Hacker News: jonahhorowitz

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "Cops Can Bypass iPhone's Automatic Reboot to Get into Locked Phones"

jonahhorowitz — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 18:22:51 +0000

You can (and should) disable access to the Control Center when the phone is locked. You could, alternately, remove the “airplane mode” button from the control center.

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics"

jonahhorowitz — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 18:13:24 +0000

I think they’re referring to a curb extension or “neckdown.” It takes a street with 2-way traffic and adds a mid-block choke point so only one car can go through at a time.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curb_extension

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics"

jonahhorowitz — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 04:20:52 +0000

In the early days, people showed up and just camped wherever. Also, people just drove whenever. For the most part, it worked, until it didn't. When things are unsafe, people are more careful. Norway and Sweden deliberately made their roads less safe to take advantage of this.

There are no stop signs at intersections at Burning Man and thousands of cyclists and yet there are very few collisions. Why? Everyone has to pay attention.

Eventually though, drugs, drinking, driving and tents randomly placed around the open lake bed lead to disaster and they had to add roads. This helped in other ways too. It meant that emergency services could find people who needed help. I also meant that it was easier to describe where your tent was to your friends, or find your way back to camp.

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics"

jonahhorowitz — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 04:15:00 +0000

It's 20 years old, so doesn't cover 2004-present but _This is Burning Man_ actually covers a good bit of it.

[0] - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/585886.This_Is_Burnin...

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "I don't like passkeys"

jonahhorowitz — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 18:01:37 +0000

Target/Walmart/BestBuy. They both have fast shipping options as well as store pickup. Sometimes (if you live somewhere more rural) they have _faster_ shipping times than Amazon.

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "Muse Spark 1.3"

jonahhorowitz — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:53:20 +0000

Coming from Claude Code, I initially went with opencode but switched to pi.dev after a while and I think I like it more. It's lighter weight. It's worth trying both.

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "Playa Phone"

jonahhorowitz — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 03:35:12 +0000

In 2003, my first burn, I camped next to embassy around 7:30 and esplanade. One of the guys in my camp brought a VoIP phone and connected it to whatever internet was available at the time. The phone was a lifeline for many people, back in the days when communicating from the playa was incredibly hard.

Your version is way cooler. Thanks for bringing a little magic to the playa.

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "Monitors for Work"

jonahhorowitz — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 04:02:15 +0000

I'm seriously considering just ordering two of these and taking them into the office. My only fear is that someone else will feel slighted thinking I got special monitors, even though I bought them myself.

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "Hackers Stalked Me by Hijacking a Smartwatch for Kids"

jonahhorowitz — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 05:25:00 +0000

If you want to buy a smartwatch for your kids, or you want to have your kids wear something you can track, but them an Apple Watch SE. It has cellular and GPS, you can call them, you can see where they are, but they can't do much with it besides call you (and people you approve) and text people on an approved list.

It's private, it's secure, and it works with the stuff you already have.

[0] - https://www.apple.com/apple-watch-for-your-kids/

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "Your phone is an entire computer"

jonahhorowitz — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 18:46:50 +0000

FWIW, you can plug your iPhone into an external monitor to do a Keynote presentation. You need a USB-C (or Lightning) to HDMI dongle in most cases, but it works fine.

- https://support.apple.com/guide/keynote-iphone/present-on-a-...

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional"

jonahhorowitz — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:20:04 +0000

In California at least (I'm not sure about Florida law), you can go to court and state "the state hasn't proved that I was the driver," and if the photos are too blurry to show who the driver was, the state loses. You don't have to tell them who the driver was, just show that they don't have enough evidence that it was you. I believe this approach is more consistent with the constitution.[1]

[1]:https://caticketking.com/help-center/photo-red-light-help/ph...

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "A sunscreen scandal shocking Australia"

jonahhorowitz — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 03:24:57 +0000

There have been cases of benzene being detected in sunscreen. It's not an intentional ingredient, just one that is common in industrial manufacturing. I don't think that's what the parent was worried about though.

https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/beware-of-benzene-shining-a-li...

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "FDA has approved Yeztugo, a drug that provides protection against HIV infection"

jonahhorowitz — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:16:52 +0000

As long as they spend so much on marketing, it's hard to believe them when they say the only way they can recoup their R&D investments is to charge high prices.

- *For many large pharmaceutical companies ("Big Pharma"), marketing costs often exceed R&D spending.* In analyses of the top 10 drugmakers by revenue in 2020, 7 companies spent more on sales and marketing than on research and development. For example, Johnson & Johnson spent $22 billion on marketing compared to $12 billion on R&D; Bayer spent $18 billion on marketing vs. $8 billion on R&D[1][2].

- The combined marketing spend for these top 10 companies exceeded R&D by $36 billion (about 37%) in 2020[1][2].

[1] https://www.ahip.org/news/articles/new-study-in-the-midst-of... [2] https://www.csrxp.org/icymi-new-study-finds-big-pharma-spent...

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "The Economist's global rip off"

jonahhorowitz — Mon, 19 May 2025 00:11:37 +0000

This post in current affairs[0] remains the best piece of writing about the Economist that I've ever read.

[0] - https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2017/05/how-the-economis...

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "Spaced repetition systems have gotten better"

jonahhorowitz — Sun, 18 May 2025 20:59:17 +0000

Does RemNote use the algorithm described in the link or something else?

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "Are Levi's from Amazon different from Levi's from Levi's?"

jonahhorowitz — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 18:59:07 +0000

I worked at the Gap and Banana Republic all through high school and college. This was well known amongst the sales staff. There's a small amount of variation between each pair of jeans because of how they're cut and how the material stretches during cutting. Also just different people on different sewing machines makes a difference. We always advised customers to try on a few pairs of the size they were looking for to get one that fit best.

Here's a quick shot of what the cutting machine looks like: https://youtu.be/oBt85Jgjvng?si=UAU0Jj4q_Vztmi5K&t=680

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "Volkswagen reintroducing physical controls for vital functions"

jonahhorowitz — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 04:39:15 +0000

Yes! Night mode was great on long road trips. I've honestly thought of buying a gently used late-00s Saab instead of anything new.

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "If your customers don't talk, NPS is a vanity metric"

jonahhorowitz — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 06:36:20 +0000

I occasionally answer a customer support survey, just because I know the person on the other end probably gets to keep their job or not based on some average score, but I am not wasting my time answering a NPS survey for some random app or company that I've used. It's just not worth my time and I get too many surveys to care.

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "TikTok goes dark in the US"

jonahhorowitz — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 04:28:06 +0000

I don't think the country fell apart when Obama directed the justice department not to enforce weed laws. [0]

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cole_Memorandum

New comment by jonahhorowitz in "TikTok goes dark in the US"

jonahhorowitz — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 04:25:19 +0000

Of course anyone who wanted to, including the Chinese, could just buy that exact data from data brokers in the US. It's readily available.[0] Nobody really believes this was about data.

[0] - https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-...