Hacker News: bbarn

New comment by bbarn in "The Other Epidemic: Trying to get off benzodiazepines"

bbarn — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 04:12:33 +0000

Funny, I tried beta blockers before xanax for flying. They didn't seem to do anything, and the xanax I take a dozen times a year works wonders. Everyone's different.

New comment by bbarn in "The Other Epidemic: Trying to get off benzodiazepines"

bbarn — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 04:09:24 +0000

I take Xanax when I fly. I have a prescription for a whopping 10 pills, and it usually lasts me three months. It does exactly what it's supposed to. "Banned, Period" is assuming your experience justifies taking everyone else's away, and those of us using them responsibly benefit quite a bit. 4x a day is also over recommended dosages, depending on strength - so that's more on the doctor than the drug.

New comment by bbarn in "Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini"

bbarn — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:21:58 +0000

But can it emulate having two voodoo II's and a desk fan pointed at it?

New comment by bbarn in "Norton Neo Browser"

bbarn — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 20:06:38 +0000

Pétain was a soldier with what, 50 years of experience when he made that choice?

He picked the wrong side obviously, but is it also possible he did what he though was best for France? Both things can be true.

New comment by bbarn in "Norton Neo Browser"

bbarn — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 20:04:30 +0000

I like one called Total Commander - the UI feels dated by damn am I fast with it.

New comment by bbarn in "Norton Neo Browser"

bbarn — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 10:05:47 +0000

It's definitely one of the saddest stories in our industry. Peter Norton's books literally taught me to program as a teenager, and now his name is synonymous with mal/bloatware.

New comment by bbarn in "Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU"

bbarn — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 15:49:37 +0000

Not sure how it would affect home mortgages but the majority of icelanders are on mortgage plans that the principal remaining rises with inflation(I forget the name, I left a few years ago) - and will never likely pay them off.

New comment by bbarn in "Get your Windows license refund"

bbarn — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 18:26:57 +0000

Because they don't license it for and support it running on millions of different combinations of models, hardware, etc. MacOS can be clean only because it has such limited scope of what it has to handle compared to windows/linux

New comment by bbarn in "The August 17 outage"

bbarn — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:44:07 +0000

Exactly this. I've seen production level trading systems grind to a halt over a simple bug and no matter what tests you have in place, it happens.

New comment by bbarn in "What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications"

bbarn — Thu, 28 May 2026 17:59:42 +0000

Uber is especially bad here. I live rural, but when I travel I use it (and uber eats sometimes) when I'm out of town. At this point I uninstall the app and only install it when I know I might use it because it's so invasive with marketing crap. Even more annoying is the fact that why yes, I would love a burger delivered but there's literally nothing your service can get me to my home.

New comment by bbarn in "Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989"

bbarn — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:46:53 +0000

I can't remember, could you buy a math coprocessor for it?

I know my 286 you could pair with a 287 next to it.. not sure if it really made a difference you could discern outside of hyper-specific uses though.

New comment by bbarn in "How to talk to anyone and why you should"

bbarn — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:05:29 +0000

If anyone doesn't know where to start - start in places you're stuck next to people. Like in line to check out at the grocery store. I have struck up dozens of conversations looking at the belt and guessing what they're making for dinner. People who like to cook love to talk about cooking.

New comment by bbarn in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

bbarn — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 15:05:51 +0000

I still use it on iOS, and I've tried to remove all other keyboards, but Apple still just seems to "make up" keyboards I don't know are installed. Or switch keyboards on me mid-typing a word to a weird native one I also don't show as installed. It used to be very occasionally this would happen but now it's so repeatable since 26 I can almost not use my keyboard.

One caveat, I have an Icelandic keyboard installed on there. Sometimes web controls will force an input box to a US english keyboard (or numpad), which is annoying but at least that's sort of covered by a spec. What really drives me nuts is when I'm mid typing on the swype keyboard and suddely it switches to a completely square grid keyboard with up and down quotes in the autocomplete (which is not actually autocompleting or correcting(which while technically correct has almost completely fallen out of popularity since the dawn of the internet)

New comment by bbarn in "How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital"

bbarn — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 22:15:54 +0000

Working for London startups in the past, I've found they're much more polite, but much less honest and straightforward. There's a layer of britishness you have to get past sometimes to get to what people really want instead of directness.

New comment by bbarn in "Toll roads are spreading in America"

bbarn — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 22:47:13 +0000

Except the impact of even gas prices going up has added to costs in basically anything delivered by truck. Every tax you put on that just eventually ends up in consumer hands.

New comment by bbarn in "Toll roads are spreading in America"

bbarn — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 22:45:02 +0000

It was very much on and off for many years. It was intended to cover the costs then go away. Instead they installed stream lined overhead tolls to not have to wait at the toll booth anymore and now it's just a perpetual tax.

It's also partially owned by outside investment (specifically the skyway from Indiana)

New comment by bbarn in "We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years"

bbarn — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 15:57:31 +0000

I had a similar issue living abroad. My wife had a work visa (which was the reason we we moving) and I was allowed to go being a spouse, but once there getting a permit to work for myself was impossible without a job, and a job was impossible without a work permit.

There were ways around it, but it took finding a job at a really big company to make it work - they had dealt with it and had HR people that specialized in it. Once "on paper", I was pretty free to move around. I would not be surprised if their method was just putting in all zeros in the system or something until the permit number came back.

New comment by bbarn in "We pwned X, Vercel, Cursor, and Discord through a supply-chain attack"

bbarn — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 21:42:31 +0000

I mean, as a hiring manager, a fresh grad with multiple bug bounties tells me a lot about their drive and skill, so I'd agree. It's a great differentiator.

New comment by bbarn in "How to Attend Meetings"

bbarn — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 22:19:23 +0000

I think the cultural norm of a stance like this for attendees will condition people over time to follow the opposite side of things.

New comment by bbarn in "A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs"

bbarn — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 23:53:59 +0000

I think it's just an unfair comparison in general. The power of the LLM is the zero risk to failure, and lack of consequence when it does. Just try again, using a different prompt, retrain maybe, etc.

Humans make a bad choice, it can end said human's life. The worst choice a LLM makes just gets told "no, do it again, let me make it easier"