Hacker News: briffle

New comment by briffle in "Peptides: where to begin?"

briffle — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:17:23 +0000

Ozempic in the US just had its price reduced to $499 for a pen with a few 2mg doses...

New comment by briffle in "Oregon school cell phone ban: 'Engaged students, joyful teachers'"

briffle — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:55:28 +0000

Kids are smart. My school district has sealed pouches.. Its amazing how many kids throw an old phone in there, and put their actual one away hidden on silent.

Which I guess gets looked the other way, since they aren't using it in class.

New comment by briffle in "Oregon school cell phone ban: 'Engaged students, joyful teachers'"

briffle — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:53:22 +0000

its a blanket rule, which has almost no exceptions. So there are some silly parts. One of my kids is in band and the school uses YONDER pouches. They have had to dig out some really, really old analog tuners to use. They have a fraction of the capability of a $4 IOS app, but the kids are supposed to keep their phones in a special sleeve with no exceptions... (so many kids break that rule, or throw an old dummy phone in the pouch)

New comment by briffle in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

briffle — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:16:20 +0000

A famous case of this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile where the man identitified he had a concealed carry, the cop told him not reach for it, he started to say he wasn't, he was getting his license the officer asked for, with the officer cutting him off repeatedly and the officer shot him because he 'feared for his life'.

All they have to prove is that they fear for their life. It does not have to make sense, does not have to be 'justified', etc.

New comment by briffle in "The bureaucracy blocking the chance at a cure"

briffle — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:56:20 +0000

Its a double edged sword. yes, it stifles renewable energy innovation, but those rules are usually put in place in a more general sense, and you would really want them in place if next door was suddenly announced to be a landfill, or chemical plant, or a chicken farm, or an xAI datacenter....

New comment by briffle in "The Wyden Siren Goes Off Again: We’ll Be “Stunned” By What the NSA Is Doing"

briffle — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:54:43 +0000

They both showed up in person, because that was NOT the first time that had happened.

New comment by briffle in "The Wyden Siren Goes Off Again: We’ll Be “Stunned” By What the NSA Is Doing"

briffle — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:07:09 +0000

I have seen what happens with garbage-in/garbage-out in databases, so this kind of stuff terrifies me. I often think of a case where we had a person listed twice in our database, with same address, birthday, etc, only thing different was gender, and last 2 digits of SSN were transposed..

After we 'fixed' the issue a few times, they BOTH showed up to our office.

Both Named Leslie, born on same day, a few small towns apart, same last name and home phone since they had been married. Back then, SSN were handed out by region sequentially, so one had the last two digits 12 and the other 21.

New comment by briffle in "Intel's make-or-break 18A process node debuts for data center with 288-core Xeon"

briffle — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 06:08:41 +0000

While I agree with you, some solutions, such as Oxide Computing could come pretty close to having all the ease of cloud, one whole rack of computers at a time.

New comment by briffle in "MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max"

briffle — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:45:42 +0000

the new models cost $200 more for each 8GB of Ram you add.. Ouch...

New comment by briffle in "British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time"

briffle — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:53:48 +0000

I believe both Oregon and Washington have passed bills, but both require CA to also pass so that the whole west coast moves. CA has still not passed a bill.

New comment by briffle in "Open Source Endowment – new funding source for open source maintainers"

briffle — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:31:58 +0000

So what is your proposed solution?

New comment by briffle in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"

briffle — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 17:55:45 +0000

when I was a kid in the early 90's, my state (and many others) banned cigarette vending machines since there was no way to prevent them being used by minors, unless they were inside a bar, where minors were already not allowed.

New comment by briffle in "AWS Adds support for nested virtualization"

briffle — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:14:08 +0000

As do all the other cloud providers, that have had this for years. like GCP and Azure, for 9 years now.

New comment by briffle in "Oxide raises $200M Series C"

briffle — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 06:56:07 +0000

Honestly, I keep an eye on them because we are a core market for their product.. We run a bunch of K8s clusters, and Postgres databases. We currently use cloud, but if someone bought us up, and demanded we stop all cloud, we could move to something like this in a fairly short time, with limited changes. I wouldn't have to deal with Dell, plus VMWare, plus a SAN company plus a networking company, and hope they all work work together nicely.

I could get a spot in a colo, drop 2 fibers assigned to a few subnets, and be up and replicating our databases in a day or two. We have no need for GPU right now, but do need to often switch DB's to add cpu, ram, etc. Honestly, it would pay off in a year to 18 months, depending on the rumored prices, and colo costs.

New comment by briffle in "Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers"

briffle — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:41:17 +0000

I hear that argument, but a relative has been an elecrtrician that started out working mostly at the original facebook datacenter in 2016 or so. he now owns the business, and his single biggest client is still the facebook datacenter.

Constant additions, reconfigurations, etc.

New comment by briffle in "The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)"

briffle — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 16:43:00 +0000

My wife was a surveyor in a past carreer. We have a tape measure in the garage that measures to the nearest hundredth of a foot. It is just so weird to see. Forcing decimal on a measurement that does not normally have it just makes me uncomfortable.

https://surveysupplyinc.com/lufkin-12-foot-hi-viz-engineers-...

New comment by briffle in "Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines"

briffle — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 18:57:10 +0000

> My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.

While that is true, the datacenters hosting those servers are going to lose a massive amount of monthly income by not having those servers colocated anymore.

And just out of curiosity, how many small/medium websites would have the in house know-how to switch to a different CDN? Cloudflare fronts your site, giving you an 'automatic' CDN, where most others require changes to your site to work with.

New comment by briffle in "A faster heart for F-Droid"

briffle — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 23:08:41 +0000

The OSU Open Source Lab gives machines to groups in their datacenter: https://osuosl.org/services/hosting/

It has hosted quite a few famous services.

New comment by briffle in "Nvidia takes $5B stake in Intel under September agreement"

briffle — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 18:34:31 +0000

They could just license all the IP, and hire away all the Engineers and executives... :)

New comment by briffle in "How did DOGE disrupt so much while saving so little?"

briffle — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 18:18:03 +0000

no, it wasn't even a real effort. A REAL effort would have been to collect what all is being done, and seeing where things should be removed, processes changed, etc. This was a slash and burn.