Hacker News: ryanmarsh

New comment by ryanmarsh in "US missile hit military base near Iran school, video analysis shows"

ryanmarsh — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:49:48 +0000

I’m not a fan of our (the US) involvement in this conflict. That said it seems like a properly executed precision strike. The school is 200m from the Tomahawk impact. Is the intent of the article to showcase American precision or to imply the school was hit? I’m confused.

New comment by ryanmarsh in "Monodraw"

ryanmarsh — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 16:12:18 +0000

I really needed this 20 years ago.

New comment by ryanmarsh in "Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes"

ryanmarsh — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 18:22:33 +0000

I worked in the Pennzoil building (mentioned). It was a horrible waste of space, for what? A couple of nondescript black triangles? They could have had so much more leasable space and the floors wouldn't have been these odd shaped low ceiling caverns to make up for the loss of useable space. Just think, each of those triangular towers needs its own core with plumbing and elevator shafts. Good grief.

New comment by ryanmarsh in "I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps"

ryanmarsh — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 06:10:53 +0000

I really like the part where the article was phone friendly.

Seriously how does anyone make money with a website where the actual content is so obscured by ads that users don’t bother coming back?

New comment by ryanmarsh in "Dear OAuth Providers"

ryanmarsh — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 21:36:18 +0000

You had me until "Please support HTTP basic auth for client authentication".

OAuth 2.1 draft spec emphasizes that basic auth is no longer preferred. I read that to mean: MAY, or perhaps even SHOULD NOT.

New comment by ryanmarsh in "IT tycoon Mike Lynch, daughter Hannah found dead"

ryanmarsh — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 21:29:24 +0000

"Coincidentally, Lynch's co-defendant, Stephen Chamberlain, who was also acquitted, died the day of the storm after being hit by a car on Saturday morning in Stretham, England."

Coincidentally indeed.

"Other missing individuals have been identified by The Independent as: Christopher Morvillo, a lawyer who had represented Lynch and wife Neda Morvillo; Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of investment bank Morgan Stanley International and wife Judy Bloomer."

Oh.

New comment by ryanmarsh in "The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat"

ryanmarsh — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 15:52:57 +0000

Nothing will compare to standing in a book store as a teen reading Mother Earth Mother Board, published in wired, while my Coke got warm.

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

New comment by ryanmarsh in "What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he's not coming back?"

ryanmarsh — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 16:52:20 +0000

Has anyone else read the story of the astronaut onboard ISS who lost it (if I recall it was over a romantic interest) and destroyed the toilet and drilled a hole in the space station?

New comment by ryanmarsh in "In 1903, NY Times predicted airplanes would take 10M years to develop"

ryanmarsh — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 20:34:44 +0000

Hacker News is not the audience for “haters gonna hate”.

The list of similarly cynical responses to great innovations and great businesses is a long one here.

New comment by ryanmarsh in "Robot Framework: generic open source automation framework"

ryanmarsh — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 14:00:59 +0000

I’ve spent a fair number of years doing corporate cucumber training.

At every client I emphatically insist that if they are not using Gherkin as a “Rosetta stone” for the business folks then they’re wasting their time with cucumber. Don’t go to the trouble of writing gherkin if you’re not using it as living documentation. Save yourself loads of trouble and just use an ordinary test framework.

New comment by ryanmarsh in "Select * from cloud"

ryanmarsh — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 15:02:18 +0000

Is this IaSQL reborn or a completely new product?

New comment by ryanmarsh in "Intel says one of its 13th Gen CPUs will hit 6GHz out of the box"

ryanmarsh — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 15:12:24 +0000

Literally halt and catch fire.

New comment by ryanmarsh in "Atkinson Hyperlegible Font"

ryanmarsh — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 15:10:17 +0000

I’ll tell you how, because I had a client in this exact situation. The business just sees fluctuations in sales. They don’t see error rates. In traditional businesses SW engineering keeps the dynatrace logs close to the vest.

I convinced a dev to walk me through their dynatrace console. I dug in and took screenshots then gave them to h to the business. The business demanded access to dynatrace and then was able to correlate error rates with revenue fluctuations (down to the hour of the day, people are habitual). They came up with a cost factor and figured out how much they’re losing. This led to budget being allocated for a project to solve these problems. I bid on the work but was denied. The VP of IT at this point hated me.

New comment by ryanmarsh in "Atkinson Hyperlegible Font"

ryanmarsh — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 15:05:33 +0000

Thanks for troubleshooting for me but no. Just a stock popular browser.

New comment by ryanmarsh in "Atkinson Hyperlegible Font"

ryanmarsh — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 17:41:18 +0000

I was showing this exact problem to my wife, a moment after trying to order something from The Container Store and their website being broken, just after trying to pay a bill and that website not working too.

I swear to God this f**ing industry.

New comment by ryanmarsh in "Company Tells Employees: Work ‘Voluntary’ Overtime or Go to Jail"

ryanmarsh — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 12:32:17 +0000

I’m a little confused. Not working overtime is striking? Is this correct or is there some other missing detail?

New comment by ryanmarsh in "Researcher finds a new method for recycling polystyrene"

ryanmarsh — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 20:35:01 +0000

I have a way of recycling polystyrene that’s also good for dealing with tyrants.

New comment by ryanmarsh in "Physical buttons outperform touchscreens in new cars, test finds"

ryanmarsh — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 00:20:49 +0000

Changing the fan speed (UI slider control) in the model X without killing yourself is fun.

To those who want to say “use voice control” let me tell you about all the times I say “turn the fan speed up” and it turns it DOWN.

New comment by ryanmarsh in "Puppertino: A CSS framework based on Human Guidelines from Apple"

ryanmarsh — Sun, 14 Aug 2022 21:52:12 +0000

Browsing HN on mobile. New CSS framework appears. I click the link, aaaaand it looks janky on mobile.

Every. Single. Time.

New comment by ryanmarsh in "A/B testing gets misused to juice metrics in the short term"

ryanmarsh — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 15:26:18 +0000

For many businesses revenue is a function of aggressive deal making. Full stop. In an undifferentiated market of discretionary (impulse) purchases if you don't hustle the customer you make less. The author of this article is confusing companies that are bad at hustling with hustling being bad.

One time offers, limited time offers, mailing list signups, up-sells, and cross sells are time tested ways to increase sales dating as far back as radio era telephone and catalog sales.

Steve Madden is a perfect example of this. They sell undifferentiated popular shoe styles less expensive than high fashion but more expensive than knockoffs. They have to hustle you to get you on their mailing list (for 10% off your order) in the hopes that you'll make another impulse purchase later when you get a text or email from them. If they weren't as aggressive you might never make another impulse purchase with them again as there are tons of brands selling nearly identical products.

Some companies are just horrible at hustling so they actually get in the way of you completing your purchase. In a competitive market this is a self correcting problem.