riffraff (u/riffraff)

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riffraff commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026) · Posted by u/david927

starbist · a day ago

https://ultigamemate.com/

I've been working on an 'anti-fantasy' football game where you pick matches instead of individual players.

You can create or join leagues to compete against your friends.

I’d love to get some feedback!

riffraff · a day ago

Just FYI, I was mildly confused by the name, as "ulti" is the name of a traditional Hungarian card game. I doubt this will ever confuse anyone else but I thought it was a fun name clash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulti

riffraff commented on Roger Ebert Reviews "The Shawshank Redemption" (1999) rogerebert.com/reviews/gr... · Posted by u/monero-xmr

bji9jhff · 2 days ago

Who is the new Stephen King? I suppose answering my question will automatically also give an answer to yours.

riffraff · 2 days ago

I think this opens a huge can of further questions: what is a Stephen King? Is it a best selling author who's a house name, a very successful genre author, one who spans genres and is successful in all of them, one whose' books get regularly translated to TV, a very good craftman of books that people actually read...

My feeling is that there isn't and _won't be_ a new Stephen King that checks all the boxes, due to declining readership and reduced barriers to independent publishing.

riffraff commented on Roger Ebert Reviews "The Shawshank Redemption" (1999) rogerebert.com/reviews/gr... · Posted by u/monero-xmr

lemonberry · 2 days ago

"Stand by Me" was based on "The Body" from that same book. Great collection.

riffraff · 2 days ago

"Apt Pupil" was also adapted as a movie tho not as good as the other two, imvho.

riffraff commented on Roger Ebert Reviews "The Shawshank Redemption" (1999) rogerebert.com/reviews/gr... · Posted by u/monero-xmr

smurda · 2 days ago

This is one of my favorite movies, yet it won 0 Oscars (nominated for 7) and was a box office flop (cost $25M to make and box office proceeds were $28M). It only gained popularity after the theatres from the VHS rental market.

I firmly believe part of the initial commercial failure was because of the title. With something more descriptive like, "Escape from Shawshank" or just "Prison Break" people would have been more interested to see it.

riffraff · 2 days ago

the italian dubbing was named "le ali della libertà" (the wings of freedom), which is one of the rare cases where I agree with using a different name than the original, since nobody would have clue what "Shawshank" means.

riffraff commented on Review of 1984 by Isaac Asimov (1980) newworker.org/ncptrory/19... · Posted by u/doruk101

squarefoot · 4 days ago

People is kept away from details by shortening their attention span with the production of continuous pervasive stimuli. Regarding Trump, when he does something apparently stupid (on behalf of the rich people pulling his strings, let's never forget this) he's just forcing the media and people consuming them to start talking about the next event without further exploring more important ones.

riffraff · 2 days ago

No disagreement on this, but we're then talking of Brave New World and distraction, not 1984 and censorship.

riffraff commented on Total surface area required to fuel the world with solar (2009) landartgenerator.org/blag... · Posted by u/robtherobber

AnotherGoodName · 2 days ago

A long article, about rising prices driven by fossil fuel costs but also a lot of positivity as you read towards the end and a sudden sharp downturn that’s coming to Australias power prices. Australia’s wholesale power prices halved in q4 2025 due to massive solar and battery investment that on a per capita basis dwarfs china. Australia is now over 50% renewables. It’s set to accelerate too.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-08/big-swings-in-austral...

So at least one continent in this picture is making great progress to achieving this.

riffraff · 2 days ago

The EU had wind + solar overtake fossil fuels last year too.

Fossil fuels are now less than 30% of electricity generation.

Alas, there's a ton more burning which is not electricity, but progress is undeniable

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/european-electricit...

riffraff commented on Total surface area required to fuel the world with solar (2009) landartgenerator.org/blag... · Posted by u/robtherobber

nosuchthing · 2 days ago

upwards of 60% of the ethanol used in combustion engines is completely wasted.

riffraff · 2 days ago

What does "wasted" mean in this context?

riffraff commented on Where did all the starships go? datawrapper.de/blog/scien... · Posted by u/speckx

CGMthrowaway · 2 days ago

> Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer.

Interesting POV because Star Trek and Foundation both have recent, big budget streaming series while new Terminator movies were flops and Neuromancer has never seen any development(?)

riffraff · 2 days ago

Neuromancer is currently in development at Apple+ :)

FWIW, Amazon made a show based on "The Peripheral" by Gibson which is way more bleak than Neuromancer, and it was crazy good, but they canceled it after one season.

riffraff commented on Tiny C Compiler bellard.org/tcc/... · Posted by u/guerrilla

csb6 · 2 days ago

I've never seen another repo with public commit access like that. I guess the project is niche enough that you don't get spammed with bad or malicious commits.

riffraff · 2 days ago

When pugs (a perl6 implementation in Haskell) was a thing, you gained commit access by asking and it was immediately granted to everyone. It was insane and awesome.

riffraff commented on Hackers (1995) Animated Experience hackers-1995.vercel.app/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

runjake · 4 days ago

I grew up hacking in the 1980s and I watched this movie and I totally hated it. Me and the hackers around me were more like War Games, but with skateboards and BMX bikes. On our best days, I likened us to the characters in the movie Sneakers, but no way, they were far more elite than us.

Then this Hackers movie came out and it seemed like a laughable clown caricature of hacker culture. It was insulting, like I imagine Big Bang Theory is to many.

Then I went to the Bay Area, and hung out at places like New Hack City and 2600 meetings, and I loved those people and the movie made more sense:

- War Games was a movie for 1980s hackers.

- Hackers was a movie about 1990s hackers.

So I re-watched the movie. I still hated it. But, I get it.

And no, I've no idea which movies are a similar anthem for 2000s/2010s hackers. Let me know.

riffraff · 4 days ago

I haven't watched it, but I seem to recall "Mr Robot" was widely praised by techies too.

u/riffraff

KarmaCake day20082September 28, 2007

About

Gabriele Renzi, originally from Rome, now living in Budapest, working remotely for 10+ years now.

On twitter and elsewhere as http://twitter.com/riffraff Blog in english at http://www.riffraff.info

Emailable as rff.rff at gmail dot com

I'm pleased to meet you :)

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/riffraff; my proof: https://keybase.io/riffraff/sigs/Sk28WtmTwza0fWgh8lM2Zh5_WhIol453WmJrHUSOl6E ]

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