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jmvoodoo

939 karma · joined May 5, 2011

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jmvoodoo··on Gravity seems holographic. What does that mean for reality?
Thank you. This is far easier to understand than the OP.
jmvoodoo··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
I've been building my own IDE that works the way do (and those in my social circles/professional life do). It allows for use of multiple agent harnesses (i.e claude code, codex, pi, opencode), and makes worktrees much easier to work with. Also has its own code review workflow. My coworkers and several friends have all started using it now. Its been an absolute blast to build, and has definitely increased our productivity vs VS Code, Zed, or Cursor.
jmvoodoo··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
It could also help foreign adversaries. I have 0 confidence that Flock hasn’t already been compromised given the current security environment and the value of the data that they have.
jmvoodoo··on Cursor removed cost information from the usage page and CSV export
I’ve been working on a project to solve this problem with Claude code, codex, etc by recording usage and translating to $ in realtime. Looks like I’ll have to add Cursor support now.
jmvoodoo··on AMD Ryzen AI Halo – $4k AI Dev Kit
I bought a bosgame version for $2199 back in February.
jmvoodoo··on Version Control for AI Coding
You can't as far as I'm aware unless you control the entire batch during inference, or don't use batching which would require you to run your own inference.
jmvoodoo··on Phase behavior of Cacio and Pepe sauce
When I read the paper I immediately wondered if this would work. Good to see that someone has tried it and indeed it does!
jmvoodoo··on Bench.co acquired after informing staff company was insolvent
A creditor calling debt because you violated your covenants is not a rugpull. That's how creditors insure they can be paid back before you predictably run out of money.
jmvoodoo··on Air traffic failure caused by two locations 3600nm apart sharing 3-letter code
So, essentially the system has a serious denial of service flaw. I wonder how many variations of flight plans can cause different but similar errors that also force a disconnect of primary and secondary systems.

Seems "reject individual flight plan" might be a better system response than "down hard to prevent corruption"

Bad assumption that a failure to interpret a plan is a serious coding error seems to be the root cause, but hard to say for sure.

jmvoodoo··on Self-locking and stiffening deployable tubular structures
Sierra space seems to be furthest along on this. Videos of their burst tests are pretty epic as well.

https://www.sierraspace.com/commercial-space-stations/life-s...

jmvoodoo··on Don't obsess over tax and legal structures
This is very well thought out advice. That said you do need to be focused on the right areas of tax code, and understand that some things can be changed later and some things cannot (at least, not easily or without significant expense).

For example, I relocated to Puerto Rico several years ago and am taking advantage of a 50% transferrable R&D tax credit. Because it's transferrable I can sell the tax credit to people that have a tax liability even if I don't.

After fees, this means I get roughly 40% cash back on my R&D expense. This is a big deal to me and my company.

If you don't do your home work you can potentially miss out on some great opportunities. That said, you do still need to build a good business, or the best tax structure in the world won't save you.

jmvoodoo··on Cautionary tale on using Chase bank for indie business
Unrelated, but I read your book in the 90s as a teenager and it had a huge impact on my life. Still one of my favorite books. Thank you.
jmvoodoo··on Show HN: PgQueuer – Transform PostgreSQL into a Job Queue
We have been using bullmq in production for just over a year. It is a piece of technology that our team doesn't have to think about, which is pretty much all I could ask for.

We did end up adding some additional generics which allows us to get strong typing between producers and consumers. That I think has been a key piece of making it easy to use and avoiding dumb mistakes.

jmvoodoo··on Twilio confirms data breach after hackers leak 33M Authy user phone numbers
One step we have taken is to build an auth system that requires you as the developer to explicitly specify the security of an endpoint using a decorator. If no decorator is provided, then the endpoint is completely locked down even to admins (effectively disabled).

If an endpoint is decorated with something that is considered dangerous (i.e. public access), that triggers additional review steps. In addition, the authentication forbids certain combinations of decorators and access patterns.

It's not perfect, but it has saved us a few times from securing endpoints incorrectly in code.

jmvoodoo··on Cloudflare took down our website
This actually seems reasonable, and a potential part of the narrative the original poster would be likely to leave out.
jmvoodoo··on Cloudflare took down our website
In this case "the service" would be to look the other way on illegal activities for $10k/mo.

I'm not saying cloudflare can't do it, I'm just saying it's wrong.

jmvoodoo··on Cloudflare took down our website
But for $10k a month cloudflare is ok with that? Either it's acceptable or it's not, there is no way that this looks good for cloudflare either way.
jmvoodoo··on North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs
Tell me you're vulnerable to SQL injection without telling me you're vulnerable to SQL injection.
jmvoodoo··on Gigantic new aircraft design aims to create the largest plane ever to fly
I actually know someone at radia and asked them this exact question last year. Apparently the blades are also extremely fragile and couldn't withstand the forces of being mounted on an aircraft. The problem with lighter than air is that the wind farms tend to be in places with, well, a lot of wind. Not ideal places for lighter than air vehicles.

Helicopters just aren't efficient enough, would have the same issues with wind (especially when carrying a giant airfoil), and would damage the blade if they came out even a bit out of formation.

You're right it doesn't make intuitive sense, but the people doing this are pretty damn smart and actually did think of these things!

jmvoodoo··on What I wish I knew about ESPP and RSUs sooner
Actually it looks like RSAs. I didn't even apparently know that RSUs were different as I've always received RSAs and thought they were the same thing (and in fact they had been called RSUs, but the structure looks like RSAs as defined here)
jmvoodoo··on What I wish I knew about ESPP and RSUs sooner
I am not an accountant or attorney, so you should do all of your own research. However any discussion or information about RSUs that doesn't mention an 83b election is at best incomplete.
jmvoodoo··on Helium is essential but nonrenewable and difficult to recycle
I don't know anything about MRI machines, but couldn't they be built with high temperature superconductors and use liquid nitrogen? If anything this feels like a cost issue not a pure technology issue...
jmvoodoo··on NY times is asking that all LLMs trained on Times data be destroyed
That's pretty much the entire point of many publications. You think readers of Financial Times aren't reading FT in the hopes of getting their own material gain? What about Wall St analysts? Consuming something for gain is not copyright infringement, distributing it for gain is.
jmvoodoo··on Fake Trees: Using Indents for Simpler UIs
I started a company that dealt with a lot of tree like data. It is possible to transform your tree structure into an indented list in O(n) time. This used to be one of our interview questions at the time. There are a number of ways to store your data in various SQL databases that allow you to quickly get and render segments of the tree as well without recursive queries.

Once you understand those concepts, then storing your data correctly as trees has a ton of benefits over indenting like this.

jmvoodoo··on Cummins pickup truck engines tricked air quality controls, feds say
I owned a Dodge ram diesel model that had one of these engines. It had urea injection, and I had to maintain the 2nd tank.
jmvoodoo··on Chesterton's Fence: A lesson in second order thinking (2021)
Tearing down fences without pausing long enough to at least figure out why they are there is how you get gatekeepers to begin with.

Its entirely possible that the fence was put there for an extremely valid reason, or that you must mitigate a separate issue before removing it. This assessment can be completed using a first principles approach, and the fence can be removed afterwards. Removing the fence then learning why it was there can be a painful experience for you and those around you.

jmvoodoo··on System-wide open source ad blocker for Mac, Windows, and Linux
The build steps are provided as a GitHub action in the repo. You can audit the build pretty easily, or if you're super paranoid you can build it yourself by following the build steps.
jmvoodoo··on David Attenborough is now narrating my life
Now you're being sued for defamation though.
jmvoodoo··on Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis
Don't disagree, but eliminating the subsidy is much more challenging politically than taxing junk food.
jmvoodoo··on Workers who cut countertops are dying of silicosis
We aren't talking about cake though. We are talking about inexpensive highly processed foods made predominantly from ingredients that are subsidized specifically because of their caloric density. I.e. corn.

High caloric density is what you want if you need to be able to feed your country in war, so we subsidize these foods.

No one wants to eat just plain corn though, so companies process it into other foods that are then sold cheaply because they are receiving these large subsidies.

People end up consuming large quantities of these foods because they are cheap, and our brain reward centers a pre-wired to love lots of cheap easy calories.

Knowing all of this, it makes perfect sense to tax the living crap out of highly processed foods that are made from subsidized ingredients. You're just taking back the subsidy you put there in the first place, and shaping consumer behavior for the greater good (which is a common use case for taxation).

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