Hacker News: guywithahat

New comment by guywithahat in "We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees"

guywithahat — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 03:30:18 +0000

> it [gmail] runs its own reputation system that has absolutely nothing to do with anyone else’s opinion of you. If you don’t do certain things “correctly” (meaning Gmail’s own definition), you get marked as spam.

I mean that's correct; I choose email providers in part due to their spam protection. I don't want to follow what a company believes is the right amount of emails, I want to decide and if they fail they should be blocked. I wouldn't be surprised if that 99% sendgrid rating is either due to some dark pattern or because everything is already being sent to spam except for those who specifically allow it.

New comment by guywithahat in "Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation"

guywithahat — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 14:57:55 +0000

There is a humor that these law firms won a case against Meta and the first thing they did is give them advertising money won from the court case. That said the ads sound pretty aggressive, and from what I've read it sounds like it wasn't a very fair decision. I understand the conflict of interest but I have sympathies for Meta here

New comment by guywithahat in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

guywithahat — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:02:04 +0000

I've been making a seabed simulation of the seabed for interacting with polymetallic nodules. The idea is these nodules contain a lot of cobalt, but due to their location on the seafloor they're had to access, making mining difficult.

It took me a while but I finally got my hands on some polymetallic nodules (basically the rocks you find on the seabed that contain cobalt) which I'm scanning and will hopefully have uploaded soon. Tragically the nodules were damaged through shipping but it's all I have, especially since the first shipment was stolen off my porch lol. It's build with Project Chrono using C++ https://github.com/thansen0/seabed-sim-chrono

New comment by guywithahat in "The SpaceX IPO: retail investor notes"

guywithahat — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:46:52 +0000

At no point did I say it was likely, if I knew what any stock would be worth in 20 years I'd be day trading from a Miami condo. It's just possible. People who claim to know the future don't, and SpaceX could explode in value in 20 years or it could be worthless.

New comment by guywithahat in "A macOS bug that causes TCP networking to stop working after 49.7 days"

guywithahat — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:26:35 +0000

Arduino too; I assume they all have to do with storing milliseconds in a uint32_t, and then getting unpredictable behavior when it rolls over

New comment by guywithahat in "NYC families need over $125k in income to live in any borough"

guywithahat — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:22:19 +0000

"With this new program we will be able to measure the problem more closely than ever before!" - a NYC bureaucrat somewhere, probably

New comment by guywithahat in "The SpaceX IPO: retail investor notes"

guywithahat — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:32:30 +0000

I don't know what the correct value is, however my understanding of IPO's is that a bank buys (underwrites) the shares first and then lists them. This would suggest a large bank has taken a massive financial bet on the company, and I trust they understand the market and SpaceX's current value.

I know this is a lame answer because it's an appeal to authority, but I don't have an opinion on the share price other than very knowledgeable people have agreed it's fair and put up a lot of their own money.

What I do have an opinion on is that I think there's plenty of room for them to expand the market and grow. I also know the EBITDA for SpaceX is outrageously high for a hardware company, would would suggest it's a lucrative industry that others have trouble entering with low recurring costs. It seems likely to me they could continue to grow on 15 billion of revenue, and this growth is likely to be profitable.

New comment by guywithahat in "The SpaceX IPO: retail investor notes"

guywithahat — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:20:34 +0000

I would argue all stock prices are speculative, they could quarter their share price in a month or they could 4x it. I've found myself constantly surprised when I look at a company, think "what else could they do?", and then watch the company explode in value again. I disagree that their share price assumes some unspecified massive success

New comment by guywithahat in "Japanese X is now America's favorite corner of the internet"

guywithahat — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:14:27 +0000

Can confirm Japanese X is great, the translate feature in general is a lot of fun and works incredibly well, I didn't realize the tweets were translated for the longest time.

New comment by guywithahat in "The SpaceX IPO: retail investor notes"

guywithahat — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 15:00:47 +0000

> The SpaceX IPO in 2026 is unlikely to mirror the 500x or 1,000x returns of early Amazon or Google

I don't think this is right; when Google first IPO'd the sentiment was that they had a single successful product, search, and the stock was expected to track search. Now they have a whole suite of successful products.

Similarily SoaceX is viewed as a rocket company, but they're likely to continue to expand their product range, and for all we know some of their future products could be bigger and more profitable.

New comment by guywithahat in "Iran war sparks renewables boom as Europeans rush to buy solar, heat pumps, EVs"

guywithahat — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:04:39 +0000

And to further your point mass immigration into Europe isn't just recent; it's been happening for decades. For a while the Islamic state was encouraging attacks in Europe, and hundreds of people were killed by jihadists running cars through Christmas parades and similar events which peaked ~2016 and 2017. I think the largest was an attack in Nice, France on Bastille day killing 86 and injuring hundreds (https://grokipedia.com/page/2016_Nice_truck_attack) and another famous one I can think of was the christmas market attack in Berlin, killing 12 and injuring 56 (https://grokipedia.com/page/2016_Berlin_truck_attack). These were the result of economic immigration, unrelated to anything specific the US had done.

New comment by guywithahat in "'Worst in Show' CES products include AI fridges, AI companions and AI doorbells"

guywithahat — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:57:25 +0000

Ehh worst in show should be "this tech doesn't work" or "this is a silly, impossible to achieve use case", not "I disagree with their privacy terms"

New comment by guywithahat in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

guywithahat — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:11:00 +0000

I don't understand this sentiment. I'm absolutely significantly more productive with AI; so much moreso that I now have freetime and we haven't needed to replace an engineer who left. On the flip side my coworkers who think they're above AI are drowning. I think there is an endemic problem of senior engineers who think they're above learning AI and agents who don't want to use them, and these cuts are about forcing them to get with the times or drown in work.

Replacing jobs is a bit of a misnomer, but it's certainly allowing us to build out more features in shorter amounts of time.

New comment by guywithahat in "New York City hospitals drop Palantir as controversial AI firm expands in UK"

guywithahat — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 22:18:11 +0000

In some regards I'd almost rather Palantir runs it, since the DoW would force them to implement very strict data isolation features which hospitals could then get for free. I wouldn't imagine Epic Healthcare Systems would be forced to isolate data so aggressively.

That said I also recognize the moral dilemma and understand why they'd pull out. Frankly I'm surprised they did much work with hospitals at all

New comment by guywithahat in "I tried to prove I'm not AI. My aunt wasn't convinced"

guywithahat — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 19:04:40 +0000

Could you say that stuff with llama 3? Llama 2 famously had a good uncensored version but I thought they put a lot of work into ruining llama 3 so you couldn't fine-tune it to say bad things. Even Grok would be hard to use in such a way that you could say phrases like that naturally.

I do believe it's possible but as far as I am aware, getting LLM's to say that sort of stuff is still pretty difficult

New comment by guywithahat in "Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case"

guywithahat — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:50:22 +0000

It sounds like an adult was awarded $6 million because she watched a lot of youtube/instagram as a kid. Literally any social media site would be guilty of this; I hate to say it but we need better corporate protections if cases like this are allowed to enter court.

At least legal experts are critical of the decision: '“I don’t think it should have ever gotten to a jury trial,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law'

New comment by guywithahat in "Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?"

guywithahat — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:11:30 +0000

I guess I don't see how your comment is useful. If LLM's/AI are not generating code for your team, you need to update your processes. Telling someone they can't run faster than a car isn't evangelicalism of cars, and it wouldn't be counterproductive to tell someone who works at a shipping company they should be using vehicles to ship packages.

New comment by guywithahat in "Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?"

guywithahat — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:59:55 +0000

Because it's a tool which must be used properly. I've encountered senior engineers who, while great on their own complain that AI isn't good at code gen. When I talk to them about it they're using terrible free models and not putting in effort to understand how LLM's work. Agents can now write thousands of lines of code across large codebases following specs closely on levels that are simply impossible for teams of humans to do.

Humans simply cannot code as well as an LLM/Agent in most cases. It's like fighting a bear, and if you think you can beat an adult brown bear you're probably wrong.

New comment by guywithahat in "Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls"

guywithahat — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:52:07 +0000

I'm not sure if that's true? There are a few companies in every industry who pay well above average, and then most jobs pay a more normal salary (110-150 would be my estimate). Maybe you're just not looking at the top companies anymore? Even if it was dropping through I don't see how that's relevant

New comment by guywithahat in "Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?"

guywithahat — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:46:45 +0000

I'm not sure if this is a joke but the field is advancing so dramatically it's hard to stop talking about it. Every week at work I have to show a new AI feature to an executive, about how we can now write 1000's of lines of codes in minutes at a higher quality than the greatest engineers. This necessitates new tools and new purchases, as well as team and org shifts.

If you're reading this and your life hasn't been thrown into disarray you're likely just behind the times. There are a lot of people who are deep in tech who still don't understand what agents and LLM's can do