thatguymike (u/thatguymike)

thatguymike commented on Tell HN: Happy New Year · Posted by u/schappim

thatguymike · a month ago

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.

thatguymike commented on Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI skyview.social/?url=https... · Posted by u/christoph-heiss

nkrisc · 2 months ago

What is going through the mind of someone who sends an AI-generated thank-you letter instead of writing it themselves? How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?

thatguymike · 2 months ago

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.

thatguymike commented on Ask HN: How do I bridge the gap between PhD and SWE experiences? · Posted by u/ecophyseis

thatguymike · 2 months ago

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.

thatguymike commented on The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed steveblank.com/2025/11/11... · Posted by u/ridruejo

thatguymike · 3 months ago

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?

thatguymike commented on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025) · Posted by u/david927

laegkos · 3 months ago

https://linog.ph

LINOG.ph is a live earthquake tracker for the Philippines.

The Philippines deals with thousands of earthquakes a year. Whenever the government volcanology and seismology department detects earthquakes, they post it on their official website.

When a major earthquake happens, a huge number of people try to visit the site, causing downtime for up to an hour.

LINOG.ph caches earthquake data from the official government website and the U.S. Geological Survey site, and makes them highly available to the public.

I built this after seeing friends and family donating and providing support for affected families after a major earthquake in Cebu. This was my way of helping out.

Two super typhoons have hit the Philippines in the past two weeks, so I'm also considering adding in typhoon tracking.

thatguymike · 3 months ago

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

thatguymike commented on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025) · Posted by u/david927

xandrius · 3 months ago

Currently working on a take on Pokémon GO + Pokémon Snap but for birding. The goal is to explore your neighborhood, find birds, take good photos of them all. Next month, I'll be doing an event to find a rare bird, excited to see how it goes!

It's still a small closed alpha, if anyone is interested: https://testers.birdlego.com

Here is a rough trailer of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVpR8aafFjI

thatguymike · 3 months ago

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

thatguymike commented on The collapse of the econ PhD job market chrisbrunet.com/p/the-col... · Posted by u/Ozarkian

thatguymike · 4 months ago

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 :)

thatguymike commented on Find SF parking cops walzr.com/sf-parking/... · Posted by u/alazsengul

thatguymike · 5 months ago

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.

thatguymike commented on Vibe Coding Through the Berghain Challenge nibzard.com/berghain/... · Posted by u/nkko

caminanteblanco · 5 months ago

>PS: And the kicker? Claude wrote this entire article too. I just provided the direction and feedback. The AI that helped me solve the Berghain Challenge also helped me tell you about it.

>Meta-collaboration all the way down.

Would've preferred to know this going in.

thatguymike · 5 months ago

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”…

thatguymike commented on OpenAI says it's scanning users' conversations and reporting content to police futurism.com/openai-scann... · Posted by u/miletus

sho_hn · 5 months ago

What I would genuinely like to see in ChatGPT and similar services are well-implemented parental controls that allow a parent to monitor a child's conversations and get reports on them.

thatguymike · 5 months ago

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...

u/thatguymike

KarmaCake day340August 29, 2020View Original