Hacker News: Joeboy

New comment by Joeboy in "LinkedIn is illegally searching your computer"

Joeboy — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:42:02 +0000

The most obvious reason for this is browser fingerprinting, right? So your visits to other websites can be linked to your Linkedin identity? Or no?

New comment by Joeboy in "Consider the Greenland Shark (2020)"

Joeboy — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 21:46:49 +0000

Maybe "Consider the ant" from The Bible?

Which I only know about from the John Wyndham story[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consider_Her_Ways

New comment by Joeboy in "355 Issues of the UK music magazine NME from 1969-1983"

Joeboy — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:49:21 +0000

These end a few years before I started getting them. I have a large pile of NMEs and Melody Makers from I guess the late '80s / early '90s if anybody wants to collect them from East London, free to good home :-)

New comment by Joeboy in "Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native"

Joeboy — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 19:07:46 +0000

I find it a bit odd how much people talk up the Rust aspect of Tauri. For most cases you'll be writing a Typescript frontend and relying on boilerplate Rust + plugins for the backend. And I'd think most of the target audience would see that as a good thing.

New comment by Joeboy in "My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood"

Joeboy — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 11:16:09 +0000

Not related to the tech bits of this, but I finally got around to watching Aftersun a couple of days ago. It's a great, sad film about somebody watching home video from their childhood and reevaluating what was going on.

New comment by Joeboy in "If you've got Nothing to Hide (2015)"

Joeboy — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 11:28:46 +0000

In the context of the Epstein files, I think Schmidt's actual quote looks pretty good ("If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place").

The problem is that even if Schmidt didn't do anything wrong (I don't know but all the link says is he may have been invited to a dinner but probably didn't attend), he nevertheless had something to fear.

New comment by Joeboy in "How London became the rest of the world’s startup capital"

Joeboy — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 12:30:46 +0000

Your comment reminded of the youtuber who changed the shop signs in his video into scary non-English script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPZxMVpnCBM

Edit: Changed to link I like a bit more

New comment by Joeboy in "Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday"

Joeboy — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 18:18:17 +0000

Anything else worth considering other than youtube (or self-hosting if scale isn't an issue)?

New comment by Joeboy in "Show HN: ChartGPU – WebGPU-powered charting library (1M points at 60fps)"

Joeboy — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 18:06:55 +0000

Apparently you can turn it on with about:config / dom.webgpu.enabled

But personally, I'm not going to start turning on unsafe things in my browser so I can see the demo. I tried firefox and chromium and neither worked so pfft, whatever.

New comment by Joeboy in "UK consulting on bringing in social media ban for under 16s"

Joeboy — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 11:25:09 +0000

I'm fairly agnostic to the headline question of whether social media should be banned for under 16s. The part that seems interesting to me is whether this will entail linking online activity to real world identity for the rest of us. It doesn't have to, but in practice I guess that's probably what'll happen. Unfortunately all the debate is "but freedom of speech" vs "but think of the kids" vs, and nobody will be lobbying for a better (or less worse) implementation.

New comment by Joeboy in "How problematic is resampling audio from 44.1 to 48 kHz?"

Joeboy — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 23:29:56 +0000

If you read the comments with the other interpretation I think the conversation will make more sense.

New comment by Joeboy in "How problematic is resampling audio from 44.1 to 48 kHz?"

Joeboy — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 19:24:00 +0000

I suppose, if you interpret "avoid" as "not care about".

New comment by Joeboy in "How problematic is resampling audio from 44.1 to 48 kHz?"

Joeboy — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 18:18:18 +0000

My reading is not that they're saying it's something they necessarily have deal with themselves, but that it's something they can't practically avoid.

New comment by Joeboy in "How problematic is resampling audio from 44.1 to 48 kHz?"

Joeboy — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 17:27:58 +0000

> Is this not the job of the operating system or its supporting parts, to deal with audio from various sources

I think that's the point? In practice the OS (or its supporting parts) resample audio all the time. It's "under the hood" but the only way to actually avoid it would be to limit all audio files and playback systems to a single rate.

New comment by Joeboy in "How problematic is resampling audio from 44.1 to 48 kHz?"

Joeboy — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 17:23:09 +0000

> This isn't really a drawback

But, that's only true because people freely resample between them all the time and nobody knows or cares about it.

New comment by Joeboy in "How problematic is resampling audio from 44.1 to 48 kHz?"

Joeboy — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 17:13:04 +0000

> Unless I'm missing something?

I suppose the option you're missing is you could try to get pristine captures of your samples at every possible sample rate you need / want to support on the host system.

New comment by Joeboy in "UK government exempting itself from cyber law inspires little confidence"

Joeboy — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 14:16:13 +0000

So I guess my next question is, why are all your recent comments saying things that are obviously and unambiguously not true? These things are all trivial to check, and it's not like nobody is calling you out on it. I don't get what's in it for you.

There's a version of this where you make your case (which IMO is, at its core, based on reasonable concerns) without relying on obviously untrue statements. Why not try that?

New comment by Joeboy in "UK government exempting itself from cyber law inspires little confidence"

Joeboy — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 16:48:32 +0000

Do you have a link about the case you're quoting? I can't find any reference to it.

New comment by Joeboy in "Can I start using Wayland in 2026?"

Joeboy — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 13:19:46 +0000

As a long-time Linux user I've also felt an incongruity between my own experiences with Wayland and the recent rush of "year of the Linux desktop" posts. To be fair, I think the motivation is at least as much about modern Windows' unsuitability for prime time rather as Linux's suitability. I haven't used Windows for a long time so I can't say how fair that is, but I definitely see people questioning 2026 Windows' readiness for prime time.

For me, Wayland seems to work OK right now, but only since the very latest Ubuntu release. I'm hoping at this point we can stop switching to exciting new audio / graphics / init systems for a while, but I might be naive.

Edit: I guess replacing coreutils is Ubuntu's latest effort to keep things spicy, but I haven't seen any issues with that yet.

Edit2: I just had the dispiriting thought that it's about twenty years since I first used Ubuntu. At that point it all seemed tantalizingly close to being "ready for primetime". You often had to edit config files to get stuff working, and there were frustrating deficits in the application space, but the "desktop" felt fine, with X11, Alsa, SysV etc. Two decades on we're on the cusp of having a reliable graphics stack.

New comment by Joeboy in "Can I start using Wayland in 2026?"

Joeboy — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 12:31:39 +0000

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 25.10, and decided to give Wayland another go since X.org isn't installed by default anymore.

Good news: My laptop (Lenovo P53) can now suspend / resume successfully. With Ubuntu 25.04 / Wayland it wouldn't resume successfully, which was a deal breaker.

Annoying thing: I had a script that I used to organize workspaces using wmctrl, which doesn't work anymore so I had to write a gnome-shell extension. Which (as somebody who's never written a gnome-shell extension before) was quite annoying as I had to keep logging out and in to test it. I got it working eventually but am still grumpy about it.

Overall: From my point of view as a user, the switch to Wayland has wasted a lot of my time and I see no visible benefits. But, it seems to basically work now and it seems like it's probably the way things are headed.

Edit: Actually I've seen some gnome crashes that I think happen when I have mpv running, but I can't say for sure if that's down to Wayland.