Hacker News Reader

holdenkon 15-minute at-home Lyme disease tick test

And it's relatively easy to get a prescription for since it's a PEP drug for high -er risk sexual activities.

We'll be running an Apache Spark community sprint centered on helping folks get their first PRs into the Apache Spark project on March 13th (Friday) from 12:00-7:00 PM at the Snowflake Bellevue Office :)

holdenkon Smallpond – A lightweight data processing framework built on DuckDB and 3FS

Admittedly just one part of the insurance paperwork but we're working on automating appeals at Fight Health Insurance / Fight Paperwork :) ( https://www.fighthealthinsurance.com/ / https://www.fightpaperwork.com/ )

holdenkon Show HN: Make your health insurance company cry too Fight Health Insurance

I created a new AI tool ( https://www.fighthealthinsurance.com/ ) to generate health insurance appeals. The code & model are both open ( https://github.com/orgs/totallylegitco/repositories & https://huggingface.co/TotallyLegitCo )

holdenkon Sony software updates breaks movie theater projectors

I think a world without any form of meaningful protection or regulation sounds very dystopian and not like one I would choose to live in under our current capitalist society.

Even the author of the “theorem” you cite indicated that he didn’t believe it to be practical.

holdenkon My fifth year as a bootstrapped founder

Only the flipside, QSBS shares have some great tax advantages if you think you might have a traditional "exit" at some point.

holdenkon How to store your app's entire state in the url

I did something similar using Racket's (nee PLT scheme) web programming module ( https://www2.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/hosc07-sk-mf.pdf ) back with an app that got on slashdot -- https://github.com/holdenk/web2.0collage

The theory was wonderful (yay! stateless load balancer etc.) but in practice browsers at the time were less than happy with trying to store that much state in the URL.

holdenkon Musk’s Twitter purchase was a leveraged buyout

This matches the "cut infra cost by 1` billion" demand he made as well - https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-orders-twitter-cut-i...

holdenkon New OSS Satellite Communication Device

If you've wanted to add satellite communication to your IoT project but traditional pricing has turned you off, we're kickstarting a new device (using an existing LEO constellation).

holdenkon Ask HN: Why are distributed systems so polarizing?

This is so true. Hire a bunch of senior engineers to solve junior level problems and they'll turn the junior level problems into senior level problems :p

holdenkon Intel's “Cripple AMD” Function (2019)

Huh I had wondered why I saw so many Python packages blacklist MKL now I know why.

holdenkon USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness (2021)

I like the tear-down approach, I wish it was more common for these devices to say what chips they used.

holdenkon Support open source that you use by paying the maintainers to talk to your team

If anyone wants to chat about Spark or related stuff I would totally do that for money.

holdenkon Feynman’s advice to W&M student resonates 45 years later (2020)

As an author I _love_ feedback especially things where I can fix it / improve it.

holdenkon Resources to encourage children to learn to code

I've been working on a book to teach kids data parallel distributed computing with Python and PySpark (Distributed Computing 4 Kids), if anyone wants an early review copy let me know :)

or give your e-mail at https://www.distributedcomputing4kids.com/ :)

holdenkon Why and How I Got My Own ASN

So they don't do dedicated boxes (sadly), they rent by the rack (including 1gb of transit + 15A power). https://he.net/colocation.html has the info. If you just want a dedicated box that isn't drawing a lot of power I've probably got some room in my rack and we can chat (and I imagine some of the other BGP for fun group folks are in similar positions).

holdenkon Why and How I Got My Own ASN

If anyone is in the bay area and wants to run physical hardware and peer with folks, FCIX down in the HE facility in Fremont is very welcoming to small networks and doesn't have port fees (although you do need to be in the HE facility).

holdenkon Daddy isn’t coming back

My partner and I talked about our health (and mental health) in the context of deciding if we wanted to be parents to a kid. I like to think that's a normal enough conversation to have.

holdenkon “It's open source! We’ll let our customers fix it.”

Apache Beam _can be_ but this person is talking about using it inside of Google (e.g. as the Dataflow API) and with a Google service. I think the comparison is on the money. That being said I think the best way forward would be both google cloud support & a JIRA ticket.

Although, to a degree, I think the authors complaint about Google's mentality towards open source is on the money, a lot of the OSS work is understaffed with the theory that the community will pick up the slack, even when the primary users of the OSS project would be Google customers.

(Full disclosure: I work on Apache Spark for my day job, have previously worked on Apache Beam for my day job, and have friends who work on Bigquery so my world view is maybe skewed).

holdenkon ‘Great Resignation’ gains steam as return-to-work plans take effect

So one of the things to remember about Google is the desire to increase attrition of senior employees (e.g. those with the most flexibility to move elsewhere). It's.... weird, but it would totally match.

holdenkon Airflow 2.0

Congratulations on the release :)

holdenkon Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

I've worked at small companies while on an H1B, if you look at the who's hiring posts on HN I think you will see many places willing to sponsor H1s, so it's not just big companies.

holdenkon AWS Ruins Own Attempt at Sabotage

So serious answer:

I worked for Amazon because they recruited from my University and it was my first after graduation job. I'd had some internships, but I didn't have a large network or a lot of options.

holdenkon San Francisco, Silicon Valley rents plunge amid downturn

Except in places like San Francisco with rent-controlled housing.

holdenkon Crypto Fund II

It was my understanding that in the current system merchants tend to eat the cost of fraud under our current system (see charge backs, rolling reserves, etc.)

holdenkon The untold origin story of eBay that I lived (2018)

So I've seen several folks say that they do.

holdenkon The Paxos Algorithm, or How to Win a Turing Award

I'm starting with a book designed to teach kids Apache Spark using garden gnomes ( http://www.distributedcomputing4kids.com/ ) and depending on how that goes I want to branch out and do some other topics.

holdenkon Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks

Dataflow it's self isn't open source. Beam is not open source Dataflow, however you can use the Beam SDK with Dataflow as a runner.

holdenkon Canada facing ‘brain drain’ as tech talent leaves for Silicon Valley

When I graduated and tried to find work in Canada multiple firms told me I was "too weird" and "should move to California", so I did and I'm super happy that it worked out the way it did -- but I still feel sad about having to leave my home country to be my authentic self.

holdenkon Engineers Should Blog

Some of the highest traffic blog posts I've written have been on the "entry-level" side of things.