Hacker News: mikeyouse

New comment by mikeyouse in "Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation"

mikeyouse — Sat, 30 May 2026 02:34:05 +0000

One regular workflow is a reconciliation we do for events that we put on — a number of costs that are expensed, a number of costs that are prepaid until the event happens, individual registration revenue that is recognized immediately and then the corporate sponsorships that are often paid in advance but their recognition is deferred until the event happens. Previously since that involved both balance sheet, income statement and CRM reporting, we relied on an integration vendor to write custom scripts to bring all the info (poorly) into our ERP. Since then, we’ve found a tool leveraging LLMs to ‘join’ those various sources and our events people generally described the report they wanted with a template in excel and it readily created that report with “export to sheets or excel” functionality.

A report that previously took ~4 hours per month for a very expensive resource now takes 30s to validate and can be run completely ad hoc by the events managers.

New comment by mikeyouse in "Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation"

mikeyouse — Fri, 29 May 2026 04:31:34 +0000

Rings true in my org -- finance is a big consumer because all the software shops who do integration work with CRMs and ERPs are garbage and take forever to implement changes and via some clever prompting, you can obviate most of that work.

New comment by mikeyouse in "FBI Arrests CIA Official with $40M in Gold Bars in His Home"

mikeyouse — Thu, 28 May 2026 12:18:16 +0000

Almost assuredly they charged him on the crime easiest enough to get a search warrant and arrest warrant and this original indictment will be superseded with one covering the full gambit of his crimes.

New comment by mikeyouse in "Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term"

mikeyouse — Thu, 28 May 2026 03:10:33 +0000

That’s the academic theory behind these markets, but there’s no actual value to knowing who the most searched celebrity will be or any of this other garbage. It’s just an unregulated casino with guesses about the popularity of Google searches instead of guessing black or red.

New comment by mikeyouse in "Canada to order military plane fleet from Sweden in shift from US suppliers"

mikeyouse — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:49:29 +0000

> Canada only has to patrol its northern border.

At what point on this current trajectory in the US would that change... mostly facetiously, but not entirely..

New comment by mikeyouse in "Private equity bought America's essential services"

mikeyouse — Wed, 27 May 2026 14:58:16 +0000

Not entirely... U Mich's is ~$20 billion, UVA & OSU are both around $8 billion, UCLA's is ~$5 billion, the Texas + Texas A&M system have nearly $50 billion in AUM.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...

New comment by mikeyouse in "Constraint Decay: The Fragility of LLM Agents in Back End Code Generation"

mikeyouse — Sun, 24 May 2026 17:19:33 +0000

I ran into similar issues as we started to roll out LLM generated financials in our org.. I’m so used to the old SQL workflow of “grab this data from this table, that data from that table, combine it into a final result that looks like xxxx” where the tables were outputs from reports in our ERP but I was having terrible results.

Ended up pointing Claude at a few sample files from our existing reporting, gave it read-only oauth access to the ERP and said “build a new report showing the cash by project as calculated by xxxx - yyyy + zzzz in the style of the existing reports” and it basically one-shot from there.

Kind of crazy and I built a bunch of redundant check-sums because I honestly didn’t think it would be able to replace like 6 workdays of effort for the 2 FTEs who generate that kind of thing manually every month but so far so good..

New comment by mikeyouse in "ICE Awards $25M Iris-Scanning Contract to Bi2 Technologies"

mikeyouse — Sun, 24 May 2026 01:01:48 +0000

Torn between anger at all the incompetent chucklefucks getting rich off taxpayer money and gratitude at them bestowing these contracts on useless sycophants instead of competent organizations..

New comment by mikeyouse in "U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators"

mikeyouse — Sat, 23 May 2026 01:33:25 +0000

It's equally important to note that the current administration is absolutely gutting those formerly non-political permanent hires and replacing them with apparatchiks. It's going to be very difficult to remove them all from office if this nightmare ever ends.

New comment by mikeyouse in "Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets"

mikeyouse — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:52:26 +0000

Right. Futures markets exist to hedge some already present risk.. airlines can buy fuel futures to protect against the risk of fuel price rises, etc. Prediction markets create a new source of risk.

New comment by mikeyouse in "CISA Admin Leaked AWS GovCloud Keys on GitHub"

mikeyouse — Tue, 19 May 2026 20:24:50 +0000

Per the EO that established DOGE, each Agency head established a 4-member DOGE team consisting of a lead, an engineer, a HR specialist and an attorney. Those DOGE teams absolutely did fire thousands of employees after EO 14210 called for huge RIFs across the government.

New comment by mikeyouse in "US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI"

mikeyouse — Sat, 16 May 2026 20:10:54 +0000

At the expense of much worse inflation..

New comment by mikeyouse in "Anthropic forms $200M partnership with the Gates Foundation"

mikeyouse — Thu, 14 May 2026 17:18:56 +0000

He’s donated something like $100 billion already… there’s no chance he’s buying farmland as an inheritance tax dodge.

New comment by mikeyouse in "Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)"

mikeyouse — Wed, 13 May 2026 19:14:52 +0000

Yeah it’s weird how they obfuscate some and surface different emails - this one seems to have both in normal and incognito mode: https://www.fastpeoplesearch.com/mark-lord_id_G-414558371175...

New comment by mikeyouse in "Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)"

mikeyouse — Wed, 13 May 2026 18:47:43 +0000

The internet is weirdly good for creeping on people with this level of detail —

https://nationalpublicdata.com/people/l/mark-lord/nv/reno/pd...

Looks like you can reach him at mark84@gmail if you want to say ‘hi’.

New comment by mikeyouse in "Starship V3"

mikeyouse — Wed, 13 May 2026 11:26:25 +0000

Antarctica might be okay as a demo site on that front; https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QK5M_UfofRU

New comment by mikeyouse in "Testing UPS Output Waveforms"

mikeyouse — Tue, 12 May 2026 20:55:11 +0000

Modern furnaces are weirdly sensitive to ‘clean’ AC power. Mine won’t work on bad non-inverter backup generators and interestingly to me, doesn’t work on non-bonded (ground-neutral) power from an inverter generator. Had to chop the cord off a drill and build a bonding plug last winter when I finally figured out why it wouldn’t run.

https://rvelectricity.substack.com/p/diy-generator-bonding-p...

New comment by mikeyouse in "I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left"

mikeyouse — Sun, 10 May 2026 14:24:37 +0000

Sure, but providing estimated costs based on reasonable pricing buckets alongside the options to add the new machine is something that every other vendor manages to do..

New comment by mikeyouse in "Agents for financial services and insurance"

mikeyouse — Thu, 07 May 2026 23:26:00 +0000

Yeah the ones that were just fraud we termed almost immediately.. there were a few in the middle ground of where they’d lost their receipts (or decided that fabricating a receipt was easier) but we could verify that the expense actually took place from a cc statement. We added an extra approval step for those employees going forward which is annoying for everyone involved so hopefully they’ve learned their lesson there.

New comment by mikeyouse in "California leaders report four to six weeks worth of gasoline and diesel supply"

mikeyouse — Thu, 07 May 2026 23:18:07 +0000

I’ve done the same, ran a new 100A feed to a subpanel by the pool as well.. but that’s probably 1/100 home owners comfortable with doing so?