News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

KayEss

Re:How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @02:13AM (#49429706)
I think every national health service does something similar (minus the ambulance fee generally), but that might be too incredible for the Americans to believe?
Re:How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @01:47AM (#49429561)
This is such an American take.

If you're unhappy with the wait time then get private insurance and go to a private doctor, just like you would in the US. But if you're too poor for that, at least you get something in six to twelve months instead of nothing or bankruptcy. And your insurance will be much much less because you're getting most of what you need publicly. Your US insurance is in the order of three to five times as much as private insurance in the EU, so your taxes are lower, but your costs are too.

The real problem always seems to be that universal health care would leave rich Americans worse off (higher taxes), would likely be about a wash for most middle earners (higher taxes, but none/less health care costs), but would leave the poor significantly better off (who are totally stiffed in the US at the moment).

So, by saying you don't want universal health care you're effectively saying that you're rich enough that you don't care about it, and you don't want poor people to be able to get health care at all, and if some die early or go bankrupt at least it isn't your problem.

Generally if you get turned away at the destination then the airline is liable for taking you away, so they won't let you fly unless they're sure that you will be accepted at the destination country.
Re:The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing on Thursday August 06, 2026 @12:56AM (#49192612)
I've been using proportional fonts for programming for more than thirty years. Makes things much easier to read and it's only a problem where people try to make patterns out of the code
I have fond memories of bricking my Smalltalk environment several times trying to get instance behaviour working :-)
I think this is looking at what OOP has become (as implemented by systems and programming languages that don't care a wit about what OO was meant to be) rather than what Alan Kay described.

If you think about something like a web server as an object, it has arbitrarily high cohesion and arbitrarily low coupling. You can only communicate to it through messages (HTTP); binding happens at the point in time that the message arrives (notwithstanding that this may be cached in all sorts of interesting ways in the implementation of any given server); and the web server is fully encapsulated (security flaws notwithstanding).

I think it's perfectly reasonable to argue that much of what gets called OOP doesn't deliver on the promise, but then it doesn't deliver on the premise either, and I think these are inextricably linked.

Re:Charlie Kirk shot at event in Utah on Thursday September 11, 2025 @10:44PM (#45218182)
You're misinterpreting what I said. I said that your ability to defend yourself and your family with a gun was hypothetical.

I can see that you like to think of yourself as a rational thinker about this, but you're refusing to answer the actual criticism: actual people are being killed every day due to the availability of weapons in your society. There are nearly two mass shootings per day. So far this year that has led to 250 deaths and more than a thousand injuries[1]. These are not hypothetical abstractions, which is all you seem interested in engaging with. These are real people, many of them children, who find themselves victims of gun violence. You are arguing that your feeling of safety is more important than their actual safety. All of your arguments amount to a continuation of your position that you put your own feelings ahead of the actual deaths of people in society around you. This is a very selfish way to engage in your society.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/us/mass-shootings-fast-facts

Re:Charlie Kirk shot at event in Utah on Thursday September 11, 2025 @07:30AM (#45210303)
This of course plays into the fear US gun advocates have of any attempt to remove their gun rights. If it were to happen though, then maybe as a prepper type with a house and lands in the woods you'd stand a chance against an armed mob that came for you, but certainly not the government. If you're defending your sub-urban house (or even worse flat), I suspect that the gun you have for self defense would make very little difference to the final outcome, but might make you feel a bit better about it.
Re:Charlie Kirk shot at event in Utah on Thursday September 11, 2025 @07:16AM (#45210214)
I have had a gun pointed at me, and I've been where guns have been fired in anger around me.

I'm kind of surprised to hear somebody in America think it's a likely enough thing to happen to be worth the obvious societal cost of the wide spread weapons.

Realistically, if they did come for you, how much use would your weapon be? Do you believe that it would mean the difference between your life and death, or just that you'd feel better going having been able to put up some defence? Several genocides have happened in neighbouring countries from where I live in living memory, and it isn't at all clear that having access to a weapon allowed anybody who was targeted to survive.

The cost in mass shootings (now nearly two per day in the US) is a real cost borne by society at large. Your cost is still only hypothetical, and of unclear value if the worst did happen.

Re:Charlie Kirk shot at event in Utah on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @10:38PM (#45207085)
This comes across a lot like you're saying that your personal feeling of safety for you and your family is worth more than the actual safety of innocent schoolchildren who are being mass murdered.
Re:We replaced passwords with something worse on Thursday August 07, 2025 @05:10AM (#44822279)
This is what makes securing this stuff so hard when you don't have proper review. What seems like a good idea from one perspective opens up another gaping hole somewhere else.

Off the cuff suggestions for improving UX in secure flows just make things worse.

Re:A Typology of Canadianisms on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @09:14PM (#44516309)
Only in some parts of the world. In many it's the room and the object
And by a happy coincidence it turns out that audio does about one foot in one millisecond making light six orders of magnitude faster
Re:ZX Spectrum Raytracer on Thursday January 25, 2024 @02:14AM (#39127054)
REM was quite common across a number of languages at the time. You might still see them in '.bat' files
Re:Don't waste money on a math coprocessor they said on Friday November 17, 2023 @02:55AM (#38300751)
I think this is a much fuller explanation of what I was trying to say :-)
Re:Don't waste money on a math coprocessor they said on Tuesday November 14, 2023 @12:37AM (#38259543)
I think you're thinking of upgrading the 486sx which didn't have the on die coprocessor. That did disable the old chip as you basically replaced it with a 486dx
No. The conversation was on the eve of the Potsdam conference
Re:C++ audio mixing library design on Monday October 17, 2022 @06:33AM (#33231731)
One big reason is that when you add two samples together, if you overflow a signed int that's UB, but if you go over 1.0 on a float it's just business as usual. This means you can do a ton of audio processing and only have to deal with fixing the overflows in one place right at the end (they use a compressor, but other algorithms are also possible).
It's essentially the same everywhere, but these large planes are flying IFR not VFR and so they rely on the separation service provided by ground control. Ground control isn't allowed to provide separation service to VFR flights (although you can ask them for an advisory, and they will tell you about traffic that is relevant to you).
Re:Dangerous toys: Anything to ed25519 (SSH Keys) on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:45AM (#30273988)
So when generating a private key, is any 256 bit random sequence good (it gets reduced down to the 252 bits available) or do you have to check you didn't pick one of the 2^4 keys that aren't valid? (Actually, is 2^4 even the right number? Seems awfully low, and hence I guess, unlikely)
Re:Dangerous toys: Anything to ed25519 (SSH Keys) on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:32AM (#30273781)
Does that imply that there are some 256 bit patterns that aren't valid private keys, or does the 2^255 - 19 not describe the private key space?
Re:File Descriptor Limits on Thursday May 20, 2021 @08:16AM (#27220160)
> Iouring looks promising though

It's more than promising. It's an unbridled joy to work with (compared to things like epoll) and performs very well already.

Re:Thai Database Leaks 8.3B Internet Records on Monday May 25, 2020 @09:07AM (#23300580)
Which have been delayed for a year due to C19.

All Thai constitutions have had strong privacy requirements, but that has never been important for what actually happens.

It's really not clear what compliance will be like. If it's anything like most things here then it'll only be if the government gets annoyed that a company will be in any danger of prosecution.

Re:Gmail on NT 3.51 with IE 1.5 via WRP on Thursday July 18, 2019 @01:50AM (#20467098)
SOCKS is very easy to implement. You could probably knock this together in pretty much any language in little more than the time it takes you to read the SOCKS docs and how to set up the server side TLS connection.
Re:Avoid Indirection in Code on Monday June 24, 2019 @12:04AM (#20260472)
> they forgot that it's about telling the computer to do something, as clearly as possible

Or alternatively, it's to explain to the next reader of the code, as clearly as possible, how the problem was solved (in such a way that it can also be executed by the computer).

Older »