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gee_totes

985 karma · joined August 5, 2011

www.leesome.com
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gee_totes··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (July 2025)
SEEKING WORK - South Carolina local or Remote

Full-stack web developer, specializing in engineering a solid User Experience. Available as an individual contributor, team lead, or fractional CTO. No ego. Can bring my own offshore team if necessary.

Track record of taking projects from 0 -> MVP -> PMF.

Expert-level Ruby, JavaScript, PHP. Confident with Python too.

Also a certified Lego Serious Play facilitator and can help your team find their strengths and align on strategic goals.

Specialties:

  - Context Engineering

  - User Experience Engineering

  - Technical writing and documentation

  - Vectorization and Elasticsearch Tuning

  - RESTful API design and implementation

  - React SPAs

  - Web Scraping

  - Cleaning up brownfield legacy code

  - US/Offshore project planning and management
GitHub: https://github.com/geetotes

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leegillentine/

Contact: lee(at)fishburd.com

gee_totes··on FCC Proposes Nearly $4.5M Fine for Apparently Illegal Robocall Scheme
This is a big fine against a modern VOIP SaaS: https://telnyx.com/

It's frustrating that the triggering event was spam calls to FCC staff members and their family. If only spam calls to us plebs could trigger such fines.

gee_totes··on Wooden satellite heads to space in Mars exploration test
Yeah, this wooden satellite news is a big day for fans of that unmade concept -- there are dozens of us!
gee_totes··on Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon
Maybe a dumb question, but I wonder if this was a software attack or IL was able to modify the physical pagers that are issued during Hezbollah onboarding. If this was a pure software attack, are only pagers susceptible? Or are we unknowingly carrying around bombs in our pocket, waiting for the counterattack?
gee_totes··on Better Call GPT: Comparing large language models against lawyers [pdf]
What you're describing in 2) sounds a lot like paper terrorism[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_terrorism

gee_totes··on Acquia, my Drupal startup
"OMG, they are still working on drupal 7?" was my thought before I realized this was from 2007
gee_totes··on Militants Behind Israel Attack Raised Millions in Crypto
Genuinely curious; could you be more specific in what you're looking for in an international observer? There is UNRWA, which has been there for a long time. Not sure how effective they've been in reducing civilian casualties. There is also the UNDOF in the Golan Heights.
gee_totes··on M.U.L.E. 40th Anniversary Special
Now kids these days are first exposed to M.U.L.E. through the game Deeprock Galactic
gee_totes··on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (February 2023)
SEEKING FREELANCER | REMOTE contract | US Based Startup with office in South Carolina

Healthcare chat startup looking for full time mid-level or senior-level Ruby engineer. Our application stack is a custom Ruby framework, so more than just RoR experience will be a big bonus.

Our product is in the rehab and addiction & recovery space, so personal or professional experience there will be another plus.

Timezone is Americas; our team is distributed from LA to BA.

Please contact lee+hn (at) fishburd.com

gee_totes··on NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow
Heated streets?
gee_totes··on Company ‘Hijacks’ Blender’s CC By-Licensed Film, YouTube Strikes User
Applying occam's razor here, I wonder if this was caused by a corrupt Google employee taking a bribe from the TV station in Uzbekistan?

Social network content moderators have been known to take bribes[0][1]. The fact that there was a manual DMCA review involved makes this more sus

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/lawsuits-onlyfan...

[1]: https://calcoastnews.com/2022/08/former-twitter-employee-con...

gee_totes··on Regulators OK largest dam demolition in history to restore salmon habitat
What if those dams contributed to the drought?
gee_totes··on Show HN: Campus FM – live stream college and independent radio stations
Love it, and love college radio!

Could you add KAOS?

gee_totes··on BSD-XFCE installs macOS-like XFCE enviroment on FreeBSD
I did not know that XFCE supported this level of customization. Where can I find other XFCE skinpacks?
gee_totes··on Show HN: I made a local development, debugging and hotreload tool for AWS Lambda
This is awesome and something I definitely would use for my docker and node based lambdas. Looking forward to this project adding more labmda backends!
gee_totes··on Ask HN: How to find a small town to relocate for remote work?
You fool! I'm moved to Cola from Seattle three years ago and absolutely love it. I see more and more people moving to South Carolina every day. We need to shut the door behind us before too many people come here!

In Seattle there was an attitude called K.B.O. which stands for Keep the Bastards Out. It mostly means when talking to outsiders, you should complain about the rain so they don't get any ideas about moving there.

We need to develop a KBO for the Carolinas. Greenville has an absolutely disgusting downtown, with an ugly gross river going through it and a rickety pedestrian bridge that is bound to kill someone. The tech industry is absolutely drying up and I'm getting ready to become a hog farmer.

Big /s

gee_totes··on The state of South Africa, 28ish years post-apartheid
I am not OP (they seem to have been downvoted to oblivion) but a fascinating book I read recently on this topic was "The Invention of the White Race" by Theodore W. Allen.

The book traces the historical development of the concept of whiteness from early Britain, where the Irish were considered non-white as a means to "other" and impoverish them, to pre-revolution Haiti, where people of mixed race could attain certificates of Whiteness that would grant them the same rights and privileges as non-mixed French people.

Those are just two of the anecdotes I remember from the book. It's really worth a read if you're into the whole "race as a social construct" thing, since it digs into the mechanics of how that social construct was created.

gee_totes··on Why video calls are bad for brainstorming
This is a big reason I got into Lego Serious Play
gee_totes··on Double ridge formation over shallow water sills on Jupiter’s moon Europa
I don't think the Dead Sea is really dead.

"Biologists have known since the 1930s the lake is "not dead yet". Instead, it's full of microbes that get along quite happily in the salty soup, for it keeps out competitors that would take over in a more hospital aqueous environment. In general, the water contains 1,000 to 10,000 archaea* per ml, a much lower concentration of life than in seawater, but quite respectable, all in all, for a place where one molecule in three is not water. Occasionally, when conditions are right, the sea blooms red with life. This happened in 1980 and 1992."

from: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/fountains...

gee_totes··on Julian Assange: US extradition bid gets a legal boost
Frustrating that the US extradition case gets a legal boost while the UK courts ignore the evidence that the US indictment of Assange is based on lies https://stundin.is/grein/13627/
gee_totes··on KFC launches 4K, 240FPS gaming console with a built-in chicken warmer
Honestly this seems like an efficient use of waste-heat generated by the computer -- use it to keep you meal warm!

Maybe in the future recipes will come with cryptographic hashes you need to crack in order to warm your processors to the appropriate level and length for cooking

gee_totes··on Why some people suffer from a stutter
It's not pathetic -- do you look at someone in a wheelchair and think how pathetic they are?

It's not pathetic -- it's just some fucking bullshit that happens. We need to cut through all the bullshit and love ourselves. :)

gee_totes··on Why some people suffer from a stutter
What if the stress level affects the dopamine level and that affects the stutter?

I have a stutter too and this was a very interesting article to add to my "head-canon" on why people stutter. My stutter is also affected by moods. Maybe we're living -- or rather, speaking -- on the edge of the brain-body connection.

gee_totes··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
Definitely appreciated the tips at the bottom of the article. Did you use anything like Storybook to share the component library?
gee_totes··on Ghislaine Maxwell arrested by the FBI
Maybe she was following CDC guidelines and staying home?
gee_totes··on Ask HN: Advice for a prisoner learning to program
I wonder if COBOL would be a good choice for him to learn. Not the most in-demand, but probably not going away in 11.5 years

Edit: Another idea -- good excel and data science and visualization skills probably won't be going away too and may be more accessible if he doesn't have access to a command line

gee_totes··on Netflix Shows Different Skin Colors on Movie Title Cards Depending on Your Race
I know, right? I just may not be seeing the black movies because I'm a white customer.
gee_totes··on Netflix Shows Different Skin Colors on Movie Title Cards Depending on Your Race
It seems interesting that with all its investment in original content, Netflix would rather re-skin "white" movies than invest in "black" movies.

I wonder if this is a sign of institutional racism at work and lack of diversity.

gee_totes··on News for the tz database
> Use "PST" and "PDT" for Philippine time.

What about us in Pacific daylight time? Now our timezone acronym is ambiguous.

gee_totes··on Ask HN: Depression and job
I think you're burned out and the personal stuff in your life is taking more of a toll than you think. I think you need to take some time off work, i.e. "mental health/self-care" days. Take at least one day off to just do nothing and chill out. You can use the other days to take care of your personal stuff. Take as much time as you need.

Also, if you're gonna quit your job, this is probably one of the safest times to do it.

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