benwen | 7 hours ago | on: First and Lego Education Partnership Update
Maybe this: https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2026-03-12/dean-kamen-resigns-f...
benwen's comments
benwen | 7 months ago | on: Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations
Obligatory link to Suasn Calvin, robopsychologist from Asimov’s I, Robot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Calvin
benwen | 1 year ago | on: What I Learned Writing an Album in Just Intonation
“ This also has the reputation of being terribly impractical, which is always a selling point for me.”
That was truly LOL. Thank you.
benwen | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2022)
Tallyfor - Better Software for Tax Professionals | Remote | Full or Part-time | Senior Clojure/Clojurescript | SF, US
“nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” -Benjamin Franklin [0]
Tallyfor is working on the second of those certainties (taxes). Our values are “Be right. Have fun. From anywhere.”
We are a small team and we are winning customers with a modern cloud approach. Taxation in the US is strangely complex and could use a little help.
Right now we, Tallyfor, could use a little help. We’re looking for expert Clojure/Clojurescript programmers who are wanting to join a small team. Re-frame, mostly. Remote hires because that’s one of our values... from anywhere.
Founded by a programmer (me) and a CPA-turned-product-person-while-at-Xero.
No recruiters, please.
[email protected]. Thanks for reading.
benwen | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2021)
Tallyfor - cloud tax software | Remote | Full or Part-time | SF, US
You: a Clojure/ClojureScript programmer looking for a small team to join. Curious. Capable. Kind.
Us: A small team. Using Clojure (Re-frame and friends). With customers, angel financing, and a set of values that includes "Have Fun" as #2. [email protected] for the curious.
No recruiters, please.
benwen | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (January 2021)
SEEKING FREELANCER | Tallyfor - Better Software for Tax Professionals | Remote | Full or Part-time | Senior Clojure/Clojurescript | SF, US
“nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” -Benjamin Franklin [0]
Tallyfor is working on the second of those certainties (taxes). Our values are “Be right. Have fun. From anywhere.” We are a small team and we are winning customers with a modern cloud approach. Taxation in the US is strangely complex and could use a little help.
Right now we, Tallyfor, could use a little help. We’re looking for expert Clojure/Clojurescript programmers who are wanting to join a small team. Re-frame, mostly. Remote hires because that’s one of our values... from anywhere.
Founded by a programmer (me) and a CPA-turned-product-person-while-at-Xero.
No recruiters, please.
[email protected]. Thanks for reading.
benwen | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2021)
Tallyfor - Better Software for Tax Professionals | Remote | Full or Part-time | Senior Clojure/Clojurescript | SF, US
“nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” -Benjamin Franklin [0]
Tallyfor is working on the second of those certainties (taxes). Our values are “Be right. Have fun. From anywhere.” We are a small team and we are winning customers with a modern cloud approach. Taxation in the US is strangely complex and could use a little help.
Right now we, Tallyfor, could use a little help. We’re looking for expert Clojure/Clojurescript programmers who are wanting to join a small team. Re-frame, mostly. Remote hires because that’s one of our values... from anywhere.
Founded by a programmer (me) and a CPA-turned-product-person-while-at-Xero.
No recruiters, please.
[email protected]. Thanks for reading.
benwen | 5 years ago | on: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
Borland Turbo Lightning, TSR (terminate and stay resident) spell checker for the lowly 8088-based IBM PC.
benwen | 6 years ago | on: MIPS R3000
Maybe Computation Structures by Ward? Lecture notes for the class from which it was born show a two-stage Laundromat model (with snarky MIT/Harvard humor) https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...
benwen | 9 years ago | on: Microsoft turns two-factor authentication into one-factor by ditching password
This seems to be _less_ secure. I noticed yesterday that my iPhone's Microsoft Authenticator app emitted at least three notifications to "Approve sign-in request...ABCDE".
I almost never log into my Microsoft LiveID account, the only identity that uses that app for 2-factor. I thought it was a little screwy, so largely ignored the first request. By the time the second and third notifications came in I had read the news about MSFT's move to go to a simple "Approve/Deny" single-factor. An attacker could just go through a list of LiveID's and try and authenticate. With a large enough list, a few folks will just hit "Approve", I'd wager. I doubt the app use any other factors like GPS or IP address. NB: There does seem to be a timeout.
Or am I missing something here?
benwen | 11 years ago | on: Apple's New Market
Apple Pocket Phone
http://blog.benwen.com/opinion/product/2015/01/29/apple-pock...
benwen | 11 years ago | on: If a monkey takes a selfie in the forest, who owns the copyright?
Also, makes one wonder about copyright ownership of the random strings and sonnets produced by those infinite monkeys typing [0].
benwen | 11 years ago | on: If a monkey takes a selfie in the forest, who owns the copyright?
Anyone else reminded by this NYT Magazine article about a legal team suing on behalf of a chimpanzee for his freedom?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/magazine/the-rights-of-man...
http://www.nonhumanrightsproject.org
Maybe after Lessig is done with the Mayday PAC he can opine on non-human IP rights?
benwen | 11 years ago | on: 3D Object Manipulation in a Single Photograph using Stock 3D Models
Reminds me of the Running Man (1987) scene where, in supposed real-time, a video production editor synthetically composes Arnold Schwarzenegger's and Jesse Ventura's characters together in a deathmatch. One would have to go from rigid-component origami birds on static frames in this CMU paper to semi-solid human figures on moving frames in the movie. 3D models of famous actors' bodies are already made for special effects, painstakingly rendered and composited together in batch mode.
(Personal recollection: there was a solid model Shaq's head at 3d modeling company Viewpoint Datalabs back in the day. His head is huge.)
Stills from Running Man taken at about 01:19 - http://imgur.com/rQlxigG
benwen | 12 years ago | on: Recommended Reading List for Developers [pdf]
Looks like C++ got a bit of an upgrade in the canon...
The Programming Language Bjarne Stroustrup
ISBN 9780321563842
benwen | 13 years ago | on: Real-World Concurrency (2008)
"This article is half stern lecture on the merits of abstinence and half Kama Sutra."
benwen | 13 years ago | on: IronMQ Push Queues - Reliable Message Delivery for the Cloud
Nice.
benwen | 13 years ago | on: 100M Messages a Day Milestone for IronMQ
Cool!
benwen | 13 years ago | on: MongoHQ (YC S11) Raises $6 Million For Database As Service Engine
MongoLab: yep, we have a similar (I'd imagine) license to the trademark.
10gen: they are awesome to work with as they know they are in for the long game - building a full ecosystem.
Congrats to the HQ team! Always good to see further evidence that the DBaaS market is generating healthy capital interest. Game on!
benwen | 13 years ago | on: Microsoft offering Linux virtual machines on Azure
Just got out of the first half of the Meet Azure prezo. Pretty slick integration of PaaS and IaaS. Git, Linux, Node.js, MongoDB, but also .Net, Team Foundation Server (ok, I had to look up TFS) and RDC. Has SQL Server as a managed service. Website hosting also: Wordpress, Drupal, etc. Caching (memcache-compliant) and Blob storage. Lots o' data centers. Identity management.... yeah Active Directory. They have multi-tentant (lower $) and reserved VMs (more $ and perf, tho not clear if everything runs exactly like on reserved VMs). Sounds like they've been hard at work. It'll be interesting to see how it works outside of a scripted demo. http://meetnodejs.azurewebsites.net/ is the node.js and mongodb demo they ran. Still seems to be up.
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