HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ben_hall

686 karma · joined February 1, 2010

Blog.BenHall.me.uk / @Ben_Hall

Founded Katacoda.com, acquired by O'Reilly Media (2019)

submissionscomments
ben_hall··on Synthetica: The first on-demand conference generated by A.I
A note from the creator: Everything, from the domain name, to the website HTML/CSS, the intro, session titles, agenda, speakers, the talks, voice, speaker appearance and video are all generated via A.I. Even the above warning was created by A.I.

I (Ben Hall) wanted to see what happened and this is the result.

This is the introduction it created:

Welcome to Synthetica, the first on-demand conference generated entirely by A.I. This groundbreaking concept is a thought experiment that explores the potential of artificial intelligence in the conference industry.

At Synthetica, all the speakers, sessions, and content are generated by AI, creating a unique and fascinating experience for attendees. The AI algorithms used by Synthetica are able to generate high-quality content that is engaging, informative, and entertaining, as well as the look, speech, and even the name of the conference itself.

The idea for Synthetica was conceived by Ben Hall, who saw an opportunity to push the boundaries of what is possible with A.I. in the conference industry. While Synthetica is a concept and is not designed to be a real conference, it serves as a glimpse into the future of A.I. and how it may shape the way we experience conferences and other events.

Join us at Synthetica and discover a new world of possibilities, where A.I. is able to create and deliver content that is indistinguishable from human-generated content. Explore the latest ideas and research in the field of A.I., and learn how this technology is shaping the future of conferences and beyond.

ben_hall··on Show HN: An online interactive Kubernetes playground
True, but it's a free signup and we don't send unwanted emails...
ben_hall··on Show HN: An online interactive Kubernetes playground
Thanks! :)
ben_hall··on Show HN: An online interactive Kubernetes playground
Take a look at https://www.katacoda.com/courses/kubernetes/ and the official Kubernetes interactive bootcamp that Katacoda also powers at https://kubernetes.io/docs/tutorials/kubernetes-basics/

We'd love to hear your feedback.

ben_hall··on Show HN: An online interactive Kubernetes playground
I'd love to hear your feedback, bug reports are always welcome. We haven't heard of other problems.
ben_hall··on Startup School – YC’s Online Class
Unable to sign up at the moment, getting a 522 from CF after entering email.
ben_hall··on Building a Bank with Kubernetes [slides]
There is a solution to this coming in v1.5 - https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/32518
ben_hall··on CoreDNS: DNS service discovery for the cloud
CoreDNS is very cool. You can try it without any downloads or configuration using a Katacoda interactive scenario at https://katacoda.com/courses/coredns/dns-responder
ben_hall··on Ask HN: What are the hottest startups related to beer / brewing?
https://ubrew.cc/ - an open brewery where you brew the beer
ben_hall··on Understanding and Hardening Linux Containers [pdf]
I may be wrong, but the container could drain the pool stopping applications like Tomcat from launching
ben_hall··on Super small Docker image based on Alpine Linux
It's been great for us. We use it for deploying applications such as curl or netcat in containers without overhead of Ubuntu potentially being downloaded onto a host.
ben_hall··on A modern responsive front-end framework based on Material Design
I've been using it for the past six months, very powerful however it's important to try and understand the underlying Google Material Design guidelines otherwise elements can look out of place.
ben_hall··on Ask HN: What language should I develop in?
For me it's about the community. Every language has a different mindset / way of approaching a problem. Read some groups, have a look at the various packages on github and see which community fits best with what you're personally doing.

Having contacts / friends who could help is also an advantage.

ben_hall··on Ask HN: How to make a profitable business from a newsletter app?
I get daily iOS notifications. I have a feeling if I didn't open the application then I would get an email which is a really nice way of handling notifications.
ben_hall··on A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft
Microsoft would never promote Scala as it's a JVM language. NodeJS is likely given the recent relationship with Red Gate and effort surrounding Azure support.

As for business logic by an average developer - I would say the same thing about every language.

ben_hall··on Ask HN: How to make a profitable business from a newsletter app?
Yep, very similar - in fact I wouldn't be surprised if Timehop added this as one of there options as they already do twitter and facebook.

I use Timehop but not sure about any user facing revenue model. They do however have the last 5 years of facebook and twitter data about me so I'm sure they're making some money from that.

ben_hall··on A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft
C# might be a great language now, but 1.0 was horrible! It was a painful experience to gain adoption within companies and frameworks on top of it (ASP+ for example) still needed to mature. The world is different now.

I predict Microsoft will push NodeJS / JavaScript / HTML5 for application development. I'm assuming this will be targeted towards the Go style community and applications. It has a lot of the same properties with Go starting to gain traction I can see why Microsoft would be exploring the space.

ben_hall··on How I Automated “Finding Almost Anyone’s Email Address”
This will stop working after a few days...
ben_hall··on I interviewed at Adzerk
I agree with statement, Adzerk are an amazing team!
ben_hall··on From idea to MVP to #1 on Hacker News in 72 hours
Would be great to hear some metrics and your next steps. What did the MVP invalidate/validate? Has your initial assumptions changed?
ben_hall··on Buildpacks - Run Anything on Heroku
They run on the same dyno environment as the web apps (Ubuntu 10.4). Basically Vulcan is a node.js app deployed onto a dyno which takes source code, starts the build command and then return you the file.
ben_hall··on Buildpacks - Run Anything on Heroku
Thanks for linking to this. The only reason it's unsupported is because I don't work for Heroku so no idea what will happen in the future. I'll do my best to help :-)

There has been a number of successful deployments and it appears to work as expected. It would be great to hear your experiences. My twitter is @ben_hall

ben_hall··on Tips for speaking at tech conferences
From my experience of speaking at tech conferences there are a few points I don't agree with, but that may be my own experience.

1) Black backgrounds work best in a dark room but rubbish in a daylight room. I think Presentation Zen also made this point. If you can, think about having a theme switch can be easily swapped.

2) Don't fear the terminal, just fear the default colours. Modified it. More important than colours is font size - make it BIG! This is the same for your IDEs. iTerm2, increased size and full screen mode are great for presentations.

3) I think it's best to take questions there and then as other people in the audience may be wondering the same thing. If you've missed something then it's easy to fix and clarify which would allow everyone to move on with you. If you leave it to the end, people will be distracted for the rest of your presentation and that's much harder to fix at the end.

If the questions get too specific then simple say "Can we take this offline afterwards or grab a beer later" and move on.

For me the most important thing is to remember that the audience have taken there time to see you. If you have a 60 minute slot and 100 people, that's 100 hours your wasting by giving a rubbish talk. Make every minute count.

ben_hall··on Bootstrap for Facebook apps
Great idea, however I imagine most applications wouldn't need to be cross-platform.
ben_hall··on Deploying C# / Mono on Heroku
Yes, that's the foundation of the approach with some additional modifications because of C# and Mono.
ben_hall··on Deploying C# / Mono on Heroku
Thanks. I'll post technical details on how people can deploy their own applications shortly.
ben_hall··on TakeThisLollipop - really clever/creepy use of the Facebook API
What happens when the countdown gets to zero?
ben_hall··on Ask HN: What (technical) skills would you recommend to your younger self?
Understand maths, algorithms and game theory.
ben_hall··on YC NYC, September 26
+1 :)
ben_hall··on Show HN: Proxino - optimize and monitor your javascript
What happens if Proxino goes down?
Page 1 of 2Next →