Hacker News: thebigman433

New comment by thebigman433 in "US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology"

thebigman433 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:31:56 +0000

One of the best reasons is that a very large % of calls can be cleared without anyone actually going to the scene. Many cities using drones as first responders now report that they clear ~30% of calls with just a drone. This is great for small cities/towns that struggle to recruit officers and have had ballooning labor costs for police in order to get people to work there. Its also great philosophically if you want police to be involved less, because it dramatically lowers the amount of time they are going to scenes

New comment by thebigman433 in "US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology"

thebigman433 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:28:09 +0000

> If it can't prevent car beak-ins, how can we expect it to make a dent in homicides.

Im not advocating for these cameras at all, but I dont think this is a very good line of thinking. The drop started before Flock, but that doesnt mean that they arent beneficial and currently helping lower the rate even further.

New comment by thebigman433 in "A School District Tried to Help Train Waymos to Stop for School Buses"

thebigman433 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:20:41 +0000

> Asking because I’ve noticed Waymos starting to go above the speed limit now

Where at? Im curious because I see a lot of people say this, but Ive never seen them go more than 1mph over the limit when riding in them, and watch them do 65 on the freeway every day, even when people are passing.

New comment by thebigman433 in "Waymo Safety Impact"

thebigman433 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:13:48 +0000

I feel like an important thing here is that we are very much not good at imprisoning bad drivers at all, even if they injure or kill multiple people. We rarely even take away their licenses!

The only type of car crash that consistently gets some level of enforcement is drunk driving, basically everything else is written off as an accident

New comment by thebigman433 in "iPhone 17e"

thebigman433 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:30:38 +0000

> Still, I don't care that the phones are faster, have larger screens, better camera, FaceID, AI, are thinner light and what have you. The iPhone design peaked in 2015, from there they could just have release the same phone year after year, making it cheaper and cheaper and I'd still be happy with it.

This obviously isnt relevant generally though, this is not how the general public feels at all.

New comment by thebigman433 in "Tesla kills Autopilot, locks lane-keeping behind $99/month fee"

thebigman433 — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:55:29 +0000

> Well... yeah, but the Tesla will do that on an empty road, then approach a slow car from behind and make a lane change decision to pass, then take your next exit and continue on through city streets, through all sorts of traffic conditions, to your destination. And it will monitor your attention with eye tracking instead of making you mess with the wheel.

The point is that it now only does that if you subscribe. If I dont want to pay a monthly fee, an economy car now has a better feature set in this area

New comment by thebigman433 in "The tech monoculture is finally breaking"

thebigman433 — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:46:55 +0000

> To the first point, they've sold at least 2M pairs, and are reported scaling production to handle up to 10M units per year

Im actually very curious to learn more about the usage statistics of their glasses overall. I live in SF and I have noticed 1 person wearing them in the wild. Its obviously probable that Ive missed a handful, but my suspicion is that a lot of people wear them for short bursts of time, for specific events.

New comment by thebigman433 in "Two Amazon delivery drones crash into crane in commercial area of Tolleson, AZ"

thebigman433 — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 20:01:19 +0000

Drones that can dodge thin wires already exist, seems more like their perception algorithms/onboard vision hardware just arent up to the task

New comment by thebigman433 in "Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students"

thebigman433 — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 01:46:51 +0000

This really is not true, basically every engineering job in the Bay Area will set you up with enough money to live extremely well.

YC startups are a bit above average, but still most startups fail.

If you care about building wealth, taking a stable engineering position straight out of college and working hard is a great path

New comment by thebigman433 in "Thai Air Force seals deal for Swedish Gripen jets"

thebigman433 — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 22:58:46 +0000

There is nothing indicating a ceasefire, and Zelensky isnt even there. That is not helping an ally.

Ukraine also is not our only ally - the current administration constantly makes fun of our other ones

New comment by thebigman433 in "Intel's retreat is unlike anything it's done before in Oregon"

thebigman433 — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 15:09:59 +0000

Portland has some major advantages over SF, but as someone who also goes there regularly (~5 weeks/year), I still prefer living in SF at the moment. Not considering the amount of tech jobs there (which is a major factor for me), the city in general just isnt quite there yet. There are also some very major fiscal problems that have to be sorted before I'd consider moving.

Great place though, definitely might end up there one day

New comment by thebigman433 in "Intel's retreat is unlike anything it's done before in Oregon"

thebigman433 — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 05:20:43 +0000

This is extreme hyperbole if you have been to most West Coast cities recently. Rents have shot up to new heights for a reason.

Portland specifically is lagging a bit, but they are on the upwards trajectory (with a few big things to fix still).

New comment by thebigman433 in "The Hollow Men of Hims"

thebigman433 — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 03:56:56 +0000

A year after quitting semaglutide, 20% of people maintained their achieved weight. But, some 44% regained weight. Of that 44%, most (59% of them) still had improved weight: their weights had not fully rebounded to their pre-semaglutide level! Possibly even more importantly, the remaining 36% continued losing weight, either mildly (47%) or majorly (53%)

https://archive.md/Wsuoz

New comment by thebigman433 in "Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones"

thebigman433 — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 05:05:48 +0000

> It's also glaringly obvious that many of the "freedoms" Apple affords its users (freedom from iMessage spam!) help drive its revenue...

Yea I mean this isnt really hard to understand. 99.9% of users would rather have no iMessage spam and also not be able to publish messages from their 3rd party watch. This works in Apple's favor revenue wise because people value having clean and familiar experiences, and dont feel like they are leaving anything behind

New comment by thebigman433 in "Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones"

thebigman433 — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 05:02:50 +0000

This has nothing to do with the plug though, its just the material they make their cables out of. Nothing is inherently different about USB-C that will stop this

New comment by thebigman433 in "Blue Origin reaches orbit on first flight of its titanic New Glenn rocket"

thebigman433 — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:02:28 +0000

Its a feed of the Blue Origin staff, who have been working towards this for years and years - makes sense that they would be pretty excited considering the level of success this was.

You dont have to consider everything you dont like to be a negative on the world

New comment by thebigman433 in "CT Scans of New vs. Used SawStop"

thebigman433 — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 05:01:17 +0000

Not really related to the actual content of the post, but I use a Lumafield at work constantly and love it! The scan quality and software is amazing. Scanning electronics is so much fun, and so helpful!

New comment by thebigman433 in "The online sports gambling experiment"

thebigman433 — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 00:04:20 +0000

> So while the right may ban porn because 'evil woman parts leading us astray', the left will ban it because 'exploitative patriarchal degradation of women'

Your whole comment is pretty silly considering only one of these things is actually happening.

New comment by thebigman433 in "iPhone 16 Pro Storage Expansion 128GB to 1TB [video]"

thebigman433 — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 06:04:28 +0000

What are some examples of phones with SD card slots and similar waterproof ratings? A quick google search didnt turn up much

New comment by thebigman433 in "Have you ever seen soldering this close? [video]"

thebigman433 — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 04:57:12 +0000

Id definitely disagree about hand soldering being a dying art! There are lots of other great techniques, but hand soldering is still vital to developing hardware. Any hardware company worth it's salt has at least a couple rework technicians that are absolute wizards with soldering.

Also stuff like reflow solder is/can still be done by hand! Its a common thing to do if you need to touch up or modify a PCB and dont want to reflow the whole thing/damage any components