Hacker News: ryanfreeborn

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "The coolest use for the Vision Pro"

ryanfreeborn — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 22:51:18 +0000

Man the reddit apps sucks

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "Govt warns kenyans about Worldcoin"

ryanfreeborn — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 05:17:24 +0000

- Fucked up predatory remittance money shops, and forced them to lower their fees and actually start competing. - Offered a more stable unit of exchange for people in places where fiat was not usable. - Cheaper alternative method for fast, large transactions. Forced big banks that traditionally accommodated these transactions to innovate.

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "Titanic tourist submersible goes missing with search under way"

ryanfreeborn — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 20:50:50 +0000

And the fact that it sank on its maiden voyage. The tragic irony makes it obvious why humans bestow such significance upon it.

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "Cormac McCarthy has died"

ryanfreeborn — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 21:56:02 +0000

Yes, exactly what huthuthike said. As I Lay Dying. Sound & Fury is great but a much more challenging read.

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "Cormac McCarthy has died"

ryanfreeborn — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 02:18:34 +0000

Ya McCarthy borrows heavily from Melville and Faulkner, which he readily cops to. Judge Holden and Ahab have a lot in common.

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "Cormac McCarthy has died"

ryanfreeborn — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 20:35:49 +0000

Some of my favorite quotes, from my favorite McCarthy book, Blood Meridian:

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

In the days to come they would ride up through a country where the rocks would cook the flesh from your hand and where other than rock nothing was. They rode in a narrow enfilade along a trail strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bake-oven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without reference to sun or man or god.

They rode on and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them. The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come.

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "Deep sleep may be the best defense against Alzheimer’s"

ryanfreeborn — Mon, 22 May 2023 02:28:00 +0000

Many have already pointed that there have been studies to measure the accuracy of sleep analysis by wearables. They aren't that great. If you have a concern, you should definitely seek out a polysomnograph, and wearables should not be a replacement for that. However, you can't get a polysomnograph every night, and wearables are probably the best option for regular analysis. Just because they're not that great doesn't mean they're useless, and doesn't mean they won't improve.

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "European DSA Recipients of Services Report"

ryanfreeborn — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 18:16:50 +0000

Purely anecdotal but I know way more TVs with an Apple TV device than I know humans with an Apple watch. In most cases they are households with many TV-Apple TV pairings, and maybe one or two people in the household have an Apple watch.

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "Utah is first US state to limit teen social media access"

ryanfreeborn — Sun, 26 Mar 2023 03:59:36 +0000

Yup. Federal law enforcement uses interstate nexus via server locations to establish jurisdiction.

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "Study finds that buttons in cars are safer and quicker to use than touchscreens"

ryanfreeborn — Sat, 07 Jan 2023 18:12:46 +0000

I don't see familiarity being with the touchscreen buttons being the issue. The issue is that actually touching a certain amount of pixels on a disembodied screen, while driving, while the car is in motion, is actually annoyingly difficult. No matter how attuned you are with them. I owned a Tesla for several years, and it never got better. It distracts the driver considerably. Unless they drastically increased the size of the interaction points on the screen and/or improved the gestures used to interact, I just don't see touchscreens being a good primary point of interaction between the driver and the car (at least until the driver really isn't regularly "driving" anymore).

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative"

ryanfreeborn — Sun, 18 Dec 2022 18:34:04 +0000

> Brave | do not use | This term perpetuates the stereotype of the "noble courageous savage," equating the Indigenous male as being less than a man.

Should we get rid of bravo then as well? I assume people making these lists have good intentions, but efforts like this really get lost in the sauce. They are effectively parodying themselves.

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "Open-source hospital price transparency"

ryanfreeborn — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 19:02:04 +0000

Tangentially related, Russ Roberts of econtalk had a good interview a few years ago with the founder of a free market hospital in Oklahoma. Super interesting.

https://www.econtalk.org/keith-smith-on-free-market-health-c...

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE"

ryanfreeborn — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 12:36:23 +0000

I have been under the good faith assumption that most (though definitely not all) of the employees that have departed Twitter were probably necessary and valuable to the company. I left the article with the same impression as you. This single person did this very important job, seemingly well, and didn't appear to be drowning in the work. What were the other 8-9k doing?

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE"

ryanfreeborn — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 12:32:03 +0000

No, I think the article makes it very clear what the value and function of SRE is. The point of the comment you're responding to is that the author was the only one doing this—not a team of ten, not even a team of two. This is Twitter's whole cache system! Probably the most important part of their hardware stack, in terms of "is the site performing well for users". There are other SRE needs at Twitter, but not that that many. What were the other 9k people at the company? It begs the question.

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub"

ryanfreeborn — Sat, 12 Feb 2022 20:18:16 +0000

Your source is a Texas-secessionist rant with no citations? Do you have any actual objective reviews of why the power grid issue happened?

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "V-Shaped Ride-in-the-Wings Jetliner Successfully Took Off (2020)"

ryanfreeborn — Sun, 08 Aug 2021 05:14:57 +0000

I'd guess that turns aren't a big deal. Commercial flights rarely turn above 10k feet, so really just some risk of airsickness briefly at either end of the flight. Wing flex during turbulence seems like it would be a far bigger concern for passengers at the ends. That would not be a fun ride, but maybe these crafts handle chop differently? I'd imagine the flex is more evenly distributed, but still problematic.

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "Judge dismisses FTC and state antitrust complaints against Facebook"

ryanfreeborn — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 18:32:16 +0000

OP's idea is that the FTC punted this at the direction of an elected official who gets campaign donations from tech companies. It does not follow that because the FTC has a revolving door problem (which it definitely does), there was executive pressure to punt. Furthermore, FTC officials tend to work at corporations primarily because they are among the most knowledgeable and well-connected people in the space, not necessarily because there is some kind of slow-acting quid pro quo here. It's still a problem, but it's not really analogous to the idea OP had.

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "Judge dismisses FTC and state antitrust complaints against Facebook"

ryanfreeborn — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 00:12:40 +0000

Unlikely. High ranking government lawyers usually don't just put on cases to appease the donors of the executive. These are high-achieving, career-driven people. They want to win.

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "Apple Introduces AirTag"

ryanfreeborn — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 05:07:23 +0000

You swore Tile off because because you don't like how batteries generally function?

New comment by ryanfreeborn in "Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed"

ryanfreeborn — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 20:18:02 +0000

Perhaps other MSM publications. The specific article here talks about US accidents in high-standards labs, and posits that those same accidents can happen in other countries. It's not attacking China at all. What you're describing doesn't apply to the discussion in this article or this thread, just seems non-productive.