pgl (u/pgl) - Readit News

pgl commented on HeyWhatsThat heywhatsthat.com/faq.html... · Posted by u/1970-01-01

dylan604 · 12 hours ago

Can't any map app do that? I mean it shows you your location on the map, and then you just scroll across the map to see what you'd be looking at, right?

pgl · 9 hours ago

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.

pgl commented on HeyWhatsThat heywhatsthat.com/faq.html... · Posted by u/1970-01-01

pgl · 15 hours ago

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.

pgl commented on Ask HN: What projects do you donate to? · Posted by u/xeonmc

nfriedly · 9 months ago

This is my current list of monthly donations, loosely organized:

Content creators

- Sci Show https://www.youtube.com/scishow

- Escape Artists (short fiction podcasts) https://escapeartists.net/

- Technology Connections https://www.youtube.com/technologyconnections

- The Bible Project https://bibleproject.com/

- Liliputing https://liliputing.com/

- Radiotopia (99% Invisible & other podcasts) https://www.radiotopia.fm/

- PBS (local station) https://thinktv.org/

Online Services

- Internet Archive https://archive.org/

- Wikipedia https://www.wikipedia.org/

- Snopes https://www.snopes.com/

- MetaBrainz Foundation https://musicbrainz.org/

Justice

- Equal Justice Initiative https://eji.org/

- Innocence Project https://innocenceproject.org/

- International Justice Mission (IJM) https://www.ijm.org/

- Institute for Justice https://ij.org/support/give-now/?

Advocacy

- Right to Repair https://www.repair.org/

- Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) https://www.eff.org/

- Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) https://sfconservancy.org/

- Free Software Foundation (FSF) https://www.fsf.org/

Making the world a better place

- Partners in Health https://www.pih.org/

- World Central Kitchen https://wck.org/

Software

- ESLint https://eslint.org/

- FreshRSS https://freshrss.org/

- Open WRT (managed by SFC) https://openwrt.org/

- Mozilla Foundation (Firefox) https://www.mozilla.org/

Ad-blocking

- Pi-hole https://pi-hole.net/

- osid.nl domain blocklist https://www.patreon.com/sjhgvr

- Peter Lowe's domain blocklist https://www.patreon.com/blocklist

- Steven Black's blocklist https://github.com/sponsors/StevenBlack

- Ajayyy (SponsorBlock) https://sponsor.ajay.app/

Local (Troy, OH)

- Health Partners Free Clinic https://www.healthpartnersclinic.org/

- Brukner Nature Center https://www.bruknernaturecenter.com/

Past ones include VLC, Retroarch, mGBA, UNHCR, and some more local things

pgl · 9 months ago

Thanks! You're the best.

pgl commented on Remembering Cyberia, the first ever cyber cafe vice.com/en/article/world... · Posted by u/DamnInteresting

n4r9 · a year ago

I couldn't quite put my finger on the building you can see through the window. I managed to find an address for the cafe (48 High Street) and it clicked after I opened up streetview. It's the corner office block next to the mini roundabout on the High Street: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4075868,-0.3077591,3a,75y,96...

If you spin around in Streetview you can see the building that must have house Cyberia itself to the left of what is now Fillies Kingston. You can also cycle back in time to the earliest Streetview shots in 2008, at which time the cafe must already have closed down, and is next to a place called Bar Elvissa.

In case you're interested, my Googling also resulted in this brief conversation on Mastodon between other apparent previous frequenters of Cyberia Kingston: https://mastodon.social/@ade/109405408248074169

pgl · a year ago

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.

pgl commented on Remembering Cyberia, the first ever cyber cafe vice.com/en/article/world... · Posted by u/DamnInteresting

dagw · a year ago

I worked at Cyberia's second location in Kingston in 1995

Wow, now there is a blast from the past! I hung out there quite a bit in 1995-1996. That was also the first place I used the actual internet (as opposed to BBS's or CompuServe), shortly after it opened. I can probably thank Cyberia for at least a small part of my future career success.

pgl · a year ago

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.

pgl commented on Remembering Cyberia, the first ever cyber cafe vice.com/en/article/world... · Posted by u/DamnInteresting

n4r9 · a year ago

Very cool! I'm acquainted with Kingston but had no idea about that aspect of its history.

This NYT article from 2004 states that it's the world's first: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/02/business/worldbusiness/th...

There's also a stock image website with photos from the Kingston branch in 2001: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-internet-at-cyberia-cafe-k...

pgl · a year ago

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.

pgl commented on Remembering Cyberia, the first ever cyber cafe vice.com/en/article/world... · Posted by u/DamnInteresting

pgl · a year ago

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.

pgl commented on Marshall Brain has died wral.com/news/local/nc-st... · Posted by u/bsagdiyev

pgl · a year ago

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

pgl commented on Peter Lowe's Blocklist pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/... · Posted by u/trms

pgl · a year ago

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

pgl commented on Goodbye, clean code (2020) overreacted.io/goodbye-cl... · Posted by u/kiyanwang

fauigerzigerk · 2 years ago

I think the pushback is against certain recipes that seem too absolutist. "Clean Code" is the title of a famous book that defines clean (among other things) as:

"No Duplication

Duplication is the primary enemy of a well-designed system. It represents additional work, additional risk, and additional unnecessary complexity."

So according to this definition, removing duplication is synomymous with simplification, which is simply incorrect.

Removing duplication is the introduction of a dependency. If this dependency is a good model of the problem then this deduplication is a good abstraction and may also be a simplification. Otherwise it's just compression in the guise of abstraction.

[Edit] Actually, this quote is a reference to Kent Beck’s Simple Design that appears in Clean Code.

pgl · 2 years ago

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.