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jasong

364 karma · joined February 9, 2019

https://x.com/jasgong
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jasong··on A compelling title that is cryptic enough to get you to take action on it
A poor attempt at joining the convo too late because I don't browse /new like everyone else. No one upvotes, and I question my intelligence for the 3rd time today.
jasong··on Extracting text from a pdf broke ChatGPT
link broken (extra slash) https://www.surgehq.ai/blog/the-pdf-that-broke-chatgpt
jasong··on FCC rules AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal
I wonder what qualifies as a robocall. Is it just something dialed automatically? Is it still legal if a human dialed the call, but an AI-generated voice speaks?
jasong··on Ask HN: Why are PDFs still heavily used?
In my experience PDFs are mostly used to ensure what you're seeing is what everyone else is seeing. If I sent out a Word or Powerpoint doc, I could be 90% sure someone would have a formatting issue. Maybe their default margins are different or they don't have the same fonts installed. It's a better format for the reader when they don't require edit access.

Google Docs + MS Office has probably figured this out by now, but there's also ton of historical momentum keeping it in use.

As a financial auditor I remember being baffled how people would go out of their way to create paper processes. A spreadsheet that requires confirmation would be printed, signed, stapled to another piece of paper - all so I can remove the staples and scan it to track digitally in our audit software. At least I knew sending them a PDF would come back looking the same...

jasong··on I Will Write More
My favorite part of this post is the distinction between writing and posting. Picking an audience is important for me when I write. If a post is mostly self reflection for yourself, it’s ok to not post it.
jasong··on Building Abstractions on Spreadsheets
Really excited to see new spreadsheet products pop up. Coda seems like the most broad solution. Most products are centered around a particular use-case like financial planning (https://golayer.io/).

Another interesting approach is to bring Git like diffs and collaboration to spreadsheets. XLTrails for example https://www.xltrail.com/.

I wish someone could figure out how to make Git work well with spreadsheets. It would really unlock so much collaboration and sharing. I think one of the main reasons you can't just find good well maintained templates for simple tools is because of poor collaboration tools around spreadsheets.

jasong··on Ask HN: Where to post landing page to gauge interest in startup?
There’s probably a subreddit where you can pose the question. Though, submitting a landing page proposes a solution. You should perhaps be focused on chatting with people who have the problem to validate if your solution is right.
jasong··on Ask HN: Parents: Best screen-time limiting software?
NextDNS can be a viable option with their “Recreation Time” feature. Overall it seems like DNS is the right place to implement this cross platform.
jasong··on VPN by Google One security assessment
Never did a security audit, but I did regulatory and financial audits of banks. Most of our work involved looking at last year's work, re-performing it and changing dates. Writing reports + financial statement notes followed a similar process.

Exceptions are immediately escalated to the audit committee and sometimes end up as a small footnote in the public reports. Most of the time it says "we were unable to collect sufficient evidence" to provide assurance. Almost never "this was done wrong".

It's interesting to see how the second report differed from their first assessment earlier in the year: https://research.nccgroup.com/2021/04/08/public-report-vpn-b...

Most of the findings in the first report were "Fixed".

jasong··on Show HN: Extract email attachments into shareable links
This is super cool. I would only consider using a self hosted open-source version of this since I am sending you sensitive info via email. Enterprise or business users will probably be in the same boat.