I'm going a bit broader with my system but it's similar. Instead of trying to predict future behavior, I'm focusing on capturing new, meaningful information, preparing it for human review (no fully automatic writes) and pairing with an ongoing review process, deduplication and treating it like a resource I manually curate (with help to make that easier of course).

I think context needs to be treated primarily globally with the addition of some project specific data. For example, my coding preferences don't change between projects, nor does my name. Other data like the company I work for can change, but infrequently and some values change frequently and are expected to.

I also use Claude Code a lot more for thinking or writing these days so there's less separation between topics than there are in separate repos.

The global vs. project-specific split is the right question and has real tradeoffs. You're right that preferences, identity, and coding style don't change between repos. Right now Total Recall is project-scoped, so if you're using it across multiple projects you'd be maintaining separate memory for each, which of course is redundant for that kind of context.

The tension is that some things genuinely are project-specific (decisions, architecture, people involved) and mixing those into a global tier makes retrieval noisier and may degrade performance to the point where its useless. I think the answer is probably both: a global layer for durable personal context and project-scoped registers for everything else. Haven't built that yet but it's the obvious next step. Am going to add this to my next sprint.

Also, your point about using Claude Code for thinking and writing beyond just coding resonates too. The more you use it outside of repo-scoped work, the more project-level memory feels like the wrong boundary. Will report back when ive come up with a potential solution.

I have one of these - it's awesome, I love it and I think it's an incredible success for a first hardware product. My takeaway from reading this is that caring about building a great product made a huge difference in how your first 500 units landed. Now the next batch gets to come with all those learnings.

I'm sure there will be more challenges as well but as long as you keep focusing on the experience you're delivering, I'm sure you'll continue to get past them

Would you be able to post an image of the labelling/markings on the unit?

Thanks so much for the kind words and being an early supporter <3

It's clearly labeled as the output of Sonnet 3.7, not truth. We all need to apply our own critical analysis of anything we read, whether it's claimed to be from an LLM or from Wikipedia. The possibility of inaccuracy isn't a reason to withhold comment.

So what do we do with that information? If I apply a critical framework around interpreting the LLM output, the answer is to reject it for being both not necessarily true but also knowing that the LLM isn't even trying to be correct, it's strictly trying to produce convincing sentences.

What value does a link to a source that's not held to any standard to be informative do? Seems a waste of everyone's time to me.

Yes, I'd rather have it cited as an unreliable source than uncited. Every human will happily regurgitate misinformation they've absorbed unknowingly, so it's not that much worse than a confident human comment with no real citation besides themself.

However, I also think it's valid to question what it adds to a conversation if someone is quoting it verbatim. Would we be happier if HN was like Quora and automatically added an AI response to everything?

HIPAA compliance is one of my focus areas: https://kwesforms.com/hipaa

Email is in my profile if you have any questions. Technically the HIPAA plan starts at $99/mo but I'll give you a discount code to get you to $29 if you give a try and are willing to jump on a call and do a feedback session with me after trying it.

(You can also try it for free before signing up for anything)

@Oia20 One challenge with form -> email solutions is staying ahead of spam. I've been deep in this space with Kwes Forms [1] and have seen some pretty insane rates of spam usage. If you ever want to chat about some of the techniques I've used for prevention (everything from intelligent rate limiting to now a user scoring service that updates based on data about the user and following actions they take which autobans if they hit a score threshold).

With the self-hosted service, I guess that's up to the hoster but likely something you'll run into on your hosted version.

[1] https://kwesforms.com

That would be a nice blog post to read - not because it's proprietary, but dealing with spam traffic is so common.

Sometimes rate limiting individual sessions, and IPs, and combinations of them, and even using fingerprinting on suspected sessions of certain kinds.. to discover in some cases that a lot of small walls can sometimes cause some automated bots to move on.

Absolutely. I was surprised both in the scale of spam attempts in certain scenarios and how quickly it died with different mitigation measures. It's a challenging thing to blog about because some of the heuristics can be fixed. To be super vague, when you have a certain amount of data about a user if metadata A should be correlated to metadata B and it isn't, that bumps the score. It's not enough on it's own if there are legitimate reasons it doesn't have to be correlated.

I'm always happy to chat through some of the details individually.

What has been working surprisingly well for the sites I maintain is to have a simple but custom "captcha" like "Enter 294 here:" (it can even be static), and to exclude the pages that have submission forms from search engine indexing.

It may not even need to be a positive action.

I had a form that got about one spam message per day. In late 2021, I added a trivial hidden-by-CSS “If you are human, leave this field blank (required)” <input name=username> honeypot. (More details: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37058847>.)

For two and a half years, this filtered out all spam, except for one message in early 2023.

But I started this comment with “may not” because since 2024-02-10, I’ve received approximately 268 spam messages, of a few different patterns (still all very easy to identify visually). So some refinement of the idea may be needed. (I have no idea how many more have been filtered out; I never bothered tracking that. But I imagine that it’s still doing something useful.)

This is, of course, low-value-target stuff, scattergun spam rather than targetted spam.

Yeah the scatter-gun spam is different.

From my experience with coding parts of Un-static [1], the advantage of having a single source for submissions for thousands of forms, is that you can filter out these more easily as well. As you can create partial fingerprints. Then just compare similarity between incoming submissions on other forms. And of course start blocking if you receive a scatter-gun message that matches partial fingerprints received across an increasing number of form endpoints.

[1]: https://un-static.com

Definitely. Any kind of unique check (another example is just a uniquely named version of a classic hidden honeypot field like https://dev.to/felipperegazio/how-to-create-a-simple-honeypo...) is usually enough on it's own until you're a higher value target.

I'm purchased a business (kwesforms.com) to follow my dream of being my own boss and right now I'm working on learning. I've built so many different pieces of software but never been in a position where everything is new, I'm playing every role (learning dev ops, marketing, sales etc too) and I have full control to make it the best it can be.

The biggest piece thing I'm working on is bringing some automated form generation tech I've been working on as a side project (ottoiq.com) to it.

I'm also working on a little AI tool to turn todos into actionable plans by gathering additional context and breaking it down. If anyone is interested in talking about their mental models for problem solving, my email is me@<my name>.com.

My dream is to be my own boss someday too. If possible, would be glad to be part of whatever you're doing.

This is my first time hearing about PowerLine. Has anyone used it extensively and have any tips and tricks to share?

Wikipedia[1] lists some pros and cons but it's not clear how impactful those cons are in real world scenarios. How does the speed compare to Wifi? Do multiple devices cause issues?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication

Hams hate them since they induce RFI, I'm honestly surprised they are allowed given they basically turn the unshielded wire in your walls into antennas.

Will ham licensing die? The average age is like 60-70 usually, the government kept lowering the requirements to get a license and it's even less popular. I heard they're usually mostly benchmarking distance and truckers listening. Besides apocalypse or maybe wanting to tunnel data through it (illegal) it doesn't seem to serve a real function or benefit.

Family radio and the public channels I heard are full of useless chatter and insults, I can't imagine radio being any better than the internet besides the idea of broadcasting data on it which the government doesn't like.

Because it runs on tattletales that tell the government, if they removed the licensing we'd just get the ability to not illegally (maybe dirty) encrypted long distance messages anonymously. A far superior system than today's.

I do quite enjoy when non-hams hop on the Internet to try and criticize ham radio.

> The average age is like 60-70 usually

I can't find any statistics on the average age among all amateur radio license holders. Wikipedia says the average age is 68, but that is marked with a [citation needed] because it doesn't point to a source. Whoever wrote that likely got it from the ARRL which declared that the average age of their membership is 68. Not all hams, and perhaps not even the majority of hams, are members of ARRL. In the same way that not all licensed gun owners are members of the NRA.

In rural areas, you may find the local ham radio club is a clique of 5 or 6 older guys who have known each other for several decades and aren't too welcoming to newcomers. But more urban areas are a completely different story. Where I live, the local university has a ham club operated by college students. There is a community club that certainly _trends_ toward older engineer retirees, but actually has members of all ages, ethnicities, and technical background. And they are all a pretty friendly bunch.

There are online clubs and communities for various demographics as well. (And an uncountable number of discords for some reason.)

> the government kept lowering the requirements to get a license and it's even less popular.

The only ones saying that are YouTubers and clickbait SEO-encumbered blogspam. There are more amateur radio license holders now than there have ever been. http://ah0a.org/FCC/Graphs.html

> I heard they're usually mostly benchmarking distance and truckers listening.

You must have heard wrong? I don't know what "benchmarking distance" means, and while there _are_ truckers that are hams and sometimes talk while they drive, IME there are not many. Certainly not enough to be a notable chunk of local ham radio activity.

> Besides apocalypse or maybe wanting to tunnel data through it (illegal) it doesn't seem to serve a real function or benefit.

You could ask the FCC, the ones who license and regulate the service? https://www.fcc.gov/wireless/bureau-divisions/mobility-divis... "The amateur radio ... services are for qualified persons of any age who are interested in radio technique solely with a personal aim and without pecuniary interest. These services present an opportunity for self-training, intercommunication, and technical investigations."

In short, amateur radio is set of spectrum set aside for hobbyists to practice and experiment with radio. Amateur radio can be and has been used to coordinate communication in areas stricken by disaster when other services were down, but it is NOT an "emergency radio" service, no matter what the preppers say.

Encryption on the ham bands is forbidden for a very good reason: ham radio activities are public, open, and are not a substitute for commercial or ISM bands. You don't need encryption in order to experiment with radio. It's a different layer, completely orthogonal. The only narrow acceptable use related to cryptography is authorization of control messages to repeaters, RC aircraft, and such. In that case, you are not obscuring the meaning of the message, you are simply proving that you are the rightful controller of the device.

> Family radio and the public channels I heard are full of useless chatter and insults,

FRS and CB radio are not ham radio, full stop.

I have never seen a single community anywhere in real life or on the Internet that didn't have the occasional asshat or two. Although a few hams can be idiots, as in any community, the majority are quite respectful and friendly.

> I can't imagine radio being any better than the internet besides the idea of broadcasting data on it which the government doesn't like.

As mentioned before, you're missing the purpose and spirit of amateur radio. It's not "free and libre wireless communication for the masses." The spectrum was originally set aside by the FCC at a time when amateurs were making more progress on the state of the art of radio technology on their kitchen tables than radio manufacturers with whole labs. Not as relevant today perhaps, but it's a miracle that we still have that spectrum available to us when these frequencies are so highly coveted by HFTs, ISPs, and mobile phone operators.

Broadcasting on amateur radio is not allowed, because there are already FCC-licensed services for broadcasting over radio. Some people think that broadcasting over amateur radio should be allowed because they don't like the FCC's policies on the broadcast bands but that's some pretty backwards thinking, if you ask me. Nobody stumps for broadcast rights on FRS, GRMS, CB, or marine bands for some reason. It's only the amateur radio service where this is ever even suggested as a possibility, generally by people who don't understand what the service is for.

If you compare the license holders and the population, the kind of "growth" that amateur licenses got is my point: proportion to the population of the US 2018-2023 had an increase of roughly 500 members, so around 100 per year. https://www.arrl.org/fcc-license-counts

Thank you for clarifying the point of its usage. Compared to something like SDRs, and meshtastic it's way more mature and has a lot less interesting specs to me besides it's frequency. I skimmed your blog and didn't see anything related to either radio. Is there a lot of overlap between sdr and ham? I only knew one who was a trucker that mostly just listened to local people.

Powerline ethernet is a decent alternative to ethernet cables or wireless, but there definitely are significant caveats:

* It generates tons of electrical noise, which can wreak havoc on electronics particularly radios.

* The actual connection speed varies greatly by the condition of the copper wiring and generally isn't that great.

* Depending on how the copper wiring is laid out, you might not get a connection between two points.

* Security can be an issue if you don't configure your powerline adapters properly.

They've been very useful in situations where wifi didn't go far enough. I find them to be more reliable and faster than wifi mesh networks, up to a few hundred megabits.

They do come in different speed ratings though, and those still depend on the condition of your house wiring.

Buy them from somewhere with a good return policy and give em a shot.

Moca is another option if you have coax wiring for cable TV in your house. That's nice cuz it doesn't share bandwidth with power lines.

I've used powerline once or twice, but I'm a heavy user of MoCa. It's basically the same thing except ethernet over Coax cable. My use case is creating wired backhauls for mesh wifi system (or adding wired AP's where stringing ethernet isn't practical)

My experience with PowerLine (TPLink) was really awful. Completely unstable and inconsistent performance.

We then switched to MoCA (ActionTec) and it has been about as good as a direct ethernet cable. Consistent performance and stays up for years at a time. No issues ever.

The performance of each likely comes down to how much noice is on the respective wires. Our electrical network is likely crowded and influenced somewhat by neighbors. However our coax was completely unused and I disconnected it from the outside world (for privacy and noise reduction)

If you have coax outlets in locations useful for networking, I would definitely consider using MoCA instead of PowerLine.

I have it deployed in my attic (one sender in basement, one receiver in attic) because so far I’ve been too lazy to pull Cat6 up there.

I get about 35Mbps and it’s a little flaky, but I haven’t tried to troubleshoot it. It serves my minimal use case (streaming to a very rarely used guest bedroom TV).

I’d use anything else in most cases (including pulling fiber to my detached garage rather than using power line to galvanically isolate the networks).

I’ve not tested it, but my understanding is that powerline networking will not pass (or pass well) a surge suppressor (which might be a problem if you have an updated electrical panel with whole house suppression).

I think I’m one of the few that have had great luck with it. We’ve got an outbuilding which is on a separate circuit than the ring main in the house which has the other end. It still gets a solid 120mbps and no meaningful packet loss, dropouts etc.

I can't remember the details anymore but the craziest bug I ever found was one that would crash the page whenever Chrome's Developer Tools were opened. I ended up having to use an embedded JS-based dev tool to figure out what was going on (I was a pretty junior developer and didn't have any better ideas at the time).

I've started tracking an index of projects and their status in Notion. Then I create an extra page based on a template to put things on hold but make them resumable in the future.

In my index, I track: name, status (active, paused, inactive), description, goal and a link to the archive doc if it exist.

My archive doc looks like this (I generally delete any sections that aren't relevant to keep these easy to create):

  # <TITLE>
  ### *Handoff to Future Me: <project name>*
  ### *Snapshot Date*: <date>
  ---
  ### *Project Summary*
  - *Objective*: Briefly state what you're trying to achieve.
  - *Motivation*: What drove you to start this project?
  - *Current State*: Is it in the ideation phase, research phase, or have you already built something?
  ---
  ### *Essential Context*
  - *Related Projects or Dependencies*: Are there any other projects or tasks that are connected to this one?
  - *Technical Specs*: For example, in your lamp project, what type of metal, what voltage for the lamp, etc.
  - *Non-Standard Tools & Environment*: Any unique or specific tools you're using. For example, a specific code IDE or a special type of screwdriver.
  ---
  ### *Progress and Milestones*
  - *Last Completed Milestone*: What was the last significant thing you accomplished?
  - *Next Steps*: Like you said, for your lamp: research, clean metal, buff, etc.
  - *Stumbling Blocks*: Any challenges you foresee or have encountered?
  - *Any Experiments/Tests Conducted*: Brief on what you've tried and the outcomes.
  ---
  ### *Resources*
  - *Important Files & Locations*: Where are the project assets or codebase stored?
  - *Reference Material*: Links to guides, tutorials, or papers that are crucial.
  - *Key Contacts*: Who can you consult about this? Even if it's an online community.
  ---
  ### *Handoff Summary*
  - *Why Stopping*: Why are you pausing this project?
  ---
  ### *Notes to Future Me*
  - Personal notes, reminders, or advice to your future self about the project.

A closed source app like that seems like the worst choice for an "archive". Better to use a format that you can easily backup and that will still be readable in many years like a simple text file.

The nice thing about plain text, easy to find archives is that they can even be useful (maybe not for yourself any more) if you for some reason can't use your computer any more.