twunde

Joined 15 years ago

Karma
1,577
Submissions
801
Member since
Oct 7
My email is my username at gmail.com
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 9 days ago
For anyone who's encountered this, you likely have access to these but either they are being sent to random email alias at your company or you need to request these (clearinghouses typically have this, but you can also request from the vendor/partner). I'll never forget how _angry_ I was to find out after finishing a project that there was a spec with everything I needed and nobody had bothered to send it to me while I was implementing the project.
Comment · 9 days ago
Surprisingly this problem of treating EDI files as lists instead of the tree structure it actually is, is widespread even among clearinghouses. In retail energy, clearinghouses would often support their own custom format, which typically was either CSV or Excel. If you used that, you would routinely run into data integrity issues.

At this point, I'm pretty convinced that if you're running into EDI (or its sister formats like HL7) processing issues, its because you've got the wrong data structure in place or you aren't keeping your rules up to date. Once you've got the right architecture in place, you can easily manage 100s of provider/partner-specific rules with one person at 20% time. If you don't your whole company is going to be dealing with data integrity issues forever

Comment · 5 months ago
I can't comment about the minimum number of stores, but I do think its the correct idea. I live in a town of ~12000. We have 6.5 bookstores (including the good local thrift store as .5). Stores/restaurants do turn over fairly regularly, so its still tough, but it certainly seems viable. We get a good number of tourists, which helps but I do think you need a mix of restaurants, and a mix of different types of stores. Even as you go to nearby towns with big box stores, they all have downtowns that are doing ok with locally run businesses. Notably the downtowns all are small business focused with few if any box stores
Comment · 5 months ago
Within the US, energy prices for are typically split into supply and distribution rates with taxes and fees added to each of these. There are typically a large number of these fees that are passed through to the consumer, but just are bundled together to reduce confusion. An example fee is one for keeping power plants idle as extra capacity for when it's needed. Electricity has a nationwide market with different prices for spot prices vs long term although if you are big enough you can also get a direct contract to hedge your energy supply prices.

The complaint here is that PJM is spending money on upgrading the long range wires and passing that fee in a way that's not calculated for usage but instead it's likely divided evenly amongst member states. If you're upgrading wires in PA why should Maryland pay for that? These would taking in new/higher fees being passed to consumers.

The long range transmission lines are different than short term transmission lines. The long range ones appear someone to hit electricity from a power plant in California for a business in Baltimore.

Comment · 5 months ago
This is essentially what some 3rd party vendors do, which is why supply chain malware is typically found in hours now and not weeks.

The reason why npmjs, pypy and other public registries don't do this is because it would likely 10x+ the cost of their infrastructure while not bringing in much new revenue. It's also potentially orthogonal to paint customers needs since it could likely lead to downtime or at least block new releases going out

Comment · 7 months ago
Other airports do have ads for tech companies (Seattle comes to mind) but the concentration is significantly lower.

Billboards are primarily focused on brand awareness since you can't update them frequently and you don't have amazing targeting/attribution data. They're also hyper-geographic specific. For tech companies that means that billboards are most useful when targeting either a specific conference or when targeting people that can make sales decisions.

Sf's billboard space is heavily used by the tech industry because A) you've got a high concentration of consumers for your tech product (developers, marketers, operations, product managers, etc) B) you've got a high concentration of decision-makers in terms of director/VP/execs/consultants going through that airport who may end up making a final decision on your sales. C) you've got a concentration of investors in terms of VC, private equity, angel investors. This helps bring in interest for that next round/acquisition. For your existing investors this means that they've got something to brag about. D) hometown pride. Companies tend to put billboards near where executives travel through since it's a reminder of the work that the marketer is doing. It also helps with hiring and media reputation.

If you compare SF to NYC or Boston, those other cities have a much smaller amount of their workforce in tech (22% compared to 11%). This is especially true if you think about the number of people transferring at these airports. The concentration of customers just isn't there, which is why NYC ads tend to be more consumer driven.

Comment · 7 months ago
For people to care of would have to be like healthcare. The Change Healthcare breach cost 2B+ and led to a huge loss in market share. Or like AMCA, which went bankrupt after the breach (Labcorp's billing company). If you're a health tech company you can no longer insure your way out of the problem over you reach a certain size.

The reality is that we need data breaches to be painful but maybe not company ending events unless it really is sensitive data. As patio11 likes to say the right level of fraud is not zero. There's a middle ground where we can increase company liability or reduce the damage caused by a beach.

Comment · 1 year ago
If you're in the northeast US it's very common to have free or have to pay a nominal fee for public tennis courts (this may depend on the quality of your town's Park and rec department)

In NYC, it's 15/hr or 100/season. In the town I grew up in it's 20/yr for residents and 40/yr for non residents. I'm my current town it's free. And I suspect that there are waivers/discounts for folks that can't pay that amount.

Comment · 1 year ago
This is much more viable than it was in the past with the advent and adoption of nvm, pyenv etc but the limiting factor becomes system dependencies. The typical example from yesteryear was upgrading openssl but inevitably you'll find that some dependency auto updates a system dependency silently or requires a newer version that requires upgrading the OS.
Comment · 1 year ago
In new England at least, independent bookstores appear to be thriving. The town I'm in (population ~12K) has at least 5 independent bookstores, all in a town with a great library. That's an unusually high number of bookstores but most of the larger towns have at least one independent bookstore.
Comment · 1 year ago
Something popular in my area, especially in the somatics community, are grief ceremonies ala https://www.earthdance.net/event/grieving-ourselves-whole-ex... although there are several variations. If that feels too new age-y or its not offered near where you live, it may be worth looking for grief groups/bereavement support, either through your preferred religious institution or through the local medical community (they're often supported by your local hospital)
Comment · 1 year ago
VC funding is often required for companies that require a lot of runway prior to selling. The example that comes to mind are database companies like Mongo, dgraph, scylla etc. These require a fair amount of upfront work to create the product before their usable. A different example are industries that require a fair amount of compliance like healthcare, banking etc
Comment · 1 year ago
It's rare but does happen. And frankly I'd only include AWS in the counterpoint. Google really struggled with GCP. Outside of Bigquery and Spanner many/most of the services were custom built for GCP and were not used internally. Hell they built a VM service when basically everything ran on Borg internally
Comment · 1 year ago
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/germa... discusses some places that are moving to Linux and some places where migrations have been reverted. But from personal experience the main issues are in order:

- Is all your software supported on Linux? Are you sure? Do all the features work or are any missing/broken? Have you tested this or are you relying on Sales or docs that are likely wrong? What happens if one piece of software drops Linux support?

- Does using Linux block any future planned projects or make future projects much more complex?

- You now need to spend time with every new hire training folks on the new OS, as well as retraining existing staff.

- Are you going to piss off a lot of staff because you've made their life harder?

- For compliance/security requirements, do you have everything necessary to easily explain to auditors that these computers have the equivalent security (antivirus, monitoring, mdm all with metrics, dashboards and logs)?

Essentially this boils down to a lot of work, which impacts the future flexibility and the morale of the company in order to save a relatively small amount of money. Often times your spending more money on supporting Linux than you're actually saving.

ChromeOS is a modified version of this argument. ChromeOS comes with a strong security and compliance story, and has easy built in management. There's been some adoption in call centers but primarily it's used in schools by students because the school has been given a grant so gets them for free. Even with all that, very free businesses are adopting ChromeOS because a) some workflow they use isn't supported and b) Windows is not significantly more expensive.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton