Hacker News: doctoboggan

New comment by doctoboggan in "Show HN: I built a navigation app that displays weather along the route"

doctoboggan — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:38:05 +0000

I’ve wanted something like this, but optimized for star gazing during road trips. I’d love for your tool to be able to tell me the best place stop along my route taking into account my expected travel location, light pollution, cloud cover, moon position, etc.

I live and spend most of my time in cities, so long road trips are some of my bests chances for seeing good stars out in the country.

Would your tool be adaptable to this use case?

New comment by doctoboggan in "System Card: Claude Mythos Preview [pdf]"

doctoboggan — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:49:31 +0000

Is this benchmaxxed or is it the first big step change we've seen in a while? I wonder how distilled it will ultimately be when us regular folks finally get to use it and see for ourselves.

New comment by doctoboggan in "Solar and batteries can power the world"

doctoboggan — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:09:28 +0000

Based on your response timestamp I will conclude you didn't watch the video. He "does it rationally" like you requested. You said "try not to blame anyone" so if you'd rather not hear about the people who actually are to blame for this situation, then skip the last 30 minutes of the video.

New comment by doctoboggan in "Was the Iran War Caused by AI Psychosis?"

doctoboggan — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:57:59 +0000

This is coming from the Saudi royal family, which is obviously not a neutral party. However the reporting seems plausible. Does anyone know the reputation of houseofsaud.com or if there is any other reporting on this topic?

New comment by doctoboggan in "I built an AI receptionist for a mechanic shop"

doctoboggan — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:32:22 +0000

Maybe I am in the minority here, but I appreciate the new crop of LLM based phone assistants. I recently switched to mint mobile and needed to do something that wasn't possible in their app. The LLM answered the call immediately, was able to understand me in natural conversation, and solved my problem. I was off the call in less than a minute. In the past I would have been on hold for 15-20 minutes and possibly had a support agent who didn't know how to solve my problem.

New comment by doctoboggan in "Intuitions for Tranformer Circuits"

doctoboggan — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 05:21:22 +0000

No, I don't think you are missing anything. Only recently have engineers been inventing things from "first principles". I think for the majority of human civilization we've mostly invented and improved through trial and error.

New comment by doctoboggan in "Launch HN: Voltair (YC W26) – Drone and charging network for power utilities"

doctoboggan — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 06:14:24 +0000

Hey, I just did this as well, but with 180 acres of very rugged ravines in rural Kentucky near red river gorge. I only paid $700 though.

My goal was to find all the old logging roads on the property, so I could revive them as hiking and 4x4 trails. This worked excellently as the resolution of the lidar was even better than he quoted and the roads stand out easily (especially after some face coloring based off of slope in blender).

Was your operator a licensed surveyor? Mine was definitely not and (politely) asked me to change my google review to remove any reference to the word "land survey" since he was not licensed to do that.

New comment by doctoboggan in "macOS 26 breaks custom DNS settings including .internal"

doctoboggan — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:25:58 +0000

Yeah I've been doing this as well. I know it's a minor nit, but I wish that TLD was shorter. I've used *.local in the past but that has bitten me too many times.

New comment by doctoboggan in "Analysing the First Solid-State Battery [video]"

doctoboggan — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:57:29 +0000

This YouTuber has been following the donut labs saga since the announcement. He has a PhD in a related area and is able to bring some good ideas to the discussion.

Analysing the First Solid-State Battery [video]

doctoboggan — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:55:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNX47A8BysE

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47442428

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by doctoboggan in "Google Workspace CLI"

doctoboggan — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 05:09:14 +0000

Yes, it most likely is. Click on the "x hours ago" and then flag the comment. That's the best way I've found to deal with these.

New comment by doctoboggan in "MacBook Neo"

doctoboggan — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:45:02 +0000

I think this is now the one you should be telling your friend to get (unless they are a developer or professional in which case they probably aren’t asking your opinion)

Claude hits #1 on the App Store as users rally behind Anthropic

doctoboggan — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 02:23:50 +0000

Article URL: https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/01/claude-hits-1-on-the-app-store-as-users-rally-behind-anthropics-government-standoff/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47213124

Points: 105

# Comments: 2

New comment by doctoboggan in "Google Street View in 2026"

doctoboggan — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:20:34 +0000

I think it's the same tech they use to make the "3d" background photos on the iPhone wallpaper, which is probably also the same tech used for inferring depth when converting a normal photo to a spatial photo for viewing on an AVP.

New comment by doctoboggan in "The rise of eyes began with just one"

doctoboggan — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 02:40:07 +0000

A photosensitive patch of cells could be wired directly to motor cells/muscles on the opposite side, which would allow the organism to swim toward the light (maybe useful for feeding or migrating, etc.)

New comment by doctoboggan in "Thank HN: You helped save 33k lives"

doctoboggan — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 02:24:02 +0000

I remember Watsi being posted years ago. I was a recent graduate then and didn’t really have the funds but I do now so I just donated to Philip’s cause! Thank you!

New comment by doctoboggan in "Ask HN: How to get started with robotics as a hobbyist?"

doctoboggan — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 18:00:09 +0000

Buy an Arduino and some hobby servos and tinker with them.

But ideally you would have a goal in mind. what do you want your robot to do? (pass butter?) Once you have a goal then you will be able to focus on just what you need to learn to achieve that goal.

New comment by doctoboggan in "Show HN: I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986"

doctoboggan — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 08:41:09 +0000

I think it comes from the RLHF. If you haven't interacted with LLMs enough to get turned off by it, I think that kind of speech is seen as powerful and confident.

New comment by doctoboggan in "Show HN: I spent 3 years reverse-engineering a 40 yo stock market sim from 1986"

doctoboggan — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 06:20:25 +0000

Really interesting, thanks for sharing!

I know it almost sounds crass, but you should consider letting an LLM take a crack at transpiling the code. Source to source translations are one of the most widely agreed upon strengths of LLMs.

New comment by doctoboggan in "GLM-5: Targeting complex systems engineering and long-horizon agentic tasks"

doctoboggan — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 05:37:34 +0000

Can you use the models you get through Gemini Ultra in Claude Code? If not, what coding tool do you use?