Hacker News: JoeAltmaier

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)"

JoeAltmaier — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:54:16 +0000

I asked for a monitor stand at work, back in the day. No money! So I went to the loading dock, found a wooden pallet for the little AC units we installed in racks, put that on my desk. Voila - monitor stand.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Ask HN: What's the most repetitive thing you do with AI that you wish it just re"

JoeAltmaier — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 02:41:06 +0000

We guess how AI will be used by trying to adapt it to workflows. But in a more perfect world, AI would take on the jobs we DON'T want to do, and we'd continue doing the pleasurable ones.

For instance, dont use AI to run a wrecking ball. Use it to run the book and make the deals so I can have the time and opportunity to run the wrecking ball.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year"

JoeAltmaier — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:51:57 +0000

Again, that's total renewables, not solar. I believe a large part of that is hydro, decades old.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year"

JoeAltmaier — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 20:49:52 +0000

Used to be this was almost entirely explained by hydro. Not a lot of new dams going in, and they take a long time.

The solar component is usually with caveats: the majority of growth. Because growth is slow otherwise. Solar is what part of renewables now? I couldn't easily see that stat in the noise.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "[dead]"

JoeAltmaier — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 22:39:53 +0000

An axe to grind. Better to talk about what's got more nutrition, than to use loaded words like 'unhealthy'. Else you resort to unsubstantiated claims and FUD.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "OkCupid gave 3M dating-app photos to facial recognition firm, FTC says"

JoeAltmaier — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 22:37:31 +0000

In a free market the company that makes every cent they can has a survival advantage. Enough time and transactions and the market will be made entirely of survivors. The rest will have been out-competed.

One counter-pressure is regulation. But hey the US has a fetish about deregulation and so here we are.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Powerful cholesterol drug cuts heart attack risk by 31%"

JoeAltmaier — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:57:12 +0000

From 7% population to 5%. Sounds like a little or a lot, depending how you present the statistic.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Sunday Robotics: The Household Robot We've Been Waiting For? [YouTube]"

JoeAltmaier — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:04:27 +0000

Lots of cool factor. But that giant mono-foot? Gonna be trouble in a house with stairs, thresholds, cats. Legos. power cords. Potted ivy plants dangling over the side of the pot. Real places. Places with kids making messes, where you might need a household robot to help.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Show HN: I made a "programming language" looking for feedback"

JoeAltmaier — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 21:28:03 +0000

I wrote a programming language, some time back. You need a good reason to add to the tumult in the marketplace, and I thought I had one. My language was for discrete control systems. You could declare samplers for data values (interval, sensor, type) and name them as variables. You could create control actions by listing a set of one or more sampler variables in brackets. Once there were 'fresh' values for all of the samplers, the action would be invoked.

It had the usual functions and i/o library stuff. In fact I wrote a tool to absorb other library headers e.g. C or C++ and product blocks that my compiler could link with, and voila your program could call those external libraries.

We used it for a couple of contracts. Some of the control engineers were enthusiastic; some not so much. One more thing to learn.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)"

JoeAltmaier — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 18:09:00 +0000

Diagnosis helps put them into the data set. Even increased diagnosis would skew the statistics. Those that died of Alzheimer's and didn't know it, aren't in the study.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "South Korea Mandates Solar Panels for Public Parking Lots"

JoeAltmaier — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 15:28:27 +0000

Agreed. But in the suburbs, there's no lack of good locations to place dedicated solar farms without obstructing traffic.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)"

JoeAltmaier — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 15:27:36 +0000

Ambulance drivers were close to medical professionals and got good, early diagnosis and care.

Taxi drivers were exposed to a wide variety of people who they conversed with, became aware of Alzheimer's symptoms and treatments and sought help early.

Off the top of my head.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "South Korea Mandates Solar Panels for Public Parking Lots"

JoeAltmaier — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 01:28:46 +0000

So often though, they are obstructed by nearby buildings.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Gianfranco used autoresearch to fix Gumroad's flaky tests in a week"

JoeAltmaier — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 14:18:53 +0000

See, the whole 'test to correctness' thing troubles me. Code to test code. But it has bugs. So, what? Tests for the tests.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent"

JoeAltmaier — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:22:10 +0000

Well, it went galloping onward during that tenure. If not the administration's responsibility, then who's?

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'"

JoeAltmaier — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 17:30:41 +0000

Physical possession of a machine is pretty hard to make secure. It's a different level of secure, an order of magnitude less secure than remote attackers. This is expected?

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Can scientists resurrect the dodo? Inside the company that says they can"

JoeAltmaier — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:29:43 +0000

I'll guess at the future of this technology. They'll produce things that looked like old extinct things, and get a lot of press. Then the administration will say, well, things are never really extinct, so it's ok to quit protecting stuff. Just record the dna and put that dam in place, or strip-mine that ecosystem, no problem, we can get it back if we want so no loss.

Welcome to the future.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Treasure hunter freed from jail after refusing to turn over shipwreck gold"

JoeAltmaier — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:24:33 +0000

I'm surprised he spent a day in jail. People with big money generally have far less trouble with the law, than that.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure"

JoeAltmaier — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:50:07 +0000

Hard enough to get a person to vote once. Probably not a big problem.

The big problem is, the folks who count the votes and cheat. They can invent an arbitrary number of votes to swing their guy.

Let's worry about the problems that matter.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Scientists reveal controversial plan to launch 50k MIRRORS into space"

JoeAltmaier — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:12:03 +0000

Science fiction has thought of this decades ago. Possibly the most drastic environmental effects that any human activity has wrought so far.

Consider - sunlight duration is a critical trigger in the lifecycle of many, many species, most very tiny. Insects and smaller. They can time dormancy to day length. Not the average, since weather is so fickle: even a flicker of sunlight means daylight because, only the sun can do that so it must be up there.

Bring a species out of dormancy at the wrong time of year, and it'll probably die. Do it over a broad area and it becomes an extinction event.

What micro-biomes can we do without? Who knows. These guys aren't even talking about it, I imagine. Just a gee-whiz thing - We can make it as bright as day, during the night! Wouldn't that be cool?

Not cool.