HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

jgelsey

25 karma · joined November 12, 2010

ex-CEO of Auth0. ex-CEO of Xnor.ai.
submissionscomments
jgelsey··on Launch HN: Palus Finance (YC W26): Better yields on idle cash for startups, SMBs
Not publicly accessible, could you fix permissions?
jgelsey··on Zero ASIC is out of stealth
The big question is what do these sell for? Cost dictates how broadly these can be used.
jgelsey··on Solar on Warehouses
The core obstacle is financing - solar traditionally takes a long time to pay back from energy savings, so the financials of solar on warehouses didn't work out. The IRA made it possible to sell the tax credits from solar deployment on warehouse roofs (e.g. https://www.reunioninfra.com/) so now solar on warehouse rooftops can make financial sense in many more instances.
jgelsey··on Anti-insect laser gun turrets designed by Osaka University
Nathan Myrvold demo'd this at TED 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwyMuwNYKvI

Safety is a blocking issue last I heard - something powerful enough to zap a bug can also permanently blind a retina.

jgelsey··on Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?
Children; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room, they contradict their parents and tyrannize their teachers. Children are now tyrants!
jgelsey··on The Haliade-X industry’s first 14 MW offshore wind turbine 260M high
What does something like this cost, and then what's it's all-up install cost? IE trying to get to a $/kWh figure.
jgelsey··on Nuclear power can help the democratic world achieve energy independence
There's no cheaper electricity source then renewables, by a long shot. Why bother with nuclear?

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c...

jgelsey··on Response to “WireGuard: great protocol, but skip the Mac app”
WireGuard is a spectacular gift to the community and I am grateful to have it.
jgelsey··on Ask HN: Why Paul Graham’s Website Isn’t Using HTTPS?
Access to the infrastructure is pretty easy - e.g. a WiFi Pineapple is $99. https://shop.hak5.org/products/wifi-pineapple

There is no absolute protection against compromise, but it would be polite for every web site to implement https and hsts to at least make it harder for visitors to be compromised. It costs them very little.

Maybe the analogy is soap in the bathroom at a coffee shop - most customers will not get cholera if the soap is missing, but is it moral for the shop owners to take the risk when the cost is so low and the downside is so high?

jgelsey··on Ask HN: Why Paul Graham’s Website Isn’t Using HTTPS?
Practically, you don't do a cert for your site, you do it to protect visitors to your site getting compromised by a MITM attack.

A site without a cert is basically telling its users "I don't care about you."

jgelsey··on NSA Cyber Unfetter Project
What's with all the typos on the web site? e.g. "Unfetter Discover: Analyze seucrity gaps and explore adversary tradecraft" or "Unfetter Disocover".

If the goal is to foster adoption these tells scream "disorganized and unprofessional".

jgelsey··on The canals of Venice are now “clear and full of fish” hoax
So it's not a hoax.
jgelsey··on Working for a startup makes less sense
Actually, my observation over the last 20 years of being a venture investor, bigco acquirer and startup CEO (including at a unicorn) is that the risk-adjusted $ compensation is the same at a startup and at bigco. Startups just have more beta in the comp. You learn a lot more at a startup and hence it's the experience you want if you hope to do your own startup. If you just care about short-term $ then absolutely stay at bigco. If you want experiences unavailable at bigcos and are willing to take the chance of making less, but also the chance of making 10X+ more, do startups.
jgelsey··on Russia Has ‘Oligarchs,’ the US Has ‘Businessmen’
U.S. has rule-of-law. Russia has rule-by-force. Comparing Russian and US elites like this smells like rank Russian propaganda.
jgelsey··on Tulsa Remote
If Tulsa would just abandon its racism and religious bigotry I bet they'd attract a lot more folks than this offer will.
jgelsey··on Unslacking Tideways Company
I don't understand why folks want less information by eliminating Slack. I've adopted Slack and 2 companies so far and find it a tremendous performance optimizer. It's a tool for passively receiving info by choice about many things, and for efficient conversations - especially with folks not sitting next to me - about specific things that are important to me.

FWIW my impressions is hatred of Slack is more a hatred of "I can't control by impulse to read everything so it's a tremendous time waster." Slack's not the problem, it's the person's self-control that's the problem in these situations.

jgelsey··on Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?
Key parts of https://auth0.com is built on top of their public serverless offering Extend serving 100M+ authentications/day.
jgelsey··on Mainframes and Supercomputers, From the Beginning Till Today
Disappointing it does not mention Convex Computer, which:

-produced the world's first commercially available gallium arsenide supercomputer, the Convex C3

-owned the minisupercomputer market from ~1986 through its end in 1995

-built the first commercially successful flat address space, cache coherent massively parallel processor the SPP1000 series in '94

jgelsey··on The Connection Machine (1985) [pdf]
Nope, USG was only ~1/3 the market for supercomputing back then. There were lots of industrial uses for supercomputing (e.g. computational fluid dynamics calculations to design tires that hydroplaned less, flame dynamics to create more efficient engines, finite element analysis to model parasitic effects in semiconductors, ..) However the market for the TMC was indeed almost exclusively the USG (or research departments at a few large corporations, and a few universities) because no one could figure out how to program it for something useful - as mentioned before, it was really, really hard to program anything more than a really constrained scenario on the CM.
jgelsey··on The Connection Machine (1985) [pdf]
Well, much of "AI" in its modern form is statistical analysis. SIMD machines are great for linear algebra (integrated vector/scalar machines like 70's CDC machines, Cray and Convex through the 90's, most Intel and AMD processors today through their SSE and AVX instruction set extensions). Any statistical calculations that use linear algebra can be accelerated with a SIMD architecture.
jgelsey··on The Connection Machine (1985) [pdf]
Very well written thesis. The machine, however, was extraordinarily difficult to program, resulting in Thinking Machine's quick death once they actually tried to compete commercially with Convex and Cray.