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benjaminRRR

65 karma · joined September 6, 2010

@benjaminRRR founder https://futureneutral.com former CTO @ https://www.jetabroad.com.au
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benjaminRRR··on Mistral Large 4
I was exploring latent space and connections, these were all smaller models and I kept getting externalToEVA as a zero co-ordinate vector. Which sent me down the rabbit hole of glitch tokens. The whole latent space exploration is fascinating.
benjaminRRR··on Autistic people challenge preconceived ideas about rationality
It's interesting, as I have this conversation with my kids - ie actually let them know, there's actually no good reason for this, it's just a societal rule. However, I then try to explain that it is often advantageous to follow these rules even if it doesn't seem to make any sense, because of the advantages you can get by being cohesive in society. It's a good exercise, and also helps me think, there really are some dumb rules, and the calculus is weighing up when to disregard them.
benjaminRRR··on Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC
Hi Max_Mustermann, it's all in a mix of google docs and jsfiddle snippets. Once it's in a distributable format I will be sure to show HN. If you're keen to help flick me a message on twitter (even to just help structure things :) )
benjaminRRR··on Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC
Is there somewhere we can discuss? I'm helping out with a curriculum to help slum kids to (web) program in Thailand in English, but in a way that they can learn English as well. I'd welcome more help (project is going slow as I'm low on spare time), and this could also help the kids in Kolkata as well.
benjaminRRR··on Hipmunk Says Goodbye
If there's one thing we do a reasonable job on it's multicity. Link in bio.
benjaminRRR··on The cognitive costs of air pollution
I bought this guy for the office - works well https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B00TH3OW4Q
benjaminRRR··on Increasing numbers of wingsuit jumpers are dying (2016)
This is a very good point. Unlike other sports - when you push you can be hurt badly, but ultimately learn from your mistake, proximity wingsuit is one-mistake-one-kill.
benjaminRRR··on Beware of Developers Who Do Negative Work
There are both upstream problems (hiring the wrong people) and downstream problems (having process to catch garbage before it gets into mainline). You need both as you will inevitably make a bad hire somewhere along the way. For downstream prevention you need good processes to catch poor quality code. We've found that automated (static analysis [we like sonarqube]) plus consistent human code reviews goes a long way to ensuring a high quality code base.
benjaminRRR··on Skyscanner acquired by Ctrip for $1.7B
SkyScanner is not an agency, they use other players to provide the content and fulfil the product so they'd have no use for ITA.
benjaminRRR··on Ask HN: Any good resources for finding software jobs abroad?
Good resource, I just posted for an opening with our team in Bangkok.
benjaminRRR··on Visual Studio Code 1.7.1
I went back to sublime as I had too many stability issues with Atom. You can throw megs of data at Sublime (if needed) and it absorbs it, Atom grinds to a painful death.
benjaminRRR··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2016)
Jetabroad (Thailand) | Software Engineers (multiple) | Bangkok, Thailand | Onsite | Full-Time | Visa / Work-Permit / Relocation |

Airfares are hard, we tackle the hardest part, multi-city up to 10 legs long. Think exponential search space, fuzzy constraints, and constantly changing variables.

We're looking for both front-end and back-end developers to work on our user-experience and search platform respectively.

Bangkok offers a great place to live with a great standard of living at low cost. Our offices are in the heart of the city overlooking the green of the Netherlands embassy on Wireless Road.

Check out details at https://bkkthailand.jetabroad.com/jobs/index.html We are predominantly built with .NET, but language proficiency is not how we hire - fundamentals always win the day.

Interview - First we Skype, then maybe Skype again and possibly a demo-style programming task, then we get you on a plane to say hello and to check out Bangkok, spend time with the team, if it all gels we make an offer. Apply https://bkkthailand.jetabroad.com/misc/jobapplicationform.ht...

Please note for expatriate candidates you unfortunately need a completed tertiary degree (>= Bachelors) to pass the Thai Labour Ministry's requirements for a work-permit.

benjaminRRR··on Hipmunk (YC S10) Acquired by Concur
My guess is that, given it has not been disclosed, the investors got as much of their money back as they could through liquidation preferences and there's not much to get excited about after that.
benjaminRRR··on Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Sydney Region
That's right, and you're even lucky to the (i) usually it's buried in the rss which is why https://twitter.com/aws_shd is useful.
benjaminRRR··on 'Hamilton' Scalpers Pocket $240k Every Week
Why not combine solutions; similar to airline seats - the cheap saver version, non-changeable, non-transferable, and non-refundable also must show original ID and credit card to enter and then the super-flexible scalper-special with two wildly different price-points. You can also have a wait-list on the night for those who bought the non-refundable and are no-shows.
benjaminRRR··on Compiling an application for use in highly radio-active environments
IEEE spectrum had a nice article very recently http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/how-to-kill-a-su...
benjaminRRR··on Climate Model Predicts West Antarctic Ice Sheet Could Melt Rapidly
Australia was a good experiment on this and the effects were dramatic, equally dramatic when it was repealed (yes a major piece of legislation was rolled back, which is another problem in itself) http://www.energy.unimelb.edu.au/documents/australia-repeale...
benjaminRRR··on Spotify moves its back end to Google Cloud
Latency is a huge one for AU. With AWS in SYD you can easily cover BNE, SYD, MEL and even AKL. The difference from SIN or TPE is very noticeable. SYD to PER and SIN to PER is negligible.
benjaminRRR··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2016)
We are located near Ploenchit BTS on Wireless Road. We pay international market rates for expatriate talent as we compete with many other large players here in the city. We also pay very competitive salaries for local staff as we want to retain the best people.
benjaminRRR··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2016)
Jetabroad (Thailand) | Bangkok, Thailand | Full-Stack, DevOps, Front-End | C#, Python, Powershell | Full-time on-site | http://bkkthailand.jetabroad.com/jobs/

We're solving complex problems in the travel industry our consumer facing site is https://www.jetabroad.com.au - Our technology platform is about getting people from A to B (and C to D to ...) where plenty of NP hard and a bunch of non-optimally solvable problems exist. We span everything from getting a UX experience that delights to ticketing a flight across multiple providers with various payment requirements to mining millions of searches a day to find the best routing combinations.

We're a fun team located in the heart of one of the most vibrant cities in south east Asia.

benjaminRRR··on Atlassian gets IPO share price of $27
Australia makes it incredibly difficult to give equity to your employees - they literally get double punished and it's often better for the employee not receive. The Australian Taxation Office will charge on receipt.

So you get 1% of the company and it's last investment round was $10M - Boom you get a $100,000 tax bill that year! Even though it's all only paper value.

Then if you do liquidate you're taxed again on the gain!

It's a huge problem and there are a lot of folks in the startup community trying to get it rectified.

benjaminRRR··on AWS having major issues
Although it's looking like end-user deliverability is not great we are seeing huge delays in things actually getting out of SES.
benjaminRRR··on AWS having major issues
We've been having issues with SES N.Virginia, but have managed to get mail through. It's intermittent, but we are getting our batches out. It's not pretty.
benjaminRRR··on Why are prices online so unpredictable these days?
That's why you have to get your name exact, airlines now charge a lot for re-ticketing, the idea is to prevent this kind of arbitrage. In fact on long-haul travel if you misspell your name the airline will force you to create a new ticket completely and pay whatever the new price is plus a change fee (and you generally can't just cancel as there's often cancellation fees).

If you hold without ticketing you have a limited time period you can hold, furthermore if you hold and cancel above a certain threshold the airlines will get upset and effectively block you from their inventory.

benjaminRRR··on There are too many shiny objects and it is killing me
In my first startup we came up with a cure for this: "Get to the problem"

Don't solve for problems you don't yet have. Solve for immediate problems first.

benjaminRRR··on Donate to the Internet Archive
This is something I am happy to donate for. These guys have been plugging away quietly for a long time to give us a record that would otherwise literally disappear into thin air.
benjaminRRR··on Vulnerability in Microsoft TLS library could allow remote code execution
For anyone that runs any web-facing IIS machines this has to be treated as a DEFCON 1 situation.
benjaminRRR··on Use a Fake Location for Cheap Airfare
The whole concept of geographical segmentation is built right into the GDS systems (Global Distribution System). Agents are all designated by an identifier that ties them to a particular geographical point of sale. That's why the above works, many TLDs of a company are actually tied to an agent point of sale in that country.

Works on all GDS content - car rentals, hotels and so forth.

benjaminRRR··on My Tech Cofounder Quit
This is a complete kick in the balls. Which is pretty much how startup life goes - one day you're up the next you're kicked in the balls. It's a roller-coaster. The trick is to pick yourself up and always have contingencies. Now this is a risk that's hard to plan for, but you should have a bunch of contacts you can go after. Put your salesman hat on and go hustle for help. You may end up giving away more equity than you would like (and I hope you have cliff vesting for your dearly departed), whatever the case if you believe in your idea this is simply the cost of doing business and if it's going to be a billion dollar exit who cares if you're a few million short. Good luck, go hustle.
benjaminRRR··on How I “hacked” Kayak and booked a cheaper flight
This is definitely the most likely scenario. Kayak and other aggregating sites have different arrangements with different partners in different regions. In turn those partners have different arrangements either with direct connect or the GDS themselves (who may also have different arrangements depending on the geographic market).

You can get the same effect with other GDS products also, try rental cars for one. The other crazy thing is that different geographic markets are generally responsible for their own revenues, so you can have different promotions, and yield management strategies depending on who is trying to hit their numbers.

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