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floathub

881 karma · joined May 30, 2016

Cofounder of Modiot Labs & FloatHub | modiot.com | floathub.com

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/floathub; my proof: https://keybase.io/floathub/sigs/qGN3TTQyNa8m9BSRQT732uRjNJdv2Y67rjpkx4tXHFI ]

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floathub··on The New Three-Tier Application
To iterate is human.
floathub··on Notebooks as reusable Python programs
One approach to this is org-mode with babel.

You can have a plaintext file which is also the program which is also the documentation/notebook/website/etc. It's extremely powerful, and is a compelling example of literate programming.

Decent overview here: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2022/08/02/org-babel-vs-jupyt...

[edit: better link]

floathub··on Amazon's killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books
I'm interpreting this as the final straw for cancelling Prime.

Very small vote with my wallet, but something.

floathub··on Test
They are testing the:

  asfasfasdfasfdasdfasfasfasfsadffffffffffffffffffffasdfsfsafsfdwfgasdgbdfbgdsgasdgdsbdb

defense system (the pentagon is a really big building).
floathub··on Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Donates $ Million to Trump's Inaugral Fund
This was from the last time around, and Trump no longer holds the lease on the hotel (and it's no longer branded as "Trump"), but it is an example of self-dealing with inaugural funds:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/22/dc-sues-trump-organ...

Fool me once, ...

floathub··on GM shuttering Cruise Taxi effort
Already active topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42381637

floathub··on GM shuttering Cruise Taxi effort
More coverage (NY Times):

https://archive.is/BgXUG

floathub··on Himalaya: CLI to Manage Emails
mu4e paired with mbsync is really amazing. All your email in Emacs, with super fast search, and the ability to integrate into things like org agenda.

I found this guide particularly useful for setting things up and even dealing with annoying outlook/office365 servers:

https://brettpresnell.com/post/email/

Does take a bit of doing, but so worth it.

floathub··on Advice for first-time inventors from a patent engineer
The patent system in general and the USPTO in particular is a very strange amalgam. As a holder of multiple patents (both hardware and method/soft), I've found the process to be extremely odd.

First you have to phrase whatever your technology involves in a legal vernacular that is weirdly constraining and rarely maps well onto what the thing in question actually does. You always have the sense that you're playing a game of legal-mumbo-jumbo performance art more than actually describing an invention.

Second, you then have to interact with patent examiners. Some are great, many not so much. One I encountered was possibly the dumbest person I have ever met. Thick as two short planks with two extra short planks nailed on.

Third, the process just seems to go on and on. The examiner will make an objection or point to prior art. These actions may have little basis in logic or common sense, but they do seem to move pieces of paper from one box to another. Meetings occur with the examiner and/or their supervisor where your jaw will drop at how little anyone involved understands the technology being claimed.

You can cut through a lot of this with good legal counsel, but that is really just contributing to the gamesmanship of the whole process.

And, in the end, a patent is a pretty meaningless thing. A portfolio of defended patents might be an "Intellectual Property" asset (what an awful term). But so many people have to jump through the process just as a defensive act so they have a sliver of reassurance that using the novel thing they came up with will not lead to immediate cease-and-desist injunctions from IP-fortified competitors. What a collective waste of human creativity.

floathub··on Show HN: Wealthfolio: Private, open-source investment tracker
There is a beancount mode for Emacs that does a lot of what you want, but only really of use if you use Emacs.

https://github.com/beancount/beancount-mode

floathub··on Orion – From idea to launch in 45 days
This is not really related to Orion, but is anyone else annoyed by the fact that Apple restricts Sidecar to only work if both devices are signed into the same Apple ID? This is on top of the insult of making it ridiculously complicated to switch Apple ID's on an iOS device (fast user switching anyone?).

They could just have an AirPlay server as part of every iPad and make a lot of this possible without dongles and cables. Bonus points for making Airplay an open standard so we don't all stand around for the next 20 years figuring out which subset of devices can stream to which subset of displays ("It just works?").

Sorry for the rant, I'm just annoyed by all of the dark-ish patterns around iOS devices that seem to be trying to drive multiple units rather than sharing of fewer units.

floathub··on Hybrid-Net: Real-time audio source separation, generate lyrics, chords, beat
Indeed.

Only things I've seen it get wrong in a few minutes of testing are french lyrics (try a Serge Gainsbourg for example).

But it is really, really amazing.

floathub··on Hiring top talent for startup: US vs. UK?
I don't think there's any magic bullet to tech hiring. You can pay over-the-top for headhunters and the like, and get almost useless candidates. You can have people who can barely figure out how to submit a resume who turn out to be serious 10x superstars.

It's hit or miss, and takes time. The only thing I've ever found that works is doing as much as possible on an interim/consultant/1099 basis. If things work out, hire permanently. If not, no harm no foul.

floathub··on Meta's new AI image generator was trained on 1.1B Instagram and FB photos
Note that you need to "Log On" to Facebook/Meta/WhateverTheyCallThemselvesNow to try it. Kind of curious, but not curious enough to create yet another burner Facebook account.

[edit: still learning to spell]

floathub··on Tesla breaks down mid-turn and causes more than nine hours of travel chaos
Or a portable generator?
floathub··on Tesla breaks down mid-turn and causes more than nine hours of travel chaos
9 hours? Nobody had an extension cord?
floathub··on Ask HN: Anyone else experiencing an Apple Outage?
Working here now as well.
floathub··on Ask HN: Anyone else experiencing an Apple Outage?
Yeah, noticed that as well. Pretty frustrating that the monitoring system says, "iCloud Account & Sign In" is solid green :-)
floathub··on Banking in uncertain times
Yes, a future stream of cash flows will be worth less now if interest rates rise, because the time value of money has changed. But not every asset (let alone every price) represents a future stream of cash flows.

Monetary policy could be performed by a couple of NAND gates if it were genuinely the case that any interest rates rise would necessarily lower the price of everything.

floathub··on Banking in uncertain times
The Fed strategy is to reduce the rate of growth (1st derivative) or prices, not reduce the actual price level (which would be deflationary). And that's non-trivial for many reasons, including the fact that not every price signal responds the same to short term interest rate movements.
floathub··on Banking in uncertain times
The claim that, "when interest rates rise, all asset prices must fall" seems, uhm, somewhat off. If this were true, it would be trivial to stop and reverse inflation (i.e. deflate) with any increase in interest rates (?).

While it's certainly useful to think about prices as signals that, "embed an interest rate derivative", it seems a stretch to claim every single one of those derivatives is perfectly negatively correlated with interest rate changes.

[EDIT: change "interest price" to "interest rate"]

floathub··on Signal K – open-source universal marine data exchange format
Indeed.

NMEA2000 is essentially a Marine Electronics version of CANBUS with their own agreed upon PGNs.

NMEA0183 is pretty close to RS-232 (and/or RS-422), usually at 4800 baud, but there's a "High Speed" variant at 38,400 baud.

floathub··on [dead]
More details to come Tuesday, but it looks like positive net energy output has been achieved!
floathub··on EDI vs. API
https://youtu.be/FZqs36C5sgM?t=24s
floathub··on EDI vs. API
All of Alma Cogan is dead, but only some of the class of dead people are Alma Cogan.
floathub··on Unsolved problems in economics
At the risk of some meta-irony, important to point out that Goodhart was an economist.
floathub··on Bluetooth relay attacks allow Tesla Model 3 / Y to be unlocked and driven away
The headline on this had me very confused; surely not even Tesla would implement something like this without a crypto challenge-response in there somewhere?

They did not. This attack relies on 2 devices: one next to the car and one next to the phone. It is tunneling the bluetooth link, but you still need an authorized phone at the other end of the tunnel (to respond to the crypto challenge).

EDIT: it had me confused because I saw "Relay Attacks" and parsed it as "Replay Attacks". Now getting more coffee ...

floathub··on Hive: A Globally-Distributed Key/Value Store [pdf]
Odd to refer to Redis as a general-purpose database:

"Hive is not meant to become a general-purpose database, like Redis"

Assume that is an error and they meant to say MySQL (or similar)? Or I'm seriously misunderstanding something.

floathub··on Ask HN: Connect to the Internet the old way during next Ethiopian lockdown?
One option would be to use a setup similar to offshore sailors and cruisers:

https://www.cruiserswiki.org/wiki/Email_at_Sea

or, more generally, amateur band based radio links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winlink

The radios themselves get less and less expensive each year, especially with software defined radios, but unsure how easily/quickly one could get their hands on the required gear in Addis.

floathub··on Predictions for September 2031
In 2031, fully self driving cars will be just as imminent as they are now :-)
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