I didn’t personally know your dad, but like many others here depended on his work with QModem during the late 80s and early 90s. The fact we are all on Hacker News is evidence of how it impacted our lives - and the relevance of the community here.
Thank you for posting - I’ve enjoyed reading the outpouring of history and stories and hope it brings you the same sense of wonder it has me. Godspeed to you and your family.
Similar to all the rest of you HN lurkers, especially the grey beards - thanks for being here and thank for keeping the “hacker” in “hacker news” alive.
Hey look on the bright side. If this is legit, then it will inevitably become a reference in the bill to overhaul the DMCA when it (finally) gets introduced!
The beginning of the end, the moment when thr DMCA jumped the shark (for the broader world, not us tech geeks)
Gen X is not all roses: See Elon Musk and all his 'friends'.
Oh how bout their kids, they started off as rockstars really taking the reins in 2016 and 2020 (see the Bernie movement). Now a noticeable % have gone far right. :/
All this, but there is also some negative PR getting funded, presumably by the incumbent car manufacturers threatened by Tesla.
Remember that NYT article came out in 2018 that painted such a terrible picture of Elon (1)? A year later it showed up on my Facebook feed as a paid advertisement. Who pays to promote a year-old news article?
I wonder if they actually want Tesla to succeed (or at least partially). Because if its true that an auto manufacturer can achieve those valuations, then they can too.
> I assumed that device manufacturers update the software in their device about every month...he said they do it annually.
Those devices are at least _getting_ updates - there is a long tail of devices whose operational lifecycle [far] exceeds the vendor's support timeframe - in other words, they don't get patches at all N months after release.
The solution to these problems is straightforward - we've been managing it in software for a long time. EOL OSes, Long Term Support (LTS) OS releases, etc - but the device manufacturers are not as mature, and have not been making natural progress to do so.
And since this is HN - there is a startup hidden in the midst of all of this: an enterprise-grade IoT OS that "does security right." Sell to the device manufacturers, allow them to market it as "enterprise-ready" or some such. If the FCC guidelines here are approved, there will be a suddenly increased demand!
>And since this is HN - there is a startup hidden in the midst of all of this: an enterprise-grade IoT OS that "does security right." Sell to the device manufacturers, allow them to market it as "enterprise-ready" or some such. If the FCC guidelines here are approved, there will be a suddenly increased demand!
Agreed. Building an automatic firmware update system from scratch would be burdensome for many IoT makers, but as it becomes necessary or encouraged, we would expect the market to provide a packaged solution/framework that manufacturers could fold into their products. It would be really helpful have to discussion of this on the record. How generalizable do you think such a solution could be? We are aware of the Uptane project, an OTA firmware update framework being jointly worked on by several car manufacturers, but would love to hear more about the feasibility of a solution for IoT devices generally, or particular classes of IoT devices.
Firmware is fairly balkanized relative to SaaS stacks, I think regulatory pressure is likely to nudge the industry towards more consolidation, which would open the door for this kind of service. But I have no idea what form the regulation should take to produce the right market and incentives
I had a chance to buy 76.com before the oil company realized they should buy it. Had I any access to capital as a kid I would have bought it for $2k. well at least I get it as a trump in dns stories missed out on.
It’s called a hedcut. WSJ built a generator in 2019, but it's only available to subscribers. [1]. There are artists that offer commissions, including at least one WSJ artist. [2]
Join an existing startup in the same field. Not only will you learn a lot - on someone else’s dime - but you will meet plenty of people hungry to do the same.
If you are an engineer, you'll just keep shipping and learn nothing and get paid peanuts while being told you're having the best time of your life working 16 hour days with no life. This is something I dont advise most people. If you live in a place like SF or NYC, unless you're a founder or in the first 5-10 employees, having significant equity, joining a well established company will make you a lot more money and you can still pursue your passions on the side.
Ancestry.com is a very well designed product with lots of data and a powerful network effect. I designed a search products for incident response data - also high volume, noisy but highly relational data set - ancestry’s design is very thoughtful.
The monthly subscription carries no commitment and you don’t lose data when not subscribed. So don’t think of it as “$xx per month commitment is so expensive!” But instead as “I’d happily pay $20 this month to support the research I want to do. Next month, we’ll see.” I’ve subscribed / stopped / resubscribed several times over the years as the time I have ebbs and flows.
That being said it's very US-centric - if you want to get materials from a specific region, turn to region-specific resources. For example when researching Poland, you would use local resources, maybe FamilySearch for source material, and MyHeritage for other people's trees. Ancestry is simply not very common and has even less resources than FamilySearch does.
Amazon sees the same potential - and risk - and has been quietly iterating for over a decade in the segment.
If you want to go seriously explore it as a product, I’d start with a deep dive study there and develop a few theories how you think you could be different enough to blow it wide open.
Thank you for posting - I’ve enjoyed reading the outpouring of history and stories and hope it brings you the same sense of wonder it has me. Godspeed to you and your family.
Similar to all the rest of you HN lurkers, especially the grey beards - thanks for being here and thank for keeping the “hacker” in “hacker news” alive.