Hacker News: rycomb

New comment by rycomb in "Motorola effectively bricked its entire line of WiFi routers without explanation"

rycomb — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 03:44:22 +0000

I'd suggest buying the OpenWRT One. I've bought a bunch, and I think it's terrific.

New comment by rycomb in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

rycomb — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:39:33 +0000

Oh dang, we all know –based on observation of your throughput and availability– that you're AI, you just can't "be nervous".

Jokes aside, thanks for your selection. I had read some, but missed others until your comment.

If it matters, I think there's some people that hasn't decided yet what tribe (pro-AI/anti-AI) they belong to. There's probably dozens of us!

New comment by rycomb in "Seagate: 'new' hard drives used for tens of thousands of hours"

rycomb — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 14:36:13 +0000

Indeed. Seems that Amazon is doing this more and more. Here in the US, I've just received a used (and damaged) Rode microphone, sold and shipped by Amazon 'as new'. And as you said, I returned it and decided not to order anything valuable from them, ever again.

Still, I wonder if these (arguably illegal) practices are still worth it for merchants and companies, considering that there's no enforcement and the majority of consumers don't drastically change their shopping habits when being abused.

New comment by rycomb in "Boston installs vending machines for addicts with Narcan, fentanyl test kits"

rycomb — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 05:23:48 +0000

I wonder how they are going to prevent abuse-theft, assuming the products are free or under the market's cost. There will always be someone wiping it all (to sell or whatever), and the vending machines will be always empty. Or, if there's some measure (e.g. limiting supply per person via biometrics), it may turn to be a disincentive for some people that need it.

New comment by rycomb in "Translating 10M lines of Java to Kotlin"

rycomb — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 01:33:52 +0000

I'm pretty sure wg0 was being facetious.

New comment by rycomb in "FUTO Keyboard"

rycomb — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 16:23:17 +0000

I agree. I really hope that they improve it.

New comment by rycomb in "Surface Laptop review: Microsoft's best MacBook Air competitor yet"

rycomb — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 22:19:53 +0000

Not sure about the SP3, but my SP4 (which, btw, had no problems running Linux) was afflicted by the so called "flickergate", and I didn't manage to replace it. Since then, I sworn off any Microsoft hardware. Their software and OS, I had sworn these off years before, which makes these devices even less appealing...

New comment by rycomb in "Gamers Nexus: Asus Scammed Us [video]"

rycomb — Sun, 12 May 2024 01:42:49 +0000

Interesting. My brother had a very similar experience with an ASUS laptop when doing a RMA several months ago, in Europe. It seems that it's systemic.

New comment by rycomb in "Debian is at the heart of the most successful Linux distros"

rycomb — Sun, 20 Aug 2023 11:49:26 +0000

My favorites are Debian for servers, Arch for desktops. Debian in desktops didn't really work for me... a rolling release makes more sense.

New comment by rycomb in "Google Deprecates Google Domains, Sells It to Squarespace"

rycomb — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 00:27:34 +0000

Pitifully, Porkbun's marketplace depends on Paypal... Otherwise it'd be perfect!

New comment by rycomb in "An analysis of conspiracy promotor Russell Brand"

rycomb — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 06:07:03 +0000

I've always seen Russell Brand -like many street preachers- as something similar to the raw verbal intelligence we see now in LLMs: capable of bringing a stream of words with interesting derivatives, easily interpretable as agreeable and intelligent, and then hallucinating a little. Yet in the depths of those regurgitated concepts that are a mix of things you've already seen, you search for glimmers of any abstract idea that you haven't thought before. Something that tickles your brain. And you find none.

He also has good timing.

New comment by rycomb in "Dark Waters of Self-Delusion: The crash of Transair flight 810"

rycomb — Tue, 04 Jul 2023 21:50:33 +0000

Ryan —not Okai— is the one with a legal practice.

New comment by rycomb in "Junk websites filled w AI-generated text pulling in money from programmatic ads"

rycomb — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 03:45:27 +0000

Ha! Somewhat unrelated, but that reminded me of a homeless guy in Portland whose intro line was "do you know how you say dragonfly in Spanish?", to which I responded "libélula" (I knew it because Spanish is my mother tongue). Interesting, he seemed kinda pissed off, as I spoiled his soliciting routine. Maybe he's the human version of those sites!

New comment by rycomb in "After weight-loss surgery, a year of joys and disappointments (2016)"

rycomb — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 11:20:23 +0000

I'd imagine that it's referring to their endocrine system changes leading to changes in gene expression (of that many genes).

New comment by rycomb in "I Miss Smoking"

rycomb — Mon, 27 Jun 2022 02:53:25 +0000

Assuming they read more than the title...

New comment by rycomb in "TurboTax’s fight against free tax filing"

rycomb — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 18:57:54 +0000

Yet there are businesses like TaxDown and TaxFix trying to get in the middle (just look at how much they're spending on ads in Spanish TV).

I seriously hope they fail, and also that they're never able to influence the powers that be / the whole process with Hacienda (they surely would like to make it more complex, more like filing a return in the US).

New comment by rycomb in "People who press on cookie banners anything except “agree” – why do you do that?"

rycomb — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 14:38:47 +0000

Many people here seem to forget that cookies aren't the only way to track, and fingerprinting a user is easy without having to use cookies (via UserAgent, IP, canvas data, and a myriad other techniques).

Now, I wonder what does the GDPR and similar legislation say about those, but my uneducated guess is that a user accepting the site's policy regarding user data collection would approve the use of fingerprinting as well (and deleting the cookies would only work partially, privacy-wise).

New comment by rycomb in "What did www.python.org look like from 1996 to 2021?"

rycomb — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 06:08:40 +0000

I guess so... with an extra dose of neutrality! (one hopes)

New comment by rycomb in "What did www.python.org look like from 1996 to 2021?"

rycomb — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 00:08:36 +0000

At the same time, you're giving free feedback saying that his free comment is a poor comment.

Arguably, his poor comment may have taken less effort than the poor video he was criticizing, and probably an equivalent effort to your comment on his comment... anyway, this doesn't seem to stop... until this will look like Reddit.

New comment by rycomb in "Tell HN: I can't buy a PS4 because of my email"

rycomb — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 14:34:17 +0000

When the conversation about "oh, you work for us?" started to get too repetitive, I'd just start using "Caesar +1" for the name, that is, instead of .

The problem is that I'd still received a lot of spam. Tried graylisting and other methods, but a hard rule (i.e. name must end in a number) ended up working better.

Another amusing thing about using a personalized catch-all is finding out who had their users' database hacked/leaked ...and, other than the common ones that we all know (the ones in have I been pwned?), I received some others that were kinda big (i.e. a Spanish airline company)