Hacker News: timbaboon

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

timbaboon — Tue, 05 May 2026 16:04:42 +0000

Seen it used in some of the fraud models (I work in insurance). So that's both from the perspective of people trying to claim fraudulently and from suppliers over charging. I can't say how much of a lift we actually get vs existing ML models

New comment by timbaboon in "Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey"

timbaboon — Fri, 01 May 2026 06:35:10 +0000

How often does it correctly identify that the blog post was actually written by Claude or ChatGPT etc? :)

New comment by timbaboon in "Don't feel like exercising? Maybe it's the wrong time of day for you"

timbaboon — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:09:06 +0000

I see, yes, you need to have two, otherwise science cannot happen

New comment by timbaboon in "Don't feel like exercising? Maybe it's the wrong time of day for you"

timbaboon — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 05:56:03 +0000

How many countries should be included before it should be published?

New comment by timbaboon in "Londoners are sick of viral videos telling lies about their city"

timbaboon — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:53:28 +0000

Sunshine in the UK?? :P

New comment by timbaboon in "Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)"

timbaboon — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 18:16:01 +0000

I read the title and felt personally attacked :(

New comment by timbaboon in "Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk"

timbaboon — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:58:57 +0000

Yep. We work with CMT and we’ve both done extensive testing on this. I think that often people don’t necessarily know what a hard braking event actually means, or how it’s quantified. Giving that realtime feedback helps close that gap in understanding

New comment by timbaboon in "Ask HN: What skills do you want to develop or improve in 2026?"

timbaboon — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 11:38:23 +0000

I’ve played guitar for 20 years, but I’ve decided to do something different and just got some drums. I need to spend some time away from work lest I suffer from burnout again…

New comment by timbaboon in "Engineers who dismiss AI"

timbaboon — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 13:23:47 +0000

If anything I’ve learnt more because I’m having to go and find bugs in areas that I’m not super clued up on… yet ;)

New comment by timbaboon in "Ask HN: Is your company still hiring junior engineers?"

timbaboon — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 18:09:09 +0000

Yes, we are. South African company.

New comment by timbaboon in "OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025"

timbaboon — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 14:10:33 +0000

Haha no - then it wouldn't have got a gold medal ;)

New comment by timbaboon in "Ask HN: Does anyone use "AI" features in consumer products?"

timbaboon — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 20:43:32 +0000

I was included in Strava’s beta testing for their AI offering (Athlete Intelligence). It was useful in no way at all, and the prod version out now is no better. Disabled that.

My bank also started offering a chatbot through WhatsApp to let you query transactions etc, but it hallucinated stuff so I’ve stopped that too.

New comment by timbaboon in "Tool to identify poisonous books developed by University of St Andrews"

timbaboon — Sun, 08 Jun 2025 23:10:44 +0000

Haha that’s exactly why I clicked on the story :)

New comment by timbaboon in "Ask HN: Are you afraid to travel to US to tech conferences?"

timbaboon — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 12:59:20 +0000

Yep. I skipped a tech conference in Feb where we announced a major partnership with a Canadian company (I’m from South Africa). I do not want to travel to the US in the current climate.

New comment by timbaboon in "How to turn off Apple Intelligence"

timbaboon — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 17:54:58 +0000

Mine won’t activate because I have Siri and my iPhone set to different versions of English… according to Apple. Both are set to English (South Africa), but it still thinks they are different and so won’t activate. I am not complaining!

New comment by timbaboon in "A new dental scam is to pull healthy teeth to sell you expensive fake ones"

timbaboon — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 16:39:43 +0000

This is exactly what a dentist tried to do to me! My normal dentist wasn’t available so I saw another one (she had great google reviews!). This dentist said I had a tooth that was bad and she would have to do an implant, but then I should do all the teeth around it because otherwise “it will look weird”. She told me it was urgent and had to be done in like a month. Quote was about $10k (I live in South Africa and this amount of money is even more ridiculous here). Then gave me all the info on how I could finance it. I went back to my normal dentist and she said yeah, just need one filling and we’re good. Saw another dentist too, and she also agreed I didn’t need a full set of new teeth.

Anyway, I was chatting to a friend after this experience and it turned out this dentist had sexually harassed him in addition to doing a bunch of unneeded procedures (without telling him what she was doing).

New comment by timbaboon in "Amazon employees: 'I'd rather go back to school than work in an office again'"

timbaboon — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 19:23:54 +0000

Think of all that time spent commuting that could be used delivering share holder value... Now it's wasted, just so that people can come in to the office. SO MUCH WASTED POTENTIAL SHARE HOLDER VALUE

New comment by timbaboon in "Notes on OpenAI's new o1 chain-of-thought models"

timbaboon — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 10:08:27 +0000

The best one I got recently was after I pointed out that the method didn’t exist, it proposed another method and said “use this method if it exists” :D

New comment by timbaboon in "Edinburgh, Scotland makes it illegal to advertise SUVs"

timbaboon — Sun, 16 Jun 2024 22:26:09 +0000

There are many countries where this is not true. Look up loadshedding in South Africa, for example.

New comment by timbaboon in "Ask HN: What is your ChatGPT customization prompt?"

timbaboon — Sun, 26 May 2024 06:37:21 +0000

“Remain neutral on all topics.

Do not start responses with the word "Certainly".

Do not ever lie to me.”

Still doesn’t listen to the second instruction most of the time, and then apologises when I point it out.