Hacker News: gausswho

New comment by gausswho in "Dark Castle"

gausswho — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 23:55:19 +0000

Note that Dark Castle was programmed by Jonathan Gay, who would eventually go on to make FutureSplash. You might know it better from what it was renamed to: Flash (of Macromedia/Adobe).

New comment by gausswho in "Music for Programming"

gausswho — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:02:33 +0000

I too can enjoy the SomaFM/Dublab sounds for work.

But when I need to mix it up, I switch to FIP (Paris). They manage several different stations, but start with the main one first. It's excellently curated with more of a global palette than your typical station.

New comment by gausswho in "Age verification as mass surveillance infrastructure"

gausswho — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:55:53 +0000

In the case of government representatives' role, I think you've reached for Hanlon's razor incorrectly. Malice better explains what is happening here than ignorance. The actual representatives are cardboard with makeup - they each have a whole team of folks doing the detailed diligence on this stuff. That team knows there's a privacy-preserving way to do this. There's a reason those solutions are not the ones on offer. Corporate regulatory capture is behind all of this.

New comment by gausswho in "Systemd-free Modern Linux: artixlinux and dinit and labwc and noctalia shell"

gausswho — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:07:53 +0000

Curious how folks feel about an alternative not mentioned here: Shepherd. It's what guix uses. As someone a bit singed from trying to get Nix to a happy state I'm attracted to guix's more straightforward design and Scheme-based compiled configuration. On paper I'm also impressed with Shepherd's design too, but switching out such a sprawling core piece of modern Linux leads me to anticipate future pains from various software that assumes I do have it.

New comment by gausswho in "H.264 Streaming Fees: What Changed, Who's Affected, and What It Means"

gausswho — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:53:16 +0000

And that's when you know they're afraid. Dolby's case sounds like a desperate moonshot.

New comment by gausswho in "The open web isn't dying, we're killing it"

gausswho — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 03:58:54 +0000

How many times must we trundle underfoot this lazy canard that HN is social media. A link aggregator with comments is not what anyone thinks of for that term.

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

gausswho — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:04:29 +0000

Has anyone published useful parts of their database? It'd be kinda nice to use a rolodex that wasn't slimed with the rest of LI's taint.

New comment by gausswho in "The Jellies That Evolved a Different Way to Keep Time"

gausswho — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:30:21 +0000

Sounds like nature's take on building a jalopy out of whatever it can scrounge. What it makes me wonder is perhaps this cobbling together creates a resilience that the other clocking architecture is vulnerable to. Could these outliers serve as a kind of important reservoir? Against calamities Earth periodically goes through that blot out the sun for longer than an individual life cycle? Or perhaps even more resilient than that - buffering against variations in planet/moon rotation speed or distances.

Jellyfish == System Recovery Mode.

New comment by gausswho in "US and TotalEnergies reach 'nearly $1B' deal to end offshore wind projects"

gausswho — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:17:40 +0000

How does that work so many generations back? Doesn't Bill C-3 add the additional requirement to demonstrate your parent(s) must have lived in Canada for ~3 years in order to make that path available?

New comment by gausswho in "Overcoming the friendship recession"

gausswho — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:23:17 +0000

It's still common parlance in New Amsterdam (New York) today. 'Stoopin it' with friends/strangers is thankfully quite alive.

New comment by gausswho in "US and TotalEnergies reach 'nearly $1B' deal to end offshore wind projects"

gausswho — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 03:23:27 +0000

Wasn't that revised to a single generation?

New comment by gausswho in "Fear and Fragility: The Glass Delusion and Its History"

gausswho — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:01:50 +0000

Intriguing article. The pattern is compelling, that perhaps there is something in the human condition that is attracted to the idea 'i'm made of this newly arrived magical stuff, and you can't prove otherwise'. New generations get to choose new stuff.

I'm reminded of Goethe's description of an athiest as a person with 'no invisible means of support'.

As I was reading, I was hoping to find an aside about the role of lead in glass production, but I suppose that'd be a distraction.

New comment by gausswho in "Why I love NixOS"

gausswho — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 19:14:35 +0000

guix would like a word

New comment by gausswho in "Books of the Century by Le Monde"

gausswho — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 22:35:28 +0000

I'm surprised to see Brave New World amongst these. The idea it presents is indeed powerful and influential, but for such a smart guy it comes across stilted and craftless. Try reading it now and it just doesn't hold up to more nuanced fiction.

New comment by gausswho in "Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode"

gausswho — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 01:57:32 +0000

Sheriff spits to the ground. One harness. One horse. How we do it' fer now on.

New comment by gausswho in "My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)"

gausswho — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:01:08 +0000

This is five months old now. Any substantial changes to the recommended setup?

New comment by gausswho in "Kona EV Hacking"

gausswho — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:34:34 +0000

Careful. Some superchargers will now charge you extra per minute as soon as you cross 80% capacity (regardless of your charge limit).

New comment by gausswho in ""

gausswho — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:28:32 +0000

Kinda like orient and orientate.

Maybe there's a word for this class of variations. Or variants?

New comment by gausswho in "E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May"

gausswho — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:02:51 +0000

Is this legitimate? It's so incoherent to see this blurb at the top saying it's being retired while everything underneath is pitching the value of e2e.

New comment by gausswho in "Show HN: Algorithms and Data Structures in TypeScript – Free Book (~400 Pages)"

gausswho — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:50:03 +0000

this is well structured and put together. i would think it serves as a good base for refreshing oneself on the fundamentals. and it has a satisfying bend towards being both concise and thorough.