Hacker News: wisemang

New comment by wisemang in "Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids"

wisemang — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 03:38:14 +0000

Pfft those suckers didn't have Parsec or Car Wars or Ms. Pac Man plus the hours spent typing TI-BASIC from a magazine was less frustrating than trying to get the jumps right on Super Mario Bros level 8-2. And I'm sure Demolition Division and Meteor Multiplication are why I ended up with a math degree.

For real though I spent so much time pining for Mario 3 before my parents finally did give in. But I feel like there was something good about the diversity, like when I could play Lode Runner on my buddy's C64 (actually a 128... GO 64)

New comment by wisemang in "How Invisalign became the biggest user of 3D printers"

wisemang — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 01:12:26 +0000

Or just take up the didgeridoo

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1360393/

New comment by wisemang in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

wisemang — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:21:59 +0000

So the tree data itself mainly comes from municipal open data, just like yours does. Street Trees datasets are pretty common across cities. I just added SF yesterday after replying here :)

Otherwise the map tiles are coming from OpenFreeMap [1] which are indeed based on OSM.

Next steps I'm interested in are including economic + ecological benefits of the trees, highlighting potential pests / invasive species, maybe some other basic info about the species sourced from Wikipedia.

I like how you've got different icons for different types of trees; I've been thinking about how to encode DBH data as well but haven't settled on anything yet.

[1] https://openfreemap.org

New comment by wisemang in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

wisemang — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 02:50:44 +0000

Nice! I’ve been working on https://treeseek.ca which is a different use case from most of the other open data tree sites I’ve seen — I want to be instantly geolocated and shown the nearest trees to me. I do a lot of walking and am often mesmerized by a particular tree, and I wanted something to help me identify them as quickly as possible, with more confidence and speed than e.g. iNaturalist (which i do also use).

This is an app that’s been bouncing around in my head for over a decade but finally got it working well enough for my own purposes about a year and a half ago.

New comment by wisemang in "LLM Writing Tropes.md"

wisemang — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 03:59:25 +0000

I’ve noticed the honestly thing for sure.

But I feel like I’ve noticed an uptick in people using the adverb “genuinely” in what I genuinely believe to not be AI generated comments, articles, etc. Maybe it’s just me, I got similar vibes about the word efficacy a few years ago, before the ascent of GenAI (but after the pandemic — again, maybe just me).

New comment by wisemang in "Building a new Flash"

wisemang — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 02:56:43 +0000

Totally. I remember a thing where there were four horses that each had an a capella part and you could click each horse to bring that part in or silence it. They all harmonized together and the silly little animations for each was a nice touch. I want to say circa 2005.

[edit] well that wasn't hard to find: https://www.numuki.com/game/singing-horses/

Anyways yes the security was abysmal but I’m sure it enabled creativity that wouldn’t have surfaced otherwise.

New comment by wisemang in "Fix your tools"

wisemang — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 03:49:21 +0000

I also clicked through to that and was similarly confused. Not a Kotlin dev but this doesn’t really seem like fixing your tools? More like understanding them properly. I wouldn’t call a configuration change like this “debugging the debugger” as another comment mentioned.

I’d also like to know the answer to your question about what is going on. I know Java and maven but not kotlin or gradle, but wouldn’t a debugger be interfacing more at the JVM level?

New comment by wisemang in "The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline"

wisemang — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:52:31 +0000

Indeed. There was a CBC radio episode last year that had parents discussing regrets. It felt weird to hear people saying these things out loud.

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/audio/9.6661746

New comment by wisemang in "Two days of oatmeal reduce cholesterol level"

wisemang — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 04:30:05 +0000

Bah. I love putting a layer of frozen blueberries at the bottom of the bowl then layering on piping hot steel cut oats to thaw and warm them up. You’re probably right that I shouldn’t add dried cranberries and a tiny drizzle of maple syrup on top (occasionally with thinly sliced bananas) but I’m happy enough to be wrong about it. I also skip the milk.

New comment by wisemang in "Ask HN: How can we solve the loneliness epidemic?"

wisemang — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 03:42:53 +0000

What’s a zucchini party

New comment by wisemang in "I Am Mark Zuckerberg"

wisemang — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 23:33:02 +0000

An ex-gf of mine’s dad had the same name and birthday as a convict. Caused him plenty of trouble when crossing the border apparently. Hopefully that’s not the case for GP

New comment by wisemang in "Show HN: I built a local-first daily planner for iOS"

wisemang — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 18:52:00 +0000

This is definitely dependent on individuals. It’s a reason during some conversations people can never seem to get a word in edgewise, even if the person speaking may think they’re providing opportunities do so. A mismatch in “pause length” can make for frustrating communications.

I am also too lazy to google or AI it but it’s something I remember from when I taught ESL long ago.

New comment by wisemang in "Democracy and the open internet die in daylight"

wisemang — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 18:32:44 +0000

Right I guess in the old model they were often syndicated. But as a kid I remember seeing things like the jumble, word search, cryptic something or other etc. in my local small-ish city newspaper

New comment by wisemang in "Democracy and the open internet die in daylight"

wisemang — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 14:42:21 +0000

Not sure I’d call them _video_ games per se but anecdotally (me) it does work.

That said NYT crossword has existed for much longer, puzzle games are a longstanding feature of many newspapers.

New comment by wisemang in "Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients"

wisemang — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 14:17:21 +0000

I find the occasional research roundups from the “your local epidemiologist” newsletter informative:

https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/long-covid-re...

New comment by wisemang in "US Military struggling to deploy AI weapons"

wisemang — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 14:41:26 +0000

Weren’t there well over 100 launched, most of which were intercepted by Ukraine, and 20 made it into Polish airspace?

New comment by wisemang in "Massive Attack turns concert into facial recognition surveillance experiment"

wisemang — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 23:00:23 +0000

I thoroughly enjoyed their Toronto show on that tour. To be fair it was the first time I’d seen them in concert so I didn’t have any points of comparison.

I also hadn’t really clued in to just how political they were until seeing their visuals, which I also thought added a lot. Surely not everyone’s cup of tea though.

New comment by wisemang in "Sequoia backs Zed"

wisemang — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 23:58:30 +0000

ST is not electron..

New comment by wisemang in "Claudia – Desktop companion for Claude code"

wisemang — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:15:26 +0000

My (somewhat elderly) father only refers to it as ChatGBT and when I tried to get to the bottom of why he said it’s because “thats what it’s called in my phone”.

Seems pretty scammy to me, akin to typo squatting with potential to collect a lot more personal information but he can’t always be reasoned with.

Hopefully he heeds my advice to not provide anything personal.

New comment by wisemang in "GPT-5: Key characteristics, pricing and system card"

wisemang — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 00:10:57 +0000

To maybe save others some time METR is a group called Model Evaluation and Threat Research who

> propose measuring AI performance in terms of the length of tasks AI agents can complete.

Not that hard to figure out but the way people refer were referring to them made me think it stood for an actual metric.