Hacker News: ryathal

New comment by ryathal in "Valve is running Apple's playbook in reverse"

ryathal — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:08:33 +0000

This was also closely related to their initial plans with the Xbox One to essentially kill used games, which they were about a decade to fast on rolling out.

New comment by ryathal in "America's betting craze has spread to its news networks"

ryathal — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 19:50:41 +0000

There's already a growing amount of smoke in almost every sport, it's not going to explode like it should because no one is actually interested in enforcement outside isolated players.

New comment by ryathal in "72% of devs believe Steam has a monopoly on PC games, according to study"

ryathal — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 18:33:20 +0000

It's pretty close to one. Having all your games in a single digital library along with cloud saves and achievements for those games in a single place is a real benefit that would lead to a monopoly.

New comment by ryathal in "Toxic "forever chemicals" found in 95% of beers tested in the U.S."

ryathal — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 15:56:51 +0000

PFAS was used in a lot of different things, the sources of major contamination are military bases and manufacturing plants, but it was used in a wide array of consumer products so there is some level of contamination almost everywhere.

New comment by ryathal in "State capacity and eight parking spaces"

ryathal — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 19:08:58 +0000

Our system is great at preventing private capture at the small scale and great at ensuring it on the large scale

New comment by ryathal in "State capacity and eight parking spaces"

ryathal — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 18:57:33 +0000

That's close enough to my experience in state government. The biggest problem was generally a lack of widespread competence. There was plenty of red tape, but there were also lots of people whose job was to deal with that tape.

New comment by ryathal in "The Academic Pipeline Stall: Why Industry Must Stand for Academia"

ryathal — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 13:53:02 +0000

While most the manufacturing work has left the US, the Midwest is full of engineering universities. It's not a coincidence that the big 3 auto companies were based in Detroit and Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are full of top engineering colleges. There's still lots of nameless firms there designing all sorts of things that are manufactured across the globe, but they don't have the employee count to be massive drivers of a city's economy.

New comment by ryathal in "How “The Great Gatsby” took over high school"

ryathal — Wed, 14 May 2025 19:54:53 +0000

There's plenty of material in Harry Potter to serve as a useful book for the basics of literary analysis. The quotability isn't really relevant to that. There's bravery, slavery, love, loss, fascism, resistance, classism, racism, journalistic integrity, crime and punishment, the hero's journey, and more.

New comment by ryathal in "Google to back three new nuclear projects"

ryathal — Thu, 08 May 2025 17:34:20 +0000

For the farmer that owns the land the windmill got built on it's great. The handful of houses in the area get fuck all though and actually have to deal with the externalities.

New comment by ryathal in "Mississippi Can't Possibly Have Good Schools"

ryathal — Thu, 08 May 2025 14:07:53 +0000

If an 18 year old achieves a great score on an 8th grade test they are above average for adults.

New comment by ryathal in "Small Town America vs. Big Box Stores"

ryathal — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 20:42:26 +0000

Dollar stores are generally more expensive in the long run than other stores. They make their money on higher per unit margins and/or vastly lower quality of products.

New comment by ryathal in "MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming"

ryathal — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 20:03:54 +0000

I'm not sure I can agree with that. I think the top level of curling has reached a point that's boring to watch as too many shots are perfect. It leads to boring games of waiting for a missed shot. It's far more entertaining to watch the chaos of a mixed doubles match. That said I wish I could see more than just the Olympics.

New comment by ryathal in "Should managers still code?"

ryathal — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 18:59:55 +0000

A manager of developers should know how to code, but any formal expectation of them coding shouldn't exist. This holds for medium to large organizations. The managerial duties should be enough to require the vast majority of their attention. Expecting development on top of management is a way to add fake capacity to a team to help ensure burnout.

New comment by ryathal in "Software development topics I've changed my mind on"

ryathal — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 16:09:22 +0000

It's saying you don't need to be proud of your app that has multiple layers of abstractions to be immune to every possible change. There are hard problems, but the most complex solution is rarely good or best.

New comment by ryathal in "Understanding gRPC, OpenAPI and REST and when to use them in API design (2020)"

ryathal — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 15:38:50 +0000

I'd argue just making everything POST is the correct way to do a public Api too. REST tricks you into endpoints no one really wants, or you break it anyway to support functionality needed. SOAP was heavy with it's request/respone, but it was absolutely correct that just sending everything as POST across the wire is easier to work with.

New comment by ryathal in "Los Angeles fires expose inflated US home prices"

ryathal — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 19:24:13 +0000

Maine, New Hampshire, Tennessee, and Vermont are the only states that don't have any limits on the increase in property taxes. California may be on the low end at 3%, but most are limiting to less than 10% growth. You can read more here https://www.kiplinger.com/taxes/property-tax-cap-by-state

New comment by ryathal in "Los Angeles fires expose inflated US home prices"

ryathal — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 14:22:21 +0000

Many states have similar laws and they don't see the same massive real estate costs. High property cost is almost entirely demand based.

New comment by ryathal in "Why are Americans paying so much more for healthcare than they used to?"

ryathal — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 18:18:45 +0000

There's not a market for healthcare in America though, at least not accessible to the average person. There is a market for Companies and insurance providers, insurance providers and doctors, but essentially nothing for a person and a doctor. It's practically impossible to actually shop for most medical procedures, by price, service quality, outcome, or any other potential metric. It's a little better for prescription drugs as different companies offer different sets of discounted drugs, but consolidation has hurt that too. Using prescription coverage, the patient is once again far removed from any actual market.

New comment by ryathal in "The average age of U.S. homebuyers jumps to 56"

ryathal — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 14:23:04 +0000

The vast majority of houses aren't rebuilt with any regularity in the US. The extreme high-end McMansions are commonly rebuilt, but that's an outlier. Much of the affordable housing is the luxury apartments of 40-80 years ago.

New comment by ryathal in "The average age of U.S. homebuyers jumps to 56"

ryathal — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 14:18:09 +0000

Inheritance rarely survives past the third generation, it's not really part of the problem.