Hacker News Reader

tonylucason Why Estonians invite strangers into their back gardens each summer

This was definitely also a 'thing' when I was growing up in Somerset, I think they just called it a 'garden open day' or similar, but I can distinctly remember wandering around one massive garden and nearly walking straight into the pond covered in Duckweed.

tonylucason Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet

I've been around the 'net long enough to remember when Altavista didn't even have it's own domain name, it was altavista.digital.com, this triggered some great memories of my first year or two using the web on the only computer in school with access to it.

tonylucason Where are all the UK red telephone kiosks?

I think OP is referring to this https://www.thebellrock.co.uk/lunch-buffet which does appear to be a fish-n-chip buffet of sorts (amongst other things) which has been in various tabloid newspapers in the last month or so.

tonylucason Agents need control flow, not more prompts

I'm working on something similar (won't link to it as don't want people to think I'm spamming) but if you want to compare notes happy to talk.

tonylucason Agents need control flow, not more prompts

I've been working on an integrated deterministic/agent integrated system for a few months now. It basically runs an AI step to build a plan, which biases towards deterministic steps as much as possible but escalates back to AI when it needs to (for AI only capabilities or deterministic failures) so effectively (when I perfect it, I'm about 90% there) it can bounce back and forward as needed with deterministic steps launching AI steps and AI steps launching deterministic steps as needed.

Probably not explaining it very well but I think it's pretty effective at reducing token usage.

tonylucason Show HN: Ghidra MCP Server – 110 tools for AI-assisted reverse engineering

Haven't looked at the app itself but the MCP tool problem is mainly solved now using lazy loading, it's far from perfect but the immediate context window overload problem is gone (in clients that support it anyway).

Now just onto the fact that most MCP tools are just transforming API calls and their functionality and return data structures suck for LLM's....

tonylucason I built an open-source, AI-powered solar panel that's 95% optimal

Nope, at least for ours it limits on export produced (on a technical basis, not a planning permission one). It will deliberately downgrade the energy produced to ensure it doesn’t exceed export limits. You get used to optimising for sunshine for when you run power heavy equipment eg car charging

tonylucason Person from Porlock

You always knew when summer had arrived when you could smell burnt brakes!

Saw more than the occasional jackknifed lorry as well on that hill

tonylucason Person from Porlock

Very random seeing Porlock on here. I grew up in the Village, although haven’t been back in many years

tonylucason Launch HN: API Tracker (YC W20) – Track and manage the APIs you use

Have just signed up, was (yet again) looking for a solution like this for monitoring outbound API calls. Look forward to trying it

tonylucason World of Warcraft: one simple line of code can cost you dearly (2016)

Exactly that, it was known as the ‘script.ini’ problem, the download directory was changed as well.

It would attempt to send to people as they joined a channel.

More info: http://www.irchelp.org/security/si.html

tonylucason Bump-Canceling Bunk Beds Promise Smooth Bus Rides

Anecdata

I used Cabin late last year, and am 6ft 2. It was compact but I had enough space (would have liked more ceiling height but length was ok)

Didn't have any problems with the bus noise, or other people, and the bus was about 3/4 full.

Biggest issue for me was the bumps in the road, so the latest ideas sound like a good step forward.

Being able to go from Santa Monica in the late evening to San Francisco first thing the next morning worked out really well for me, I'd use them again.

tonylucason Should You Build a Webhooks API?

We are just in the process of launching something similar at Converse to allow users to extend our conversational workflow capabilities to add their own modules, events, including extending API endpoints and the core UI.

Definitely a good way of doing things, still looking for more beta testers but feedback is very positive so far.

https://get.converse.ai/v2.0/docs/plugin-development if anyone wants to kick the tires on it, all feedback welcome.

tonylucason Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

Disclaimer: Workplace Partner @ Job

I was cynical about it to begin with, when it was just 'Facebook at Work' but I do believe it addresses a lot of the issues brought up in the blog post and the Workplace team are executing very well.

Accounts are completely separate from Facebook, no crossover at all.

I don't think it's a Slack killer, as they both solve different problems in different ways, and Workplace is very much a 'big co, top down' approach.

I do think other existing collaboration tools have a lot to be worried about between Slack & Workplace though.

Last stat I heard was there is over 14k companies using it.

tonylucason Twilio Functions – Public Beta

We do exactly this with Lua inside our platform to drive workflow modules in a multitenant environment.

It's not using OpenResty though (although OpenResty is very cool)

We are going to be adding Node as well though, for the reasons you mention above around Ecosystem.

tonylucason Google Spreadsheets and Python

Worth also looking at Airtable here as well, becoming a big fan of it.

tonylucason Lastpass acquired by Citrix

Citrix has spun out the Goto* products, and that's what has merged with LogMeIn.

Citrix hasn't bought LastPass Citrix hasn't merged directly with LogMeIn, it's still a separate company.

tonylucason Challenges you’re going to face when building a chatbot

The way we handle this (and avoid the lowest common denominator problem) is allowing you to have one bot, but then specific 'modules' that execute only if being accessed over a specific network.

This lets you build one bot that supports everything from SMS to Messenger to Slack in the same interface.

Other tools I've seen apparently do automatic conversion of one rich media form to another, but I'm less keen on that idea personally.

tonylucason Challenges you’re going to face when building a chatbot

Quite a few depending on what level of control/functionality you are looking for.

Some are more developer/write your own code focussed, other more graphically focused.

In alphabetical order and not exhaustive.

API.AI (now Google) Chatfuel (YC) Converse.AI (disclaimer, $currentstartup) Flowxo Gupshup.io IBM Watson Engagement Advisor/Watson Meya.ai Microsoft Bot builder Motion.ai Wit.ai (Facebook)

AWS also has a suite of tools that between them you could use, check out Lex, Polly & Steps

All of these do one or more of the following:

NLP User management Messaging Platform Integrations Conversation State & Context Management Workflow Human Escalation Backend integrations (Helpdesk, CRM etc) Analytics

Pick your poison based on what you need :)

tonylucason Challenges you’re going to face when building a chatbot

Sadly most bots today are solutions looking for a problem.

Our customers (thankfully) are typically looking for ways to engage with their existing customer base better, and/or deliver their existing commercial services in a better way.

tonylucason Challenges you’re going to face when building a chatbot

There is lots of deja vu for me. I spent my days in 97-00 hosting Eggdrops on IRC (mainly IRCNet but some others as well).

Spent my days deep in TCL, accidentally discovering probably the single deadliest bug in Eggdrop with an accidental copy and paste (would cause all bots in the botnet to go into an infinite loop)

For the last two years I've been working on similar problems but for Messaging networks (Messenger, SMS, Intercom, Slack etc) in $currentstartup

If anyone has questions around bots, conversation management, integrations, NLP etc etc, feel free to ask.

tonylucason GoDaddy Acquires Host Europe Group

4.3.3 In the Document covers this scenario.

tonylucason GoDaddy Acquires Host Europe Group

Quite a few: Sign-up.to, intergenia AG, Paragon Internet Group, MCS Computersyteme, OpenIT, 5quidhost, Webfaction, Dataflame, Elastichosts, Mr Site, Freezone, Daily Internet & Namescon

Think Intergenia was probably the biggest from memory.

tonylucason GoDaddy Acquires Host Europe Group

The document you link specifically states protection mechanisms put in place to prevent this from happening.

They will still have a significant vote, but a long long way from a majority on any key issues.

tonylucason Amazon States Language – A JSON-based language to describe state machines

This is interesting, has a lot of similarities (not surprisingly) with how the state machine we build workflows on our bot platform, although of course ours is specifically fixed around chat/messages as a key interaction point.

Major differences that I can see are we enable multiple functions to be sent per state, and that the output data from any state is referenceable by any other state, not just passing it down in turn through the states.

We support fallback states but in a different way, and don't support the retry concept directly within the state language itself, has to be built as a set of states to perform a loop to attempt a retry.

We don't support parallel stages, but do support branches, and remerging of those branches.

Probably the final difference I can see, is one of our options when running a function allows you to actually append additional states to the machine during the runtime process.

tonylucason If your code accepts URIs as input, filter out “file://”

For those using curl for this, it has flags to specify protocol filters for initial request and redirects

https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/CURLOPT_PROTOCOLS.html

tonylucason Microsoft Bot Framework

Different frameworks provide different pieces, a non exhaustive list:

Front end integrations (Slack, Skype etc) NLP Conversation state and context management Automated knowledge/learning.

etc etc.

I'm in the middle of writing a blog post on this, but https://medium.com/point-nine-news/software-bots-c56aeedcfec... is a good piece to read

tonylucason Microsoft Bot Framework

It's not easily possible yet (no API access to ASK) but I find it hard to believe Amazon don't have similar plans in this area.

tonylucason Microsoft Bot Framework

This is the area we (www.converse.ai) are focussed on, as it's solving a real pain point.

Semi or fully automating realtime customer service is definitely a real use case :)