niche and generally proprietary nature…
ben-gy··on I invited strangers to message me through a receipt printer
That’s awesome - I did a similar thing recently by replacing my sticky notes with receipts - https://github.com/ben-gy/thermalnotes
ben-gy··on Show HN: HumanAlarm – Real people knock on your door to wake you up
Yeah - absolutely - every business has risks, but the point here that I’m trying to make is if those risks aren’t fully assessed, and you aren’t willing to risk going to jail based on the “hope” that humans behave exactly as expected and agreed then this is likely a business probably not worth pursuing - of course everyone has different risk tolerances - but there’s risk tolerance assessment and lack of experience in assessing risk - I don’t know the founder here but I believe it can only be helpful if different perspectives are presented.

To go a bit deeper, what you have here is a business where a somewhat unknown person is hired to any address that you type into a website and pay a marginal fee for - I’m struggling to see how you could keep people safe with this concept (not only the contractor, but also the customer).

ben-gy··on Show HN: HumanAlarm – Real people knock on your door to wake you up
It’s a fun, niche solution, but I’d posit when you start looking into the minimum financial requirements to operate this business in a way that “guarantees” everyone’s safety and insures against worst case scenarios, this is not a viable business even at the smallest scale.

I’m not sure how things are in America, but in Australia you can be made personally liable (both small and large businesses) for things that go wrong in your company, especially when someone gets injured e.g. https://www.ohsrep.org.au/prosecutions_sn_699_connect

ben-gy··on Tesla's self-driving tech ditched by 98 percent of customers that tried it
This is exactly how I read it until working my way through this thread.
ben-gy··on Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
It wasn’t a bail out, it was an opportunity for investors to get great terms on equity at a crucial juncture for the company.
ben-gy··on Ask HN: Should I quit my startup journey for now?
IMHO it’s a corrupt line of thinking for a founder to not pay their employees. Even if they do raise the round (chances are they won’t) then you won’t want to work for these founders anyway as they’ve shown they are not capable of treating their employees fairly.
ben-gy··on US military's mysterious X-37B space plane zooms toward orbital record
That may be the case, but still keen for a source referencing that particular usage…
ben-gy··on Atlassian: We estimate the rebuilding effort to last for up to 2 more weeks
From what I can find online HQ is in AU, and is staying in AU?
ben-gy··on Yandex warns of bond repayment and supply risks
And when you are not blacklist
ben-gy··on Why is LinkedIn so cringe?
Hahaha
ben-gy··on Vaccine Makers Funneled Undisclosed Cash to Democrats and Republicans in 2020
I don’t understand why this is news worthy. You could replace “Vaccine Makers” with almost any sector as well…
ben-gy··on Bulgaria's new eGov minister is a software engineer
When did an active software engineer last get elected to use their skills as a politician in your electorate?
ben-gy··on Covid-19 vaccine certs on the dark web [pdf]
Again, this comment doesn’t make sense in the context either… I responded to the difficulty of conducting a transaction on the dark web - you respond with comparing the dark web to a persona bribe?! I don’t understand why people seem to throw logical debate out the window when it comes to covid… I get that for some people it’s a personal affront, but in my opinion that’s no excuse to just throw logical processing out the window.
ben-gy··on Covid-19 vaccine certs on the dark web [pdf]
Sure - but if they really want to go their local bar, you can either expose your computer to dark web to buy a certificate, or just go and get a free shot…

Whilst your comment is factual, I think it doesn’t make sense in the context. The barrier to purchasing a certificate off the dark web is high and require a fair amount of financial and personal conviction / exposure…

ben-gy··on Ask HN: How much equity should an early employee get?
I don’t agree with this logic - I run a bootstrapped startup with 7 figure revenue and > 50% margin - we’re growing ~12% monthly - I have no intention of raising capital, but no way would it be appropriate for me to give away a few percent to a new employee just because i haven’t raised any money from investors
ben-gy··on Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy
HIPAA is PHI - wouldn’t apply in this example
ben-gy··on Australia to acquire nuclear submarine fleet (AUKUS)
Your statement is contradictory - on one hand you agree that the US values Australia therefore justifying their decision for this agreement, and on the other you say Australia is independently matching itself to China - it’s not appropriate or correct to selectively choose parts of either statement because they are are in fact mutually exclusive relative to your argument. Either Australia is a puppet of the US and therefore by postering towards China it is not an AU vs CN issues but instead a US vs CN (via AU) issue or somehow Australia has managed to convince US to give them top secret technology and have independently decided to tackle CN. Over to you - which is it?
ben-gy··on Australia to acquire nuclear submarine fleet (AUKUS)
It’s a lot more strategically complex than that. Fo example, America manages the majority of its signals intelligence for a large chunk of the Asian content through various faculties such as pine gap [1].

You’d be foolish to postulate that geopolitically charged agendas are driven by a simple explanation such as “a superiority complex”.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Gap?wprov=sfti1 https://maps.apple.com/?ll=-23.799000,133.737000&q=Pine%20Ga...

ben-gy··on Alabama man dies after being turned away from 43 hospitals as Covid packs ICUs
Nope - that’s basically the equivalent of saying “does anyone else find it odd that that person who got their driver’s license 6 months just died in a car accident?”
Page 1 of 3Next →