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camhenlin

958 karma · joined September 23, 2014

my twitter: @camhenlin my stuff: http://github.com/CamHenlin my email: cam.henlin+hn@gmail.com
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camhenlin··on U.S. companies are hiring Latin America’s tech talent
I’ve hired about 50 Latin American devs as contractors over the last six months or so and they’ve all been absolutely top notch — I will continue to aggressively hire more.

Some anecdotal highlights:

- great time zone overlap with US business hours

- very very good English

- very strong engineers who actually take ownership of the products we’re working on

- leadership aspirations and drive - I’ve promoted a few folks to team lead positions

- shared culture that works in a similar way to US culture

camhenlin··on Adventures of putting 16 GB RAM in a motherboard that doesn’t support it (2019)
This is true for many older Apple products. I have a similarly aged Mac Mini that officially only supports 8GB but took 16GB without problems
camhenlin··on Lead poisoning among US children
Inert lead, like asbestos, is safe to be around. It only really becomes a problem if you start taking actions that could allow it to become airborne in some way. There's nothing especially negligent about allowing lead paint to remain somewhere, especially if it's been sealed under layers of non-lead paint as is going to be the case in most situations at this point.
camhenlin··on I introduced my 5-year-old and 2-year-old to startx and xmonad (2012)
This is actually not a bad idea. I started my son (now 4) last year on a Macintosh Plus playing around mostly in kidpix and MacWrite. Now he asks if he can “work” on the old computer in my office while I work.
camhenlin··on An ode to the 10,000 RPM Western Digital (Veloci)Raptor
Yes I had a 52x drive in the early 00s shatter a cheap writable CD (I think rated at 24x or something along those lines) and I was picking bits out of the drive to get it working again. But then again, a CD is an insanely cheap piece of plastic, so how fast should we expect it to reliably spin at?
camhenlin··on The untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb
EU citizen might register in which case they could be forced to comply or suffer fines
camhenlin··on The untold story of the world’s biggest nuclear bomb
Similar idea to the doomsday device described in Dr. Strangelove!
camhenlin··on Ssheven: A modern SSH client for Mac OS 7-9
For real. I’ve tried porting several modern UI libraries to classic Mac, such as Nuklear, uGUI, and a couple of others. And I’ve succeeded in getting them working, but as soon as you start doing something with text, they fall on their face. Just having a text input is nearly impossible on an 8MHz 68000!
camhenlin··on California exodus is a myth, UC research project finds
It may be a myth, but here in Southern Oregon, I have several new Californian neighbors that I got over the last year, where in previous years most of my newer neighbors have been other Oregonians.
camhenlin··on “Great resignation” wave coming for companies
I joined this wave, started a new position last week for nearly another $100k/year, similar work, fully remote, great benefits. Tried asking for a raise at my previous job twice this year and my old boss wouldn’t discuss. Good luck to him retaining the rest of that team!
camhenlin··on It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
I also have a similar but older personal project that allows you to send iMessages over the web via an always on Mac.

https://github.com/CamHenlin/iMessageWebClient

I also have some other iMessage related git repos on my GitHub. Interesting stuff!

camhenlin··on Vesuvius ancient eruption rescuer identified at Herculaneum, says expert
By that logic, nobody should be doing any construction, anywhere.

Natural disasters are a part of living on our planet. If an event is exceedingly rare, such as a volcano eruption, how much time do we need to spend worrying about it? As far as the Romans were aware at the time, Vesuvius was probably one of the only volcanic episodes that any Roman had ever dealt with, they were likely well aware that it was unlikely to happen again. Today, we're a bit better off with our hoards of knowledge and ability to observe to some higher level of accuracy, when a volcano might erupt, so it does make a lot of sense to just build whatever convenient infrastructure we need right next to a volcano

camhenlin··on Ask HN: Bad programmer producing good code
I had a pretty good buddy who was a retired helicopter pilot in the Marines, and he, many times, told me there are 4 groups of helicopter pilots that most people fit into. I think that there are strong parallels in software dev (and other fields!) and it might be useful to chat about here. One thing to note is that through training people can move between these categories, nothing is permanent. I think if you look at any of these groups from the perspective of "would I hire this person?" the answer is a "yes, but..." where we need to be very aware of the person's limitations and groupings

1. Pilots who are good and they know it. These are people who are naturally good pilots: memorizing the checklists, failure states, what to do in bad conditions, etc come very naturally to these people and they don't need a lot of training or hand holding. Generally great to work with unless they are cocky.

2. Pilots who are good and they don't know it. Pilots in this category have everything going on from the first category, except they don't realize how good they are. Often times, these can be the best pilots to work with, because they stick to all the checklists, procedures, manuals, policies, and so on, because they know that they might not know what they are doing, and on top of that they can shine in tough situations because they are in fact good pilots. These pilots are great because it's very rare to get one with a lot of ego.

3. Pilots who are bad and they know it. These are people who are aware that they are not naturally strong pilots, and their awareness leads them to following checklists, spending lots of time reading manuals, procedures, policies, to a T. In most situations, these are very good pilots to work with because they are aware of their own limitations although they may need more training for bad situations. Again, there is often very little ego here. I think this is the level of awareness that we're seeing in the OP here.

4. Pilots who are bad and they don't know it. This is the worst group of pilots to work with, but they can be fixed with training and guidance from senior pilots. Often times if you asked a pilot in this group, which group they fit into, they would tell you they fall into the "good and know it group", but they're wrong: they might be skipping checklist items, missing key policies, or just generally be a bad team mate. I would liken this to a junior or mid level dev who thinks they know everything. Often times there can be a lot of ego in this group

camhenlin··on Ask HN: How to negotiate continuing to work remotely?
It seems like nearly all tech companies these days are moving to fully remote hiring. Tell your manager that you’re staying remote indefinitely or you’ll be beginning the search for a new job. You’ve already had the last year to prove how productive of a remote worker you are. Bonus for you: tech industry salaries are on a massive upswing at the moment - if you do get a shiny new remote job, chances are you’ll also be able to grab a pretty sweet raise as well.
camhenlin··on RetroBridgeBBS: An internet bridge BBS to transfer files to your retro computers
Very cool! It's a lot of fun working with retro computers and helping them be more "useful" in the modern age.

I've also been playing around a lot with Classic Macintosh programming recently and have been working on building out some serial port-utilizing software, and some different UI approaches due to finding the Macintosh Toolbox a bit frustrating to work with. Although having spent more time with it, I may commit to diving in more on the Toolbox at this point.

I haven't written up any blog posts or anything yet as I haven't built a full piece of software, mostly just library exploration, but I have plans to build some more comprehensive pieces of software soon.

Here are some of the things I've been working on: probably the most interesting at this point is this one:

- coprocessorjs host library: https://github.com/CamHenlin/coprocessor.js + mac app library: https://github.com/CamHenlin/coprocessorjslib + example app: https://github.com/CamHenlin/retro68-coprocessorjs-test, allows Classic Macintosh applications to send nodejs programs and function calls over a serial port to a remote machine (I was thinking an RPi) and get a response back.

and some UI toying around:

- nuklear quickdraw: https://github.com/CamHenlin/nuklear-quickdraw - nuklear back end for quickdraw. Too slow for 68000-based system unfortunately. I think this would be fine for targeting an 020 system however. Looks and functions really nice so it's unfortunate that it's a bit too slow.

- micro UI quickdraw: https://github.com/CamHenlin/microui-quickdraw - similar to the nuklear backend, a micro UI backend. Also too slow for 68000-based systems but was an easy test after writing the nuklear back end, so why not?

- UGUI quickdraw: https://github.com/CamHenlin/UGUIQuickDraw - again similar to micro UI and UGUI, but way slower due to only relying on drawing a single pixel at a time. Might work OK on a considerably faster system

camhenlin··on Ask HN: What (side-)project are you working on?
I'm working on a system hand off nodejs workloads over a serial port to another machine running some host software.

My intent is to easily write Internet-connected software for old machines where a host machine is doing all of the heavy lifting. I have been messing with 68k Macintosh systems first. The code is very much a work in progress that I am actively chipping away at, and not in a usable state just yet. I write a lot of nodejs professionally but haven't used C since college so its been a fun project.

nodejs software for the "modern" machine: https://github.com/CamHenlin/coprocessor.js

C software (targeted at a 68k mac) for the "slow" machine: https://github.com/CamHenlin/retro68-coprocessorjs-test

camhenlin··on Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs
Sure, but who do you know that’s willing to get 100 flu shots in a year?
camhenlin··on Ask HN: Your preferred device to take hand written notes?
8th gen iPad and a 1st gen apple pencil works for me. I also like to write because I find I can hand write notes while holding a conversation, but I can't come anywhere close to speaking while typing. I use OneNote. No handwriting recognition seems to be able to handle my handwriting so I leave the notes in handwritten form
camhenlin··on Moderna Covid vaccine candidate almost 95% effective, trials show
You need to get vaccinated to do your part in preventing those hypothetical 80 year olds you speak of from getting sick
camhenlin··on Grubhub sued for listing restaurants without permission
> > Restaurants may not be able to handle the additional load placed on them by these services.

> I empathize with this one and don't really have a rebuttal.

Isn’t that classic supply and demand situation? Raise prices to drop demand until load drops to acceptable levels. More money for the restaurant as well as acceptable workload for the restaurant staff.

camhenlin··on Roof blows off new Tesla Model Y
Back in 2007 I had an acquaintance with a new 2007 Z06, who had the carbon fiber roof skin come unglued and fly off on the interstate. Seems like this is only news because it happened to a Tesla.
camhenlin··on If it ain't broke: Share your oldest working gadgets
I remember admiring these back when they were new in the stores. A tiny laptop! With a start menu and everything! How cool!

Are you still using it in 2020? If so, what have you found it to be useful for?

camhenlin··on The Impending Doom of Expiring Root CAs and Legacy Clients
I think you might actually want to search for products that are positioned as "monitors". Some of these are pretty reasonably priced and should offer what you're looking for.

For example, I am using an LG LG43UD79 currently. This is a 42.5" IPS 60hz 4k "monitor" at a decent price (I think I paid $399 at costco.) it has HDMI and USB-C inputs, but no smart functionality at all, no tv tuner, etc. The color and picture are pretty good after calibration. I normally use the monitor for programming, web browsing, chatting, etc but also do some very light gaming and it is fine for that.

I recommend this monitor and am hopeful that there are some more modern equivalents of it when I inevitably upgrade in a few years as I love the large monitors for getting work done.

camhenlin··on Show HN: How we reduced our Twilio costs 80% by switching to iMessage
Hi, I've actually tried to run a similar (and now completely shut down) service a few years ago. If you look at my github I have several public iMessage-related projects. The biggest thing I ran into was getting my services rate limited or even blacklisted from iCloud for large periods of time when attempting to scale up. At low scale things worked fine and I am still running some iMessage bots (similar to classic IRC bots) for group chats with some friends without issue.

The only way I was able to mitigate rate limiting and black listing was to use actual physical Macs, only host a low number of users on each Mac, and put each Mac on its own physical internet connection. I also had to rate limit users and prevent them from sending the same message to many recipients as that would cause the machine to get blacklisted. Because of this I determined it would be nearly impossible to scale up without charging exorbitant amounts of money, which you seem to have avoided with your $20/mo rate which seems very reasonable.

Can you share answers to any of these. Totally understand if some of these are secret sauce and you can't answer:

- how you are preventing or mitigating blacklisting and rate limiting?

- what are you doing to detect when you are blacklisted?

- what is your remediation once you've detected that you are blacklisted?

- how are you handling scaling up your numbers of users?

- how are you sending/receiving the messages? (I'm curious: did you write your own solution that talks to iCloud services or are you abusing Messages.app and its corresponding SQLite database?)

- has anyone from Apple contacted you? are they okay with it?

Anyways, cool service, good luck!

camhenlin··on Coronavirus deaths of Wikidata notable people
In the US, we are currently sitting at 21k deaths (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_t...) after states slowly started locking down throughout March and this month. There are also several stories of hotspots having completely overburdened hospitals with patients dying in hallways. The medical system currently in place is stretched to its absolute limit in many places.

Contrast that with the previous 2018-2019 Flu season, where 34k died with 0 lock downs of any kind. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html

This is nothing like the flu.

camhenlin··on First 100 Days of Dio
You could say it's heaven and hell
camhenlin··on Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China
This is a really smart move on Japan's part and hopefully other countries quickly follow suit with more substantial sums of money. $2.2B isn't going to go very far, but pumping trillions in to local manufacturing might, and would also act as a decent stimulus for local economies. Any products that can be manufactured domestically, or might suffer from shortages during global pandemics or other worldwide issues, need to be manufactured domestically. This ought to be pretty obvious at this point.

We should be using this opportunity to determine which must have manufacturing capabilities locally, making that happen, then sticking to it long term for national defense. This doesn't just apply to Japan, or the US, but every country on the globe. Global supply chains are really showing their weaknesses over the last couple months.

Additionally, anything that countries can do to pry away CCP control of global supply chains should be done, with a long term goal of weakening the CCP as they have certainly shown they can't be trusted. They can't be trusted by their people, they can't be trusted by other nations. They've shown now multiple times they will do everything that they can to cover up growing pandemics within their boarders, hide actual infection and death numbers, downplay problems, silence whistleblowers, and lie. Beyond that, they continue to support genocide inside their own boarders, and they continue their aggressive expansion in the South China Sea. They are a bad actor.

camhenlin··on Japan to fund firms to shift production out of China
That ought to depend on how heavily the Japanese government is willing to subsidize them
camhenlin··on Chloroquine, past and present
Is there any difference in aquarium cloroquine and prescription? I’m assuming mostly manufacturing conditions

How do you plan on measuring your dose and dosing it?

camhenlin··on A copy of your property deed costs $3 – this SoCal firm will do it for $89
Fill them with glitter! Much messier than dirt when they get opened.
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