Hacker News: pgl

New comment by pgl in "There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days"

pgl — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:49:54 +0000

The missing context is that he was quote-tweeting a thread by Sandy Petersen titled "How Quake ruined id software":

https://x.com/SandyofCthulhu/status/2069592209645785294

> How Quake ruined id Software.

> There has been a lot of praise of Quake of late, with its 30th anniversary, and it's deserved. Quake is an amazing feat of art, programming, and design. I worked on it, and everything came together almost perfectly from all of us. We ended up with a free-wheeling, frenetic action game with enough of a visible world to grip the imagination.

> ... [thread continues] ...

New comment by pgl in "HeyWhatsThat"

pgl — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 20:44:34 +0000

Kind of - but when the country across the water is hundreds of km away, turning slightly to the left or right could mean you're facing a completely different country. But I'd also love to know which part of a country you're facing.

New comment by pgl in "HeyWhatsThat"

pgl — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:46:52 +0000

Related, but does anyone know of an app or site that can tell you what you're facing when you're standing on a beach? As in, what country or part of the country - so if you were standing on a Croatian beach somewhere and pointed it east, you could find out what part of Italy you're looking at.

I've always thought it would be cool to stand on a coast of Malta and tell if I'm facing Libya, Israel, or Greece.

New comment by pgl in "Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?"

pgl — Tue, 27 May 2025 13:59:06 +0000

Thanks! You're the best.

New comment by pgl in "Remembering Cyberia, the first ever cyber cafe"

pgl — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 18:40:28 +0000

Hey, thanks for that Mastodon link. I think I remember at least one of those guys. I think that building over the road is nothing of note - just some generic commercial real estate.

New comment by pgl in "Remembering Cyberia, the first ever cyber cafe"

pgl — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 13:13:52 +0000

I probably served you coffee at the time, then, brilliant. It was definitely the place I fell in love with the internet - I ended up leaving school early because it.

New comment by pgl in "Remembering Cyberia, the first ever cyber cafe"

pgl — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 12:36:32 +0000

Hah, amazing! That brings back memories. The PC where the guy with the red t-shirt is sitting is where one regular used to come in and send out his erotic fanfic. He'd bring in a floppy disk that he'd set up at home and always seemed to have problems getting it to read - so we'd have to go over and help him out all the time.

New comment by pgl in "Remembering Cyberia, the first ever cyber cafe"

pgl — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 03:23:08 +0000

I worked at Cyberia's second location in Kingston in 1995, before getting hired by Easynet to do tech support on the top floor of the building where Cyberia London was located. It was an interesting time! This article captured the energy pretty well - but there was a whole lot going on at Easynet as well at the time, too.

FWIW, I think the claim was always that Cyberia was The UK's first internet cafe. At least, that's what I've always said.

New comment by pgl in "Marshall Brain has died"

pgl — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 23:09:43 +0000

He was such an amazing guy. We got to interview him on our tiny podcast[1] after we reached out and he so happily joined us for half an hour. His book, Manna (which is $0.99 to download from Amazon[2] or free on his website[3]) is still one of the most fascinating and interesting visions of the future that I've come across (although I don't totally agree it's the only reasonable option).

What a loss.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5v2cfJp1o

[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Manna-Two-Visions-Humanitys-Future-...

[3] https://marshallbrain.com/manna

Edit: Fixed "free to download from Amazon" - it's not

New comment by pgl in "Peter Lowe's Blocklist"

pgl — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 09:45:37 +0000

Well, thanks for posting but that page is way out of date! I don't think I've updated it for... 15 years now? The data itself is kept fresh though: https://pgl.yoyo.org/as/serverlist.php

New comment by pgl in "Goodbye, clean code (2020)"

pgl — Fri, 08 Dec 2023 17:03:54 +0000

I love this part: "It represents additional work, additional risk, and additional unnecessary complexity", because it could be "refactored" into "additional work, risk, and complexity". I assume it hasn't been, because (in the author's opinion) it communicates the intended meaning better - which might be the case with code, too. "Well-designed" is subjective.

New comment by pgl in "Fun with DNS TXT Records"

pgl — Sun, 26 Nov 2023 16:51:28 +0000

I did some research on TXT records a little while back, that might be of interest: https://labs.ripe.net/author/pgl/the-joy-of-txt/

New comment by pgl in "Mullvad Leta: A search engine used in the Mullvad Browser"

pgl — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 15:49:03 +0000

It all comes down to trust in the end, but over time I've come to trust Mullvad more and more. One particular example that sticks out to me is that they ended subscription based billing, specifically because it required them to hold customer information that they didn't want to have.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/6/20/were-removing-the-opti...

You can see an example of their lack of data retention from a post about when they were raided - there was nothing to find.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/4/20/mullvad-vpn-was-subjec...

Their blog is a good place if you want to get a sense of what they're like as a company.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/

New comment by pgl in "Mullvad Leta: A search engine used in the Mullvad Browser"

pgl — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 11:18:30 +0000

Mullvad really does have a commitment to privacy.

Some key points:

- Acts as a Google proxy, removes tracking links and caches results

- Only available for Mullvad paid users

- 100 free direct searches a day, unlimited cached searches (further search result pages count towards limit)

- Results cached over all users for 30 days

New comment by pgl in "Intravenous Caffeine"

pgl — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 23:42:59 +0000

I think this may be referring to this study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29206091/

"Effects of caffeine administration on sedation and respiratory parameters in patients recovering from anesthesia"

> Caffeine has been shown to enhance the speed of recovery from general anesthesia in murine models, though data in human patients is lacking. This is a retrospective review of intravenous caffeine administration (median dose 150 [125, 250] mg) to 151 heavily sedated patients in the post-anesthesia recovery area, to determine the association between caffeine administration and changes in sedation score, respiratory rate, and oxyhemoglobin saturation.

State of DNS Rebinding in 2023

pgl — Mon, 01 May 2023 18:16:14 +0000

Article URL: https://research.nccgroup.com/2023/04/27/state-of-dns-rebinding-in-2023/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35776876

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by pgl in "Intercepting t.co links using DNS rewrites"

pgl — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 02:11:01 +0000

> I only really noticed this properly when my DNS sinkholing server (Adguard home) started blocking t.co links and I was getting an error when say, clicking a linked news article

Mission accomplished!

New comment by pgl in "Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now"

pgl — Sun, 18 Dec 2022 22:00:00 +0000

Suspended. That was quick.

New comment by pgl in "JC – JSONifies the output of many CLI tools"

pgl — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 08:00:40 +0000

Command line output as JSON. Very handy and has parsers for tons of common utilities, written in Python.

Blog post with examples here: https://blog.kellybrazil.com/2020/08/30/parsing-command-outp...

JC – JSONifies the output of many CLI tools

pgl — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 07:55:40 +0000

Article URL: https://kellyjonbrazil.github.io/jc/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33448204

Points: 411

# Comments: 132