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bmcahren

476 karma · joined May 1, 2020

Current Find me on YCombinator Co-Founder Matching

Past Head of Product / Acting GM at SKULabs Founder at Lever Games (No More Room in Hell)

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bmcahren··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2023)
SKULabs | South Florida | ONSITE | Full stack Node/React | 120-160k

SKULabs helps ecommerce operations scale effectively. We're launching new products and need more great engineers especially if you have experience in the ecommerce or warehouse operations space. You'll join an existing well-rounded team and have the opportunity to make tangible product improvements and iterate on them over time.

We are only accepting applications from those with at least 3 years professional full-time experience outside of bootcamp.

Full Stack: https://jobs.lever.co/skulabs/338dd628-5281-4423-bad7-6b68e7...

If you're a React "back of the frontend" developer, we need you too! Apply to full-stack for now.

We're also in need of a full time community manager: https://jobs.lever.co/skulabs/cb732bcf-a2bc-420e-b151-d0b4f4...

bmcahren··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2023)
SKULabs | Coral Springs, FL | ONSITE | Full stack Node/React | 120-160k

SKULabs helps ecommerce operations scale effectively. We're launching new products and need more great engineers especially if you have experience in the ecommerce or warehouse operations space. You'll join an existing well-rounded team and have the opportunity to make tangible product improvements and iterate on them over time.

We are only accepting applications from those with at least 3 years professional full-time experience outside of bootcamp.

Full Stack: https://jobs.lever.co/skulabs/338dd628-5281-4423-bad7-6b68e7...

We're also in great need of a full time community manager. Know someone? https://jobs.lever.co/skulabs/cb732bcf-a2bc-420e-b151-d0b4f4...

bmcahren··on Pixel 8 Pro
Samsungs are non-standard by default. They take the AOSP experience which Pixel fully embraces then they hack in cute fonts, water drop overlays, and replace the default tooling that comes with Android to build their samsung experience.

Pixel drives and creates the innovation like cut-out display support, notification APIs that support multi-media control for instance across multiple apps, sound multi-plexing between apps, how calls interact with multimedia apps, foldable display support, app switching, fingerprint unlock support, the android API, etc.

Samsung takes that, twists it into their own.

In that essence, Pixel is the standard experience that Android is meant to be whereas Samsung is a customized experience built on the backbone of Android and in some ways in opposition to Android Open Source Project & Pixel Launcher's ideals.

Samsung android phones are the Ubuntu whereas Pixel is Google's Debian.

bmcahren··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2023)
SKULabs | We help modern warehouses operate smoothly | Node.js Full-Stack Developer | South Florida We are building the software your warehouse loves. It's an ERP without the ERP overhead, intuitive interfaces your team can pick up and go. Support for inexpensive scanners and any inexpensive mobile device. Runs on anything.

We have a full-time UX designer, but you must be able to show proof of intuitive interface design competency.

Target full-time allocation: NodeJS: 2 days/week, React: 1-2 days/week, Bootstrap: <1 day/week.

We have one remaining role and are attempting to hire local-first.

We are also hiring for a community manager, the listing will be live soon!

https://jobs.lever.co/skulabs/

bmcahren··on Tesla Confirms Automated Driving Systems Were Engaged During Fatal Crash
> We also receive a crash alert anytime a crash is reported to us from the fleet, which may include data about whether Autopilot was active at the time of impact.

> To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed. (Our crash statistics are not based on sample data sets or estimates.)

> In practice, this correlates to nearly any crash at about 12 mph (20 kph) or above, depending on the crash forces generated. We do not differentiate based on the type of crash or fault (For example, more than 35% of all Autopilot crashes occur when the Tesla vehicle is rear-ended by another vehicle). In this way, we are confident that the statistics we share unquestionably show the benefits of Autopilot.

Every answer to your questions is on the link below:

Source: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport

bmcahren··on ChatGPT proposed a new model for explaning the universe
A good critique is that ChatGPT is a large language model that bases the next word after the previous words in a probabilistic nature. Asking it to speak as an expert is just as likely to produce a characature of an expert or the common interpretation of how that expert behaves (including biases) as it is to speak truth or half-truth.

It is not intelligent just as the monkey who when shown 6+3 instinctively hits 9 to get some banana smoothie.

bmcahren··on Triplebyte acquired by Karat
Years ago, I took a Triplebyte test and at the end of it learned critical (and accurate) insights on my strengths and weaknesses. I realized if I can screen my candidates in this same way, they will be incredibly valuable employees.

After confirming the skill-ranking capabilities with our first hires, we integrated Triplebyte into our hiring process to save developers hours of wasted time on pointless coding exercises that are thrown away after each interview only to start over again with the next company. This was an advantage for us, we had a better signal to noise ratio on candidates and we found more talent willing to take a triplebyte test than our own in-house tests. Further, the triplebyte tests were maintained and refined over the years to an accuracy I believe is going to be very difficult to replace.

Yesterday, Karat announced a shutdown of Triplebyte with less than 2 weeks notice. They don't care to offer a solution to any of Triplebyte's customers. In their words they "only purchased a technology that Triplebyte made available to other companies" i.e. "we don't want anyone else using this".

The Karat website uses floaty words like "interview cloud" and emphasizes live-coding interviews as part of some legacy product that would put us back into the stone ages when it comes to our current hiring process. Karat expressed no intention on offering solutions to replace what Triplebyte did best. Karat do not care about the inconvenience of their customers. Karat provides less than two weeks notice to paying customers that they are cancelling service.

bmcahren··on Triplebyte acquired by Karat
I've had incredible success in gauging candidates skill-level using TripleByte Screen. Everyone I've hired has taken the test. It's not a pass/fail response but it is fairly indicative of someone who has worked full-time in their tested language/skill.

If the tests go away, I don't know what I will do to help gauge candidate skill without traditional and wasteful live / take-home / repo-based tests.

As an evaluation tool, TripleByte was great. As a user of Magnet (the recruitment marketplace), it was not so great. We signed up during the hiring frenzy of 2020 and the good candidates we tried to get were all getting offers from much more established brands. We didn't see any success there, but TripleByte Screen is an excellent product I hope remains available.

bmcahren··on GPT4 and the Multi-Modal, Multi-Model, Multi-Everything Future of AGI
This quote seems far more alarming having monitored the advancement over the last few years.

> Preliminary assessments of GPT-4’s abilities, conducted with no task-specific finetuning, found it ineffective at autonomously replicating, acquiring resources, and avoiding being shut down “in the wild.”20

bmcahren··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2023)
SKULabs | We help modern warehouses operate smoothly | Node.js Full-Stack Developer | South Florida (Hybrid)

We are building the software your warehouse loves. It's an ERP without the ERP overhead, intuitive interfaces your team can pick up and go. Support for inexpensive scanners and any inexpensive mobile device. Runs on anything.

We have a full-time UX designer, but you must be able to show proof of intuitive interface design competency.

Target full-time allocation: NodeJS: 2 days/week, React: 1-2 days/week, Bootstrap: <1 day/week.

We have one remaining role and are attempting to hire local-first. We will take either of the roles listed on our Lever: Senior Node.js (120k-170k) / Full-Stack (90k-140k)

https://jobs.lever.co/skulabs/

bmcahren··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2023)
SKULabs | Fullstack/Node.js Developer | ONSITE / REMOTE | Full-time | $90-$140k | Pay based on experience.

SKULabs is seeking two additional developers experienced in Node.js to help accelerate existing projects in 2023. You'll join a team of 5 developers and help ecommerce sellers deliver satisfaction to their customers like the pros. Specifically, SKULabs offers a multi-channel platform to manage everything from receiving inventory to shipping orders and everything in-between. Billed as a lightweight ERP, we grew out of the app-store ecosystem to meet the needs of an ever-growing audience of those who need inventory solutions with or without ecommerce. We're rated almost 5 stars on all channels by our customers and have an excellent roadmap for 2023. We'd love to have you on the team if making impactful changes and seeing results matter to you.

https://jobs.lever.co/skulabs/9435d2c6-6125-4bc9-8b9c-8274b3... https://jobs.lever.co/skulabs/08da8c42-8ff4-46b7-bad3-33d145...

bmcahren··on Problems with disk encryption in AWS
Many reasons:

I know people who work there. I've read the infrastructure designs. I know Amazon audits themselves. I know AWS has third party audits. I know AWS has government and enterprise users who require their partners be legally liable for improper implementation. I do not subscribe to conspiracy.

bmcahren··on Problems with disk encryption in AWS
I'm equally interested to see what lengths people like yourself will go to when given the option!

Where is it you draw the line?

Do you bother with Spectre mitigations since Amazon policy is to deny service to those who would attack you?

Do you bother requiring authentication on your database since policy is to use a closed VPC?

Hell, we haven't seen any man in the middle attacks lately, let's just drop SSL because you know your customers are wired and trust the endpoint networks.

SSL is the best example subject to the same common failures (including expiration, key loss, downtime to initially deploy) as you describe disk encryption migrations.

Encrypting disks is mandatory and there is zero justification otherwise.

bmcahren··on Problems with disk encryption in AWS
The basis of this take is "because it doesn't happen very often, it's snake oil". Has DrRobinson considered that the mere fact they think this is proof it works?

The entire point of encryption at rest (on the cloud) is that when any of the following happen you have nothing to worry about.

1. A machine/disk is rendered inoperable and can't be wiped.

2. The data stream coming off of a disk cluster is tapped.

3. An employee steals a disk or is lost.

4. An actor violates their account segmentation and can read raw data from segments of YOUR sectors of the shared disk.

5. SSD firmware goes bad/gets hacked and starts returning incorrect sectors of disk.

6. Memory pointers go bad and return sectors from the wrong area of the disk.

It's incredibly naïve to not use encryption at rest on AWS with how incredibly easy and problem free it is to deploy.

bmcahren··on Show HN: Domain Name Search with AI
Available.....for $75,000.

Not very useful to know it's available for a price like that.

bmcahren··on If you unscrew your belly button, your bottom will fall off
ChatGPT is the best:

Once upon a time, there was a young man named Jack who had a golden screw in place of his belly button. Jack was very self-conscious about this unique feature, but he soon discovered that it had some incredible powers.

One day, Jack was walking through the forest when he came across a beautiful fairy. The fairy was in distress and begged Jack to help her. She explained that she was being held captive by a wicked witch and needed someone to rescue her.

Without hesitation, Jack agreed to help the fairy and set off on an adventure to defeat the witch. Along the way, he encountered many challenges, including fierce beasts and treacherous obstacles.

But with the help of his golden screw, Jack was able to overcome each challenge and finally reached the witch's castle. He battled the witch, using his golden screw to conjure up powerful spells and defeat her.

The fairy was grateful to Jack and rewarded him with a magical amulet that granted him the ability to fly. With this new power, Jack flew back home, feeling proud of his bravery and accomplishment.

Years later, Jack discovered that the golden screw could do even more than he had initially thought. He realized that he could use it to shape-shift into any form he desired.

Excited by this new discovery, Jack began experimenting with his newfound ability. He turned into a bird, a fish, and even a dragon. But one day, he accidentally turned into a duck and couldn't change back.

Feeling frustrated and embarrassed, Jack decided to give up his powers and return to his human form. He unscrewed the golden screw and, to his horror, his butt fell off.

bmcahren··on Musk’s Twitter purchase was a leveraged buyout
Do you really think the richest person in the world still has to make personal guarantees on business loans lmao?
bmcahren··on Tesla Megapack battery ignites at substation after less than 6 months
AfTeR lEsS ThAN 6 MonThS! Where will we be in 10 years? Instead of run-away ramps, we'll have to have a network of burn-boxes on the side of every road for self-driving Teslas to drive into and burn out. Who's going to pay for all that? I'll keep my kerosene lamps and leaded gas thank you very much. /s
bmcahren··on Ask HN: Why server side rendering is not used anymore
Node/React/VueJS SSR apps are a benefit to the user and do no such thing. SSR for React uses your heavyweight servers to pre-render the initial HTML. Thereon it's an SPA again, it's just seeded with the SSR results. In-fact, if the client determines the seed data for state/html can't be used it will be abandoned and the client will render by itself. This can happen when your state model isn't intact or if you have differing versions of client and server. You can have certain modules entirely render on the backend by choice but it's not mandatory.
bmcahren··on Surprising dust strike on Webb telescope has scientists on alert
old news from may
bmcahren··on LG 28-inch 16:18 DualUp Monitor
60hz no thanks
bmcahren··on Uzi Nissan (nissan.com) died of covid July 2020 and the website is now down
Many people who learned computers in the 90s still type in pets.com/google.com/Chevy.com before searching for what they want.
bmcahren··on Uzi Nissan (nissan.com) died of covid July 2020 and the website is now down
No, but seeing as his vehemently anti-Nissan-motors content is gone in entirety from both nissan.com and digest.com I count this as "down" in terms of the website that once was a bastion of internet freedom.
bmcahren··on Uzi Nissan (nissan.com) died of covid July 2020 and the website is now down
I was discussing trademarks and domains with somebody today and tried to show them my favorite long-standing trademark dispute nissan.com but it appears all of the website content has been taken down in May 2022.

Here's one of the last standing copies: https://web.archive.org/web/20220406221134/https://nissan.co...

Oh, and digest.com where he told is lawsuit story is now for sale (http://digest.com/)

https://web.archive.org/web/20220402233023/https://digest.co...

bmcahren··on Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill
Title 18 Code 1030 says it is illegal to commit computer fraud but it is not a responsibility of your service provider to eat/pay for fraud committed against you.

Your only legal recourse under Title 18 Code 1030 is against the "violator". Amazon did not violate your computer systems and commit these offenses.

> Any person who suffers damage or loss by reason of a violation of this section may maintain a civil action against the violator to obtain compensatory damages and injunctive relief or other equitable relief.

On that basis, your contract stipulates who is responsible for fees associated with use of your AWS key by "any other third party".

> You are responsible for all applicable fees associated with use of the Services in connection with IAM, including fees incurred as a result of any User Credentials. You are responsible for maintaining the secrecy and security of the User Credentials (other than any key that we expressly permit you to use publicly). You are solely responsible, and we have no liability, for any activities that occur under the User Credentials, regardless of whether such activities are undertaken by you, your employees, agents, subcontractors or customers, or any other third party. You are responsible for the creation, distribution, and security (including enabling of access) of all User Credentials created under your AWS account, including credentials that you have used IAM to create or disclose to other parties.

bmcahren··on YaLM-100B: Pretrained language model with 100B parameters
AWS has them in US-EAST1 for $9.83/hr spot with 96 CPU cores, 1152GB of ram, 8 A100s with 320 GB of RAM, 8TB of NVME, and 19 Gbps of EBS bandwidth to load your data quickly.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/p4/

p4d.24xlarge

An alternative is the p3.16xlarge for 8 V100s with 256GB of GPU RAM but you might as well get the A100s since it's only $0.50/hr cheaper

bmcahren··on Florida rejects 54 math books, claiming critical race theory appeared in some
Unsolicited strategies are "core math". I am convinced 98% of the books are banned because of this but they tossed in CRT to get peoples' wallets out for political donations.

Title may as well have been "dear leader protects children".

bmcahren··on Tell HN: I Need Project Ideas
https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/
bmcahren··on AWS us-east-1 outage
I made sure our incident response plan includes checking Hacker News and Twitter for actual updates and information.

As of right now, this thread and one update from a twitter user, https://twitter.com/SiteRelEnby/status/1468253604876333059 are all we have. I went into disaster recovery mode when I saw our traffic dropped to 0 suddenly at 10:30am ET. That was just the SQS/something else preventing our ELB logs from being extracted to DataDog though.

bmcahren··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2021)
SKULabs | UX Engineer / Senior React Engineer / Senior Node.js | Full-time | Remote | $120k-$190k | Benefits | https://skulabs.com SKULabs helps rapidly growing ecommerce brands maintain delivery expectations, ensure accurate delivery, and spend less time on warehouse / inventory operations.

We're well-reviewed, profitable, and rapidly growing. Our stack is React, Node.js, MongoDB, Redis.

We're looking for additional frontend engineers to join our core team and drive new objectives react-first applications to help our existing customer base and expand into new markets. We're looking for those who take pride in designing easy-to-use enterprise react applications.

Senior Front-end Engineer | https://jobs.lever.co/skulabs/9b09ebdc-bf4f-48d6-b772-5d3fb2...

UX Engineer | https://jobs.lever.co/skulabs/408ce2cc-31ea-4911-87e0-dacff5...

Senior Node.js Engineer | https://jobs.lever.co/skulabs/08da8c42-8ff4-46b7-bad3-33d145...

https://jobs.lever.co/skulabs

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