Hacker News: tomkat0789

New comment by tomkat0789 in "South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots"

tomkat0789 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 02:04:33 +0000

I’ve always wondered what is unique about semiconductors that PhDs need to work like assembly line workers. I’m sure they’re not solving partial differential equations all day, but what’s so different between different batches of chips?

New comment by tomkat0789 in "Bunk beds for economy passengers take off on Air New Zealand's new planes"

tomkat0789 — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 03:30:01 +0000

This looks awesome! Before the pandemic I’d take a 16 hour flight leaving at midnight to where my wife’s family lives in Asia. This takes flying closer to long trains and it could be good!

New comment by tomkat0789 in "Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task"

tomkat0789 — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 03:32:11 +0000

Was it this one? This article has stayed with me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44100677

New comment by tomkat0789 in "Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (May 2025)"

tomkat0789 — Fri, 02 May 2025 02:56:30 +0000

SEEKING WORK Location: Chicago, IL Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Python, scikit-learn, pandas, numpy, scipy, MATLAB, C LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-thomas-01702183/ Email: mthomasmail@gmail.com

I'm a senior data scientist with a multidisciplinary engineering background spanning chemicals, renewable energy, and aerospace. Past projects have included abnormal event detection in chemical and energy systems, optimization, and signal processing and classification. I'm ready to take on any problem, in any industry, big or small, in data science, machine learning, forecasting, optimization, statistics, and any sort of modeling.

Reach out if you have questions about how you can extract knowledge from your large pile of industrial data. I'm always excited to learn about a new industry!

New comment by tomkat0789 in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2025)"

tomkat0789 — Fri, 02 May 2025 02:45:54 +0000

  Location: Chicago, IL
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Python, scikit-learn, pandas, numpy, scipy, MATLAB, C
  Résumé/CV: Available on request
  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-thomas-01702183/
  Email: mthomasmail@gmail.com

I'm a senior data scientist with a multidisciplinary engineering background spanning chemicals, renewable energy, and aerospace (I'm ready to adapt to a new industry if necessary!). Past projects have included abnormal event detection in chemical and energy systems, optimization, and signal processing and classification. I'm ready to take on any problem, in any industry, big or small, in data science, machine learning, forecasting, optimization, statistics, and any sort of modeling.

I can do full time employment if you have big problems, or contracts if you only have a few little problems. I'm comfortable with developing and maintaining cloud-based, containerized, ETL services.

New comment by tomkat0789 in "LinkedIn is now using everyone's content to train their AI tool"

tomkat0789 — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 20:31:12 +0000

the new way all these online services suck

New comment by tomkat0789 in "Loneliness trajectories are associated with midlife conspiracist worldviews"

tomkat0789 — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 01:11:58 +0000

“results from a population-based sample of Norwegians followed for almost three decades, from adolescence into midlife (N = 2215).”

Nice! Largish sample size and 3 decades of following the subjects around! I wonder what else this group is learning.

The conclusion makes sense. When you’re by yourself too much your mind can get stuck going in circles without somebody to bounce ideas off of.

New comment by tomkat0789 in "'Better than a real man': young Chinese women turn to AI boyfriends"

tomkat0789 — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 03:30:44 +0000

I wonder if the article itself was written by an AI. The style seemed strange to me.

New comment by tomkat0789 in "Comparing Tech Used for Apollo, Artemis NASA Missions"

tomkat0789 — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 18:50:42 +0000

+1, I enjoyed that talk. He showed a diagram of the Artemis mission plan and said, “Does this make sense!?”

He also referred to a publication NASA created after Apollo titled “What made Apollo a Success” which is good reading: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720005243/downloads/19...

“They gave you the playbook!” Lots of stuff that I’m glad somebody stood up and told the Artemis engineers and managers.

New comment by tomkat0789 in "James Webb Space Telescope captures high-resolution image of Uranus"

tomkat0789 — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 19:04:35 +0000

From your link;

“Near the solstice, one pole faces the Sun continuously and the other faces away, with only a narrow strip around the equator experiencing a rapid day–night cycle, with the Sun low over the horizon. On the other side of Uranus's orbit, the orientation of the poles towards the Sun is reversed. Each pole gets around 42 years of continuous sunlight, followed by 42 years of darkness.”

Very different from Earth! Wow.

Forget Oil. Wildcatters are drilling for “geologic” hydrogen

tomkat0789 — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 14:52:25 +0000

Article URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2023/06/26/forget-oil-new-wildcatters-are-drilling-for-limitless-geologic-hydrogen/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36493737

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by tomkat0789 in "Mark Twain's two-week stint as a Confederate soldier"

tomkat0789 — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:54:27 +0000

Twain’s escape West is an entertaining memoir! He did a little bit of everything and accumulated some great (if a bit tall) tales. I remember it has the story of his first stand up comedy act, including a description of some people he paid to sit in the front row and laugh at everything. Getting scammed, getting lost, a gold prospector who worked with a cat, and a great story about a goat… “Roughing It” has it all.

New comment by tomkat0789 in "Difficult to impossible travel across wide swaths of the U.S."

tomkat0789 — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 04:38:36 +0000

I switched from spammy weather apps and other sites to just using the NOAA years ago! The maps are basic but show me what I need as well!

My tax dollars at work! I’m very pleased.

New comment by tomkat0789 in "43 Hours on the Amtrak Southwest Chief"

tomkat0789 — Sat, 04 Feb 2023 05:13:40 +0000

With all the lawyers in this country you’d think one of them on the train would use their hours long delay to assemble a law suit against the freight rail companies. What an insulting deal for taxpayers!

New comment by tomkat0789 in "Ask HN: What do you think when companies ask for gritty people?"

tomkat0789 — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 01:54:34 +0000

Work for 10 people, but they only want to hire 3.

SOURCE: my current company likes me and the other 2 gritty software engineers.

New comment by tomkat0789 in "George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf"

tomkat0789 — Sun, 17 Jul 2022 23:25:05 +0000

Yes! I spent many hours with Legos growing up!

I also remember playing a basic little kid video game about road construction. You’d select various heavy machinery to plow snowy roads and build bridges. I vaguely remember laying down pavement for a road being very satisfying.

New comment by tomkat0789 in "George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf"

tomkat0789 — Sun, 17 Jul 2022 16:26:31 +0000

I think he highlights some fundamentally toxic aspects of human nature with this bit:

“The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do.”

The engineer in me wishes we could substitute the soldiers with construction workers or something, but I can’t deny enjoying war games growing up. These days “peace games” like Stardew Valley are more appealing to me, but maybe I’ma little odd.

New comment by tomkat0789 in "Ask HN: Recommendations on how to become a Git expert?"

tomkat0789 — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 04:45:43 +0000

I’m not a git expert, but little visualizers like these helped me get comfortable (coding work on and off for 10 years) with git bash:

https://learngitbranching.js.org/ https://ohmygit.org/

Merge conflicts are usually pretty tedious but not something I fear. I’d have to Google to know what precisely rebase or bisect are useful for.

My coworkers have used gui tools to deal with git and I can’t understand how those work/translate to the commands. Git commit, add, push, status, and diff have gotten me pretty far!

Hopefully that helps!

New comment by tomkat0789 in "Amazon admits giving police Ring camera footage without consent"

tomkat0789 — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 17:24:02 +0000

A middle option could be to install a fake ring camera as a deterrent without the privacy hazards.

New comment by tomkat0789 in "3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work"

tomkat0789 — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 17:41:20 +0000

Time off for illness! That's nice. I wonder if one of the HR scribes tracked the days every person took off in an analog ERP system. Scribes seemed important, maybe they outsourced the basics to contractors.