Hacker News: rhblake

New comment by rhblake in "Connie Converse was a folk-music genius. Then she vanished"

rhblake — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 19:07:07 +0000

As far as I know, the rights are still owned by her family. The albums were issued by an independent label operated by one of the persons who tracked down her music. The recent reissue of "How Sad, How Lovely" is on Jack White's Third Man Records (also independent).

New comment by rhblake in "Most people can't juggle one ball"

rhblake — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:51:15 +0000

Great story, thanks for sharing. Just a minor correction: it's Judy Finelli, not Pinelli.

New comment by rhblake in "The most brilliant bookshops in the world"

rhblake — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 10:03:25 +0000

I mean, visiting Shakespeare & Co _is_ a very touristy thing :) They have a nice selection, but it feels a bit like a well-curated tourist trap these days (pre-covid, anyway...), with a large part of the visitors mainly there to take a selfie.

Regarding Joyce: the present Shakespeare & Co is not the one of Joyce and Hemingway. That was a different store at a different location with a different owner, closed in 1941. The present one (1951-) wasn't called Shakespeare and Company until 1964. But for sure it also had its fair share of famous patrons.

My #1 recommendation for English books (new and used) in Paris would be The Abbey Bookshop, which is not far from Shakespeare & Co. Run by a friendly Canadian guy since 1989. It's quite an experience.

New comment by rhblake in "Fastmail is having problems again"

rhblake — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 23:23:55 +0000

Switched from Gmail to Fastmail in 2008. No regrets. Haven't considered anything else since (and didn't notice these recent problems I now read about). Email hosting is something I'd want to change very rarely. Track record counts for a lot; good-AND-profitable email hosting is tough, and I generally wouldn't trust any entity [in this space] that's been around for <5 years. Fastmail's been at it for 20+ years now, and I'm reasonably sure I don't have to worry about changing anything for at least another 5-10 years.

New comment by rhblake in "The Framework is the most exciting laptop I've used"

rhblake — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 20:17:43 +0000

Some of the latest models in the "classic" lines with one or more RAM slots: P14s Gen 2 AMD/Intel (a.k.a. T14 Gen 2 AMD/Intel); T15 Gen 2 / P15s Gen 2; P15 Gen 2; T15p Gen 2; P1 Gen 4; X1 Extreme Gen 4. Plus some of the slightly more "budget" ones like L14 Gen 2 AMD/Intel and E14 Gen 3 AMD.

Tip: search " psref" to quickly get to a PDF with specifications.

New comment by rhblake in "Ubuntu 21.04"

rhblake — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 14:33:20 +0000

I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Firefox (from the default Ubuntu repo) is updated frequently. It might lag behind the official release by a few days, but I can live with that. Currently at 87 [0], so I expect 88 (which Mozilla released a few days ago) any day now.

[0] https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/firefox

New comment by rhblake in "Sublime Merge 2"

rhblake — Tue, 26 May 2020 16:18:00 +0000

Sublime Text 4 dev builds (with public download links for Linux, Windows and Mac) are announced on their Discord [0]. If you're using Arch, or just want a quick download link to the probably most recent Linux build, see [1]. I believe a valid ST3 license is required.

[0] https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/sublime-text-discord-server/...

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/sublime-text-4-dev/

New comment by rhblake in "What Unity Is Getting Wrong"

rhblake — Fri, 22 May 2020 20:20:09 +0000

It's the latter. A third party provides you with the stuff you need to export to consoles, e.g. export template(s) and such that for legal reasons can't be included in the normal version of Godot. Here's a recent thread about having a Godot game built for Switch: https://twitter.com/monolithofminds/status/12599133551769272...

New comment by rhblake in "Ask HN: What website, from your early days on the net, do you miss?"

rhblake — Sun, 26 Apr 2020 03:26:08 +0000

Stephen "Blue" Heaslip is still at it, ~24 years later, doing daily updates [0]. Full archives stretching back to 1996. Quite a bit of history in there.

[0] https://www.bluesnews.com/

New comment by rhblake in "Learn Godot Game Development"

rhblake — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 15:28:55 +0000

Corona Labs is shutting down in a couple of weeks. While they're releasing everything under a permissive license (MIT) and turning it into an open source project, the future is very uncertain.

New comment by rhblake in "18-year-old personal website, built with Frontpage and still updated"

rhblake — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 14:24:25 +0000

My personal favorite, which is in a similar vein - an Italian, although the site is in English; Frontpage; still updated - is https://www.luigicases.com/. He makes leather straps and cases for cameras. Famous in the classic camera community. Only active site that I can think of that still uses frames.

New comment by rhblake in "Gitlab's Director of Risk and Global Compliance Resigns"

rhblake — Fri, 08 Nov 2019 17:20:47 +0000

No need to speculate, it's right there in the GitLab issue. The now-resigned director of risk and global compliance Candice Ciresi wrote this six days ago [0]:

"The countries selected were not chosen because of legal requirements, they were not chosen based on risk, they were not chosen based on political climate (as other countries are facing heightened sanctions from the US). I do hope they were not selected because a customer asked for it - or that could violate anti-boycott laws. In fact, having no objective basis for the restrictions is not conservative - it is careless. (Please let me know immediately if a customer has requested that we not do business with any particular country as that may be a reportable event.) I recommend against proceeding until you have developed a sound basis - that gets applied equally - for any exclusion of any country."

To which VP of Engineering Eric Johnson replied:

"I appreciate your position. Please be aware there is an active, time-sensitive contract negotiation linked to this matter. And you need to advocate to the DRI that the company walk away from that contract in order to enact your proposal."

New comment by rhblake in "Linux Journal Ceases Publication: An Awkward Goodbye"

rhblake — Thu, 08 Aug 2019 03:47:58 +0000

The PDF downloads aren't working, but the HTML archive (all issues, 1-301) works fine: https://secure2.linuxjournal.com/ljarchive/LJ/

There's also a ZIP with issues 1-293 (March 1994 to December 2018): https://secure2.linuxjournal.com/ljarchive/LJArchive2018.zip (805 MB)

New comment by rhblake in "Drones piloted by climate-change activists target Heathrow"

rhblake — Sat, 15 Jun 2019 12:32:35 +0000

Per capita, which seems like a more fair comparison, plenty of Western countries produce more CO2 than China; the US and Canada each produce about twice as much.

New comment by rhblake in "Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)"

rhblake — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 03:25:06 +0000

It really should be noted that years later Joe changed his mind about OO and came to the realization that perhaps Erlang is the only object-oriented language :) From a 2010 interview:

..."I wrote a an article, a blog thing, years ago - Why object oriented programming is silly. I mainly wanted to provoke people with it. They had a quite interesting response to that and I managed to annoy a lot of people, which was part of the intention actually. I started wondering about what object oriented programming was and I thought Erlang wasn't object oriented, it was a functional programming language.

Then, my thesis supervisor said "But you're wrong, Erlang is extremely object oriented". He said object oriented languages aren't object oriented. I might think, though I'm not quite sure if I believe this or not, but Erlang might be the only object oriented language because the 3 tenets of object oriented programming are that it's based on message passing, that you have isolation between objects and have polymorphism.

Alan Kay himself wrote this famous thing and said "The notion of object oriented programming is completely misunderstood. It's not about objects and classes, it's all about messages". He wrote that and he said that the initial reaction to object oriented programming was to overemphasize the classes and methods and under emphasize the messages and if we talk much more about messages then it would be a lot nicer. The original Smalltalk was always talking about objects and you sent messages to them and they responded by sending messages back."

See https://www.infoq.com/interviews/johnson-armstrong-oop (2010) for the full answer (and more), it's worth a read.

New comment by rhblake in "Pale Moon Browser Continues Support and Development of XUL"

rhblake — Sun, 17 Mar 2019 00:43:41 +0000

The astonishing thing to me is that, as mentioned elsewhere, this mess in the GitHub issue happened after the person doing the port politely asked the Pale Moon people about the right way to do things with regards to patches and branding: https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?t=18256

New comment by rhblake in "Pale Moon Browser Continues Support and Development of XUL"

rhblake — Sun, 17 Mar 2019 00:13:19 +0000

It was a work-in-progress tree and they weren't redistributing any binaries/sources from there. The Pale Moon devs were both wrong and remarkably hostile.

New comment by rhblake in "Schedule – 35th Chaos Communication Congress"

rhblake — Sun, 23 Dec 2018 23:22:09 +0000

Some congress-goers see tons of talks, some see none. I wouldn't stress too much about it; do what you feel like, but be sure not to miss out on the non-talk-stuff, because that's an equally big part. For me the "best stuff" is meeting people, and an easy way to do that is to check out the assemblies/projects going on. For more about that see the wiki, which is the main source of info (apart from the Fahrplan) and is always being updated: https://events.ccc.de/congress/2018/wiki/Main_Page

#35c3 on hackint.org is the main IRC channel. Easy way to get answers. @c3infodesk on Twitter is worth following.

This year your wristband is also a public transport ticket valid in the city of Leipzig (zone 110). At night a special tram runs between Congress and the central station (Hauptbahnhof), so no need to worry about getting back.

The alcohol on offer inside is not very exciting, if you care about that. There is however a big supermarket (or hypermarket, rather) nearby, Globus, along with some restaurants/fast food places. No problem bringing in drinks/food from elsewhere to Congress. No security check whatsoever (pointing it out because while this is "obvious" to CCC people it might not be obvious to everyone).

The venue is big: https://35c3.c3nav.de/ is helpful for navigation.

Every year, no matter what I do, I feel I missed out on lots of things and that it ended too quickly. Just explore and enjoy!

New comment by rhblake in "Schedule – 35th Chaos Communication Congress"

rhblake — Sun, 23 Dec 2018 19:37:42 +0000

No live subtitles this year: "This year, we'll focus on providing high-quality subtitle tracks for the released videos in a timely fashion. In particular, we will not provide any live subtitles for talks." (Subtitle Angel description @ https://engelsystem.de/35c3/angeltypes?action=about)

But subtitling work will be done during congress so I imagine they'll be released very quickly.

New comment by rhblake in "Schedule – 35th Chaos Communication Congress"

rhblake — Sun, 23 Dec 2018 19:32:34 +0000

If you happen to be around on the 26th ("day 0") you can go check out the venue in the afternoon/evening. Wristband exchange usually opens at some point in the evening of day 0 (last year it was open until midnight-ish). Nice way to avoid the day 1 queues and explore. Some of the bars inside will probaby be open. (On day 0 they don't check wristbands so you can just go in.)