HN user

stanleydrew

8,502 karma

blog: https://benton.io gmail: andrewmbenton

Co-founder and CEO at Riza, a company working on untrusted code isolation with WASM: https://riza.io / hello@riza.io

Previously COO at ngrok: https://ngrok.com.

I was the Founder and CEO of an MVNO/VoIP hybrid company called Charge (formerly known as Bolt): https://charge.co.

I worked at Twilio: https://www.twilio.com.

I wrote the original ruby library that wraps Twilio's HTTP API: https://github.com/twilio/twilio-ruby

Other projects include receive-only telephone numbers at https://oneway.tel and free HPKP report bin hosting at https://hpkp.org (now defunct).

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/andrewmbenton; my proof: https://keybase.io/andrewmbenton/sigs/m4O8mq4uxoPSm2XlB1RUT1XkH5v8KX7UR448y8T74mo ]

Posts297
Comments1,635
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www.theverge.com 10mo ago

OpenAI comes for Hollywood with Critterz, an AI-powered animated film

stanleydrew
2pts2
www.muniroutle.com 1y ago

Muni Routle

stanleydrew
2pts0
predictablerevenue-newsletter.beehiiv.com 1y ago

Customer development = learn and land customers

stanleydrew
2pts0
riza.io 1y ago

Just-in-time programming

stanleydrew
3pts0
www.bloomberg.com 1y ago

Andreessen Horowitz Ditches Miami Two Years After Opening Office

stanleydrew
9pts5
supabase.com 1y ago

Postgres Foreign Data Wrappers with WASM

stanleydrew
4pts0
riza.io 2y ago

Running HumanEval Safely with Riza

stanleydrew
1pts0
github.com 2y ago

Show HN: Abusing a GitHub repo as a private certificate authority

stanleydrew
26pts7
www.theverge.com 2y ago

Luminar starts shipping Lidar for Volvo EX90 while readying its next-gen sensor

stanleydrew
1pts0
www.sfgate.com 2y ago

Once-hot tech office in SF's SoMa sells for a fourth of its 2019 price

stanleydrew
3pts0
blog.cloudflare.com 2y ago

We ensure Cloudflare customers aren't affected by LE's certificate chain change

stanleydrew
36pts16
gorilla.cs.berkeley.edu 2y ago

GoEx: A Runtime for Autonomous LLM Applications

stanleydrew
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 2y ago

Ask HN: Who is using ClickHouse in production?

stanleydrew
8pts3
sfstandard.com 2y ago

New indoor EV charging lounge in San Francisco offers a glimpse into the future

stanleydrew
4pts1
www.theatlantic.com 2y ago

ChatGPT's FarmVille Moment

stanleydrew
2pts0
www.theregister.com 2y ago

Google killing Basic HTML version of Gmail In January 2024

stanleydrew
2pts0
www.wsj.com 2y ago

Banks Don’t Love Rich Mortgage Borrowers as Much as They Used To

stanleydrew
4pts1
blog.chromium.org 2y ago

Protecting Chrome Traffic with Hybrid Kyber KEM

stanleydrew
3pts1
www.washingtonpost.com 2y ago

Scientists woke up a 46,000-year-old roundworm from Siberian permafrost

stanleydrew
3pts0
www.sfgate.com 3y ago

Fresno tech darling Bitwise Industries furloughs entire 900-worker staff

stanleydrew
3pts0
www.wsj.com 3y ago

Paper Money Diehards Refuse to Fold

stanleydrew
12pts5
www.wsj.com 3y ago

For Executives Only, CEOs Amass Billions in Savings with ‘Top Hat’ Plans

stanleydrew
3pts0
www.theguardian.com 3y ago

On the trail of the Dark Avenger: the most dangerous virus writer in the world

stanleydrew
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: Who's got domain names for sale or lease?

stanleydrew
1pts5
www.washingtonpost.com 3y ago

ChatGPT can ace logic tests now. But don’t ask it to be creative

stanleydrew
3pts0
blog.benton.io 3y ago

Experian is a pile of dark pattern garbage

stanleydrew
642pts152
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: Is a self-MitM HTTPS proxy that injects API keys useful?

stanleydrew
2pts5
www.bbc.com 3y ago

Girl, nine, finds megalodon shark tooth on Maryland beach

stanleydrew
7pts2
www.techdirt.com 3y ago

Thursday Night Purge: Elon Musk’s Twitter Bans Tons of High Profile Journalists

stanleydrew
31pts0
oneway.tel 3y ago

Oneway.tel: two-factor auth phone numbers for side-projects and small orgs

stanleydrew
23pts19

Still, my point is that my parking space isn't actually mine, so I can't modify anything in the garage.

Presumably over time shared parking areas will get upgraded with charging infrastructure to keep attracting tenants.

idk why we need MCP servers when LLMs can just connect to the existing API endpoint

Because the LLM can't "just connect" to an existing API endpoint. It can produce input parameters for an API call, but you still need to implement the calling code. Implementing calling code for every API you want to offer the LLM is at minimum very annoying and often error-prone.

MCP provides a consistent calling implementation that only needs to be written once.

Technically it's not really much different from just giving the LLM an OpenAPI spec.

The actual thing that's different is that an OpenAPI spec is meant to be an exhaustive list of every endpoint and every parameter you could ever use. Whereas an MCP server, as a proxy to an API, tends to offer a curated set of tools and might even compose multiple API calls into a single tool.

I have a silly theory that I only half joke about that docker/containers wouldn't've ever taken off as fast as it did if it didn't solve the horrible python dependency hell so well.

I don't think this is a silly theory at all. The only possibly silly part is that containers specifically helped solve this problem just for python. Lots of other software systems built with other languages have "dependency hell."

One of the design principles of sqlc is that SQL queries should be static in application code so that you know exactly what SQL is running on your database. It turns out you can get pretty far operating under this constraint, although there are some annoyances.

Riza, Inc. (https://riza.io) | SWEs and DevRel Engineers | Full-time or part-time | San Francisco

We use WASM to provide isolated runtimes for executing untrusted code, mostly generated by LLMs. Our customers do things like extract data from log lines at run time by asking claude-3-5-sonnet to generate a parsing function on-the-fly and then sending it to us for execution.

Things we need help with:

* Our janky account management dashboard (Postgres / Go / React / TypeScript)

* Our hosted and self-hosted runtime service (Rust, WASM)

* Integrations and demos with adjacent frameworks and tools (Python / JavaScript / TypeScript)

* New products

We have seed money, but the whole company is currently just me and Kyle working out of a converted warehouse on Alabama St. We’re second-time founders, so we know the risk we’re asking you to take and we’re prepared to compensate accordingly. Send an email to me at andrew at riza dot io or pop in our Discord (https://discord.gg/4P6PUeJFW5) and say hi.

Large Enough 2 years ago

Why do we have to "get there?" Humans use calculators all the time, so why not have every LLM hooked up to a calculator or code interpreter as a tool to use in these exact situations?

Large Enough 2 years ago

I would argue that most sota models do know that they don't know this, as evidenced by the fact that when you give them a code interpreter as a tool they choose to use it to write a script that counts the number of letters rather than try to come up with an answer on their own.

(A quick demo of this in the langchain docs, using claude-3-haiku: https://python.langchain.com/v0.2/docs/integrations/tools/ri...)

Large Enough 2 years ago

Yes, we are doing this at Riza[0] (via WASM). I'd love to have folks try our downloadable CLI which wraps isolated Python/JS runtimes (also Ruby/PHP but LLMs don't seem to write those very well). Shoot me an email[1] or say hi in Discord[1].

[0] https://riza.io [1]:mailto:andrew@riza.io [2]:https://discord.gg/4P6PUeJFW5

Large Enough 2 years ago

Plug in a code interpreter as a tool and the model will write Python or JavaScript to solve this and get it right 100% of the time. (Full disclosure: I work on a product called Riza that you can use as a code interpreter tool for LLMs)

What would this even look like? An 83b election is something I file with the IRS. Are you suggesting a company might have me sign a contract committing me to not file an 83b election?

How would they ever find out if I did file, and why would they care?

No, although it could also be cashless.

Early exercise is purchasing shares before your options vest, making you a shareholder sooner and solving a bunch of tax issues. The company retains the right (basically the obligation) to repurchase any unvested shares should you leave the company before fully vesting.

Besides, thinking that QR codes can replace servers seems to indicate to me that the article author has literally no idea what they're writing about, if they don't even understand the basic function of servers...

It just said QR code menus can speed up service, not replace servers. Seems logical to me that if servers are spending time bringing out food rather than standing around waiting for guests to tell them what they want and writing it down that service will generally be speedier.

It's not. VCs are investment professionals and are trying to avoid adverse selection just like everyone else. Here's a relevant quote from a recent Matt Levine newsletter:

I think that, if you had only five minutes with a world-class trader, and you asked her “teach me the essentials of trading,” probably she would spend the five minutes on adverse selection. The essential lesson is that, if you are being offered a trade, that probably means it’s a bad trade; your job is to understand that thoroughly so you can figure out the exceptions.

A profitable business has either reached market potential, or isn't spending enough on growth.

Yes, but spending money on growth is probably the number one thing VCs like to invest in. If you happen to be profitable, but also can demonstrate a clear path to growth, then VCs will lean in.

Grandma is getting scammed over regular phonecalls already anyway.

This is not a good argument. Yes things aren't perfect in many areas of technology, but that doesn't mean we should give up.

The better version of this argument acknowledges that there are tradeoffs: allowing side loading may introduce risk but the risk is low relative to the other risks users face and the benefits outweigh the costs.