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breily

1,343 karma · joined November 18, 2007

http://brianreily.com

email: brian at brianreily.com

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breily··on Covid is surging in the world’s most vaccinated country. Why?
This article has nothing to do with your hypothesized 'vaccine passport'.
breily··on Tunneling traffic through DNS, a.k.a free internet in cafes/airports
This is also possible by tunneling through ICMP: http://www.cs.uit.no/~daniels/PingTunnel/
breily··on Ask HN: Help me make HN work well on the iPhone
The only improvement I can think of is to set the pre areas to wrap. Right now they completely ruin browsing on the iphone, as they make the screen way too wide and this makes the font way too small.
breily··on DuckDuckGo is top result for "new search engine"
Also, you could set the num parameter: http://www.google.com/search?q=asdf&num=1
breily··on Ask HN: What web framework(s) do you guys use?
Thanks, that's always good to hear.
breily··on Ask HN: What web framework(s) do you guys use?
I used to use Django, tried cherrypy and web.py, and have ended up starting to write my own (http://github.com/breily/juno).
breily··on Ask HN: Which school do you attend?
Nice - doing CS here now
breily··on Simple iPhone Interface for Hacker News
Am I the only one who thinks HN works really well on the iPhone? I've never had any problems using it, but as there's like 2-3 of these iPhone versions I guess I'm in the minority.
breily··on Effective teachers have a gift for noticing what one researcher calls "withitness."
Yea, I don't want to get into a huge debate about this either, and the names you mentioned are definitely in the same class as the first picks. My main thought was that while its not a science, the scouts are definitely not just randomly picking players like Gladwell makes it out to be (saying that "there is no way to know who will succeed at it and who won’t" and that "college performance doesn’t tell us anything").
breily··on Effective teachers have a gift for noticing what one researcher calls "withitness."
Out of the 9 years listed it really only happened 3 times that a better QB was left - 2000 (Tom Brady), 2002 (David Garrard - debatable, but he's starting and Carr isn't), and 2005 (Aaron Rodgers). So 6 times out of 9 the best one was taken first - that seems pretty good.

If you go back even further I'd imagine this trend would continue - even Gladwell's main example (Ryan Leaf) was taken second to the best QB playing today (Manning).

breily··on Ask HN: Do you think primarily in English?
I'd noticed this sometimes too, but I think it's something that you can change if you want to. When I was learning german, after a couple years of high school classes I went to a month long full immersion program. When I finished that, I was thinking entirely in german. This stopped over time as I went back to English, but I can still make myself do it sometimes. So with practice/time, you could probably teach yourself to think in something besides English. Though English seems like it might be the most efficient mode for a native speaker.
breily··on Prioritiz'd
Is there a way to log in/sign up besides OpenID? I don't have one, but wanted to use your site. I spent about half an hour trying to figure out which accounts of mine are OpenID enabled, and to get the url for my ID. I keep getting errors like "Open ID server can't be found", etc. so I imagine the urls that I'm putting in the sign up box are not the right ones. Then when I finally get signed up and logged in, later I try to log in with the same url and I get an error. Very frustrating.

Anyways, to summarize: Open ID seems to suck, and its very confusing (though to be completely honest I'm a little drunk which might have made this more difficult for me). I'd imagine most users would appreciate a simple, traditional login (I would have). Anyways, I really wanted to use your site, but after 30 min of failure I've given up. Good luck though.

Edit: For spelling/etc.

breily··on Rockets help build Chinese bridge higher than Empire State Building
This seems pretty innovative, but how do they stop the rockets when they get to the other side? Seems like a very dangerous method.
breily··on College Stops Giving Students New Email Accounts
I do tech support part time for students at my school, and I have to agree with the parent. I'm astounded every day by how bad some people are with computers. We have normal email accounts here, and people still have trouble figuring out to use them. I personally think its a great idea (the first thing I did when I got to school was forward my school account), but I'll bet 75% of the people wouldn't be able to figure it out.
breily··on 19 year old from Florida commits suicide on Justin.tv
In this case if anonymity is to blame then it has to be anonymity of the poster - the victim was live on webcam.
breily··on Google, iPhone, and Thinking Like a Programmer
I haven't done any iPhone development, so I may be wrong here, but doesn't his version not do what the Google one does? How does his code prove that Google's feature could be done with documented API calls when his version uses touch instead of proximity?
breily··on Dropbox for music
Does anyone happen to know of a service like you describe - Dropbox, but made to back up music, with playback/playlists in browser?
breily··on Dumb people don't know they are dumb. Is there a simple explanation for this?
Above-average compared to other professors or compared to the general population? I haven't read anything about their findings but I'd imagine 94% being above average compared to the general population would be on the low side.
breily··on Ask HN: Review our startup (bitloot)
Seconding these criticisms - they make it very difficult to browse the site. A related problem is that you can't right click links to open them in their own tab from the browse page. All in all a cool idea though (not sure I see the business potential though).
breily··on How I Use My Dell
I've never done any serious development on Windows, but I'd imagine you need/want a shell for the same reasons you'd use one on a unix system - using vim, scripting, an array of useful programs (e.g. whatever the Windows version of grep is), etc.
breily··on Major Breakthrough: First Photos of Planets Around Other Stars
Why not? It seems like if we can see them they could see us - unless you just mean our planets are smaller so they'd need a better telescope than we can make?
breily··on Debian ported to the android-powered T Mobile G1
I believe he means that since Debian already ran on ARM processors, it didn't have to be ported for this to work.
breily··on Tell HN: Vote.
I think I'm as libertarian as anybody, but I fail to see a connection between not paying taxes and being murdered by the government. Obviously there are consequences to not paying taxes, but those would be fines/jail time, not certain death. Could you explain a little more?
breily··on Why not Io?
It seems to be pretty much close to the speed of similar languages (python, ruby, etc). It loses a lot in the languages shootout[0], but that was back in January and its a very young language. It does seem to beat python in vector ops[1], so who knows what else it wins at.

Anyways, speed isn't the reason he is rewriting Io for the JVM - he wants the advantage of all the libraries already available, as well as being able to fix some small things he doesn't like.

[0]: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/io.php [1]: http://iolanguage.com/about/speed/vector/x86/

breily··on Why do you have to click Start to shut down?
As of at least 10.4 the trash can becomes an eject icon when you drag a disk.
breily··on Science proves exotic cars turns women on
An article I read recently (I think it was wired but I can't find a link) that said the increase in silent hybrid/electric cars means people will start needing artificial car noise for safety (to warn pedestrians/animals/etc.).

It hinted that people will take a similar path as ringtones and start using music etc.

breily··on California High School's Offensive Scheme Adds Randomness to Football
I imagine the main issue is the number of eligible receivers different leagues allow. In the NCAA offensive linemen cannot be receivers, and in the NFL, you have to have at least 7 players on the line of scrimmage, and only 2 of these are eligible (basically linemen aren't eligible).

There are probably similar rules in the high school leagues for the other 10 states.

breily··on Nice Gallery of Open Source PHP Apps
http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
breily··on The Traffic Guru
If you found this article interesting, I heartily recommend the author's book 'Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do' [1]. Most of this article is pretty much an excerpt of one chapter, but the book goes in a lot of directions.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/03072...

breily··on How to Work 80+ Hour Weeks
I think he meant out of the time you're awake - so if you're up for 15 hours a day, 4/15 > 1/4.
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