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sherbondy

134 karma · joined August 19, 2009

CEO & Cofounder at Boxtree, making Table Space, the ultimate tabletop games sandbox for mixed reality on Meta Quest, Apple Vision Pro, and Steam Frame (soon).
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sherbondy··on Apple WWDC 2026
Stoked about custom environments on visionOS from your panoramas. I have been shooting so many panoramas of national parks in anticipation of this moment.
sherbondy··on Ask HN: Has any YC startup from the last 6–7 years scaled like Stripe or Docker?
Also I honestly don't know much about these two, but they are huge and have raised a lot of money!

Whatnot: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/whatnot Zepto: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/zepto

Both are in the top 100 list, W20 and W21 respectively.

It takes time to build a massive business! Most overnight successes are often 10 years in the making.

sherbondy··on Ask HN: Has any YC startup from the last 6–7 years scaled like Stripe or Docker?
Deel? Though I guess that is right at the cutoff of your time window (founded in 2019).
sherbondy··on Anthropic acquires Bun
Congrats Jarred and team! You have saved humanity many hours already, and I'm sure with Anthropic's backing, you will spare us many more. Farewell would-be headaches from Node & NPM tooling and waiting for builds and tests and package updates. Exciting times ahead!

Using bun on a side project reinvigorated my love of software development during a relatively dark time in my life, and part of me wonders if I would have taken the leap onto my current path if it weren't for the joy and feeling of speed that came from working with bun!

sherbondy··on Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F
Can’t wait to be able to hail a Waymo from SFO. They are truly a marvel of modern technology.
sherbondy··on Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not
Nah, Ive is cited on a bunch of the patents for Vision Pro core technologies, including the first inventor listed on the EyeSight display patent, filed in 2018, 6 years ago:

https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

sherbondy··on Typing on Any Surface: A Deep Learning Method for Keystroke Detection in AR
Hopefully something along these lines gets incorporated into visionOS before launch (or as a v2 fast-follow). Typing against a floating keyboard in thin air is not ideal!
sherbondy··on ChatGPT app for iOS
Now they can start to compete more directly with things like Siri and soon Google’s Assistant on somewhat more equal footing, though neither OS provides quite the hooks for third party apps to directly subvert them, though maybe this will change with some of the more extreme antitrust provisions in motion in the European Union.
sherbondy··on It looks like GPT-4-32k is rolling out
Yep, if you sign up via Azure OpenAI Service, you might get access sooner. Same exact API, just served directly through Azure, and likely to be maintained for longer.

Direct link to the relevant sign up form fwiw:

https://customervoice.microsoft.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?...

We got access a few weeks back via Azure.

sherbondy··on Solar Roof for the VW ID Buzz EV
I’m still holding out hope that vehicles like the Aptera (https://aptera.us) manage to make it to production and help buck this trend.

From a sheer efficiency POV, rooftop or grid-scale solar installations will always be more effective than solar on an EV, but I think you’re right: there’s something to be said for how effective automakers are at packaging technology and pushing the frontier of competition that could further reverberate throughout the industry.

For the average consumer, purchasing your next vehicle and having all of these capabilities integrated is so much more straightforward and accessible compared to retrofitting your home with solar, battery, and the electronics required for managing the system and dynamically interfacing with the grid. If you’re a renter, many of these conversions are simply out of the question.

We are seeing more solar add-on options on conventional vehicles, with the likes of Hyundai Ioniq 5 and the Toyota Prius Prime including solar roof options. But they remain premium options rather than standard trims for now, as you mentioned.

sherbondy··on Show HN: Practice for Your YC Interviews with Betafi
Ah, yeah this landing page is optimized for new accounts. For new accounts that use the registration link on the page, we preload the YC prep project template on their accounts.

But you’re right, we should be able to devise a way to use a single link for both cases, new and existing users. We’ll try to tweak the setup here to better accommodate existing users!

sherbondy··on Autodesk criticised by 35 named architects (2020)
One potential source of disruption here (though I’m sure many folks will likewise feel it is frustrating to be locked into a SaaS model), is we are starting to see several intriguing startups building browser-based CAD software that are serious contenders for “the Figma of Architecture/BIM” crown, with the likes of:

Arcol (http://arcol.io), Infurnia (https://www.infurnia.com/), Qonic (https://www.qonic.com/), and Snaptrude (https://www.snaptrude.com).

Here’s nice little write-up about this emerging space from upFront: https://www.upfrontezine.com/2022/04/upf-1128-1.html

It remains to be seen if they will manage to out-compete the Goliath that is Autodesk or simply get acquired/assimilated, but it is exciting to see some fervent activity in this space.

Better yet if several of them take a “freemium” approach and students/hobbyists/freelancers are able to use a polished, user-friendly packaging of this incredible CAD technology for free (as in beer).

I love free software, open source, and amazing projects like Blender (it is a true anomaly & gem in the OSS world, re: professional-grade end-user applications), but sometimes the profit motive goes a long way towards creating delightful and approachable user experiences that empower people.

(Though I’m likewise rooting for an open source offering in this space to really take off!)

sherbondy··on SQLite Internals: Pages and B-trees
Obligatory link to Project Mentat: https://github.com/mozilla/mentat

No longer actively maintained, but maybe a nice starting point for hacking on your dream!

sherbondy··on How We built a $1M ARR open source SaaS
Pretty darn fun to be able to see the Hacker News front page effect in realtime since they have their own site's Plausible stats publicly available!

https://plausible.io/plausible.io?period=30d&source=Hacker+N...

What a great demo of the product :D

sherbondy··on Stripe Treasury/Issuance Alternatives?
Maybe try requesting an invite to Increase: https://increase.com/

In private beta right now but hopefully it could fit your use-case.

Created by amazingly talented team including several former Stripes to boot!

sherbondy··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2021)
Betafi | Founding Software Engineer (Full stack) | Full-time, Singapore / Remote (UTC+8) | https://www.betafi.co/

Betafi is building a next-generation platform to democratize user research and help product teams to co-create with their customers.

We empower organizations to understand their target customers and build usable interfaces with delightful UX by integrating research directly into their product development cycles, with fast turnarounds from finding the right participants to arriving at actionable insights.

As one of our Founding Engineers, you will help to build and scale the software powering the core Betafi platform across our web dashboard, live video toolkit, and mobile experiences.

What makes you a great fit:

- #1 You are a generalist, "full stack" product engineer, familiar with web technologies and able to contribute across the frontend and backend, undeterred from scoping and tackling systems-level challenges with an eye for ensuring a delightful end-user experience.

- #2 You have 3-5+ years of experience writing software professionally, ideally for SaaS tools or consumer-facing digital products.

- #3 You enjoy talking to customers to hear about their pain-points and translating them into high-impact engineering deliverables. As a small startup, each of us wears "the PM hat" in some capacity: you are keen to iterate on different product surfaces to delight our users.

- #4 You are excited to start as an "individual contributor" with the potential to grow into a leadership role over time (if interested): help with hiring and onboarding other engineers to the team, providing mentorship to junior staff in the future as we ramp up the business.

Stack: We use the Elixir programming language with the Phoenix Framework to power our backend services, and a mix of Phoenix LiveView and a more conventional React (TypeScript) codebase for rich interactions on the front-end. We rely on a variety of AWS and GCP APIs to power the Betafi platform.

To apply, please send an up-to-date:

- one-pager resume that covers technical projects you have delivered in the past and clarifies your involvement, technologies you are familiar with, etc. - Personal website, GitHub profile, or any representative examples of code you have written recently that reflect your engineering capabilities

To: jobs@betafi.co

(Read the full posting on Notion: https://betafi.notion.site/Job-Description-Betafi-Founding-S...)

sherbondy··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2021)
Betafi | Founding Software Engineer | Singapore (Remote APAC timezones)

Apply to: jobs@betafi.co

Full Job Description here: https://www.notion.so/betafi/Job-Description-Betafi-Founding...

Betafi is building a next-generation platform to democratize user research and help product teams to co-create with their customers.

We empower organizations to understand their target customers and build usable interfaces with delightful UX by integrating research directly into their product development cycles, with fast turnarounds from finding the right participants to arriving at actionable insights.

As our Founding Engineer, you will help to build and scale the software powering the core Betafi Platform across our web dashboard, live video toolkit, and mobile experiences.

---

We use the Elixir Programming Language with the Phoenix Framework to power our backend services, and a mix of Phoenix LiveView and a more conventional React (TypeScript) codebase for rich interactions on the front-end. We rely on a variety of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud APIs to power the Betafi platform.

---

To apply, please send an up-to-date:

- resume that covers technical projects you have delivered in the past and clarifies your involvement, technologies you are familiar with, etc.

- Personal website, GitHub profile, or any representative examples of code you have written recently that reflect your engineering capabilities

sherbondy··on Figma announces FigJam: an online whiteboard for teams to ideate and brainstorm
Seems like a viable, playful alternative to some existing collaborative whiteboarding tools like Miro as well as possibly even more specialized systems diagrams tools like Whimsical, Lucidchart, etc.

Curious to hear people’s thoughts and see how they wind up using for their software endeavors!

sherbondy··on Electric cooker an easy, efficient way to sanitize N95 masks, study finds
You are right, I was mistaken, sorry for the misinformation! They went though the NIOSH modified testing protocol, not the official approval process.

They have been tested for respirator filter efficiency only and were found to exceed 99% filter efficiency: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/respirators/testing/results/...

But they are explicitly not NIOSH approved and as mentioned have an ear loop design whereas seemingly all approved masks go around the head. Wish I could edit/remove the original posting.

sherbondy··on Electric cooker an easy, efficient way to sanitize N95 masks, study finds
My wife has been selling NIOSH-approved KN95 [1] masks to folks in the US for the past few months. First she tried to supply them directly to hospitals but ran into a harrowing amount of red tape. Then she listed them on eBay but got banned for “price gouging” despite listing at a lower rate than many of the approved sellers. Now she’s just selling the remaining inventory directly, and completely deterred from trying anything like this again because of all of the obstacles through this process.

Here’s her site FWIW ($128 for a box of 50, $2.56 unit price): https://www.wesupplyppe.com/product-page/KN95-2

[1] https://coronavirus.health.ok.gov/kn95s

sherbondy··on Show HN: I built a spreadsheet app with Python to make data science easier
Nice! Looks like a kindred spirit to “Flowsheets”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q

But broadly usable in the here and now! Excited to try it out!

sherbondy··on RCN is much more data efficient than traditional Deep Neural Networks
As far as I can tell, the code on GitHub (https://github.com/vicariousinc/science_rcn) only works for the MNIST dataset.

Unclear how to run on the CAPTCHA examples referenced in the paper, even though they did make the datasets for those examples available.

Bummer, a big part of what the paper mentions about being so great with this RCN model is being able to segment sequences of characters (of indeterminate length even!). Sad that I cannot easily verify this for myself!

sherbondy··on Flubber: smoother shape animations in JavaScript
Really enjoyed Noah's OpenVisConf 2017 talk which covered a lot of the motivation and prior art behind the development of the library:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLc1y-gim_0

(Link is in the README file on GitHub too, but easy to miss)

sherbondy··on Apple Announces Full WebRTC Support in Safari 11
SO excited about this. Data-channel and all. Non-jailbroken torrenting on iOS at long last :P https://webtorrent.io/

Also, definitely worth trying out this AR.js demo if you're running the beta: https://freinbichler.me/apps/web-ar/

Always thought it was a little peculiar that the Media Capture APIs are tied to what is otherwise a very data/protocol-oriented spec.

Wish we could have had a camera feed in a canvas element on Mobile Safari a few years ago without having to wait for the entirety of WebRTC to be vetted. :P

---

And now, for my own unrelated Web API peeve:

Beyond service workers and all that jazz, I'm a little bummed out that the Pointer Events API isn't even listed on the Webkit Feature Status page: https://webkit.org/status/

It just seems like such a pleasant unification of all of the input-type APIs (mouse, touch, pen, hypothetical future peripherals...)

At least touch events have a "force" property with Apple Pencil input in the meantime. No tilt though.

Maybe next year :/

sherbondy··on Reactive Offline-first Database
This project appears to be built atop PouchDB fwiw!
sherbondy··on This AI Boom Will Also Bust
First consumer Tango phone is already out!

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/smartphones/phab-series/phab2-p...

I think it first went on sale Nov. 1 but just started shipping initial batches recently.

sherbondy··on This AI Boom Will Also Bust
Hey, 3D vision system amateur here, but very interested to learn more!

Can anybody point me to some literature or reference materials about attempts to combine the inputs from multiple techniques simultaneously?

E.g. a device with stereo conventional cameras and infrared cameras & emitters which compares the resulting model from each input source/technique and actively re-adjusts final depth estimate?

Is "sensor fusion" the right jargon to use in this context?

Or, even crazier, a control system which actively jitters the camera's pose to gain more information for points in the depth map with lower confidence scores / conflicting estimates?

But maybe such a setup is overly complex and yields minimal gains in mixed indoor & outdoor scenarios?

sherbondy··on Additional Notes on “Drawing Dynamic Visualizations” (2013)
Some related open source projects that were released, for those who are curious:

http://aprt.us By Toby Schachman & co over at CDG

http://tonysherbondy.github.io/datadrawer/ DataDrawer, by Tony Sherbondy & co, very much directly trying to implement the tool that Bret originally demoed.

sherbondy··on Uber ruled illegal in Taiwan
As a side note, do any native Mandarin speakers have a good understanding of why app is usually spelled and pronounced as if it were an acronym (A.P.P.) instead of an abbreviation? Have been wondering about this for months, and the Quora thread on it is a little unsatisfactory: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-Chinese-people-in-China-pr...
sherbondy··on Chromecast + NFC
Hi maxwellito, we're working on something along these lines. Sent you a tumblr message but figured I'd post here as well. Just applied to YC. Would be nice to talk. Overall pretty underwhelmed by the "digital signage" industry and think we could push things forward using affordable commodity hardware.

Over the next few years, think this is a viable / utilitarian medium for delivering on some of the promises of ubiquitous augmented reality.

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