matt_heimer (u/matt_heimer)

matt_heimer commented on I'm not worried about AI job loss davidoks.blog/p/why-im-no... · Posted by u/ezekg

gordonhart · 2 days ago

Whenever I get worried about this I comb through our ticket tracker and see that ~0% of them can be implemented by AI as it exists today. Once somebody cracks the memory problem and ships an agent that progressively understands the business and the codebase, then I'll start worrying. But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form and the value of SWEs is to turn the bigger picture into a functioning product.

matt_heimer · 2 days ago

It's not binary. Jobs will be lost because management will expect the fewer developers to accomplish more by leveraging AI.

matt_heimer commented on Ask HN: Why are electronics still so unrecyclable? · Posted by u/alexandrehtrb

matt_heimer · 5 days ago

Ease of recycling is not prioritized during design or manufacturing because there is no monetary incentive (for the manufacturer) to do so it most cases. It would eat into profits. Simple as that.

Unless a component is expensive to manufactory and recycling/reuse could save the manufacturer money it won't happen. The only real solution are laws requiring it.

matt_heimer commented on Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup? · Posted by u/newbebee

johnsmith1840 · a month ago

Build something novel, what has changed?

matt_heimer · a month ago

I'd argue the question was wrong, it's not that big companies can copy you easier now. They could have always invaded your space and destroyed your business. As other pointed out it was always picking up the pennies that they didn't want until those pennies became dollars.

The concern now is that other small team or solo developers can rebuild what you have very quickly. This happened in the mobile space with all the decompiled and repacked (with min changes) apps that showed up in the stores.

The moat for SaaS startups was that the code is hidden. Now that matters less because people use AI to try and reverse engineer your backend from the API or even UI screenshots.

You have to pick up the pace to keep ahead of them and make sure you don't cause problems for customers while doing it.

matt_heimer commented on A $20 drug in Europe requires a prescription and $800 in the U.S. statnews.com/2025/10/31/w... · Posted by u/geox

cogman10 · 2 months ago

Anyone know what's going on with the ACA marketplace?

I like to take a peek at it every so often and it's just stupendously worse than employer healthcare. There is no plan in my market (Idaho) which doesn't have extreme out of network deductibles. The cost is also identical to what I and my employer pay for insurance.

Is it just that the ACA is mostly used by sick people or something?

matt_heimer · 2 months ago

Prices have jumped, see:

    * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44604365
    * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989706

matt_heimer commented on India orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app reuters.com/sustainabilit... · Posted by u/jmsflknr

DeepSeaTortoise · 2 months ago

Require all people who received higher education to work for their country first for 15 to 20 years.

There's no point in being able to buy an outrageously fancy toilet with remittances if there's no sewer to hook it up to.

matt_heimer · 2 months ago

That would discourage higher education, you are basically punishing people for it.

Try giving free education to all government employees instead.

matt_heimer commented on James Cameron Says Netflix Movies Shouldn't Be Eligible for Oscars worldofreel.com/blog/2025... · Posted by u/randycupertino

snowwrestler · 3 months ago

Maybe, maybe not.

> “Kids and preteens,” a recent National Research Group report concluded, “have been the driving force behind many of the biggest theatrical success stories of the past three years.”

> The kids and preteens in the youngest generation have grown up with the ability to watch any movie on any device anytime and anywhere they desire. As it turns out, the place they really want to watch movies is the theater.

https://www.wsj.com/business/media/wicked-zootopia-pg-movies...

It really is better seeing a movie in the theater. And I hope the next generation are coming back around to that.

matt_heimer · 3 months ago

Kids and preteens don't care about the experience being better in one environment vs another. That age group has less patience than older age groups, all they want to do is to see the movie NOW. They don't want to go to the theater, they want instant gratification. If a movie also released on streaming they'd be watching it before you could get them in the car for a trip to the theater.

matt_heimer commented on A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure sacbear.com/xfinity-wont-... · Posted by u/vedmed

matt_heimer · 3 months ago

I found that logging into the cable modem itself and getting the signal levels and modem event logs helps. The poster seems to just be logging IP reachability. You have to keep repeating that modem logs show the problem is outside of my house until they send a technician. Then you hope the tech knows what he is doing enough to verify the issue and call the right person.

It took about 2 months and 5 visits to get my outages fixed. I also had to get some of my neighbors to report the outages.

matt_heimer commented on Amazon’s Ring to partner with Flock techcrunch.com/2025/10/16... · Posted by u/gman83

Aurornis · 4 months ago

> When you take this info and combine it with the ability of Wifi7 routers to "see" where people are in their house,

WiFi routers can’t tell you where people are in the house. The routers don’t even know their own location within the house.

All of those papers you see on the topic have extensive additional information being put into their models. The routers don’t magically know the layout of your house.

At most, a WiFi device could infer movement in a house if the RSSI of devices is fluctuating where it is normally stable.

matt_heimer · 4 months ago

Not just social media postings but past real estate listings can probably provide floor plans.

And if you don't have those, a lot of buildings have common patterns. Its very much in the realm of possibility to train a model using exterior and interior information so that you could have AI generate a floor plan using only exterior data.

Combine that with a small drone that could fly around a building and take different wifi signal readings to triangulate access point positions.

Once you have all that don't you have everything you need to detect movement in the building based on signal disruptions?

Yes, seems like a bit of work but it absolutely seems like the type of effort some governments would put effort into.

matt_heimer commented on Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why? · Posted by u/ofalkaed

csense · 4 months ago

Java Applets.

All the buzz in the 2020's about WASM giving websites the ability to run compiled code at native speed, letting pages network with your server via WebRTC?

Yeah, you could do that with Java Applets in 1999.

If Sun (and later Oracle) had been less bumbling and more visionary -- if they hadn't forced you to use canvas instead of integrating Java's display API with the DOM, if they had a properly designed sandbox that wasn't full of security vulnerabilities?

Java and the JVM could have co-evolved with JavaScript as a second language of the Web. Now Java applets are well and truly dead; the plugin's been removed from browsers, and even the plugin API's that allowed it to function have been deprecated and removed (I think; I'm not 100% sure about that).

matt_heimer · 4 months ago

Java eventually got a DOM API but it was too late. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/ma...

matt_heimer commented on How to Run WordPress completely from RAM rickconlee.com/how-to-run... · Posted by u/indigodaddy

r1ch · 4 months ago

Cloudflare will actually slow down TTFB for small, less popular sites since they don't maintain a keepalive connection to the origin. This means you pay an additional TCP/TLS setup cost from the Cloudflare POP to the origin which is worse than a direct connection. I also tried testing a smart-placed worker and cloudflared, neither of which seemed to help.

matt_heimer · 4 months ago

They can use keepalive but it's likely the small sites are not getting enough traffic on the edge nodes to maintain the connections.

You don't think taking a small hit on TTFB is a good trade off for the improved scaling that a CDN offers?

Gone are the days that you don't have to worry about bot traffic being a DDOS. An unresponsive site is a lot worse than an extra TCP/TLS setup.