<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: jtap</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jtap</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 02 Sep 2026 09:25:33 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=jtap" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jtap in "Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Same, but with vision models. Unfortunately, I might be at my limit locally. I have three models that I'm using to find and identify objects in pictures. The largest dataset and model now takes about 8 hours per epoch on my Mac M4 with 16G memory.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 31 Aug 2026 20:51:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49514703</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49514703</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49514703</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jtap in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The app and scanner is heavily inspired by Manabox.  It's a great product, and I would have used that if they did Pokémon, but it's only Magic.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:25:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48892341</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48892341</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48892341</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jtap in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I’ve been continuing work on <a href="https://mybulkcards.com" rel="nofollow">https://mybulkcards.com</a>, a phone app and website for scanning, organizing, and searching Pokémon card collections, especially the thousands of bulk cards that my daughter and I have in our closet from playing.<p>The goal hasn't changed too much, make building decks easier by knowing exactly what you own and where it’s stored. You organize cards into boxes, search your inventory, search friends’ collections, and keep track of trades instead of digging through a similar closet of cards that my daughter and I search for.<p>The fun part has been the AI. I trained computer vision models that run entirely on the phone to detect and identify Pokémon cards. Training has become the slowest part. For the model that needs to be retrained every new release, I’m up to about 5 hours per epoch on my M4 Mac with 16 GB of RAM.<p>The Android app is currently in public testing with people from my local Pokémon league. It’s built with React Native, and I’m working on the iPhone version next.<p>Still lots to build, mostly around product and ux, and because a recent stupid mistake on my part, backups and deployment safeguards.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 04:55:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888085</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888085</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48888085</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jtap in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I’ve continued to work on a phone app + website (<a href="https://MyBulkCards.com" rel="nofollow">https://MyBulkCards.com</a>) to scan Pokemon bulk cards and tag/organize where they are stored.  I added a bunch more features like finding a friend, searching through friends cards, and trading.<p>It's been pretty fun to build.  Trained a couple of models to identify a card that run on the phone app.  They work very well and are comparable, and much better than many, to any other card identifier in the market. As the models get more complicated training is getting a bit longer.  I'm at about 9 hours per epoch on my Mac M4 with 16G of memory.<p>The Android phone app is in public test with a couple of my local group testing. The app is built in React Native, and I’m hoping to get an iPhone version out soon since there are a bunch of iPhone peeps.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:30:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542761</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542761</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48542761</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jtap in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've continued working on a tool for my daughter, our friends, and I to scan and index Pokemon cards. The tool is a phone app and website (<a href="https://MyBulkCards.com" rel="nofollow">https://MyBulkCards.com</a>) The phone app uses the camera to scan a card and run the image through a couple of models, a record is written of the card along with the location. It's pretty basic, but I can store cards in boxes like “Box 1 AAA, Box 1 BBB, …” and find cards easy peasy. There’s also a friends feature so I can see what others have locally. We borrow cards from each other quite a bit.<p>It's been a super fun tool to build.  The phone app just got approved in the Android app store.  I have a bit of cleanup, but plan on releasing it soon.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:50:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48464740</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48464740</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48464740</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jtap in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My daughter introduced me to Pokémon TCG. We found a local group and have been playing for about a year and a half. At this point we have so many bulk cards that it takes way too long to search through them. Other than a few specific pulls we keep in a binder, we honestly have no idea what we own.<p>I’ve been building a phone app + website (<a href="https://MyBulkCards.com" rel="nofollow">https://MyBulkCards.com</a>) to scan cards and organize where everything is. It’s pretty basic right now, but I can store cards in boxes like “Box 1 AAA, Box 1 BBB, …” and find cards easy peasy. There’s also a friends feature so I can see what others have locally. We borrow cards from each other quite a bit.<p>It’s been a fun project to build. I trained one model to find a card in the camera frame and another to identify it. Still iterating a lot. One epoch on my Mac M4 takes about 2 hours, and I’m still seeing improvements past epoch 10. Even now, it can find and identify a card more often than not, even without the OCR bits. Both models are under 20MB, run directly in the camera frame, and are fast enough to identify a card as I slide it into view.<p>I started with Android since that’s what I have, and I’ve shared the app store testing link with my local group for testing. The app is built in React Native, and I’m hoping to get an iPhone version out soon since there are a bunch of iPhone peeps. A couple of the players also got me into MTG, so now I’ve got a pile of Turtles cards too. I’ll be training an MTG model next. I don’t think it’ll be too bad since I can reuse most of the same approach.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 02:12:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47746752</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47746752</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47746752</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jtap in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I started working on <a href="https://billsimplified.com/" rel="nofollow">https://billsimplified.com/</a> an easy to use billing solution that can help me collect taxes and run dunning.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2025 17:01:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45570705</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45570705</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45570705</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jtap in "Show HN: Mktbx.com – Merging LLMs with Expert Systems"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hey HN,<p>I’ve been thinking, for a while now, how I could merge a LLM and an Expert System.  What I wanted was the ease of use of an LLM and the rules based processing of an Expert System. Over the past couple of weeks, I built what I thought was a unique way of merging the two.  I choose to use auto insurance as an example because of my past history in the industry, but I feel as though it would be applicable in other industries.  It’s still very rough around the edges, but if you are interested you can try it out at <a href="https://mktbx.com/#tryout" rel="nofollow">https://mktbx.com/#tryout</a> I’d appreciate any feedback and your thoughts.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 Nov 2024 15:54:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42173554</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42173554</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42173554</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: Mktbx.com – Merging LLMs with Expert Systems]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://mktbx.com/#tryout">https://mktbx.com/#tryout</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42173543">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42173543</a></p>
<p>Points: 1</p>
<p># Comments: 1</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 Nov 2024 15:53:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://mktbx.com/#tryout</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42173543</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42173543</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Ask HN: What email service(s) do you use for your side projects?]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have a couple side projects that I use for my friends, family, and myself.  I'd like to have both an email such as team@mysite.com to send and receive emails that I might want to type out.  I'd also like to be able to send transactional emails, password reset ...  I would think that I'm not the only one with this problem.  What do you all use to achieve this?</p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41594209">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41594209</a></p>
<p>Points: 39</p>
<p># Comments: 48</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Sep 2024 17:30:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41594209</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41594209</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41594209</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jtap in "Ask HN: What have you built with LLMs?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have a couple. A fun one is catchingkillers.com.  Here you are a private investigator who is trying to find out who committed a murder.  Two stories are active.  The third, bathtub one, isn't done.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 11 Sep 2024 05:17:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41508220</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41508220</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41508220</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jtap in "Ask HN: Ideas for LLM-Based Games"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah I did just that. CatchingKillers.com hosts the game. The first two stories are playable.  Sour Grapes of Wrath, taken from an excellent pdf I found online.  The other, The Masquerade Murder of Charleston Manor, is custom story for the game.  The third story hasn't been finsihed. So not really payable. I have set the limit on that gpt account to $5 so I don't get abused, but should be enough for a bunch of runs of the games if someone wants to try.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 03 May 2024 15:10:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40248576</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40248576</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40248576</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jtap in "Ask HN: What have you built with LLMs?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I built out a few utilities as experiments.  One app linked to Salesforce to query/analyze sales data.  Another that reads our help documentation and gives instructions via chat.<p>The last app, the only one that was deployed anywhere, is <a href="https://catchingkillers.com" rel="nofollow">https://catchingkillers.com</a> This app is a simple murder mystery game where the witnesses and the killer are ChatGPT bots.  The first two stories are complete and active, the third is not complete yet.  The first story of the working two is taken from another murder mystery group game <a href="https://www.whodunitmysteries.com/sour.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.whodunitmysteries.com/sour.html</a>. The second story was highly influenced by ChatGPT.<p>It's a bit rough because I didn't spend too much time on it, but if anyone does signup to play, I'd love to hear feedback.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 05 Feb 2024 21:40:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39267611</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39267611</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39267611</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jtap in "Role-playing with AI will be a powerful tool for writers and educators"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've tried something similar with a little side project, <a href="https://catchingkillers.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://catchingkillers.com</a>. The witnesses, chatgpt chat bots, wouldn't have much of an attention span and start making things up.  I think this added to the fun of the game.  You had to question each witness to get verification on what another chat bot said.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 Dec 2023 05:07:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38622930</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38622930</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38622930</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jtap in "Ask HN: What is the best air quality monitor purchasable on Amazon (no DIY)?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not sure if it's the best but I recently bought a "Airthings 2960 View Plus - Radon & Air Quality Monitor".  Choosing the correct app and setup was a bit annoying, but not too bad.  I think setup was about an hour once done.  Also the phone app wanted to read results for a week or so before displaying some info. The device has a screen that will show you the current values.<p>I purchased the device because I was a bit worried about radon and other garbage that I might be breathing while working in my basement office.  Radon and other data points were not a problem.  Turns out C02 was more my problem.  It's pretty surprising how quickly that number rises with a closed door.  I believe I can attribute the tiredness with the C02 levels.  Having history correlates with when I'm in the basement office, and opening a window, it's a walkout basement and I have windows, decreases C02 stat pretty quickly.<p>Overall I'm happy with my purchase, and I'm considering buying another one for the ground level of the house.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 27 Apr 2023 15:55:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35729970</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35729970</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35729970</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jtap in "Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've made a bunch of projects that hit about 80% completion that I never end up finishing. My current projects that I have most recently put in some time are:<p><a href="https://cruisedirector.io/" rel="nofollow">https://cruisedirector.io/</a> I have it running on some of my sites. It continues to run but I have no customers, and I haven't tried to sell it as a service.  Tracks user actions inside an application.  Every click is tracked so you can make rules based on any user clicks and show prompts made with a graphical editor.  For example:  Someone is button smashing, you can ask them for feedback.  Popup a message on first login in the past month... Really lots of fun stuff.<p><a href="https://ezdataloader.com/" rel="nofollow">https://ezdataloader.com/</a> I recompiled some old c# code from about 10 years ago, and with a few tweeks the backend now can run in mac, windows, or linux.  Pretty sweet, other than the interface.  I used electron for an interface and got it working a bit.  But, I haven't put too much time into this one either.  I'm tempted to scrap the downloadable executable, and turn it into a saas app.  Might be a bit easier for customers I'm targeting.  I've been pretty busy at my day job though, and haven't had time for this in the past year or so.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Jan 2023 16:45:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34548158</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34548158</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34548158</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jtap in "High-performance image generation using Stable Diffusion in KerasCV"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Just as another point of reference.  I followed the windows install.  I'm running this on my 1060 with 6GB memory.  With no setting changes takes about 10 seconds to generate an image.  I often run with sampling steps up to 50 and that takes about 40 seconds to generate an image.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 28 Sep 2022 13:48:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33007883</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33007883</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33007883</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jtap in "Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>He presented at an online nanog event.  You can watch it here 
 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo</a> I did enjoy listening.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Aug 2022 14:05:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32412165</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32412165</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32412165</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jtap in "How I took my SaaS from idea to sold in 14 months"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There are a couple negative comments here.  Don't let that get you down.  You've done more than most.  You built a product, validated, and made real money on that product.  Then you exited with a positive payout.  Great job!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 05 Jan 2022 20:12:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29814293</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29814293</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29814293</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jtap in "My wife recently passed away. I used my time off to build her a giant bookshelf"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My father had a couple duplexes, and I learned to hack stuff together pretty well there.  But I did take a class at Woodcraft that was pretty nicely done about 10 years ago.  It was a simple course over a few nights.  I learned a couple woodworking tricks that upped my game, but there were a couple beginners.  Hopefully Woodcraft will start having classes again once things start opening up again.  If so signup and they will teach you how to use the basic tools and more importantly you will walk away with a bit of confidence and knowledge on how to fix mistakes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 01 Oct 2020 15:15:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24651847</link><dc:creator>jtap</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24651847</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24651847</guid></item></channel></rss>