Hacker News: mybbor

New comment by mybbor in "Em dashes are fucking amazing"

mybbor — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:24:48 +0000

Em dashes really came on my radar, and I started using and appreciating them after reading Barack Obama's AMA on Reddit. His responses there felt very personal, genuine, and conversational and I think a lot of it had to do with the way he used em dashes (although, looking back at it now, they weren't "proper" em dashes).

New comment by mybbor in "Cloudflare Drop"

mybbor — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 04:55:01 +0000

I co-founded a page builder for WordPress. Myself and my co-founders would joke about the "friends and family" problem. When friends or family asked us to help build their website, we usually pointed them away from our tool+WordPress for something simpler. It's nice to see more options out there that reduce the friction from someone with an idea to something published and sharable.

Several weeks ago, I got frustrated hitting the free tier limits on Netlify, and was looking for a self-hosted solution for this problem. I built it using a DO VPS and Caddy in the backend. It's free on Github. I was able to get the whole thing set up in an hour or two with the help of an agent. Feel free to give it a spin.

https://github.com/RobbyMcCullough/honeydrop

New comment by mybbor in "Wallace the 6 inch f/2.8 telescope, building it, and hiking with it"

mybbor — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 22:09:36 +0000

Yeah! I meant impressive more in the “big sturdy woodwork” sense, not lightweight. They had to hold a heavy mirror and still move smoothly enough to aim by hand. The Dobsonian design, plus Teflon on Formica bearings, made big aperture amateur telescopes way more accessible to hobbyists. From what I gathered it was definitely a “bigger is better” kind of thing, and weight seemed pretty secondary.

New comment by mybbor in "Wallace the 6 inch f/2.8 telescope, building it, and hiking with it"

mybbor — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 21:31:46 +0000

Love this. Thanks for sharing. My friend and I pulled an old Dobsonian telescope of my Dad's from the garage when we were teenagers. We spent hours and hours out with it under the stars, and on cloudy nights I would read a book about telescope construction. Back then, cabinet makers were building the most impressive wood frames. Interesting to see how the technology has changed.

New comment by mybbor in "I used sound waves to make espresso. It could cut coffee‑brewing energy use by ¾"

mybbor — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 18:45:14 +0000

I tend to wake up before my partner, and I can only imagine the look on her face when the ritualistic grinder noise gets joined by a noisy brewer.

In all seriousness, people tend to have a routine around coffee, but I think the Aeropress showed that people will change if the result is meaningfully better.

New comment by mybbor in "Ask HN: Does your mind drift while waiting for AI prompts to finish?"

mybbor — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:17:09 +0000

That's relatable. Sometimes I feel like my short attention span is well-tuned for this kind of workflow, bouncing between the different projects I'm working on and swapping between one or the other while waiting for an AI to complete a task. I also worry that it's exacerbating a bad habit and only going to further impede my ability to actually concentrate.

New comment by mybbor in "Ask HN: What are your best Claude hacks?"

mybbor — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:15:22 +0000

I think one of my favorite workflow hacks is to instruct the various harnesses to use the same format for writing handoffs, instructions, and context for me and for the next agent.

Instead of a Claude.md file, I have all my agents look for and use a generic, agents.md, file and a create/update a humans.md file throughout projects. Regardless of whether I'm using the CLI or a harness app, I almost always create a new folder for new projects, and I'll use subfolders for subprojects.

The humans.md file is for me so I can look at it and remember which harness I was using last. If this was a Claude project, a Codex project, or an OpenClaw project, etc. It also includes some human-readable details to bring me up to speed with the project context. I found this makes it a lot easier to switch models mid-project.

New comment by mybbor in "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?"

mybbor — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:58:51 +0000

Before agentic coding went mainstream, one of my main use cases was creating sticker designs for concerts and music festivals. Creating the stickers and giving them away was a good way to meet new people.

I used OpenClaw to make a health and wellness coach agent that tracks calories and alcoholic drinks and logs it to a personal dashboard. I send it photos of my meals, and it will estimate the calories and log it. It will also help me make meal decisions and give me words of encouragement.

I used this HAM dashboard git repo to create a bespoke dashboard of different video and weather feeds from my area: https://github.com/VA3HDL/hamdashboard

I also, in the same rabbit hole, created a radio reference guide for the Sonoma County area: https://mybbor.com/petaluma-sonoma-ham-radio.html

I've spun up probably close to a dozen one-off or small websites for various little interests or projects. One of my favorites is a short domain file uploader that I can quickly host Markdown and HTML files to share with family, friends, and colleagues. It's using Caddy and running on a DO-VPS. I open sourced the code here: https://github.com/RobbyMcCullough/honeydrop

New comment by mybbor in "Fine-tuning an LLM to write docs like it's 1995"

mybbor — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 19:51:54 +0000

Hi! Love it. The sound effects are a great touch. :)

New comment by mybbor in "Fine-tuning an LLM to write docs like it's 1995"

mybbor — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 19:06:23 +0000

For the last few weeks, I've been running an agentically created AI design publication where each day's issue gets re-imagined in a new design direction. Today the agent used this post as inspiration and built the issue as a Windows 98 help viewer, a nice nod to the manuals in your training corpus.

I jumped in and added working minimize/maximize/close buttons, a draggable window, and a Start menu, because of course. Brought back memories of young me learning Visual Basic to make AOL add-ons.

https://artdirectiondaily.com/issues/2026-06-05-docs-find-a-...

New comment by mybbor in "Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations"

mybbor — Thu, 21 May 2026 21:27:06 +0000

This was helpful to hear. I added Slackmoji and encouraged my colleagues to use it liberally on me.

https://x.com/RobbyMcCullough/status/2057570435936731273

New comment by mybbor in "Today is Y Combinator's 17th birthday"

mybbor — Sat, 12 Mar 2022 16:27:56 +0000

YC has been an invaluable resource for me.

An acquaintance was in the 3rd batch of founders and turned me on to the ecosystem and community here. Around that time, I was a few years out of high school and working for minimum wage at a pizza shop.

I was experimenting with web design, making a few extra dollars running google ads on phpBB forums, and learning to code in the process. I never realized my geeky side could translate into something entrepreneurial until I started spending time here. Tracking the progress of my friend and this community planted a seed that turned into a dream of someday being a founder.

Today, my two business partners and I have been running a successful software business for almost a decade. We were distributed before it was mainstream. We're in the WordPress space and have a team of 20+ people all over the globe. I've had the opportunity to travel, meet investors, smoke cigars with business heroes, sleep in if I want to, and enjoy an exciting and fulfilling life.

I still find myself regularly googling about issues that arise in my company with "hacker news" appended to the end of the query. The stories here helped us navigate a very stressful M&A process and countless other "business stuff" hurdles that we encountered over the years (ie business insurance "hacker news").

YC provided me with direction and inspiration when I was floundering around in my early years. The simple ideas that you don't need an MBA to start a business and being an odd duck is a valuable entrepreneurial trait were life-changing. The community and discussions here are where I come to learn and be inspired. I sincerely hope it continues to be that for myself and others for many more years to come.

Thanks YC!