HN user

izak30

870 karma

https://www.issackelly.com - CTO and Co Founder bowtie.works

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www.issackelly.com 14y ago

Things I Can't Say [in my YC Application]

izak30
9pts2
www.kellycreativetech.com 14y ago

Three lessons learned from giving a talk at a technical conference

izak30
3pts0
www.kellycreativetech.com 15y ago

Integrating Compass, CoffeeScript and Virtualenv

izak30
2pts0
blog.mccrory.me 15y ago

Walk-through of the VMforce / Cloud OS / OpenPaaS Demo

izak30
1pts0
www.kellycreativetech.com 16y ago

Curious UX choices on the iPad

izak30
2pts0
www.shotblox.com 16y ago

Ask HN: Review my web-publishing tool for Professional Photogs

izak30
1pts2
blogmaverick.com 16y ago

Success & Motivation : Scatterbrained and in College

izak30
1pts0
thesoundofhumanlives.blogspot.com 16y ago

"What the Fuck is Going On?" A musician's take on MySpace

izak30
30pts29
news.ycombinator.com 16y ago

Ask YC: Viability of StackOverflow for other topics and community building.

izak30
5pts6
www.issackelly.com 17y ago

A Plea to Pass to your Friends and Family using IE 6

izak30
2pts0
www.mytwitternotebook.com 17y ago

New Twitter Personal Organizer

izak30
7pts5
news.ycombinator.com 17y ago

Ask HN: Hiring a contractor.

izak30
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 17y ago

Ask YC: Review my webapp (crm/notebook/toy)

izak30
1pts7
cleveland.craigslist.org 17y ago

India is re-outsourcing to...Cleveland?

izak30
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 17y ago

Ask HN: E-mail providers and mail servers

izak30
5pts9
news.ycombinator.com 17y ago

Ask YC: Becoming a Merchant Service Provider.

izak30
7pts9
news.ycombinator.com 17y ago

Ask YC: Duplicate Posts

izak30
14pts19
sfbay.craigslist.org 18y ago

Servee, looking for Designers in the Bay area to show off to.

izak30
1pts4
www.issackelly.com 18y ago

Image Processing Troubles.

izak30
2pts1
news.ycombinator.com 18y ago

Ask YC: Online Text Editors.

izak30
21pts17
www.issackelly.com 18y ago

How Fog Creek Saved me half a grand OR Great Customer Service

izak30
15pts6
radar.oreilly.com 18y ago

US Judge censors WikiLeaks.org by ordering DNS records removed

izak30
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 18y ago

Ask YC: Scaling questions.

izak30
15pts24
news.ycombinator.com 18y ago

Ask YC: Places for Freelancers to rent

izak30
2pts1
news.ycombinator.com 18y ago

Ask YC: Friday Morning pre-release testers for my web app.

izak30
4pts8
news.ycombinator.com 18y ago

Ask YC: Money from your users.

izak30
1pts0
isitchristmas.com 18y ago

Is it Christmas? .... does not account for time zone..

izak30
7pts9
news.ycombinator.com 18y ago

Ask YC: Has anybody used MS Visual Web Developer Express?

izak30
1pts2
blogs.technet.com 18y ago

Change IE7 user-agent to IE6 in vista

izak30
1pts1
news.ycombinator.com 18y ago

Ask YC: Where to find legal help for a tech startup

izak30
3pts3

Just for kicks I ran `git log | grep "Author: Simon" -C 20 | tail -n 50`

``` commit 53eddd4a0f8786e23f511a653d8d7ffa947ad8db Author: Simon Willison <simon@simonwillison.net> Date: Mon Apr 23 21:24:41 2007 +0000

    Added HTTP_HOST example header

    git-svn-id: http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk@5063 bcc190cf-cafb-0310-a4f2-bffc1f526a37
```

There are earlier references as well, but I think the author was making pretty deliberate choices.

I make art installations and UI/UX research. A modern browser is one of the best technical canvases. If you are working on browsers and you turn things off, please always allow me a backdoor for my own browsers to turn them back on.

Complex software control of multimedia and the whole browser experience gives me the ability to develop new ways of interacting with computers.

It all depends what you're doing. For a weather station you could do very well and have very low power at one reading per minute. HTTP is great for that.

Also your approximation is off. I'm under 200ms (closer to 110) per insert, end to end. That's before any optimizations.

I buy stuff from Adafruit because they do good work. They are advocates for approachable and understandable electronics. They work hard at combining art and technology and education. They pick good components and they make software libraries and tutorials to match.

I buy their stuff because I think beginners should buy their stuff and I want to see more companies like them exist.

Good question! For some toy weather data, Elasticsearch as the only data store made sense. If I were to add more sensors and features and make this a long term project, I'd likely try to wire up some automated backups. If it were some kind of production app that a second human relied on, then I would think hard about the data, the failure scenarios, budget, etc.

Does that answer your question at all?

Celery does a ton of things that channels doesn't currently do. Celery has a lot of workflow concepts built in (Chains, Chords, etc). Celery also has prioritization, and a fairly robust ecosystem that channels may take a while to deliver.

Yeah, it's a projector. pre-recorded projection mapping, custom electronics as a triggering mechanism. Automation for the projector and underlying computer. flask-socketio + Chrome for the media player.

You saw what the article was claiming was the total budget right? If we had done "mischief managed" levels of wizardry on that budget you would have heard about a very different aspect of what we did.

Well, it's all public now, through various straight forward means like this article, public postings on the website by the owner, etc. This covers most of my NDA. At the time, most of the secrecy was for game mechanics. That's pretty moot now as well. I've had several jobs where nobody wants the specifics discussed, so I've gotten good at saying "Imagine if you had a shipping container with a lock that needed to open for a hundred different people at a hundred different times". You can zoom into and out of problems with fabricated scenarios.

The other side of this, is that for the 18 odd months that Book One was open I would just give you a card. From my POV, that was better than any description I could give. I gave them out like candy and I still only had about 50 or 70 people come through. I probably gave out a hundred and fifty invitations.

For those who don't know: He's talking about the in the aforementioned "beach" room, which had a different name, meaning, and story. MrEricSir appears to be one of the top google results for "The Latitude Book 2" if you care to explore.

There was a hexagon shaped table with a sandbox. In each corner of the sandbox there was a digital camera (connected to a raspberry pi) that would photograph the sandbox throughout your appointment and then send the pictures to your personal account on our website. When you went back to the website to confirm that you had completed your experience, you were presented with a handful of sandcastle-POV photos that were just for you.

Yeah, I heard that a couple of times. That's part of why there were 6 cameras, with the hope that two or three would be working + get a decent shot.

Still, I'd say from a design pov, that _totally worked_. People behave different when they know they're being watched or evaluated. This was meant to be a private space for you, and the photos of that thing were meant to be a pleasant surprise.

As far as the experience goes, one of the things I'd say over and over is that if you noticed my work, I did a bad job. I was building the automation, electronics, mechanics, and hardware and software systems to make things tick. I was typically working with about two other hacker-types. sometimes hardware and audio folks, sometimes web and software folks.

So there was this beach on the top floor of a building downtown. When you were invited in, a whole day would pass in the scope of twenty minutes. More than anything, it was a place to think. And through some very clever crafting with about a dozen RGB floodlights (and previous work deconstructing how to work the Philips Hue API) we made it simultaneously look like an office/gallery, that would pass from dawn through early morning, noon, afternoon, sunset, evening and the sort of blue-midnight you only see on television.

I didn't really "do" the experiences, I always knew what was behind the door when I opened it, and often times I was "doing" it for QA purposes, but that part of that room will probably stick on me like a soft spot for a very long time.

OK, so my most memorable moment was The On Call Day From Hell.

I've told this story a few times a few different ways, but for this purpose, you could call what we did theatre. Every 5, or 10, or 15 minutes, all weekend, some weekdays and evenings, the show must go on. ~6 Locations spread through the city, two separate experiences, both with their own windows, problems, and margins for error.

Sunday morning comes around and I get an alert about one of the locations. The system didn't come online (startup was automated for one experience, and manual, but staffed for another). The automated experience wasn't booting up. I had a three hour window to make the trek from Oakland to SF and debug this, probably minor issue.

I had VPNs everywhere, if I needed to show up, it was usually a hardware or networking issue. I was grumbling as I left my girlfriend on Sunday morning. I felt like it wasn't my turn (there were two other engineers, one other who would sort of rotate these duties at the time). So I'm trudging along and I get a text from the staff member running the other thing. She tells me that "there's water under the tunnel". This is very bad. This particular thing was built into a basement, which was at one time a creek. Even in the drought we were pumping ...water (and mission st run off)... out fairly constantly.

So I parlay the problem downtown by forcing an unexpected reboot of all equipment and make sure it sets itself up properly. I move to the mission and I'm woefully underprepared. The set itself has begun getting wet, I go to the source and it's just a black hole. Our construction crew set it all up initially, and would normally be the go-to for this, but we were a very small crew. Construction wasn't responding, and the first appointment was in 45 minutes. This was my problem. So I psych myself up. I was going to something else and definitely not planning on getting shoulder deep in sludge. I undress as much as I can around other employees, the two of us cover the set with as much protective barrier as we can and I just stare at it.

I'm about to get into the sort of territory where I'm cautious about telling it to the HN audience, but I shit you not, a voice from inside the hole, and from a very good friend whispers to me "psssh. Hey, you, It's down here. Come on down".[1]

And I get shoulder deep in a sump pump field disassembly and repair. No appointments were missed, edited or canceled that day.

[1] There's a very practical and boring explanation for this, but it was a very laugh-out-loud at my own weird life sort of moment.

I'd disagree with your assumption that it wasn't a real society. Maybe it wasn't really secret, maybe it wasn't...something or other; but that was, and for many many people, is, real. It might be more apt to say that it was a society pretending to be a startup.

Pretend is almost always the wrong word when anybody in the room takes it seriously.

Well, the public part of TLS spanned two Burning Men, and is in the Bay Area. It's not my scene, but I'm sure it happened.

---

Alt note: I spent two years at that gig, and much of it was "public" facing, i.e. to participants. Talking about it now it's very difficult not to default into the cloak and dagger mode. It's now shockingly easy for me to write coyly.

Ahoy! I just stumbled on this. I was the Director of Technology for this set of local bizareness for its last two years. I won't say "I'm happy to answer any questions" because I may avoid some. If you want to ask, maybe hit me up, Especially the tech, especially if you got to play and have a good idea of what we were doing.

Also! I think I'm signed up to give a talk in May at ADG. If you're interested in this sort of world-building, and the hacker side of it; maybe come to that? My talk isn't on the shedule yet, but it's penciled in (and Definitely go to Catherine Herdlick's if you can!) http://www.meetup.com/Adventure-Design-Group/