Hacker News: kfogel

New comment by kfogel in "Vouch"

kfogel — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 20:11:04 +0000

Can't believe they didn't call it VouchDB.

New comment by kfogel in "Why should I care what color the bikeshed is? (1999)"

kfogel — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 04:22:46 +0000

We are happy to be providing this public service :-). I wish the term were better known outside tech; it's useful in so many contexts.

New comment by kfogel in "Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year"

kfogel — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 02:03:25 +0000

So many stories like this about Slack.

We use Zulip (https://zulip.org/) for our corporate chat, and we've never looked back. It's been good, and it's fully open source. We self-host, but paid hosting is easy to get too if you want.

Open Source JobHub

kfogel — Thu, 15 May 2025 16:47:55 +0000

Article URL: https://opensourcejobhub.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43996842

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by kfogel in "N8n – Flexible AI workflow automation for technical teams"

kfogel — Sat, 03 May 2025 15:33:25 +0000

Wow. This project was the cause of a very long and intense discussion about mis-use of the term "open source". See https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/issues/40#issuecomment-5397146... for details (lands mid-thread -- you might want to scroll back to see the start, and if you read the whole thing to the end then you deserve some sort of award!).

TL;DR: The author originally tried to call n8n "open source" but while using a non-open-source license. After much discussion, he kept the license but stopped using the label "open source", to the relief of many people.

That half-decade-old thread is still what I point to when I want to explain to someone why preserving the specificity of the term "open source" matters.

Trump ends internet program for millions in China, worrying some in Congress

kfogel — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 14:23:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/03/20/trump-ends-internet-access-china-iran-otf/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43423939

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by kfogel in "Ask HN: What's the best implementation of Conway's Game of Life?"

kfogel — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 03:08:14 +0000

Xlife

I believe it implements Bill Gosper's hashlife quadtree algorithm (already mentioned elsewhere in the comments here).

Xlife is unbelievably fast.

New comment by kfogel in "The Parker Solar Probe will make its closest approach yet to the Sun"

kfogel — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 21:27:32 +0000

Most of the comments so far are about the temperature and the closeness to the sun, and, hey, I get it: those are both amazing to think about. But to me even more amazing is... 0.16% of the speed of light?? Yikes.

Lessons from the Death and Rebirth of Thunderbird

kfogel — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 16:29:34 +0000

Article URL: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/982610/9b7bbd7513567996/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41058741

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by kfogel in "Iconography of the X Window System: The Boot Stipple"

kfogel — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 17:01:57 +0000

That part about "...you wouldn’t want to wing it with the configuration, because allegedly you could break your monitor with a bad Monitor setting" -- strike the "allegedly"! Or at least, let me allege it from personal experience: I did that to one monitor, in the early 1990s. You could smell the fried electronics from across the room.

New comment by kfogel in "Show HN: E-Paper 7-color display showing the current weather"

kfogel — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 18:13:52 +0000

Just ordered. Thank you :-).

New comment by kfogel in "Show HN: E-Paper 7-color display showing the current weather"

kfogel — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 17:25:27 +0000

Got it -- I appreciate the explanation.

New comment by kfogel in "Show HN: E-Paper 7-color display showing the current weather"

kfogel — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 17:12:38 +0000

AHHHH, that's the key thing I didn't know (I have a Raspberry Pi sitting in a drawer and have played with it embarrassingly little -- I didn't realize how important having the SPI or other special interface is in this context). Thank you again.

New comment by kfogel in "Show HN: E-Paper 7-color display showing the current weather"

kfogel — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 17:06:07 +0000

Thank you. My idea was more the opposite: do it with a normal laptop or desktop computer driving the display, rather than a tiny microcontroller. I guess I'm assuming that either the display's USB input supplies enough voltage to run the display, or that the display has a separate power supply -- i.e., that there's nothing magical about a Raspberry Pi that makes it supply special bits or special voltages to these displays that can't be supplied by, say, my desktop computer.

New comment by kfogel in "Show HN: E-Paper 7-color display showing the current weather"

kfogel — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 16:58:17 +0000

Does anyone know why projects like this always seem to specify using a particular type of tiny, low-power computer (usually a Raspberry Pi or something similar) to drive the display?

I already have plenty of non-tiny computers that run Debian GNU/Linux. Suppose I wanted to run an e-paper display from one of those computers, using this code, just via a normal USB cable. I could do that, right? There's no reason I would have to use a Raspberry Pi or something similar?

New comment by kfogel in "Ask HN: Any fun ways to learn Emacs?"

kfogel — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 21:13:43 +0000

The most important factor in my learning Emacs was doing it in a room with experienced Emacs users. I really strongly recommend doing this if you possibly can. A few minutes of an experienced user shoulder-surfing while I worked, and giving advice on better ways to do things, was worth hours of self-directed study.

Get together with experienced users in person and have them watch you edit. That's it.

Culture Change at Google

kfogel — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 04:46:32 +0000

Article URL: https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-19-CultureChange/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051655

Points: 573

# Comments: 483

New comment by kfogel in "HashLife – A memoized algorithm for Conway's Game of Life and cellular automata"

kfogel — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 02:55:34 +0000

There are algorithms where I think "Sure, with enough time and attention given to the problem, I might have thought of that." And then there are algorithms where I think "Oh, wow. That came from another planet. I would never have come up with that myself."

This one is definitely in the latter category.

New comment by kfogel in "System76's Lemur Pro Laptop Is Just a Nice Linux Laptop"

kfogel — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 17:43:42 +0000

Very happy user of a System76 Lemur Pro laptop (i7, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD) for the past year, FWIW. I'm running stock Debian on it, not System76's Pop!_OS.

I get the kind of battery life the review mentions if I put the laptop into "Power Saver" mode. In "Balanced" or especially in "Performance" mode the battery doesn't last as long, of course. So when I can't be plugged in, I put it into Power Saver mode (this is super easy via the Gnome upper-right settings popup panel; I assume it would be just as easy in other window managers).

I got great customer service from System76 when I ran into a hitch at the start of my Debian installation process (TL;DR: see Debian bugs #1024346 and #1024720 -- the file ".disk/info" existed on the pre-installed Pop!_OS partition; getting rid of that enabled the installation to continue). System76 support went above and beyond the call of duty in tracking this down and solving it, considering that I was installing an OS that wasn't even officially supported by them.

Happy customer; would buy again; I get no commission for any of this -- I just want to see the company flourish so they're still there when it's time for me to upgrade my laptop!

New comment by kfogel in "Signal Public Username Testing (Staging Environment)"

kfogel — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 01:24:22 +0000

The linked page is on signalusers.org, but Signal's regular home site is https://signal.org/.

I'm looking all over signal.org for some link from there to signalusers.org, as that would make me more relaxed about the authenticity of the latter -- i.e., that it really is run by the same people who run signal.org.

Yes, maybe I'm being paranoid. But we're talking about an app whose whole purpose is secure communications :-).