HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

mattdmrs

15 karma · joined October 17, 2013

submissionscomments
mattdmrs··on Claude Opus 4.7
I don’t know about ChatGPT, but in Claude Code I _have_ been able to do a side-by-side comparison of API-based metered billing vs subscription billing, in the same UI. You just switch from one to the other using /login.

You should probably not be so quick to dismiss what people say as nonsense.

mattdmrs··on Californian fed up with stolen mail sends Apple AirTag to herself to catch thief
I like how you compared car drivers to toddlers in terms of behaviour change
mattdmrs··on Bioaccumulation of Microplastics in Decedent Human Brains
Compared with the other examples you gave, I think one of the differences with micro- and nanoplastic and their growing bioaccumulation, is that if/when we discover that some level of concentration of it causes noticeable issues, it will be very hard to reverse, and it will be globally abundant (i.e. throughout the entire food chain). We'll be stuck with the problem for a very very long time.

It's not like we'll be able to just outlaw it and be done with the issue after a few years. So for this specific polluant, it feels right that we should be cautious and look for solutions as quickly as we can.

mattdmrs··on Dioxus 0.5: Web, Desktop, Mobile Apps in Rust
Honestly curious: what makes you hate it so much?
mattdmrs··on I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
Let’s not forget about how the new Dart 3’s patterns can help with parsing and validating JSON: https://dart.dev/language/patterns#validating-incoming-json
mattdmrs··on I feel like I made a mistake investing professionally into Flutter
At our company, out of the 8 engineers I hired, only 2 had specific experience with our backend (Elixir) or frontend (Flutter) stack. I hired for apparence of talent, experience in some other equivalent stack and the right attitude towards learning.

All of them got productive rather quickly and had PRs shipping to prod in the same week, if not within a couple days.

I’m not saying it _will_ go as smoothly for anyone else, but if you have the right environment and pick the right people, as an employer you’re better off being flexible with experience.

mattdmrs··on Noulith: A new programming language by the current Advent of Code leader
I’d go further: Reading someone else’s writing is akin to mind reading.
mattdmrs··on Estimated cumulative excess deaths during Covid, World
How do you even force weight lost?
mattdmrs··on Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store
Or recycle it. Don’t pollute the rivers!
mattdmrs··on Show HN: Intercept.rest – Faster API debugging
Looks awesome! Quick note about the landing page: the GIF captures in the "How it works" section are a bit vertically stretched, weirdly pixellated and really too quick to understand what's going on.
mattdmrs··on Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?
Disclaimer: I have a company and I've started a few in the past.

My take is that the loyalty a company has towards a given employee cannot be the same, simply because it lacks the emotional basis that usually makes that loyalty as strong and/or as irrational. It's completely a matter of company culture which, in most cases, isn't very empathic to employees.

I don't think lack of loyalty is a rule though. I think that if the company culture is set up properly, it can totally have some form of valuable, albeit different, loyalty towards its employees.

mattdmrs··on Slack Acquires Astro
They’re not selling t-shirts, but conference badges AND they’re already profitable from their email app. Quite a feat for a 3-person shop.
mattdmrs··on Wave After Wave of Garbage Hits the Dominican Republic
That, and plastic material making up much of that load. Dumping large quantities of wood =/= dumping large quantities of styrofoam.
mattdmrs··on M.V.P., not M.V.P.O.S.
> I feel like many people miss out on the V part of MVP

... and rightfully so. Unlike "minimum" or "product", people's interpretation of "viable" is so subjective, it will end up being influenced by the founders' experience, personality and so forth.

mattdmrs··on The End of Coding
> If you’re a programmer and this offends you, consider how much more value you could create if you didn’t spend half your time as a glorified PSD->HTML translator.

As the author states, the idea of abstracting away the complexity of creating user interfaces isn't new, but I think it's wrong to think we could one day create tools that lets you do that without having to write code and still keep all the flexibility of going sufficiently low-level. An application platform usually gives you low-level building blocks (e.g. Core Animation) and higher-level ones (e.g. UIControl and family). You can construct visual tools to manipulate the latter, but you can't do the same with the former, since they're much more than just position and parameters. Reducing this difference in complexity by blaming it on the tools is misguided IMHO.

There an inherent complexity in coding that isn't its weakness but rather it's advantage. You can't abstract away coding just like you can't abstract away human language or writing. Could you substitute an essay with a very detailed painting?

mattdmrs··on Interactive Resume
It works wonders with touch enabled devices like smartphones and tablets
mattdmrs··on Interactive Resume
Definitely, he should use something like a ladder. Shouldn't be too hard for him given he did the balloon thing.
mattdmrs··on What Do Cats See?
For the video simulations you're suggesting, they would have to slow everything down for us to see the difference, which would kind of break the realism they showed until then.

Also, the glowing trail thing would be a great way only for creatures like us humans, with slowly refreshing visual brains to handle information coming from faster refreshing retinas. But I have to imagine cats have their brains appropriately tuned for the refresh rate if their retinas and see movements clearly, with great detail in the time dimension.

mattdmrs··on Contrary to public claims, Apple can read your iMessages
What we know is that it seems possible, when looking at the system externally, for them to perform MITM attacks. What we don't know is if their system internally makes it possible for anyone inside apple to intercept and read those messages, with or without an order from the NSA. They could very well have told us the truth!
mattdmrs··on To an alarming degree, science is not self-correcting
One can argue that science will always have a hard time constructing an accurate model for predicting weather, because of its inherent humongous complexity and nonlinear behavior:

> [...] we provide a number of illustrative examples and highlight key mechanisms that give rise to nonlinear behavior, address scale and methodological issues, suggest a robust alternative to prediction that is based on using integrated assessments within the framework of vulnerability studies and, lastly, recommend a number of research priorities and the establishment of education programs in Earth Systems Science.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/B:CLIM.0000037493.8...

mattdmrs··on Sleep Flushes Toxins from the Brain
Science is slowly getting to those conclusions:

> Taken together, these changes in brain and body are further evidence that sleep deprivation is a chronic stressor and that the resulting allostatic load can contribute to cognitive problems, which can, in turn, further exacerbate pathways that lead to disease.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0026049506...