New comment by freefal in "A Little History of the Anchovy"

freefal — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 12:04:17 +0000

The first syllable is stressed in the US

New comment by freefal in "West Coast Trail – The 75km/48 mile hike in Vancouver Island (2021)"

freefal — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 00:33:59 +0000

I did this hike with some friends years ago. It can be wet, but it's a beautiful hike. You can camp on the beach and make fires every night. I highly recommend it if you're looking for a through hike with lots of terrain you can't access except by foot.

New comment by freefal in "Disabling the Intel Management Engine"

freefal — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 17:21:02 +0000

“removes the vast majority of the ME's software modules (including network stack, RTOS and Java VM)”

There’s a Java VM on these things?!

Chess Investigation Finds U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times

freefal — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 19:41:49 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chess-cheating-hans-niemann-report-magnus-carlsen-11664911524

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33085649

Points: 326

# Comments: 322

New comment by freefal in "Twitter takeover battle: Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey turn up pressure on board"

freefal — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 18:14:11 +0000

Update: This is wrong. Ignore it. The poison pill is not diluting any individual shareholder disproportionately. What it is doing is issuing the right to buy shares at a steep discount. For example, if shares of Company XYZ are currently trading at $50/share, the board would issue all the company's shareholders the right to buy stock at $25/share. Economically, everyone should exercise their rights since this is a good deal. The issue for the hostile bidder is that it can become quite expensive to actually fund the exercise price to maintain their ownership interest. The company now also has more cash and so purchasing all the remaining stock that the hostile bidder does not own will become more expensive/difficult.

New comment by freefal in "Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private"

freefal — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 15:12:43 +0000

I believe Microsoft offered a cash option so not sure subsequent returns are relevant.

New comment by freefal in "Reddit can't build a better search engine"

freefal — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 05:04:28 +0000

When it came out, PageRank was a really innovative way to order search results that cut through most of the "SEO" at the time, which was webpages doing lots of unsophisticated things to range well for a given topic (e.g., putting that topic in the many times).</p> </article> <article> <h1>New comment by freefal in "Goldman Sachs invests $250M in compressed air energy storage"</h1> <p>freefal — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 17:14:10 +0000</p> <p>A bit tangential, but New York City has an operating steam system that's still widely used by commercial customers.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system</a></p> </article> <article> <h1>New comment by freefal in "How are Rome's monuments still standing?"</h1> <p>freefal — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 22:11:32 +0000</p> <p>Either reads fine to me.</p> </article> <article> <h1>New comment by freefal in "Microsoft Edge’s new ‘Buy now, pay later’ feature is the definition of bloatware"</h1> <p>freefal — Sat, 20 Nov 2021 15:50:09 +0000</p> <p>I wouldn’t use this because it just seems like a hassle but how are 4 interest-free installments worse than paying upfront?<p>I’m unclear on Zip’s business model so appreciate I could be missing something here.</p> </article> <article> <h1>Retirement Fund Giant Calpers Votes to Use Leverage, More Alternative Assets</h1> <p>freefal — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 13:33:48 +0000</p> <p>Article URL: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/retirement-fund-giant-calpers-votes-to-use-leverage-more-alternative-assets-11637032461">https://www.wsj.com/articles/retirement-fund-giant-calpers-votes-to-use-leverage-more-alternative-assets-11637032461</a></p> <p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29240346">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29240346</a></p> <p>Points: 4</p> <p># Comments: 0</p> </article> <article> <h1>New comment by freefal in "IRS announces 401(k) limit increases to $20,500"</h1> <p>freefal — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 02:25:34 +0000</p> <p>No, but you can hit it via after-tax 401k contributions and then convert those to a Roth IRA (i.e., Mega Backdoor Roth)</p> </article> <article> <h1>New comment by freefal in "Wyoming natural gas flared for cryptocurrency mining exempt from taxation"</h1> <p>freefal — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 23:48:37 +0000</p> <p>These are crude wells for which natural gas is just a byproduct. While crude can be stored in tanks near the wells and trucked intermittently to pipelines, the natural gas requires pipelines to the wellhead which may not be economic. Generally there isn’t a productive use of small quantities of natural gas in the middle of nowhere so it’s flared. The Bitcoin mining provides a “productive” use.</p> </article> <article> <h1>New comment by freefal in "On the disappearing antonyms of “grumpy” words"</h1> <p>freefal — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 02:10:14 +0000</p> <p>Here's a fun New Yorker article that takes this to an extreme: <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/07/25/how-i-met-my-wife" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/07/25/how-i-met-my-w...</a><p>A sample: "It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate. I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array."</p> </article> <article> <h1>New comment by freefal in "Anna Kiesenhofer: Mathematician, amateur cyclist, Olympic champion"</h1> <p>freefal — Sun, 25 Jul 2021 16:15:54 +0000</p> <p>The big difference between typical pro races and the Olympics is that in the Olympics the riders don’t race with radios, which made this situation possible. In a typical pro race, the team director would be telling his riders there is still someone up the road.</p> </article> <article> <h1>New comment by freefal in "Survey shows people no longer believe working hard will lead to a better life"</h1> <p>freefal — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 12:57:11 +0000</p> <p>Imported from where?</p> </article> <article> <h1>New comment by freefal in "Commenting vs. Making"</h1> <p>freefal — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 02:06:50 +0000</p> <p>The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt is excellent.</p> </article> <article> <h1>New comment by freefal in "The World’s Fastest DES Cracker"</h1> <p>freefal — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 19:15:11 +0000</p> <p>Indeed. It was actually a great system that sat somewhere between email and IM in its usage on campus. The Windows and Mac clients had notifier processes that would signal the client to poll if the server alerted them to new messages. It made messages appear nearly instantly which they did not back in the POP/IMAP time-based polling days.</p> </article> <article> <h1>New comment by freefal in "The World’s Fastest DES Cracker"</h1> <p>freefal — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:08:08 +0000</p> <p>Back in '07, my school still used a custom email protocol called Blitzmail that verified the user by sending a random number, having the user encrypt the random number via DES using his password as the key and then send the result back. One problem (there were many) was that passwords were 8 characters and DES only wanted a 56-bit key so the protocol just dropped the <i>least</i> significant bit of each character. So while everyone thought they had one password, they really had 2^8 = 256 passwords, where 'b' and 'c' were interchangeable as were 'd' and 'e' and so on...<p>Now <i>that</i> was easy to crack.</p> </article> <article> <h1>New comment by freefal in "It Feels Like the Game Is Rigged"</h1> <p>freefal — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 05:14:21 +0000</p> <p>The Post article is an op-ed, not something written by the editorial board. I’d prefer that newspapers feel free to publish a wide range of views without readers ascribing those views to the paper (I.e., the newsroom or editorial board).</p> </article> </main></body></html>