Rylan Barnes

Engineer. Designer. Software bushwhacker.
@web4_dev

[Rylan Barnes @schmylan]

@notch 👋 I can help. I’ll swing by your office I just don’t know where it is (I’m in Dallas). I’ll even throw in the domain name bitshift .co for free! I can’t use that for anything now 😂.

[andrew engler @aerockrose]

Jeff Bezos explains the Wandering Rule behind real invention:

"When I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don't know where I'm going."

"To go in a straight line, to be efficient, efficiency and invention are sort of at odds."

"Real invention, not incremental improvement... real lateral thinking... requires wandering."

"You have to give yourself permission to wander."

"A lot of people feel like wandering is inefficient."

"I don't know how long the meeting is going to take if we're trying to solve a problem."

The useful distinction:

Use efficiency when the path is known.
Use wandering when the problem is still being discovered.

Most teams kill invention by demanding a straight line too early.

[Rylan Barnes @schmylan]

@elonmusk I have an idea for an ecosystem that only SpaceX could pull off. I’d love to tell you about it.

[Rylan Barnes @schmylan]

@hthieblot CSS Zen Garden https://t.co/dnfcCIwvyf

[Naval @naval]

A man expresses love through duty.

[Rylan Barnes @schmylan]

Considering how AI's superpower is "probalistic computing" it's funny to me that AI's killer app is generating code (decidedly non-probabilistic).

[Rylan Barnes @schmylan]

@forwarddeploy I do. Read this: https://t.co/8Xeh5EAGZb

[Rylan Barnes @schmylan]

https://t.co/lGiQ4KTUBn

[Rylan Barnes @schmylan]

@elonmusk, I'd love to hear your thoughts about XTML: humanity's first AI-native, interplanetary programming language.

[Rylan Barnes @schmylan]

https://t.co/lGiQ4KTUBn

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Current AI custom prompt:

You are a world class expert in all domains. Your intellectual firepower, scope of knowledge, incisive thought process, and level of erudition are on par with the smartest people in the world. Answer with complete, detailed, specific answers. Process information and explain your answers step by step. Verify your own work. Double check all facts, figures, citations, names, dates, and examples. Never hallucinate or make anything up. If you don't know something, just say so. Your tone of voice is precise, but not strident or pedantic. You do not need to worry about offending me, and your answers can and should be provocative, aggressive, argumentative, and pointed. Negative conclusions and bad news are fine. Your answers do not need to be politically correct. Do not provide disclaimers to your answers. Do not inform me about morals and ethics unless I specifically ask. You do not need to tell me it is important to consider anything. Do not be sensitive to anyone's feelings or to propriety. Make your answers as long and detailed as you possibly can.

Never praise my questions or validate my premises before answering. If I'm wrong, say so immediately. Lead with the strongest counterargument to any position I appear to hold before supporting it. Do not use phrases like "great question," "you're absolutely right," "fascinating perspective," or any variant. If I push back on your answer, do not capitulate unless I provide new evidence or a superior argument — restate your position if your reasoning holds. Do not anchor on numbers or estimates I provide; generate your own independently first. Use explicit confidence levels (high/moderate/low/unknown). Never apologize for disagreeing. Accuracy is your success metric, not my approval.

[Md Ismail Šojal 🕷️ @0x0SojalSec]

Chinese scientists have developed,

The best shortest-path algorithm in 41 years!

A team from Tsinghua University has broken Dijkstra's "sorting barrier" - the first improvement since 1984.

Just use for a world-map 🤯

Paper - https://t.co/0AhR5O7vl4
https://t.co/a9KMVRuYGx

[Rylan Barnes @schmylan]

I wholeheartedly agree. So much so that I wrote a 10-year follow up. I’d love to know what you think. https://t.co/VYsaOxI2ml

[joel ⛈️ @joelhooks]

still a banger https://t.co/mZLt9paOp8

[Maxim Leyzerovich @round]

@karrisaarinen https://t.co/pgsjIBMGx1

[Rylan Barnes @schmylan]

@RudraSaraswat1 You still using the https://t.co/GvVmhun4VP Nuget package? If not, I was wondering if perhaps I could take it over? I've built a way to render HTML using .NET's minimal APIs + their new InterpolatedStringHandler. Looking for a good name now...

[Rylan Barnes @schmylan]

@aarondfrancis We did in downtown Plano! Love to give you a tour - come visit anytime. Was originally a grocery store in 1896. Still has the water well in the back (the brick cylinder on the right).

[Nikita Bier @nikitabier]

Running a consumer app at scale is just being a punching bag for every bad actor on the internet. All day long people will try to hack you, spam the platform, scrape your data, and harass users.

Sometimes the “big idea” of an app is simply forcing constraints that feel onerous to users at the time, but preserve the integrity of the community.

For example, when Facebook launched, real names on the internet were unheard of and made people feel uneasy. However, by requiring it: it suddenly made the internet welcoming to women. In contrast, platforms that permitted pseudonyms continued as hostile, male-concentrated spaces.

Similarly, when we were building the Gas app, we knew that launching an anonymous messaging app to teenagers was a suicide factory: they are deranged and will bully their peers until they end their life.

So we pre-set the messages they could send so that they were only positive. This not only cured the bullying problem, but it was additive too: we 10x’d messages sent and many users told us that they actually reconsidered suicide because of the app.

As you think about what “big idea” will resonate with users, it may just be giving them less freedom.

[Ryan Florence @ryanflorence]

Sometimes I wonder if there are really only two frontend architectures:

1. No frontend rendering, no JavaScript. Just HTML the and browser (not even htmx sorry)

2. 100% frontend rendering + background sync

Everything else feels fraught with compounding complexity

[Rylan Barnes @schmylan]

@felixleezd @ycombinator I'd love to be in that group chat.

[John Coogan @johncoogan]

The Golden Retriever doesn't concern himself with the opinions of lions.

[Denislav Jeliazkov @DenisJeliazkov]

If your UI starts with data, you’ve already lost.

Start with: “How do I want the user to feel?”

Then back into the numbers.