Richard Stallman's Personal Site | Hacker News Reader

Richard Stallman's Personal Site

stallman.org

59 pointsryanlm49 comments

I remember I once sent sent RMS a short message about a small bug on his website. He responded within 4 hours.

  > Small typo on line 724 of the source of your homepage... 
  > I believe you meant "that is NOT an excuse to carry out the promise"

  Thanks, I fixed it.

  Would you like to join the FSF, perhaps?

It's also worth mentioning, that this was his autoreply :)

  I am not on vacation, but I am at the end of a long time delay. I am
  located somewhere on Earth, but as far as responding to email is concerned,
  I appear to be well outside the solar system.
  
  After your message arrives at gnu.org, I will collect it in my next batch of
  incoming mail, some time within the following 24 hours. I will spend much of
  the following day reading that batch of mail and will come across your
  message at some point. If I write a response immediately, it will go out in
  the next outgoing batch--typically around 24 hours after I collected your
  message, but occasionally sooner or later than that. Please expect a minimum
  delay of between 24 and 48 hours in receiving a response to your mail to me.
  
  If your message is hard to understand or responding takes real work,
  the response could take longer.
  
  So please wait 48 hours after sending a message before you resend it,
  remind me about it, or ask if I have received it. If it has been less
  than 48 hours, the absence of a response from me only means you have not
  given me time to answer.
  
  If you are having a conversation with me, please keep in mind that each
  message you receive from me is a response to the mail you sent 24 to 48 hours
  earlier, and when writing it, I probably had not yet downloaded your later
  mail.

I've had several long correspondences with RMS over email. He's surprisingly humble and down to earth for someone with that level of fame. The first time I emailed him and he responded, I was very pleasantly surprised. In general he's very nice. He does take everything incredibly seriously though. And I do mean every single thing that goes through his brain. His website and his email reply kind of hint at that. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, it's just very unusual. And I think that's off-putting to a lot of people.

Every sentence you form is a contract, every fantasized aloud common endeavor uttered a promise. The problem is, that he is a contrast to most of us who - for having a family and a live style "sell out". He is what we could have been if we would have stayed true to the ideals of our youth. That's what put people off.

Do wonder if the ancient greeks had similar reactions to their philosophers.

The source code is very straightforward too. Commented out sections of the website with dated reminders to uncomment them. I guess he must look at his source code frequently enough that these reminders work?

Very simple but effective mechanical turk I guess?

e.g.

   <!--  Enable just after Thanksgiving thru Jan 6 -->
   <!--
   <center><h3>
   It's the Grav-Mass season!<br>  <a href="/grav-mass.html">Grav-Mass</a>
   is the celebration of physical laws. <br>December 25<br>
   Isaac Newton's birthday.<br>  &iexcl;Feliz Gravidad!
   </h3>
   <a href="./grav-mass.png"><img src="./grav-mass-icon.png" alt="A Grav-Mass tree"></a>
   </center>
   -->

If memory serves me correctly, RMS doesn't actually manage his own website. He has a number of volunteers that help update the website and post political notes. Those notes are likely a message from him to his volunteers, or the volunteers reminding themselves.

Source is in the fifth and sixth bullets of this page:

https://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

RMS does edit things sometimes but most of the editing comes from the volunteers. That particular note is both for and by me.

If he doesn't have a script that can update the website using those date notes, he is dishonoring his Unix heritage

That particular bit isn't scripted (I just haven't gotten around to write a script for it) but a bunch of other things are the site are done with perl scripts.

Reading _about_ Richard Stallman is much more fun than reading Richard Stallman.

Oh I dunno... "Stallman Does Dallas" made me giggle, and the time he ranted about a baby announcement on the GNU mailing list was (perhaps somewhat unintentionally) hilarious.

https://stallman.org/articles/texas.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html

My favorite part of this is "write a recipe for how to connect to the WiFi in a Mcdonalds without running its nonfree Javascript't" Always found that interesting about how thorough he is with what he does with his laptop.

Duh, so what? There's nothing wrong with it. There's a lot wrong with websites that will look all wonky in five years when the js libraries they depend on are obsolete or the css is outdated or whatever.

And it's a pleasant surprise that he uses no tables (that make it so hard for screen readers- not that I use one, but there are many people who do so).

This is some kind of art

https://www.stallman.org/photos/rms-working/index.html

Reminds me of that old series of photos of a kid's travels around the world with his Gameboy and in every single shot he's either playing it or holding it. Oh, look, a famous monument!

Great site. The political notes are are usually higher in quality than most US news sources.

If the design bothers some people, I believe everyone can add the 2 to 5 css rules they'd want themselves ;)

> SCROTUS demanded that Greenpeace, 350.org and the Union of Concerned Scientists hand over privileged legal communications about investigating Exxon's global heating fraud.

Does anyone know WTF "SCROTUS" is? My first guess would be that it has something to do with the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) and that Stallman disagrees with them over something and so calls them SCROTUS instead of SCOTUS.

However, what that item on his site links to is a story on the Committee on Space, Science and Technology of the House or Representatives and its bogus investigation of several groups. I'm having a hard time finding any even remotely rational way to turn "Committee on Space, Science and Technology" into SCROTUS.

Sleazy Congressional Republicans Of The United States

Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2016-mar-jun.html#26_May_2016_...

Stallman's big on puns so that wouldn't surprise me. He calls Uber "Goober"

This is part of what makes him unreadable

My personal favorite is the Amazon "Swindle"

I saw him speak in person and averted my gaze from him in guilt when he said that, since I had my "Swindle" in my bookbag at the time.

Some Texans have felt uncomfortable around him.

https://stallman.org/articles/texas.html

I was surprised by the comic having a No-derivatives license.

Replace Times New Roman with Courier and you would have a liberal mirror of the Drudge Report.

Watch out. If you view it you are required to make everything else you view available for free.

This website a good example what's wrong with a lot of open source software (and don't get me wrong, I love FOSS, in fact, I make a living out of it). Complete ignorance of form. There's plenty of awesome function and amazing minds behind it, but humans are visual beings and sites like this (completely unscannable) make it really difficult to separate what's important and what's not. The only reason to visit a site like this is if you're given a good blog post with a direct link.

Yes, I know it renders on everything properly, but that doesn't make it right, UX, after all is where most of the technological products fail - because users do not know how to use them properly - or at all. Apple and Tesla understand that.

> humans are visual beings

Yep, it's important for a site to be easy to skim, but beyond that, you'd be surprised at how little people care about or note good design. I mean, you're posting this on Hacker News, which can't even be bothered to set a reasonable text column width.

Your feedback is fair, but does if anything particular to do with FOSS vs software websites in general ? Beyond perhaps that bad UX can kill a business faster than a volunteer project, so bad commercial websites tend to disappear

Are you seriously comparing someone's personal wep page to Apple and Tesla? If that's supposed to be a satire on Silicon Valley's startup culture, I think it's hilarious.

I think his page is really great because it has lots of high-quality content and nothing in the "UI" made it difficult to access it.

>Apple and Tesla understand that.

Do you have some reason to believe that? My frustrations with Apple hardware began and ended with their single button mouse. Tesla's cars are having their firmware modified without their riders fully understanding the implications of the modifications, resulting in entirely preventable, physical accidents.

Lol, it's funny when you see how bad computer geniuses websites can be! Just proves that you can't know everything when it comes to programming. (Viewed on my Android Phone)

I find it quite readable.

The poster you are replying to was on an Android phone.

On my iPhone the section that has the three column layout is screwed up. The first column is fine, but the third column overlaps the second column.

In conversations about webdesign, I usually always mention HackerNews and Stallman's political blog: http://stallman.org/archives/polnotes.html

Minimalist, all the content is linkable, and they both work even on Links or Opera Mini. I'd prefer this over some fancy layout that don't degrade gracefully, e.g. requiring JS to display static content. It's not everyone who have fast internet and fast laptops.

You can even easily read it in Lynx :)

I gave up Lynx in favour of Links2 because problems reading HackerNews. Try navigating to news.ycombinator.com without the https:// and Lynx will freeze completely.

Some other classics:

DJBs site: http://cr.yp.to/djb.html

Fabrice Bellards site: http://www.bellard.org/

Donald Knuths site: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/

With Bellard's page it's surely not just because he "couldn't be bothered with JavaScript" or something, because 4th link boots up Linux in a browser window.

I wonder if there is some law on the inverse relationship between between bells+whistles and relevance of content.

http://www.landley.net/ is also quite austere.

Stallman doesn't maintain his site and hasn't programmed seriously in a while (read that somewhere on the site). Most old hackers made their site in the 90s and haven't bothered updating it.

Same with professors. The most "advanced" website from a CS professor I've had used Bootstrap.

At least it works fine and is readable.

On the contrary, I personally think user agent styling is the most appropriate for an old school heavy weight like Stallman.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com