TodPunk

My local tech community has a slack where the grievance of low-effort sloppypasta was being discussed, and one of them made this and a whole bunch of feedback looping ensued. I was pleased enough with the result to share even though I didn't make it.

I'm local to the area of the company. Peeps in the community here have said they issue ridiculous old or underpowered laptops for many positions and that many if not all of those 30 employees are likely using their personal machines because they're more comfortable to the employee.

Unsupervised | Software Engineers | Full-time | US Remote or Boulder, Colorado

Unsupervised is an AI driven data analysis company. We run an unsupervised learning engine we built in-house to do a lot of analysis on customer data. The value (according to customers) is the insights we find that help them take action in their organization to move the needle on their metrics, things that matter to them and their goals.

We're hiring software engineers to work on our core compute engine and web interface. In the web app we use React and Graphql via apollo-server and TypeScript server-side, speaking to GRPC services we write in Go and Rust. In the compute engine, we're largely Python and C++. You don't need to know those coming in as long as you can learn it fast enough. On the compute side, Dask and Ray experience is a plus. You definitely need to know data structures and graphs enough to talk shop about them. We deploy on Kubernetes in a cloud native modern dev workflow, but we'll happily train what you need to know there, we've got decent tooling in place to make it very approachable and iterative.

See open positions and specific descriptions here: https://grnh.se/63f1772d2us

Unsupervised | Software Engineers | Full-time | US Remote or Boulder, Colorado

Unsupervised is a Data Capitalization Management company. We help organizations find actionable insights in their data so they can make their data more of a measurable asset (think extreme leverage from data science). We do this by using an unsupervised learning engine we built in-house to do a lot of analysis on their data.

We're hiring software engineers to work on our core compute engine and web interface. In the web app we use React and Graphql via Graphene (Python Graphql server). In the compute engine, we're largely Python and C++, but you don't need to know those coming in as long as you can learn it fast enough. On the compute side, Dask and Ray experience is a plus. You definitely need to know data structures and graphs enough to talk shop about them. We deploy on Kubernetes in a cloud native modern dev workflow, but we'll happily train what you need to know there, we've got decent tooling in place to make it very approachable and iterative.

See open positions and specific descriptions here: https://grnh.se/63f1772d2us

Yes, yes you should.

The vast majority of businesses are not going to fit any of this playbook. The problem is this playbook covers a niche. If you don't want to play that niche game, that's totally fine. However, like me, you will have to look elsewhere to decide what game you DO want to play, and what rules you'll have to live by. Sometimes that's customer focus, sometime's that is volume focus, or diversifying, or a 12 month profitability plan (sometimes longer, like maybe a restaurant).

There's no rules in business but the laws of the land. Pretending that there's one definition of success is very limiting to both focus and opportunity for all of us.

We started our company because I could fund it out of pocket for less than the cost of coffee or lunch for a week, and grow at whatever pace made sense. Even if we only occupy 0.1% of the market ever, we'll be able to pay the salaries of ourselves and our friends and have a lot of room to spare into other projects that we think should be made but probably need more development up front.

This isn't exactly an HN love story, but it's working out well for us so far, and we're learning a lot. I can't say I regret it, and at the moment I know that I would regret if I had gone after funding of some sort. Right now it's just me and the customer, working out who needs what. Third legs need not apply.

I do two things for this. One, I have a separate phone line that I largely ignore, and I give this as my main contact line for people or businesses that I have no dire need to talk to. Best Buy, for instance. If it's important, they'll leave a voicemail. This started as a land line, that was expensive but I needed DSL anyway (this was 10 years ago). It moved to a cell phone with basic service.

Fees sucked, so I started (shameless plug) Phone Janitor[1] to give me better filtering. This allows me to check voicemail anywhere, unlike my cell line (unless I sign up for their service) and just transferred it to my own company. Turns out this helps a lot of other folks with similar privacy desires. Control is a wonderful thing.

Ultimately it's really, really crappy, but the Telecoms and the FCC don't want to be too heavy handed in this, and advertisers are finding new ways of skirting the donotcall rules. They ruined SMS in this regard[2] as well, deliberately.

[1] https://phonejanitor.com/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_spoofing

"People" in this instance is a handful of special edge cases compared to the majority of computer users, even if we're only looking at people that build their own computer, or hell, even just looking at only linux users. Dual booting is a minority. Yes, you CAN do it. Linux has made it easy. Great! But not many DO.

Nobody gives hell to every other OS manufacturer that will clobber our current bootloader configs. That means more than OSX, btw.

I don't buy it. The US is bringing their cases to protect their interests and the interests of their economies. It's not about territory control, it's about industry control. I don't agree with how they're going about it, but I'm not going to make up motivations that don't fit just because of my disdain for it.

Of course, this is one reason why I'm not in politics.

This opens up my mind to a lot of possibilities. Some poignant conversation starters for your local lunch group:

- What kind of investment returns did the stock of those bankrupted yellow pages make and at what cycles?

- What does it really take to kill an old technology?

- Is there a way to compete with established dying tech companies at their own game, or is it purely by trying to advance their users to your new tech?

- What does this say about transitional companies that possibly offer both the old AND the new techs, like the yellow pages that offer online versions? Are they going to move forward or are they just delaying their deaths a bit?

- What kind of talent is needed to sustain these kinds of businesses? It's going to look very different from the talent that grows new business, but I can't deny that they're both forms of talent.

Lots of food for thought.

You are describing turn-key solutions. They are services that provide complete end-to-end consumption methods, like Netflix. In the scenarios of content consumption (be it articles, movies/tv, or even games) even recent history has shown that it isn't the availability of content that is the limiting factor, it is the accessibility of content. What I mean by that is not that you have authorization to consume the content, but that you have the capability of enacting your end of the transaction (in this case, pressing play).

The reason VHS and DVD sales are better than digital is because it is still vastly easier to put a thing in a magic box hooked up to the TV and press play on the remote. Even this is frought with danger (How do I hook it up, how do I get to the right input, where exactly is the button to play the movie on this DVD menu?) This is also why you hear those complaints near constantly.

There's other factors as well (like people not feeling like they own a file, but a DVD is theirs), but again the barrier to entry for consumers on computers is getting past having to think of any of the moving parts. This is true in a lot of places, like automatic transmissions and ATMs (read up on the history of ATM interfaces, it's fascinating if you're into that).

Currently on a PC if you download a file that is a piece of media to consume, you have several important barriers for most people: - I have to put the file somewhere, and I don't understand filesystems - I have to have software that uses the file format, that works on my machine - I have to know how to use that software - I have to know how to purchase the file, whatever that is supposed to mean - I have to like how it's being displayed - I have to know how to get it from the machine I downloaded it on to my TV or whatever

There's probably others in some scenarios, but you probably see the point. A lot of things we tech users take for granted is that these things are very, very hard for most people, and they always have been (again, physical tech like cars or elevators follow this). Even giving someone a link is barely beginning to scratch the surface of this process. So this is, bar none, the reason digital is going to have problems until netflix or youtube or whatever can just play everything.

This is also, as a related aside, why a web browser and mobile apps win in breaking down those barriers. Everyone already has them and it's the "click icon to do thing" model, where icon might be a bookmark or typing a simple address, but the point is the same. No installs, no understanding of local mechanics and difference. It's also why Apple products are viewed by the consumers as more user friendly. There's very little to understand about your machine on a Macbook. You don't have to take my word for it here. Watch your average user use a mac. Or read their user interface guides.

Actually, the harsh reality is that we do not yet have a digital content ecosystem that makes consuming any digital media easy for the vast majority of the population (US or otherwise). This is why netflix can do what they do: they have a walled garden where the entire experience is driven purely by their interface and delivery mechanisms (see also: Steam in the PC games space).

I've written specs for studio approved DRM schemes and done pre-dvd content on in-flight entertainment systems. Please believe me when I say that it is a nightmare even if you DO know what you're doing with all the tech involved, but even if it weren't a legal problem there's a good example that is pretty damning as a foundational assumption: we still don't know how to share a file.

I mean that sincerely: try to get your average non-tech worker to send a file to your grandmother on their own. I can not overstate this enough. This does not work.

We have a lot of distance to cover before the digital content world cares about our niche whims.

The generalized popular programming industry, largely in web, desktop, or mobile high level programming. Not an entirely useful generalization, but one that is common enough to habitually pick up on when "we" is used in such a context.

I very much agree, but I was only using startup culture in the context of that term's use in the article. If we want to get more general than that, you are very correct that startup culture as a separate principle is not overlapping at all with hackerspaces. The use of it as a term of starting a tech company out of your garage hobby is.

Not in the slightest. Hacker spaces are an extension of just about every enthusiasts club ever, and if anything startup culture is a product of THOSE. Nobody sat down and said "you know, these startups are pretty cool, I should start a casual place to work on such a thing." Most hackerspace projects aren't even for profit, they're just things to learn on or group projects to socialize and expand the craft.

Remember that Wozniak tinkered with hardware for fun and his day job at HP. Such things were possible then, but before that there was always clubs for engineers and creatives of all kinds. We often ignore history when we create these kinds of articles, because writing things in the context of history is hard and doesn't get as many clicks if you don't put more effort into it. I find this phenomenon deeply interesting, as we'd do much better as a species if we learned historical contexts for a lot of things we think are new and powerful ideas.

tl;dr: No, startup culture is a niche extension of hackerspaces. Not the other way around.

Alternatively, just get rid of the phone system entirely. Transitional points are starting to exist, and if we can do more things that interop without involving telecoms and are decentralized, you can have a situation a lot like what email /should/ be (with better identity management and less 60's holdover support).

I truly believe eventually cell phones will just be a data communications tool and "voice" will be done through these kinds of standards rather than phone numbers and ridiculous bureaucracy surrounding them, not to mention the quality of such communications will be fantastic comparatively.

Well, it /is/ "security" in their sense of the word. It isn't very /good/ security or very /effective/ but it's goal is indeed what it is claiming. They don't desire totalitarianism or anything.

Remember that a controlling government is a byproduct of giving governments control, not the actual goal of any individual or group within government (who merely want control to do a different thing). Nobody wants to be a bad guy, they genuinely think this is helpful. The road to hell and all that.

You can be into all those things AND be an introvert. It's about how you connect with people or not.

I'm not saying the study is true or anything, just that it could be. I find it interesting that in a mountainous region, there's less paths in/out, so it's like a civilization level example of a controlled social experience. Ports and to a certain extent plains allow approach from everywhere.

I agree. The reason game guides make money at all is because they have shops like Gamestop pushing those guides with every purchase. Not many a gamer is going to pay even $5 for a video guide they have to watch the entirety of if they just want to know how to do X thing when that's freely available in multiple forms elsewhere. For specific things gamefaqs and achievement guide videos are already a well established free "product".

A business is not just "people want X." It has to at least fit the "ENOUGH people want X and are willing to pay for it or are valuable enough as users in order to be sold to advertisers." The morality of that can be debated to death and isn't very interesting, but the reality of it is something we seem to miss a lot.

Off the top of my head: any time you want to run a computational thing in another thread without doing something like an entire celery process or somesuch.

It's not about being THE solution for such things anyway. It's about being an option.

I'm agreeing with you that "criminal" was too strong a word. I edited a couple words in to see if that could be made more clear. (I also agreed from the get-go that the immigration system needs reform. It's one of the worst in the world by any measure.)

I'm willing to concede the term "criminal" in exchange for "unlawful entrant" in this instance. Using "criminal" is actually a bit more than what was deserved for describing both her treatment and her infraction. At the time it seemed to flow better, but I'm all for accuracy.

As usual with dramatizations of poor policy where the treatment of people is concerned: response on both sides was over the top. Obviously immigration reform is needed. Obviously immigration workers and the security they employ are more tough than they need to be. The problem with this article is the author dehumanizes them because she feels superior to them and more importantly aggrandizes her suffering as if it is comparable to any one of the analogies she draws, let alone all of them.

She spent the night in a jail cell and it was uncomfortable. She was treated like a criminal (ignoring the fact that she was, in fact, a criminal, accidentally or not). She was not, however, treated like anyone typical in Nazi Germany. She certainly wasn't treated like anyone was sticking it to PhD students out of jealousy (how would they even know, especially given the number of people they have to process through customs in a day?) Making the comparison like she is diminishes the actual terrors and actual social dichotomies faced by people that are in no way deeply concerned about not having a cell phone for a day.

In that case, yes, it would be interesting to make a system to verify such and probably doable in the short term (ignoring the UI issues which are separate). The problem still remains the same that your speech recognition is going to be very spotty on untrained processing, so you can at best (key word there) match maybe 500 words on one accent pool. This means you have a limited set of questions and it does make it a barrier to entry, but certainly not unbeatable and definitely much more in favor of the AI programmer.

This is also why your average big-company automated attendant is so bad at interpreting what you want outside of the 5 common things people want to talk about (most of which I can do online, so it's never what I'm there for) and again sadly only if you're in the more common US American English accent pool. Southern accents tend to get squelched pretty bad and that's just the beginning of accents common in the US.

One could conceivably target an individuals desired accent recognition so you could let the user say "Most of my callers speak in an X accent" and then get a little more accurate for that pool of callers, but this also means installing disparate systems for recognition, each of which are quite expensive computationally.

This is a deeply interesting problem space, though, and if you're interested there's quite a bit of discussion over it in the sphinx project and several research communities.

There is not, especially where POTS is concerned. If you want private calls, you don't want old POTS interactivity at all (and there are services for this). If you don't involve POTS at all, this become easy to achieve.

A fair question. =c)

I can't really answer that exhaustively, as I am not intimately familiar with all of GV. Phone Janitor does have some things I couldn't find in one package elsewhere that I wanted for managing my own stuff (some of which might be doable in GV? I'm not totally sure), and these include:

- Being able to route based on group, contact, time of day, day of week and to any phone number I want all in a single rule

- Linking my voicemails to family and friends without having to go through some authentication stuff I never saw a reason for (there's a story to this one actually, and I'll happily tell it to anyone interested)

- Not having to call anyone to access my voicemails

- Being actively developed on (this space seems rather stagnant to me from big tech. I have some tools options as a developer, but my parents can't really take advantage of any of that)

- Something I can integrate into other things I care about through some sort of API or export format or something (we chose the API route).

- Support. I don't need 24/7 instantaneous phone support (and don't want it, ideally) but somebody in the case of a huge issue should be contactable, fairly easily.

Even Phone Janitor isn't everything I want it to be (yet), but we've found customers find it incredibly useful, and we've had some good feedback for features that others will also find useful but still stick to our core goals (so ads probably won't be supported any time soon). Some of the feedback has been here today as you can see. I'm pleased with the criticism and praise we've received here, and I'm hoping to incorporate some of it into some progress in the near future.

That's a fair perspective and I will give some sincere thought to the prospect. Striking a balance is important to us as a team, so I can't say I will cater to everything you wish, which I'm sure you understand easily enough, but I do wish to treat it with the weight it deserves when you're being very reasonable about explaining your position. Cheers.

Doable, but voice recognition is severely lacking outside of targeted small dictionaries, and a simple wav file can beat it. I wouldn't rely on it for a long while.

We are. Neither of us grew up here, but the tech is great and the cost of living is fantastic comparatively. So we can be much more lean.