Hacker News: Joeboy

New comment by Joeboy in "Dolly Parton has died"

Joeboy — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 21:52:40 +0000

She was certainly a fine guitarist, but Wikipedia says you were right first time, it was a session player called Chip Young.

New comment by Joeboy in "GIMP Development Update"

Joeboy — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:45:31 +0000

> I use it to add text to a family photo. The primary storage medium is jpeg. I don't want or need anything else.

So you open your photo, add your text, press Ctrl+E, choose a filename or press Enter to overwrite your old version, and press Enter to accept the default jpeg settings.

I guess it could save a couple of keypresses by auto-overwriting your original file without asking, or not asking about jpeg settings. But it doesn't seem like an outrageous workflow, considering that other people will want those options.

I do feel the same way as you about Photoshop muscle memory, having got quite good at it in the '90s and never really having caught up in Gimp.

New comment by Joeboy in "GIMP Development Update"

Joeboy — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 11:15:56 +0000

I'm a fairly casual / infrequent user, but they've already addressed most of the things I found infuriating in the past.

The big remaining thing I can think of is the "layer boundary" thing, which (it seems to me) is very confusing for new users and inconvenient for all users.

I also have a vibes-based feeling that when I used to use Photoshop twenty-five years ago I was a lot more productive than I'm able to be in GIMP, but I can't be sure if that's just because I used to do more graphic stuff back then and I've never picked it up to the same degree. I find myself having to hunt for things in menus a lot, but that might be a me problem. Photoshop also took a while to get used to.

Edit: I basically agree with the people complaining about Save and Export being unexpectedly separate, although also it's not that hard to press Ctrl+E instead of Ctrl+S.

New comment by Joeboy in "GIMP Development Update"

Joeboy — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:02:55 +0000

After the first run (where it has to evaluate plugins etc) it starts in under 4s on 26.04 on my Lenovo P53 (laptop from 2019). Which is admittedly not exactly snappy, but it's OK IMO.

New comment by Joeboy in "Controversial creators are benefiting from monetization programs run by Meta"

Joeboy — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:20:36 +0000

Headline has now been updated to be less misleading / more boring (rendering prior conversation confusing to newcomers).

New comment by Joeboy in "Facebook is paying controversial creators to produce rage-bait content"

Joeboy — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 11:02:58 +0000

If you use the friends or "all" feeds, you just get stuff about what your friends are up to and things from pages you've subscribed to. Or I do anyway. Also good for discovering events locally.

Even the main feed isn't that bad for me. I guess it depends who your friends are and what you click on.

New comment by Joeboy in "FFmpeg 9.1's new AAC encoder"

Joeboy — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:15:06 +0000

I think the closest thing to an actual "standard" is AES5-2018, "Recommended practice for professional digital audio".

Abstract:

> A sampling frequency of 48 kHz is recommended for the origination, processing, and interchange of audio programs employing pulse-code modulation. Recognition is also given to the use of a 44.1-kHz sampling frequency related to certain consumer digital applications, the use of a 32-kHz sampling frequency for transmission-related applications, and the use of a 96-kHz sampling frequency for applications requiring a higher bandwidth or more relaxed anti-alias filtering. This revision further quantifies the preferred choices for higher sampling frequencies.

Edit: From my personal perspective, 44.1kHz is a legacy minor annoyance

New comment by Joeboy in "TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP"

Joeboy — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:09:05 +0000

I also have a tendency to say "Last century", thinking it comedically suggests "a long time ago" without it actually being that long ago. But as time goes by it obviously becomes legitimately a long time ago, and I suspect young people wouldn't see the attempted irony at all.

New comment by Joeboy in "'Backrooms' Stuns with $81M Debut"

Joeboy — Sun, 31 May 2026 22:37:40 +0000

The big IP films got better distribution and marketing, but there hasn't really been a shortage of original films produced over the last decade. The big franchise movies are a small proportion of films produced.

New comment by Joeboy in "Who will buy your services if you fire us all?"

Joeboy — Tue, 19 May 2026 11:05:33 +0000

If you're talking about introducing it somewhere where there's currently no social safety net, sure. Where I live if you were to replace the existing safety net with say £1k a month (the level of our state pension, which is widely considered a time bomb of unaffordability), that's like a million instant homeless people.

New comment by Joeboy in "The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)"

Joeboy — Mon, 11 May 2026 10:26:09 +0000

I suppose it's like a magic trick. It's less impressive once you understand how it all works. But still, it's clearly effective and you can admire the artistry.

New comment by Joeboy in "The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)"

Joeboy — Mon, 11 May 2026 08:54:08 +0000

> Does the public really not know what editing is?

I think most viewers would be unaware of the cut unless it was pointed out. Hence this sequence being called a "shot".

New comment by Joeboy in "Rotten Dot Com"

Joeboy — Sun, 10 May 2026 10:04:42 +0000

My recollection from this era is there was a common argument that provocation and boundary pushing were the way to ensure an uncensored internet. To me, it seems like that argument has been defeated by reality, but I've never seen much discussion of it. Maybe it's a last-year's-war now anyway.

New comment by Joeboy in "Rotten Dot Com"

Joeboy — Sun, 10 May 2026 09:25:09 +0000

Not really answering your question, but the Belgian Congo photo is probably more notable and consequential.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nsala_of_Wala_in_the_Nsongo_Di...

New comment by Joeboy in "I want to live like Costco people"

Joeboy — Thu, 07 May 2026 19:59:56 +0000

> emails between her and her husband

If we're dropping random trivia it should probably be mentioned that her husband is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis

New comment by Joeboy in "Bugs Rust won't catch"

Joeboy — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:44:47 +0000

Because it's Ubuntu policy to replace some foundational part of the system with some janky unfinished experiment in every release.

I agree with you that that's more the story here than "OMG, somebody wrote Rust code with bugs in it".

New comment by Joeboy in "Reflections on 30 years of HPC programming"

Joeboy — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:46:22 +0000

Maybe not what they meant, but Rust sometimes makes it tempting to just copy things rather than fighting the borrow checker. Whereas in C++ you're free to just pass pointers around and not worry about it until / unless your code crashes or gets exploited.

Speaking authoritatively from my position as an incompetent C++ / Rust dev.

New comment by Joeboy in "Do you even need a database?"

Joeboy — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:28:56 +0000

Don't know if it counts, but my London cinema listings website just uses static json files that I upload every weekend. All of the searching and stuff is done client side. Although I do use sqlite to create the files locally.

Total hosting costs are £0 ($0) other than the domain name.

New comment by Joeboy in "What is RISC-V and why it matters to Canonical"

Joeboy — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 20:13:40 +0000

Also the Acorn Archimedes is, technically, an ARM / RISC desktop.

New comment by Joeboy in "A compelling title that is cryptic enough to get you to take action on it"

Joeboy — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 18:31:58 +0000

An opinion about the design of the website.