Tell HN: Ralph Giles has died (Xiph.org| Rust@Mozilla | Ghostscript)

Hacker News lit up with a rare, unanimous mood: grief. The thread announcing the death of Ralph Giles — known online as rillian — turned into a chorus of simple, weighty “RIP”s from users like nubg, brson, and hexagonwin, the kind of silence-that-speaks that you don’t often see online. Behind those short messages came stories that read like love letters to the open‑source world Ralph helped build. One engineer shared how rillian patiently guided them through a nightmare of clunky thermal printers and serial cables, even following up to make sure it worked — a small kindness that felt huge. Another remembered long tea walks in Vancouver talking Rust (a safer programming language), privacy, and even ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics — the sort of eclectic curiosity that made him a legend beyond code.

For readers new to his impact: Ralph was a pillar at Xiph.org (free audio/video tech like Theora), a core Ghostscript developer (tools behind PDFs and printing), and helped ship the first Rust code in Firefox, a milestone for both the browser and the language (link). The official announcement is here (link). The strongest “take”? No hot takes — just gratitude, memories, and the internet doing something rare: collectively, quietly saying goodbye.