Hacker News: thatguymike

New comment by thatguymike in "Waymo Drives Off with South Bay Man's Luggage"

thatguymike — Sun, 03 May 2026 01:10:41 +0000

Agreed - they dont even need to send an employee to do it, they can just send a driverless waymo with the luggage surely!

New comment by thatguymike in "Where the goblins came from"

thatguymike — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 05:18:22 +0000

A decade ago I gave a presentation on automata theory. I demonstrated writing arbitrary symbols to tape with greek letters, just like I’d learned at university. The audience was pretty confused and didn’t really grok the presentation. A genius communicator in the audience advised me to replace the greek letters with emoji… I gave the same presentation to the same demographic audience a week later and it was a smash hit, best received tech talk I’ve given. That lesson has always stuck with me.

New comment by thatguymike in "Cursor Camp"

thatguymike — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 18:48:11 +0000

Well this is incredibly joyful, well done.

New comment by thatguymike in "Men who stare at walls"

thatguymike — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:55:40 +0000

Tech Guy reinvents meditation

New comment by thatguymike in "ARC-AGI-3"

thatguymike — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:32:41 +0000

Curious, that doesn't match the graph up on the Leaderboard page? https://arcprize.org/leaderboard

New comment by thatguymike in "1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6"

thatguymike — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 05:25:59 +0000

That’s… not how the labour market works

New comment by thatguymike in "Tell HN: Happy New Year"

thatguymike — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 15:57:16 +0000

Happy new year from SF. 2025 was about hanging on, balancing a heavy workload and a new baby, but in ways which I’m confident are the right decisions for our future. I did a lot of Becoming An Adult this year, learning to trust myself and my partner, and prioritizing what matters. 2026 will probably be more of the same..! But I am hopeful things should ease up over time.

Happy new year, this community has given me a lot and I’m grateful for you all.

New comment by thatguymike in "Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI"

thatguymike — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 17:14:47 +0000

The conceit here is that it’s the bot itself writing the thankyou letter. Not pretending it’s from a human. The source is an environment running an LLM on loop and doing stuff it decides to do, looks like these letters are some emergent behavior. Still disgusting spam.

New comment by thatguymike in "Ask HN: How do I bridge the gap between PhD and SWE experiences?"

thatguymike — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 15:14:56 +0000

Not easy, but I have a friend who did this by reaching back out to his old professors and colleagues, figuring out what they needed, and ended up doing a swe project in his old lab and built that into a consultancy which does tech partnering for science.

New comment by thatguymike in "The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed"

thatguymike — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 15:16:55 +0000

Based on this article alone, I can believe this is a good thing. The US military suffers incredibly from its monopsony position and without a doubt will get a heavy wakeup call (read: dead young people) next time it has to fight a real war. In addition the army should be the most accountable and results oriented branch of government, since it’s the only one that’s actively oppositional. If we can’t fix procurement there then what hope do we have for the rest of government?

New comment by thatguymike in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

thatguymike — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 22:51:12 +0000

Why doesn’t the government put Cloudflare or something in front of their site?

New comment by thatguymike in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

thatguymike — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 22:49:40 +0000

Oh I was hoping for this but with real birds in my neighborhood. Still neat!

New comment by thatguymike in "The collapse of the econ PhD job market"

thatguymike — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 20:38:39 +0000

Not taking away at all from the message, but: there's something funny about a freehand MSPaint extrapolation appearing in a post about econ PHDs :)

New comment by thatguymike in "Find SF parking cops"

thatguymike — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 20:21:48 +0000

This is great. Watch them take the data down in 3, 2, 1...

Until then I'd love to see trails of where the traffic enforcers have been on the main map, it would make the map more engaging.

New comment by thatguymike in "Vibe Coding Through the Berghain Challenge"

thatguymike — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 16:54:25 +0000

It’s funny, I immediately thought it was LLM but I was fairly confident it was ChatGPT. I suppose the styles are converging more than I thought: too long, lists, “not just x it’s y”, “here’s the X”…

New comment by thatguymike in "OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police"

thatguymike — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 20:29:15 +0000

Good news! It's being worked on, announced in the blog post linked from that article. https://openai.com/index/helping-people-when-they-need-it-mo...

New comment by thatguymike in "Why the Internet Is Turning to Shit"

thatguymike — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 07:58:02 +0000

Getting laid off in our careers is indeed likely, but part of the deal is that it’s not mutually exclusive to becoming a multimillionaire. We work cushy jobs for high pay, with the possibility of absurd payouts, accepting that the deal we get from the industry is good enough to not rock the boat too hard by unionizing. There has been enough excess value to go around.

I think it’s not a coincidence that most of the unionization pushes i hear about are in the Games industry: it’s superficially similar to the software industry but workers are treated much worse for much smaller payouts. If software industry keeps heading in that direction, maybe unions are coming. But the idea of unionizing up until now has been mostly laughable, and proponents haven’t made themselves look informed or relatable by pushing it.

New comment by thatguymike in "An Investigation into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine"

thatguymike — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 00:37:00 +0000

This article suggests it's mostly groups which the democratic party is against, but can't stop because of loose campaign finance regulations. But the posted article suggests the DCCC is involved with Mothership.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/harris-camp-warns-of-democratic...

New comment by thatguymike in "An Investigation into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine"

thatguymike — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 00:35:03 +0000

A fundraising 1.6% efficient fundraising model... This surely can't be true can it? Surely a national scandal if so?

New comment by thatguymike in "British man claims he's unable to watch porn as tattoos confuse age check system"

thatguymike — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 14:11:17 +0000

> The King of Ink Land, who is now considering using a VPN, …

> At the moment, he feels stuck with no clear solution.

Hm.