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benburleson

906 karma · joined January 31, 2011

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benburleson··on Watermark API – $0.01/image, 10x cheaper than Cloudinary
I think these types of projects are really great for developers to exercise their end-to-end skills -- developing all pieces of the product. Kudos for launching it!

As someone who's done this before, the value is all in that experience and finding those gaps that you didn't know existed.

One important gap I originally didn't know about was needing a market for my product idea. I thought just because I had a clever idea that it would sell! Turns out that's not the case most of the time.

And in this case, I don't think there's a market for no-code solutions that simultaneously require HTTP API integration (that's not no-code, that's low-code), when there is a really simple low-code solution that doesn't require a network round-trip.

Again, kudos on completing the exercise of releasing something! It's a step most developers don't take, and absolutely worth the experience no matter where it goes.

benburleson··on The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System
Ha, thanks for letting me know! I hope it's not causing too many problems out there :-)
benburleson··on The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System
Interesting. Wayne Rosing (Silicon Valley pioneer and early engineering lead at Google) has been working on a global telescope project for a long time now also.

https://lco.global/

benburleson··on I used Claude Code to write a piano web app
I've found the most useful prompt tip is to add to the end of every prompt:

"Ask questions for clarification as needed."

Claude will then present a list of questions I answer, either directly, or sometimes those prompt more thought or questions from myself.

Either way, that statement helps escape the assumption that I just want some slop reaching the goal in the quickest way possible.

benburleson··on The Toyota Corolla of programming
I dabbled in Hack and HHVM several (almost 10 now??) years ago but haven't kept up. My understanding was that PHP8+ now includes the improvements that Hack brought, making the leap to Hack less interesting/valuable. Is that not the case?
benburleson··on Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf
Which raises the question: If the productivity gains are realized by the employer, is the employer not paying this subscription?
benburleson··on How close is AI to human-level intelligence?
Maybe that’s the true destiny of AI all along..
benburleson··on The extremely large telescope will transform astronomy
I used to work in the telescope world. Our organization acquired another organization that was working on NGAT: Next Generation Astronomical Telescope. At the time, we were also working on newer telescope models, and I joked about what we would name those…

I guess astronomers, like programmers, are just bad at naming things.

benburleson··on Making GRID's spreadsheet engine 10% faster
Is the engine available as a package/library (like phpspreadsheet)?

Also, does anyone know of a golang excel engine??

benburleson··on Google settles account settings lawsuit less than one week after being filed [pdf]
I wish Google could have decided to stick with their “Don’t be evil.” ethos.

Instead, I find myself continually extracting their products from my life.

benburleson··on Webhook Failure Scenarios
I’ve always referred to those client/server.
benburleson··on Jetbrains are offering 65% off Rider personal licenses for 65 hours
I was confused for a minute, thinking the announcement was that VSCode was going away!
benburleson··on AWS Icon Quiz
Ahem, did you mean OpenTF?
benburleson··on Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
You don't put your Peloton in your living room like some peasant if you're buying a $1000 car seat.
benburleson··on Ask HN: Any hardware startups here?
Most likely because you can't guarantee how it has been used once the first customer has used it. And that will lead to major legal problems if e.g. it has been in a crash and is now compromised, but nobody noticed, then failed to protect the 2nd child.
benburleson··on The FBI has formed a national database to track swatting incidents
But haven’t we been there for years…and nothing is changing? Or at least not in the direction you’re suggesting.

Seems obvious to me as well: we tried normalizing gun culture and this is what we got. Maybe we should try something else?

benburleson··on Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
I highly doubt that.
benburleson··on How to do the thing you've been avoiding
Is this supposed to be a joke?
benburleson··on We tried to book a train ticket and ended up with a 245k records data breach
In America you get accused of crime for this type of activity. Seriously: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2022/02/journalist-wo...
benburleson··on Show HN: Text a photo to send as a postcard
Yes, curious about this too. Maybe a quick video handling it to show the weight/quality.

Really cool idea for a product though, love it!

benburleson··on Reddit Strike Has Started
This shows how much I don’t use Twitter, but I was curious to verify this and learned I need to sign in (or in my case create an account) to search…is that true?
benburleson··on Pixel Tablet
Right, I don't understand who buys into the Google/Pixel ecosystem now knowing it will be unsupported in a few years.
benburleson··on Pixel Tablet
Is this really considered "first generation" Pixel tablet?

Google is so good at killing off products that nobody remembers the previous attempts at tablets?

benburleson··on Downtown SF has 18.4M square feet of empty office space. We mapped every vacancy
Texas sure seems to be an outlier though.
benburleson··on Starbucks claims $181M in revenue from unused gift cards (2022)
That seems...sleazy.
benburleson··on Elizabeth Holmes loses bid to stay out of prison during appeal of sentence
The people she pissed off are wealthier and more connected.
benburleson··on Mass layoffs and absentee bosses create a morale crisis at Meta
I think the main demographic supporting the current price is people who bought it as a speculative investment.
benburleson··on Reddit has been down for more than an hour
Looks like you have a clear agenda, but your point is real.

I hadn't thought much about it until recently. I posted something in a popular (and generally extremely positive) subreddit that was (unbeknownst to me) both divisive and posted recently. Rather than a simple message or warning to me, I got a message that I was "permanently banned" from the subreddit.

The message said I could reply to that message to communicate with the moderators, and I did ask for reasoning behind the decision. I never got a response, but I was apparently un-banned. I have a feeling either the mod that banned me realized his knee-jerk reaction, or other mods realized that one mod is a loose cannon. Either way, the experience really changed my view of Reddit.

benburleson··on Serverless maps at 1/700 the cost of Google Maps API
I would be that's actually a majority of usage in the wild. Sometimes I'll zoom out if I need more context, but I'm not wandering around most embedded gmaps.
benburleson··on Having friends in HR is fine, but HR is not your friend
I've noticed this as well. Especially going through layoffs. It's not "people" getting "fired," it's "resources impacted." Oh, it's also not a "layoff," it's a "reduction in force."

Maybe I'm old-school, but give it to me straight.

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