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stephenhuey

2,218 karma · joined March 12, 2011

Rice alumnus, native Texan, spent half of my early years in Nigeria, have worked in giant companies and several startups. A lot of my ancestors are Czech and I have a lot of connections to Switzerland, so I have much admiration for those countries. Lately I have been writing about tech, faith & government at:

https://reconcilingstate.substack.com

Feel free to reach out or refer me for technology consulting!

https://www.highemprise.com

stephen AT highemprise DOT com

submissionscomments
stephenhuey··on Wends of Texas
As a child, I also ate them for breakfast every time I spent the night at my grandparents' house. I'm in Houston now, and this afternoon I was talking to a neighbor from the town of West (which is a few hours northwest of here). My Czech grandparents lived an hour south of Houston but the neighbor and I both agreed on how much we like prune kolaches. I also love apricot. Some places use canned fruit which might taste fine to someone who doesn't know better, but it's a terrible clash with memories of what my grandmother made (and what some of my cousins still make), and I refuse to pay for them at any shop which does that. We also talked about the poppyseed ones, and how for us it's so heartwarmingly nostalgic but often other people who didn't grow up with poppyseed struggle to understand the appeal.
stephenhuey··on Happy New Year 2025
May you walk into each day of 2025 with joy, courage and creativity!
stephenhuey··on Claude AI to process secret government data through new Palantir deal
Back in 2011, I joined a software startup working on a product which aimed to prevent stuff like the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The founders talked about how throughout the industry and the world, tons more data was being generated than ever before (of course), but we (humanity) didn't have a good handle on making use of all of that data, so a lot of it was not being interpreted, reacted to, etc.

Not long after that, I found out that Palantir got their first energy industry customer. Some employees in Palantir thought it wouldn't be worthwhile to go after oil & gas companies because they viewed them as old school and slow to adapt to new ways of doing things. However, in those days Palantir was focused on acquiring no more than one customer per industry, because they were trying to boost their valuation as quickly as possible and wanted to demonstrate how many industries they could serve. And then, due to a contrarian within the company, they did get an O&G customer, and it was the biggest single deal so far in the company's history.

What I don't know is exactly how well they served that customer. What I do know is that they were selling the customer on the idea that they have sooooo much data and they're leaving tons of low-hanging fruit that could easily boost savings in the company. Stick all this data into Palantir's product and we'll help you on a million fronts and therefore boost your profits significantly. One example is the longevity of machine parts and all the data you can get about historical wear and tear, etc. Now, this is what they were selling, and I don't know which areas ended up being the most helpful, but yeah, as someone else in here said, they were insisting on customers putting in all the data they have and the product would make connections, or reveal insights, etc.

Even if it's a crude product by Star Trek standards, you've gotta admit there is probably a ton of low-hanging fruit like that in most companies, and a lot of the time they don't go after all that because they're making money, but just don't have extra manpower or expertise to look into all that, so if Palantir delivers on the promise to boost the bottom line, then I guess it's worth it. It also means there's room to compete, although a big problem is even if you're a sharp cookie, Palantir probably started with way more business connections than most nerds will ever have.

stephenhuey··on Poll: Do you use browser profiles?
A year ago I started using them in the developer edition of Firefox on my Macbook, but then months later the Firefox developer edition started flaking out, e.g. I'd open a profile and it literally wouldn't navigate anywhere, or if it did it wouldn't last long. Bizarre. Even mentioned it to a college classmate who recently took a job at Mozilla but he's not working on anything close to that. So I started using profiles in Safari, and honestly, neither is perfect but some stuff worked a bit better in Firefox. I still go open up Firefox every now and then to retrieve a password I haven't yet migrated over to Safari. I probably should bite the bullet and get rid of Firefox developer edition and just install the regular build. I love using Firefox Focus on iOS since it feels faster than the other browsers.

edit: flaking out, since I can't think of a better way to describe what's happening :)

stephenhuey··on A modest critique of Htmx
Pretty cool, I hadn't heard of Renarde and it looks promising. Around 8 years ago, I really wanted Aurelia to win the SPA wars but they're still pretty niche even though they've been growing lately. But honestly, after playing with everything over all these years, I still believe a server-side framework with minimal amounts of JS is ideal for most projects, especially all those internal corporate web apps but also for B2B stuff and even the average consumer-facing app. People say consumers are more demanding now, but how many developers are really working on something that caters to the most demanding consumers? Unless you need the most snazzy UX ever, just don't.

And honestly, using Rails or other server-side frameworks, you can get very far with way less effort than those expensive front-end teams by simply using Hotwire:

https://hotwired.dev

Sending down rendered HTML using Hotwire Turbo requires far less time, and HTML over the wire is in reality no heavier than sending down JSON. If you absolutely need a bit more interactivity on the front-end while avoiding a server roundtrip, it's easy to drop in little Stimulus JS controllers as-needed. From my journeys to and fro in the real world, I've seen most projects do not need more than that, and are arguably wasting budget trying to use heavier tools than that! For most sizeable projects, you can do more in Rails & Hotwire with fewer developers than a 6-person team using their favorite server side language and React. I'm not saying you have to use Ruby on Rails. I'm saying I wish the dev world would embrace this paradigm in whatever their favorite language/frameworks are.

stephenhuey··on A modest critique of Htmx
I entered the working world in the aftermath of the dotcom bust when JS was a nightmare of footguns (much more than now) and Microsoft literally had zero developers working on IE, the most-used browser in the world, for YEARS. Web dev was therefore stuck in an archaic prison and there was much rejoicing the day Microsoft announced they were once again assigning a team of developers to work on the browser. Fast forward a decade and a lot of terrible things in JS were being rectified at the language level. A dozen years ago, I tried a SPA for the first time and it seemed cool to have a framework (Angular, the first version) to provide more abstractions than jQuery and Backbone. However, the groupthink bandwagony insanity that ensued was ridiculous, and I felt like such an old codger trying to tell the kids to just be grateful that JS was finally working pretty well and move on and build stuff instead for a while instead of spending so much energy remaking the tools every 5 weeks. I'm not trying to be dramatic--I really do feel like companies have no idea how much they overspent on web app development in the past decade versus how much more working code they could've gotten for the money they spent. It literally felt like people were creating extra work, and had no idea how much easier it was than a few years before.
stephenhuey··on Sausages: An Anthology
Delightful how Rudyard Kipling lived above Harris the Sausage King! "...for tuppence, gave as much sausage and mash as would carry one from breakfast to dinner when one dined with nice people who did not eat sausage for a living."

Would've been a good place for me to live as a young man as I grew up on sausage. The most common variety I ate was made by my Texan-Czech grandparents and other relatives. It often had venison and pork if someone had gone deer hunting recently enough. The venison was a nice touch but the pork helped it to be less dry. So delicious, and the archetype by which I measure all other sausage. The closest recipe I can find is from Prasek's Family Smokehouse in Hill (original Czech spelling is Prášek). They have multiple varieties, with and without jalapeño, but the all-beef and pork & beef have a flavor extremely close to the kind made by my relatives. I'm extra fortunate since you can now find them in HEB in Houston.

https://www.praseks.com

stephenhuey··on Normans and Slavery: Breaking the Bonds
This sounds more like indentured servitude, but it's not even as bad as that. As frustrating as this situation is, in the USA you are not sent to prison for this unpaid debt and still have agency over your time. But of course human trafficking throughout the world is still a problem today and I very much want to see it ended (as much as possible).

:edited my first sentence to clarify it's not quite indentured servitude :)

stephenhuey··on Techniques used by developers to bypass App Store review
Seems pretty unreliable. At least I know a recent Google Play Console reviewer was located at the Google office in Lisbon. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple used reviewers outside Cupertino.
stephenhuey··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2024)
Can't edit my comment anymore to clarify that someone has now edited the Shield comment to no longer say San Diego, Texas. :P
stephenhuey··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2024)
I was pretty surprised to see Shield had a location in a town in the middle of nowhere with only 4,000 people but their website makes it clear they have nothing in San Diego, TX. :) However, it would probably be a pretty cool spot for some of the AI flying that they do! Anyway, the cities are actually San Diego (CA) and Dallas (TX) in case you're considering applying.
stephenhuey··on I organized a 20-acre game of Capture the Flag
We played as a kid and it was always fun but a bit annoying when players would argue about whether they had safely crossed the line when the other team tagged them, so in my 20s, I had the idea to solve that once and for all with 1,000 feet of yellow caution tape! I organized multiple games at Spotts Park in Houston, a city not known for having elevation changes, but Spotts has a bit of hilly landscape to mix things up, plus plenty of trees and other things to hide behind. It wasn't pitch black since we were in the middle of the city, but it was big enough that people could sneak to the other side undetected if they kept looking for routes with no enemy patrols. We actually used glow sticks as the flags and the only particular rule was that they had to be visible from multiple sides if you were several feet away. A lot of adults came out to play--at least a dozen per side but sometimes twice that many!
stephenhuey··on Cold brew coffee in 3 minutes using acoustic cavitation
Cold brew coffee is by definition not brewed with hot water the way most coffee is (in other words, room temperature is within the range of "cold" when talking about brewing with "cold" water). So, it's not necessary for it to be served cold to enjoy the benefits of the cold brew method--sometimes I like it chilled, but I also enjoy the taste at room temperature or warmer.
stephenhuey··on College students should study more
Yeah, I was trying to make sense of the graph in the article, because even if I were carrying only 3 STEM classes per semester (sometimes it was more), then class plus at least 1 lab would come out to 10 hours per week, but these classes typically had problem sets we spent 4-5 hours on each week, so that's almost 25 hours per week before we count the other 2 classes I didn't mention, or study for exams. And if it was programming, most would have similar workloads, but some were notorious, so a single graphics or operating systems class might demand 15-20 hours of programming outside of class time the entire semester!
stephenhuey··on What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
On a previous HN discussion, plenty of people here believed it was fully possible that someone at Boeing essentially pulled the trigger and gave plenty of examples, even from a huge successful Silicon Valley company, of corporate folks doing stranger nefarious things than would be believable in film. As someone who has known multiple people who committed suicide, I'm not sure I can feel as certain as you that this was a suicide without more evidence.
stephenhuey··on What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane
I learned some things reading this article from 2 days ago:

Boeing’s Dead Whistleblower Spoke the Truth

https://www.thefp.com/p/boeings-dead-whistleblower-spoke-the...

The Free Press

stephenhuey··on Lifelong Disadvantage: How Socioeconomics Affect Brain Function
With a quick search online it looks like you got it backwards. I'm not Catholic, so don't understand the intricacies of every single position, but it looks like there are about 10 times as many "sisters" compared to the number of men serving in the various religious orders.
stephenhuey··on Why are most sofas so bad?
Been putting off commenting for over 24 hours and this is still on the front page! I can confirm there are quality furniture makers here in the USA, though they can be hard to find.

A decade ago, I shopped for the first time at the most famous furniture store in this part of Texas: Gallery Furniture. Growing up anywhere within an hour or two of Houston in the 80s, Mattress Mack was more recognizable to a kid like me than any news anchor or any other television personality. Before the 80s was over, I'd probably seen him hop in the air hundreds of times with a fistful of dollars, talking about how Gallery Furniture will save you money, and he's still going strong today. He even toured big city and small town schools warning kids about drugs. Anyway, I had gotten by for years on hand-me-downs and IKEA furniture, but it was time to replace something ratty, and I walked in there with a vague impression that it might be more pricey than other stores. They told me it was all made in America (some places up north like Indiana?) and when I was asking about cheaper sofas that a guy over 6 feet tall could comfortably nap on, they pointed me to one they said was made locally in the Houston area. It was very long and had a very simple design and had firm foam that wouldn't sag (something I had asked for), and they let me have it for $500, and it felt like much better quality than a lot of the prettier stuff in other furniture stores.

A couple years later when I got married, we were looking for a nicer sofa, and I figured out that the local furniture maker that Gallery Furniture had been selling was called Living Designs Furniture and had a factory in the East End:

https://www.livingdesignsfurniture.com

Their factory's showroom was very bare, but it was full of pieces, including a colorful chair in the shape of a stiletto shoe! We found an elegantly shaped light gray sofa long enough for me to sleep on, and again with high quality foam, and they built one with some slight customizations we wanted for $1,081 total. Unreal, because we have a white sofa from IKEA that isn't much less, but the quality is on another level!

I'd really like to see a resurgence of products like this in the USA. I've heard of some custom sofas costing several thousand, but somehow this local company is managing to sell at a lower price point. 18 years ago, a buddy of mine was living in Charleston, South Carolina. He had talked to a local high end furniture maker about doing a 3-year apprenticeship to learn how to make fine furniture, but in the end he knew he'd make very little per year in wages (he estimated $35,000 or so). Instead he pursued another dream and went to Napa Valley for a one-year course at the only open-wheel racing mechanic school in the country and ended up working on an Indy Car team for a dozen years. Hopefully more guys like him can find the furniture maker route feasible in the future if American consumers can escape the throwaway mindset. The average household doesn't need expensive Amish Craftsman offerings. A lot of people could afford this local furniture maker we have available, but I understand it could be a risky business venture to try to compete with the stuff shipped over the ocean.

stephenhuey··on Show HN: Creating custom coloring pages from photos. Great for parents/teachers
When I saw this posted late last night, I was pretty excited since I have kids, but then realized it's just determining the basic idea of what it sees in the photo, and then drawing a new image from scratch that has those elements. What I wanted is something that takes the original photo and removes things from the image until we're left with some basic line drawings, so that the people in the coloring book actually look like the people in the photo! Their examples very obviously show how different the resulting image is from the original. If Google allowed you to search by saying "Find me a coloring book image where a dad is sitting behind 2 kids with his arms around them, and the daughter is on the left and the son is on the right" then we'd end up with results almost as good.

I'm no Photoshop expert, but someone else in this discussion pointed out that Photoshop has some filters or other tools that do edge detection and can yield much more accurate results. If the techniques could be replicated in a SaaS then you'd have a much better product. Of course, if it could be done in a desktop Mac app or an iOS app, I might choose that for privacy reasons.

stephenhuey··on How does Sidekiq really work?
I agree, and will add that even though it might seem "boring" to some people, there are plenty of unique fun requirements per project even when using the same stack. 5 different clients have gotten me to start new projects in the past 3 years, and I chose Rails for all of them. Different business domains, different budgets for MVPs (4 figures to 6 figures), sometimes multiple developers and sometimes not, but in all cases we were able to ship product quickly without burning too much of the client's money. Contrast that with some bloated, slow dev on traditional SPA apps I saw during my last stint in enterprise, Rails enables us to move at lightning speed. Seriously, I saw people burn way more money for far less output! Maybe SPA wasn't the only problem and enterprise was, but the point is for that a lean MVP for a wide variety of domains, it's hard to beat Rails if you already know it.
stephenhuey··on Ask HN: How many of you are self employed?
Self-employed since December 2019. Back then I wasn't sure how long it would last, but I'm still doing it! I've juggled several consulting clients needed web/mobile app development, sometimes simultaneously, and sometimes with extra developers on the project. A business partner and I also started a B2B SaaS that we're bootstrapping.
stephenhuey··on Dart/Flutter now has macros/metaprogramming
As someone who has written plenty of Java and JavaScript, Dart feels way more enjoyable to write. It just does. Maybe it's because I was less experienced when starting with Java and JavaScript, but it felt like there was a much smaller learning curve with Dart, too. I imagine it helps that I'm writing it in Android Studio, a JetBrains product, but I find the ergonomics better than even Kotlin. If you want to use it outside Flutter, you probably will wish it had a larger ecosystem, depending on what you're trying to write.
stephenhuey··on How to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech
I'm not as familiar with the compliance part of their solution, so there could be some of what you're talking about. I don't think their software is totally useless, just possibly, um, over-priced, and needing competitors. :)

Our lightweight SaaS was focused on analytics related to share of wallet and return on capital and improving insights into client relationships. With our tool, an investment banker could perform some tasks in seconds or minutes that normally an MD expected a junior analyst to do in hours or days. Not rocket science, but useful. And not as expensive as Dealogic. I wish I could say our creation was taking the world by storm, but we haven't been involved for many years and as so often happens with acquisitions, they didn't really execute well on our original target audience and took it in another direction.

stephenhuey··on How to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech
Before we sold our fintech SaaS startup in 2015, we received a C&D from Dealogic and I thought, wow, we've made it into the big leagues! My adrenaline wore off pretty quickly though, because after our attorney sent them a defiant letter warning their London law firm to not mess with a Texas LLC, we never heard from them again. We were flying below the radar, so we just surmised some Dealogic customer had showed a Dealogic sales rep our product, and they probably carpet bomb anytime they see anyone playing anywhere near their entrenched & wildly expensive product.
stephenhuey··on The Aha Stack
It has.

Among the 4 production B2B Rails apps I've been adding features to in the past year, the only one using jQuery was created 13 years ago. None of the others ever used jQuery, and using Hotwire Turbo to replicate SPA functionality is easy nowadays.

One of the Rails apps serves a Flutter mobile client on the front-end, and as much as I appreciate all the lifting Flutter does for me, the sheer amount of code required to support that is enormous and laborious in comparison to writing a few Turbo frame tags in the fullstack Rails app. If not for a few gotchas that the client app needed, that mobile app would have been done with Jumpstart Pro iOS & Android with Turbo Native (great code reuse potential).

Users of Rails apps leveraging Turbo frames or streams don't think those apps feel more shiny and cool and performant than legacy SPA frameworks such as React, and the modern Rails developers spend less time churning out code.

stephenhuey··on Why we didn’t get a malaria vaccine sooner
It's not just a parasite - it's a protist. An online search led me to a snippet from a paywalled online study site that has this text:

"Biologically, a protist-disease vaccine is more difficult to develop due to the mechanism and pathophysiology of diseases such as malaria and chagas."

More on vaccines for protozoal diseases:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3961066/

Specifics on the difficulty with a vaccine for malaria:

https://www.malariavaccine.org/malaria-and-vaccines/vaccine-...

stephenhuey··on Consumers defrauded on Zelle are left high and dry by the banks that created it [pdf]
I agree with you. It was just fascinating to me how in hindsight I couldn't access the full digital trail of those funds and other people wouldn't just reveal it to me on account of privacy. As other people have pointed out, the courts would be needed, because even though I showed them evidence with some screenshots, etc, I suppose I could have fabricated those to cause trouble for someone.
stephenhuey··on Consumers defrauded on Zelle are left high and dry by the banks that created it [pdf]
FedNow is live, but not quite "here" since I can't personally send money to my neighbor with it yet. I'll be interested to see how the implementation looks to an end user such as myself, and how I can verify the identity/destination of the recipient. A little over a month ago, the Los Angeles Times said JPMorgan Chase would offer it soon. The JPMC website has a page about how people can implement it through their platform. However, when I log into my Chase account and search for fednow, this is what I get:

You asked: "fednow"

We're sorry but we need more details to give you a complete and accurate answer. Can you please rephrase your question?

https://www.jpmorgan.com/payments/solutions/fednow

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-07-29/heres-now-...

https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow

stephenhuey··on Consumers defrauded on Zelle are left high and dry by the banks that created it [pdf]
I see other comments here saying it's intended to be digital cash, but as a programmer it makes no sense that we Zelle users cannot find out the identify and ultimate destination on the other side of the funds transfer - it's also annoying that the USA doesn't have a simple bank transfer system like many other countries do.

About 4 years ago, I got scammed when I sent a payment to a local preschool and later found out the preschool did not receive those funds. Someone was illicitly reading their emails and and also had control of a discarded email address the school no longer used and routed my Zelle payment to the bank account associated with that. The school suspected a former employee, but nothing ever came of it even though there was a police report and I also filed a complaint with the feds. A police officer called me several months later to say the case had ended up in his lap but he didn't see a way to do anything about it. Chase had multiple meetings with me, and they even knew which bank the funds had been transferred to, so it made no sense to me that there was nothing that could be done to retrieve the funds. Eventually the whole saga just ended with no resolution, and I figured if that person was so desperate they probably needed the money more than me.

Anyone have more insight into the underlying mechanics and why we can't confirm recipient identity/account as a Zelle user?

stephenhuey··on This boat don't float (2009)
As a native Texan with a love of language and linguistics, I'm really enjoying all the comments in response to your question. Just so you know, there are lots of search results for that phrase outside of that article, including one as far away as Australia:

2007 financial outlook - "The Krispy Creme (KKD) Donut Boat Don't Float" https://247wallst.com/investing/2007/06/04/the_krispy_crem/

Picture of a boat that actually doesn't float: https://www.deviantart.com/theuniphotoghrpher/art/This-Boat-...

Houseboat for rent: https://www.travelocity.com/Hartwell-Hotels-This-Boat-Dont-F...

Church sermon title: https://journeyorl.podbean.com/e/when-your-boat-dont-float/

Poem title: https://inprinthouston.org/event/first-fridays-presents-rebe...

2002 article about a Ford/Mercury car: https://www.deseret.com/2002/6/11/19659250/marauder-muscle-c...

Fishing forum: https://www.fishexplorer.com/co/fxrforum.asp?action=det&pid=...

Boating forum: https://forums.sailboatowners.com/threads/new-to-the-forum.1...

Australian website asking "What happens if your boat don’t float?" https://www.aussiemob.com/beer-can-regatta/

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