HN user

jmacd

4,186 karma

Jevon MacDonald

Posts241
Comments369
View on HN
twitter.com 2mo ago

Learning on the Shop floor

jmacd
5pts0
www.frontiersin.org 4mo ago

Mobile phone short video useimpacts attention functions: an EEG study

jmacd
3pts0
hopeyscott.substack.com 11mo ago

I'm Building My Father's Brain Before He Dies

jmacd
2pts3
www.ft.com 1y ago

Insurers launch cover for losses caused by AI chatbot errors

jmacd
136pts64
2025.buildcanada.com 1y ago

Show HN: Real‑time tracking of candidates' promises in the Canadian election

jmacd
2pts0
www.thetimes.com 1y ago

Plan for subsea cable to send Canada's clean power to UK

jmacd
6pts2
hacker-radio.onrender.com 1y ago

Show HN: Hacker Radio – NotebookLM style episodes based on /best and HN comments

jmacd
2pts0
hacke-radio.onrender.com 1y ago

[delete]

jmacd
1pts1
machinelearning.apple.com 1y ago

Combining Machine Learning and Homomorphic Encryption in the Apple Ecosystem

jmacd
1pts0
www.youtube.com 2y ago

Why Ryanair wil not fly trans-Atlantic [video]

jmacd
1pts0
www.cbc.ca 2y ago

Wild 'superpigs' from Canada could soon invade some U.S. states

jmacd
3pts0
docs.stripe.com 2y ago

Stripe Usage Based Billing

jmacd
4pts0
huggingface.co 2y ago

Apple OpenELM Instruct Models

jmacd
4pts1
www.economist.com 2y ago

Why are there so many unfinished buildings in Africa?

jmacd
2pts1
www.saunatimes.com 2y ago

A 45 year engineer clears up electric sauna ventilation

jmacd
203pts68
exclaim.ca 2y ago

40 Years On, 'Brave New Waves' Still Echos Through Canadian Underground Music

jmacd
1pts0
search.sciphi.ai 2y ago

Open Source agent-first search engine

jmacd
1pts0
99d.substack.com 2y ago

The Future of Software Looks Like Services

jmacd
2pts0
www.reuters.com 2y ago

Canada's Supreme Court overturns ban on single use plastics

jmacd
4pts1
www.tier.run 2y ago

Logs are a better way to implement usage based billing

jmacd
1pts0
linear.app 2y ago

Linear Method

jmacd
2pts0
www.tier.run 2y ago

Billing Engines Don't Solve Pricing Problems

jmacd
146pts59
investmenttakes.substack.com 2y ago

Pricing in the End of Obesity

jmacd
3pts0
assets.diewithzerobook.com 2y ago

Die with Zero: Mental Models [pdf]

jmacd
4pts0
localmile.org 2y ago

Prioritizing Driver Speed over Children’s Safety and Wellbeing

jmacd
1pts0
localmile.org 2y ago

Trumpkin’s Notes on Building a Sauna

jmacd
46pts6
github.com 2y ago

Tier – Pricing-as-Code

jmacd
1pts0
github.com 2y ago

RemoteUI

jmacd
3pts1
www.wesh.com 3y ago

Farmers Insurance Group stops writing new property policies in Florida

jmacd
9pts1
www.maptattoo.com 3y ago

E-Ink GPS for Boats

jmacd
2pts0
Kimi Work 2 days ago

Everyone calling this a copy is willfully overlooking that the major labs are nakedly copying each other AND smaller vendors constantly. Codex and Claude Code didn't just materialize at the same time. And frankly, they both copied Aider in the beginning.

Then there is reasoning itself.

Agent SDKs.

On and on.

This isn't a game of hide and seek. It's a race. The fact that Kimi is Chinese doesn't make their stride any more a copy than 90% of what the major labs are outputting these days.

As a parent of 4 kids, I find Shorts to be morally reprehensible. I think the people working on them should honestly question their decision framework. Youtube is an international treasure. One of the greatest learning resources of all time. I want my children to have as broad of access to youtube as possible. I can't do that though, because they can go from watching a very interesting documentary or something fun like a Mark Rober video, to being zombified unwittingly in to watching videos of a woman putting on makeup and making pronouncements in to the video camera.

It's not just annoying. It's not just inconvenient. It is harmful.

Layoffs at Block 5 months ago

Block really did not come down from it's COVID/ZIRP era high # of employees as much as many other companies, and it's COVID era headcount growth was extremely rapid by any standard.

In some ways this isn't daring, future looking leadership... it's much more lazy leadership that took a while to adjust to market demands.

Kimi Claw 5 months ago

The most interesting thing for me is that I built an extension for Pi that has it recognize when it does not know how to do something I am asking and it then attempts to make its own extension and/or skill to enable whatever that functionality is. Best example there is I just told it to make a todo list for me, and so it made a skill that uses a local file to track todos and follow up on them. I instructed it to make an LLM call to find the best suggested follow up timing to remind me.

So... the real value so far is I find it fun? It isn't the "life changing need to go make a tweet!!" level for me.

Kimi Claw 5 months ago

I went through the setup process for Openclaw. Near the end I felt like I had wrestled more with setting it up than I would have had to if I had just built it from the ground up. So I pointed Pi at Nanoclaw and asked it to review it and build me a minimal clone. It took a few minutes and I had the core of something that is easier to maintain (for me) than some unknown large and cumbersome system, or whatever Openclaw is.

To each their own.

This is one of those announcements that actually just excites me as a consumer. We give our children HomePods as their first device when they turn 8 years old (Apple Watch at 10 years, laptop at 12) and in the 6 years I have been buying them, they have not improved one ounce. My kids would like to listen to podcasts, get information, etc. All stuff that a voice conversation with Chatgpt or Gemini can do today, but Siri isn't just useless-- it's actually quite frustrating!

You can tell just from the title alone.

I am currently employing a consultant for something. It's something I don't want to do myself and they are doing what I need, but it's so painfully obvious they are just vanilla ChatGPTing everything it's almost funny at this point.

I felt the same way for a while, but I am really not so sure now. Cursor is definitely drawing on the influencer/growth well to drive some portion of these #s.

It's a lot easier and more scaleable to get 1000 people "vibe coding" than it is to get 10 experienced engineers using you for autocomplete.

Any IDE based editor feels like a stopgap to me. We may not be there yet, but I feel that in the future a "vibe coder" isn't even going to look at much code at all. Much of what developers who are relying on Cursor, Windmill, Replit, etc etc are doing is performative as it relates to code. There is just a lot of copy/pasting of console errors and asking for things one way or another.

Casual or "vibe" coding is all about the output. Doesn't work? Roll back. Works well? Keep going. Feeling gutsy? Single shot.

I am currently dealing with a relatively complex legal agreement. It's about 30 pages. I have a lawyer working on it who I consider the best in the country for this domain.

I was able to pre-process the agreement, clearly understand most of the major issues, and come up with a proposed set of redlines all relatively easily. I then waited for his redlines and then responded asking questions about a handful of things he had missed.

I value a lawyer being willing to take responsibility for their edits, and he also has a lot of domain specific transactional knowledge that no LLM will have, but I easily saved 10 hours of time so far on this document.

Gemini 2.5 Flash 1 year ago

I agree. I found it unusable for anything but casual usage due to the rate limiting. I wonder if I am just missing something?

I just had this experience. I had a 200ft run between my house and barn. The original builder put a direct bury ethernet between the two and it failed. I dug a trench, put in a conduit, pulled 2 fibre lines and left a pull string in.

I recently had the primary fibre fail and am now on the backup. If I need to pull new ones in the future I can do that pretty easily through the conduit.

I have a Dodge Ram. Last night I had a 400km drive to do after a very long day. I wasn't exhausted, but I certainly felt like I did not want to drive an extended period of time.

I have a Comma 3x in the truck and felt way more confident, alert and comfortable for the entire drive. OpenPilot/Sunnypilot/Frogpilot are not FSD, but they are hands off driving assistance. The 2020 Ram performs incredibly well. The latest driving models are very smooth as well, no ping-ponging and they handle passing and traffic extremely well.

A legacy car maker would be smart to acquire Comma if its for sale. They would be extremely close to a viable assisted driving capability with it.

Are the costs of roof/home installs falling anywhere? Here in eastern Canada the pricing has gone up per kWh in the last 10 years fairly significantly.

I've always thought of scarcity and FOMO as different things, at least from a product marketing standpoint.

Scarcity: There isn't much of this thing, so I need to compete to get it. I will prioritize it more highly. There is a scale of desire for this thing. If I believe I need it in the future rather than now, I may defer.

FOMO: 0 or 1. I am going to miss out on this. Is it important to me? If it is, I will prioritize all my resources to get it now. If I believe I need it in the future, I will act now.

I also have an 11 year old with an Apple Watch and it has been such a good introduction to connectivity as well as social media (iMessage/texting...)

She has gained a lot of independance because we are able to track her with the watch, and she is now proactively communicating with it to let us know where she will be etc.

I'm not enthusiastic about the teen years with TikTok/Instagram,etc but at least she will have been onramped gradually and hopefully it's a natural progression.

Posting this here, because it was advice given to me by one of the founders we all look up to on HN when I had my first child (on our 4th now).

"If you are going to have kids and run a company, you all need to sleep." and then he introdued me to a sleep trainer/coach.

"No way, we are not sleep training" was my thought, but I quickly realized that there is a difference between sleep normalization and what we know as sleep training.

The sleep coach gave us a completely customized regime for 2 weeks. Once the baby is 6 months or so, you can start. (up until 6 months, I just slept with the kids in my arms every night. Oh my god I miss those nights now. It makes me cry to think about how wonderful it felt.)

We've done it 4 times now and all our children gladly sleep from 7pm to 6:30am every single night. (The older ones now go to sleep more like 9pm). Everyone in the house is rested every day and it makes a big difference. Those two weeks are a lot of work for one of the parents (it is specified that one person should be focused on it) but in our experience it works by the 3rd night or so.

The main takeaway from the aproach is to disassociate eating and interaction from the act of sleeping. It created buffers between feeding times and play times and when you finally put them down in their crib to sleep. If they do wake up during the night they don't think "oh, if I cry I will get to eat right away." and they self-soothe and go back to sleep. If they do wake up hungry, it's a failure of the parent to have ensured they've eaten properly. You adjust as they grow. (A hungry cry is totally different from a discomfort or bored cry. You learn them pretty quickly.)

When I put my 10 month old in his crib to sleep now he looks back at me briefly and then turns over and gets in his sleeping position and he's asleep before I leave the room. It's such a relief knowing that no matter how badly a day goes, you can sleep that night.

I've had a lot of friends think this isn't for them, but 100% of the ones I have convinced to do it (and in some cases have just paid for) have been successful.

I'll also add that 2 of our kids were "colicky" and were very unfcomfortable during the day for their first year. Even still we were able to have them sleeping the entire night most nights after 6 months.

Again, there is no "cry it out". In fact, the baby almost never cries at all in this process in my experience.

The sauna design rabbit hole is a very deep one.

If anyone is interested in more information about sauna design in general, Trumpkin's Notes are by far the most referred to guide out there. [1]

There are also new products [2] which help improve saunas which are not ideally designed or where there are constraints (ceiling height mostly) to deal with.

1: https://localmile.org/trumpkins-notes-on-building-a-sauna/ 2: https://saunum.com/en/