Hacker News: macartain

New comment by macartain in "How are folks affordably self-training in AI?"

macartain — Sun, 10 May 2026 23:42:07 +0000

Good shout - particularly for learning, I assume, rather than getting the most productive reply from a SOTA model.

New comment by macartain in "How are folks affordably self-training in AI?"

macartain — Sun, 10 May 2026 23:40:14 +0000

I accept you have to invest in your skills occasionally, but there are so many providers to choose from. Anyway, thanks a lot for the suggestions - I am now looking into these.

How are folks affordably self-training in AI?

macartain — Sat, 09 May 2026 15:36:37 +0000

I am an engineer at a small organisation - there is no question of budget being available to buy us accounts with any of the major model providers. How are other folks in my position managing to keep their AI integration skills up to speed? Most free or low-budget courses I see online - e.g. at DeepLearning - seem to assume a paid account. At the moment i cannot justify that outlay.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48075805

Points: 7

# Comments: 9

New comment by macartain in "Snowball Earth may hide a far stranger climate cycle than anyone expected"

macartain — Sat, 09 May 2026 10:47:38 +0000

Much appreciated - living in the UK, I have heard of Doggerland and should have expected there would be plenty of similar areas worldwide - this is interesting stuff.

New comment by macartain in "US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos"

macartain — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:26:11 +0000

Use that internet thing to pop them on a 'website' and we can all take a look, no?

New comment by macartain in "Snowball Earth may hide a far stranger climate cycle than anyone expected"

macartain — Sat, 02 May 2026 09:31:45 +0000

It's increasingly accepted that a large portion of human history is 100M underwater on the continental shelves, estuaries, and other coastal areas where humans would have liked to live.

Any references for that? Genuine question.

New comment by macartain in "Any Open Source projects in need of documentation writer?"

macartain — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 09:55:37 +0000

I came here to say something like "This is a joke, right?" Not to be snarky, but because I just assume everyone throws the Inevitable Looming Tool at docs, especially where resource is scarce.. but this point has already come up and I suppose there is some truth in the idea that folks detect AI and are often put off by it - but while I think that's true in creative/blog pieces, is it really true in formal docs? For me that is in the same column as cancer cures, gene comprehension, room temperature fusion wrangling etc. - the 'lets-get-AI-onto-it-pronto' column...

Anyway, my vapid observations aside, I have a couple of related questions:

- I too would be willing, even keen, to contribute to good documentation of FOSS projects that need it and that I am interested in - a huge barrier to me is that a person needs sufficient understanding to really contribute, don't they? To the point that you pretty much need to get into the code quite deeply or else endlessly pester committers to explain how it works? OK, I am generalising, but it seems valid in the main. A while ago, I observed on a relevant list that the libvirt documentation of how to take qemu snapshots was amazingly fragmented, inconsistent and out of date and this led to comments that I should step up and produce some PRs - but my whole point was that this sh1t is hard to understand without very good docs! I would barely know where to start and I would be very hesitant about making definitive statements...

- As for improving doc structure - and this is a serious consideration as soon as you sit down to think about this stuff - I came across and adopted the https://diataxis.fr/ framework a few years ago.. I have to say the uptake among my co-workers has been dismal. Can anyone suggest doc frameworks or approaches that are more motivating, have less friction, whatever?

New comment by macartain in "As US missiles leave South Korea, the Philippines asks: are we next?"

macartain — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:33:27 +0000

much appreciated!

New comment by macartain in "As US missiles leave South Korea, the Philippines asks: are we next?"

macartain — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 17:27:13 +0000

Oh hey - the TLA/milspeak guy (gal?). I wouldn't wish more typing upon you but I would love if you could do a bit more 'longhand' so I could have a better grasp of some of the stuff you say - genuinely not being snarky, you seem to have great and informed insights! Thanks!

New comment by macartain in "Rendezvous with Rama"

macartain — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:20:21 +0000

I have been lusting after a decent visual interpretation of Ringworld ever since I read it decades ago... I was thrilled to hear Halo was set on a ringworld and - because I am diehard Nintendo guy - had to go to a mate's house to see it on his XBox.. I spent ages wandering about looking up, but it wasn't quite what I was after and hey, given the era, the graphics were not up to much. I am still amazed it has not been well done in a film or game or VR to this date - at least afaik, i am open to suggestions. (One of the most visually plausible habitats in film imho was in Elysium and I always feel this film has been a little overlooked. The parallels with the modern world's refugee issues are overstated but I thought incredibly compelling.)

New comment by macartain in "Rendezvous with Rama"

macartain — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 09:31:00 +0000

For genuine, believable oddness - although the SF pigeonhole seems restrictive - I would recommend the utterly unique M. John Harrison, specifically the later Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. The much earlier Centauri Device pops up on lots of lists but although it is entertaining and original, is not in the same league. Definitely more in common with the Strugatsky brothers than Clarke - humans fixated on commerce and sex, much more than technology.. quantuum weirdness bleeding into the occult... a galaxy-wide, neon-lit rust-belt. If there is anyone else doing anything remotely like him then I am all ears - sadly, I have read it all! I also felt that Tchaikovsky's ideas are striking and well thought-out, but I did not encounter any people in his books. Peter Watt definitely interesting but often unnecessarily hard to parse, I thought? Must revisit Reynolds - only tried one many years ago...

New comment by macartain in "Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking"

macartain — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:54:33 +0000

It's not that you weren't thinking. It's that you weren't thinking /right/...?

New comment by macartain in "Show HN: Customizable OSINT dashboard to monitor the situation"

macartain — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 19:44:57 +0000

Interesting.. Minor point: it would be good to know what each of the default panels is? not entirely clear to me?

Intrigued by spiderfoot, but seeing that the last release - from that repo anyway - was in 2022, I assume the action has moved elsewhere, given that this is a very quickly changing field - anyone know?

Both of these make me realise how out of date my copy of Bazzell's OSINT Techniques is..

New comment by macartain in "We're learning more about what Vitamin D does"

macartain — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 13:42:01 +0000

whereas i heard it was POHM (Prisoner of Her Majesty) stencilled on clothing and articles of folks who had been "transported"..

New comment by macartain in "What you can get for the price of a Netflix subscription"

macartain — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 15:03:23 +0000

I find the free version of plex - once I config out all their own streaming junk - is perfectly good.. (and it runs acceptably on my ancient synology) Are there any compelling reasons for me to look in to jellyfin?

New comment by macartain in "My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before"

macartain — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 17:16:33 +0000

Checks out - for a while there, the future seemed appealing.. right now, I would guess most folks would prefer to escape into the past.

New comment by macartain in "I audited 47 failed startups' codebases"

macartain — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 14:27:55 +0000

you think?!? doesn't read like it at all to me...

New comment by macartain in "Show HN: I built a simple ambient sound app with no ads or subscriptions"

macartain — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 21:45:32 +0000

Meh.. Needs ios18.. But thank you - I salute the effort!

New comment by macartain in "10k pushups and other silly exercise quests that changed my life"

macartain — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 17:39:12 +0000

Agree this is very inspiring - I suspect many folks out there might respond to a simple approach like this. I have fallen off several wagons in this regard, Convict Conditioning and the Busy Dad Routine most recently - generally because, although fun and encouraging initially, they are just too much faff from an administrative perspective!

I am up for this! One question: do you accrue push-ups during the day in a 'greasing the groove' type approach and then stick in the total at end of day? Or more of a session? Just curious what was successful for you...

New comment by macartain in "Indefinite Backpack Travel"

macartain — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 08:08:24 +0000

Great thought. Hereafter-based hosting. Why shouldn't you be in control of your data after the Rapture? That's going to be a big dollar...