News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

Qem

Interesting observation. Never noticed that.
It's said cats purr to strenghten their bones. Perhaps the mechanism is related. It would be interesting to see if besides exercise, vibration can trigger it in humans as well, perhaps checking people that worked with pneumatic hammers or other vibration exposed workplaces.
William Shatner.
I wonder if that explains the benefits of walking, despite being a light activity. Also the paradoxal fact that being slightly overweight appears to decrease mortality.
Just look at the shenanigans Meta pulled in Brazil election.
Social media explains the Fermi Paradox. Once it arises technical civilizations regress.
Re:Python's experimental JIT to be removed on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @11:21AM (#50260704)
Sad news, I put a lot of hope in this project. At least we keep the base interpreter improvements they brought along, and we still have PyPy. CPython JIT is dead. Long live PyPy!
Re:Pharo 14 on Monday October 26, 2026 @04:49PM (#50250719)
Pharo MOOC is still based around Pharo 8. Any prospects to refresh It to the latest version?
Re:Pharo 14 on Monday October 26, 2026 @04:44PM (#50250666)
They want to avoid an implicit promise of backward compatibility.
Re:Lula wins election after final votes tallied on Monday October 26, 2026 @08:44AM (#50242672)
Those were not four straight terms. There was alternation, with opposing groups taking the presidential seat in between.
Re:Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @07:55AM (#50179398)
> We're facing the issue in Ontario where firefighters are bored out of their minds and are being used as first responders for anything and everything.

With climate change we can repurpose them as waterfighters when sea level rise, floods and berm breaches become an acute problem.

> I mean, a combination of political and economic factors from 1930s to 1960s forced the wealthy to return a portion of the returns of automation to the remaining working people.

The credible threat of communist revolutions put the fear of god into the capitalist elites. So they had to share a larger share of wealth with workers, beyond mere subsistence wages, to keep them peaceful. With the downfall of USSR, communist revolutions stopped being a credible threat, and elites clawed back productivity gains, pushing workers toward subsistence wages again.

Re:Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran on Friday October 16, 2026 @10:05AM (#50118557)
It's only another 30 years before we have the first one hundred years old extant programming language.
Re:Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell on Saturday September 26, 2026 @07:11AM (#49855401)
Gnumeric has montecarlo built-in.
Is it just my impression, or programming language posts took a hit. I think I don't see them as often as before.
Nice. Suggestion: Add PyPy too.
Re:RISC-V is now officially supported by CPython on Sunday August 30, 2026 @06:59AM (#49497586)
Did they already test how the proposed jit fares on RISC-V?
Re:The Einstein-Szilard Refrigerator on Sunday August 30, 2026 @06:54AM (#49497557)
Szilard is an underrated genius. Also was an early formulator of the nuclear chain reaction concept, to tap into nuclear energy, but did not zero in uranium right at the outset as the element to make it feasible.
Microstrokes, that affect capillary vessels in the brain, don't cause short term acute loss of function, but have a cummulative impact over time?
Re:The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @08:49PM (#49266503)
> How so? You can just... refuse?

It would be like doping in some elite sports, say road race cycling in Lance Armstrong era. Nobody would be coerced by force, but some people would start taking it, making less sleep time the new normal. With time business would adjust to expect and require it, and other people would be forced to take the drug just to not become unemployable in a market with a upshifted baseline. I think this is already happening in education, with ADHD medications. Children are likely being overdiagnosed, because in a environment with many medicated children, just displaying normal child behaviour starts looking odd, pathology-like.

> Doing a job that you hate for 8h and sleeping for 8h is much worse than doing a job that you love for 16h.

Some jobs just suck but somebody still has to do them.

Re:The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @05:14PM (#49264588)
> What is surprising to me is the knee-jerk reaction I see whenever the idea of looking into this is brought up.

It's because if it were achieved, likely result would be employers forcing people to take the drug and increasing daily work hours back to 16+.

Now I'm puzzled if whatever made Mars lose its primordial water oceans and dense atmosphere could be involved in Mars Bar losing 20g.
Re:Squeak/Smalltalk 6.1 Release Notes on Monday August 10, 2026 @11:38AM (#49245096)
Also SNOBOL/Icon.
Re:Squeak/Smalltalk 6.1 Release Notes on Monday August 10, 2026 @11:32AM (#49245034)
Re:Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice on Friday August 07, 2026 @12:22PM (#49212790)
Not if it's just microbial life. Anyway it's just one case or another. We knowing what's the case doesn't change it. If the news never break it would be just as bad, perhaps even slightly worse, as we would not have early warning to prepare.
Re:Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice on Friday August 07, 2026 @10:15AM (#49210801)
Likely we don't need to replicate. We just need to get a sample of life with completely independent origin to our kind of life here on Earth, to study. This way we would be able to separate what are universal properties for any life from historical contingencies specific to us. To have samples of a single kind of life complicates things.
Re:Dress made of living mycelium can renew and repair itself on Thursday August 06, 2026 @03:24PM (#49201148)
> Or perhaps there is a risk that the wearer will absorb harmful chemicals secreted by the mycelium via contact with the wearer's skin?

Or just getting a bad itch.

Older »