Hacker News Reader

matheweison White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report

I’m not sure that what’s happening right now in California is any better.. even Nate Silver is crying foul and this point.

matheweison What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves

> Prices of things that require natural resources will go up.

This suggests a potential equilibrium sooner rather than later .. few modern technological advances have been as resource hungry as AI

matheweison Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

It’s not a free market construction issue at all, it’s a regulatory zoning and permitting issue.

Read the article and the peer comments here; Austin’s boom came about from reducing regulatory constraints.

Nationally remove the artificial restrictions and the supply side will fix itself.

matheweison Doge 'doesn't exist' with eight months left on its charter

We should also not ignore the fact that USAID was responsible for many hundreds of millions (if not more) in fraudulently directed contracts and spending [1].

[1] https://www.irs.gov/compliance/criminal-investigation/usaid-...

matheweison Immunotherapy drug clinical trial results: half of tumors shrink or disappear

The problem is that the cancerous cells are themselves descended from healthy cells; other than the small differences that make them cancerous, they are in fact the same thing.

Many of the cutting edge immunotherapies for cancer essentially teach the immune system to target the cancerous cells.

However, in combination with an autoimmune disease like Chrons where the immune system has already learned to react to healthy cells, there is a much higher chance that an immunotherapy intended to target only cancerous cells also causes the immune system to target more healthy cells.

matheweison Whistleblower says DOGE officials copied Social Security numbers

There are at least two reasons:

First is Hanlon’s Razor; “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”. It appears to be especially applicable here.

Second is that this kind of information (with far richer data) is already accessible to and used by corporations at scale; think credit bureaus, background checkers, etc.

matheweison US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years

> prices double every 7 years, which is obviously not what we observe.

It’s not? The first two things that came to mind to check are almost exactly doubled:

Case-Schiller for Seattle metro area for example is almost exactly double: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SEXRNSA/

Price of eggs is almost exactly double: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111

matheweison Solar became EU's largest source of electricity in June 2025

Tangentially related from two days ago; Solar becomes top source of electricity in California - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44512968

matheweison House passes Trump's signature bill

If so, this shouldn’t be flagged because it would be a significant event relevant to tech

matheweison I tried making artificial sunlight at home

I have a bunch of related questions so I will drop them all here:

* You mentioned focusing the spectrum on humans, but I have always wanted to have light that works well for both humans and plants (e.g. houseplants) as they are also beneficial for human spaces. Why not do both?

* Exposure to near IR has significant health benefits and seems like it should be included in an ideal lighting fixture that attempts to replicate the sun: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9855677/

What do you mean when you say IR can be produced in other ways more efficiently?

* How does your product compare with the Yuji Skyline?

matheweison Study finds 46 percent of U.S. counties have pharmacy deserts

According to one of my local pharmacies (that closed in the last year), there are laws in some states preventing brick and mortar stores from imposing additional fees over online pharmacies. Reference in a sibling comment.

matheweison Study finds 46 percent of U.S. counties have pharmacy deserts

> There is no law against a pharmacy owner from charging whatever they want.

On closing, one of my local pharmacies claimed otherwise and referenced the following:

> states have enacted legislation prohibiting certain PBM clients from imposing additional co-payments, deductibles, limitation on benefits, or other conditions (“Conditions”) on covered individuals utilizing a retail pharmacy when the same Conditions are not otherwise imposed on covered individuals utilizing home delivery pharmacies. However, the legislation requires the retail pharmacy to agree to the same reimbursement amounts and terms and conditions as are imposed on the home delivery pharmacies.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1532063/000153206318...

matheweison Study finds 46 percent of U.S. counties have pharmacy deserts

Yea, where I live there is sometimes a 2+ hr wait at the Rite Aid.

matheweison Study finds 46 percent of U.S. counties have pharmacy deserts

It’s not even legal for them to try to compete. Even if someone preferred to pay more for the convenience the brick and mortar shops aren’t allowed to charge a premium over the online pharmacies.

matheweison Study finds 46 percent of U.S. counties have pharmacy deserts

Yes, pricing regulations forced brick and mortar pharmacies to sell drugs below cost. Several closed in my area in the last few years and this was one of their cited reasons why.

matheweison CDC Study Finds Silent Bird Flu Infections in Dairy Veterinarians

How is that statistic not severely flawed?

Unless they are performing large scale sampling of the general population, the denominator (cases of confirmed influenza) is potentially much larger in practice.

Moreso because it seems likely that the confirmed cases are sampled from the sickest population seeking treatment.

And this article is further evidence of exactly this, since the "silent infections" here were previously uncounted.

matheweison I Like and Use Global Variables

Exactly the issue; inevitably someone will forget to follow those rules, at which point esoteric bugs will have been introduced.

I think it’s somewhat similar to unchecked memory access. Used correctly it works just fine and offers extremely high performance. Unfortunately, history has shown that over enough time mistakes will be made. As an industry we’re now to the point of actively denouncing entire languages over the risks of unchecked memory access.

Using software development patterns that rely on the engineers to follow a bunch of rules to do things correctly will eventually burn you. Better to avoid them entirely if at all possible.

matheweison I Like and Use Global Variables

> A Few Rules For Using Globals: > If you change observable state, restore it

I’m sorry but no. Humans are human and mistakes will be made. I’ve lost count of the number of esoteric bugs I’ve had to track down due to global state being changed and not put back properly.

If you have to qualify a pattern with rules that are easily forgotten or open to corner case bugs, it’s far better to just not use that pattern in the first place.

matheweison Commercial jet collides with Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan airport

The FAA publishes supplemental charts specifically for helicopters in areas with high concentrations of helicopter activity: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/productc...

Specifically the Baltimore-Washington route chart was relevant for these flights: https://aeronav.faa.gov/visual/10-31-2024/PDFs/Balt-Wash_Hel...

If you find the DCA airport on that chart, you’ll find routes 1 and 4 which roughly correspond to the helicopter’s flight path.

matheweison Boom Supersonic to break sound barrier during historic test flight today

The XB-1 prototype is powered by three General Electric J85 engines; mentioned in this writeup: https://boomsupersonic.com/flyby/xb-1-pilot-profile-tristan-...

matheweison Indoor Air Quality in Naturally Ventilated Primary Schools

I’m not surprised by this at all. I purchased a pro-sumer grade (Ambient Weather) weather station a couple of years ago that happened to include an indoor CO2 sensor. Among other things I discovered:

* Modern building codes (for energy efficiency?) leave buildings far too sealed. HRV/ERV should probably be mandatory as we continue to have tighter regulations for insulating homes.

* The level of CO2 produced by a Gas stove range is a bit shocking.

I now leave my windows open a crack during the winter which keeps CO2 levels around 800-1200ppm. If I purchased a home I’d upgrade the HVAC system to include an HRV/ERV.

matheweison Will Elon Musk fire a third of the US government?

We have a bit of a vague idea what might happen, from the recent election of Javier Milei in Argentina

matheweison Trends in Cars that Could be Affecting Toyota's Legendary Reliability

> New Toyotas come with … worst of all, hybrid drivetrains.

Yea, they just put out a TSB for the hybrid drivetrain in a large number of Tacomas.

Seems odd, though, to blame the hybrid drivetrain as something fundamentally flawed .. the CVT in the Prius and Corolla has a reputation for lasting forever.

matheweison A Stock Prius just drove across America averaging 93.158 MPG

Yup, I get around 64mpg in a Corolla Hybrid without trying at all.

matheweison Tesla parental controls keep teenage lead feet in check

Asked for this 5 years ago, nice to see it finally implemented! https://x.com/matheweis/status/1109106624612859904

matheweison Computers Reduce Efficiency: Case Studies of the Solow Paradox (2023)

There are at least two dimensions to this that I believe that the author has overlooked:

1. Economies of scale. It may be that drafting something up in CAD takes more cycles to get right up front, but once you have an established design it is much easier to reproduce it by orders of magnitude

2. Changes in software. Software companies are ever changing their interfaces, decreasing productivity every time their users encounter this learning curve.

matheweison The U.S. crime rate is still dropping, FBI data shows

A study posted here yesterday, had the interesting statistic that the “clearance rate” i.e. percent of crimes solved by the police - when reported - is down drastically in recent years, a trend that seems to have started long before covid:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40223240 (note, flagged, although not clear to me why)

This might explain part of the growing frustration and questions about the veracity of the reporting data.

matheweison First-in-human implantation of bionic device to halt Crohn's disease (2023)

> It's also interesting to note many food allergies have increased in prevalence in the last 30 years

Wonder how much of this is due to the relatively recent trend of having dual incomes with both parents working?

Cause and effect might be hard to tease out but it’s looking like there are some drastic differences in babies that were born early in the pandemic:

> only about 5% of the lockdown babies had developed a food allergy at age one, compared to 22.8% in the pre-COVID group.

> Of the lockdown babies only 17% needed an antibiotic by the age of one. In the pre-pandemic group, 80% of infants had taken antibiotics by 12 months

Can’t find a link to the original study at the moment but here’s a secondary source:

https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-pandemic-babies-develope...

matheweison Alaska Airlines flight 1282 NTSB preliminary report [pdf]

I think that software engineers put people in danger more often than they would like to believe; have a look at the UK Postal Service scandal for a great example of a seemingly innocuous bit of software absolutely destroying numerous lives.