Hacker News: MassiveOwl

New comment by MassiveOwl in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

MassiveOwl — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 19:18:59 +0000

Thanks! This is encouraging. I try to use Claude Code for producing client facing presentations that are static html files with charts, tables, and annotations. It never gets the tone correct and phrases things so weirdly - it drives me mad. I have to really fight it to stop it writing insights in a flowery and verbose way

New comment by MassiveOwl in "AI's top startups are barely publishing their research"

MassiveOwl — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 11:04:09 +0000

What exactly makes it proactive? I created a similar system that ran on a ticker, but then could also set itself to run in n seconds in the future. RSI came from the actions available to the system and granting the ability to modify itself. The prompt was a string of messages made from static and dynamically generated sections (like memories or plans of tasks or outputs from actions taken on the previous turn). It worked really well

New comment by MassiveOwl in "Show HN: GlycemicGPT – Open-source AI-powered diabetes management"

MassiveOwl — Fri, 15 May 2026 11:04:22 +0000

I've done this with the Libre 2 sensor. I added Gemini to it. It gets like 2 weeks of readings at once, and the user can "chat to their data". I added a meals tool as well, where the user can photo their meal, and the ai estimates the impact on the readings.

It's so helpful to offload some the thinking about the condition to ai, all these people moaning about 'muh safety' don't get it. T1D suffers have to think about it all day all the time. A person doesn't have their own blood glucose data in their head.

New comment by MassiveOwl in "The cost of Go's panic and recover"

MassiveOwl — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 10:18:37 +0000

I use recover when i'm unsure on how reliable some legacy code is so that we can emit our telemetry and then exit gracefully.

New comment by MassiveOwl in "Young people are flocking to astrology"

MassiveOwl — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 10:07:40 +0000

I never reveal it at work, there are morons out there that have opinions like "I'm starsign x, and if you're y, then we won't get along". It's so frustrating

New comment by MassiveOwl in "Etsy Strike"

MassiveOwl — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 18:58:43 +0000

Has anyone tried buying art from Etsy recently? It's very difficult to find something that is actually original. Etsy is full of super hero Chinese knockoff poor quality shite

New comment by MassiveOwl in "Grindr and OkCupid Spread Personal Details, Study Says"

MassiveOwl — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 11:37:23 +0000

Be careful with OKCupid. I'd been using it on and off for a while and recently I got a notification saying that my email address on my account had been changed, then 2 minutes later, that my password had. You don't need to confirm anything to change the email on your account! Not even click an email link!

I was panicking

I was still receiving phone notifications despite not being to log into the app. I could see that messages were being sent and received but couldn't access my account. I believe that others are being scammed using my account

I quickly changed all other passwords and contacted OKC immediately. It's been a week now with no response. OKC have lost a paying customer for life

New comment by MassiveOwl in "Rust 1.40"

MassiveOwl — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 18:06:51 +0000

Weird, I write in Go, and based on the number of posts about Rust, i'd assumed that it was gaining traction

New comment by MassiveOwl in "Tesla Cybertruck"

MassiveOwl — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 16:56:01 +0000

If it's really made out of stainless, with those angles wouldn't it fail on pedestrian collision tests?

New comment by MassiveOwl in "My years working on black programs"

MassiveOwl — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 18:05:57 +0000

Ha! I help out the NHS and they're amazed that we are able to autopopulate forms using ActiveDirectory. They're used to paper...

New comment by MassiveOwl in "Creating the Go Programming Language [audio]"

MassiveOwl — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 09:34:15 +0000

I write primarily in Go, I have to admit that I can't stand the name of it. When doing a search I constantly have to write "go golang" in my searches to get relevant results. It's too generically named, like naming something "The"

New comment by MassiveOwl in "Ask HN: How do you deal with professional envy?"

MassiveOwl — Mon, 15 Jul 2019 09:54:14 +0000

I'd be interested in your take on this as someone slightly older than the cliched tech employee.

To be honest, i'm never usually that impressed with people that are in their mid-20s and working as developers. They can typically produce good output, but in my experience they are unable to state 'why' something works well. They're following best practices laid down by people in their 40s/50s years ago. I think they have the energy to not give up and trawl the forums till they get the answer, not necessarily finding the answer by considering the principles underlying the task

New comment by MassiveOwl in "Google employees are listening to Google Home conversations"

MassiveOwl — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 15:03:58 +0000

This is a good point, one of the reasons to use it is for reminders "Hey Google, remind me to visit x at place y"

New comment by MassiveOwl in "My Life Was So Hard After Leaving My Google Job"

MassiveOwl — Fri, 05 Jul 2019 09:32:22 +0000

I find it difficult to read articles like this, the content itself is very interesting to me, but it's wrapped in creative writing bullshit like this:

"I’d step off the bus, route through the CL3 barista in my clanking heels, clutch the hot compostable coffee cup to warm both my hands while I walked to my desk, voicing the american greeting of ’heyhowreyouimgood’ to anyone caught in the path of my morning march."

New comment by MassiveOwl in "Glass Enterprise Edition 2"

MassiveOwl — Tue, 21 May 2019 11:03:26 +0000

As a cyclist and a motorcyclist, I love the idea of Glass. Being able to have a HUD that shows your speed and basic directions is a brilliant tool. You don't have many options for mounting your phone on the handlebar, and doing so requires you to look down, something car driver don't have to suffer from

New comment by MassiveOwl in "Snapchat weighs what was once unthinkable: permanent snaps"

MassiveOwl — Tue, 29 Jan 2019 12:27:56 +0000

I know an analyst at SnapChat, it's not a well managed company at all apparently. The way it was described to me was that a manager of a very popular lemonade stand suddenly is put in charge of Pepsi. They have very talented engineers, and analysts, but the glue to connect the employees - management, is so lacking that it's a shit show

Due to a lack of overall direction and a common goal, teams are isolated in their own silos (which they're good at), but there's no cohesion. At the moment the company is reactive to competitors, not innovative and a leader in the space like what you could argue they were a few years ago

New comment by MassiveOwl in "Design flaw behind MacBook Pro’s “stage light” effect"

MassiveOwl — Tue, 22 Jan 2019 16:52:13 +0000

Seriously don't. I have a 2013 MBP that's my own, then a 2018 MBP that's my work machine. I alternate between working on both and I can't stand the '18's keyboard, it feels similar to typing on mouse buttons, tactile but doesn't register well

Zero difference in the track pad that i've noticed either. This is 3500 GBP machine that is basically just pretty looking and sleek. I do enjoy the touchbar though, although I never expected to - some things are easily done on it, such as changing the colour of terminal windows, or having Spotify constantly live on it (which is great!)

New comment by MassiveOwl in "The creeping IT apocalypse"

MassiveOwl — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 17:46:45 +0000

I was a SQL/Tableau analyst and a SF Admin before I turn to software engineering. SF is truly a fantastic piece of shit to do any proper development for. I am so glad i've stepped away from it. It has been built with the idea to sell to managers that will not be handling the implementations, and with the idea that non-programming staff can configure it. The front end is decent and most people can make it do... something. But custom integrations are just a pain. Salesforce impose lots of fair usage policies on upserts for example.

I was at a Money Transfer company and we couldn't move our Transaction Monitoring staff over to SF without hitting limits

New comment by MassiveOwl in "Field notes: London, England (2018)"

MassiveOwl — Tue, 15 Jan 2019 11:03:06 +0000

In response to this the British police have recently changed the law allowing them to chase and hit motorcyclists with their cars. Last year, the gangs would ride scooters without wearing a helmet. This would mean that the police weren't authorised to chase them, as chasing them could cause them to drive dangerously and harm themselves