News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

andrewjf

Re:Tesla Roadster on Friday October 16, 2026 @11:12PM (#50127544)
> he has a track record of achievements that no other human has ever come close to reaching.

Your obsequiousness is disgusting.

Re:What I Self-Host on Thursday October 15, 2026 @08:49PM (#50112308)
I second this, it's great. Commonly called "Quadlets".

I also use BGP advertised pod networks so each pod gets it's own IP address that's directly routable (l3 ipvlan) with the rest of my network (hint, don't use 100.64.0.0/10 for that if you use tailscale), so I don't bother with NAT on the host itself or port mapping or port conflicts. It also makes caddy in front of it super easy, barely an inconvenience.

Re:X Once Again Marks the Spot on Sunday October 11, 2026 @08:51PM (#50049896)
I mean, I get it... but having principles is _hard_ - and I'm definitely not perfect; but I'm not about to knowingly support the owner of a company actively undermining democracy, enabling corruption, and just being a general piece of shit (nazi salutes, and most recently, lashing out at the Delta CEO because he called him names? Come on, snowflake).

Sorry John Gruber rather have his tech fix than standing up for what's right, I guess.

Nobody wants backups as a feature. The feature is restore.
Re:EVE Online moves to Python 3 on Saturday August 29, 2026 @07:07PM (#49494112)
Why choose a second rate backwoods language if you could choose one that actually has guardrails for AI with an actual functioning type system?

Half joking.

Re:Run Windows 2000 on a DEC Alpha with a new es40 fork on Sunday July 05, 2026 @12:39PM (#48795593)
This is pretty cool, it brings back memories. Thanks for posting.

I used to manage Tru64 (Alpha) and OpenVMS (VAX and Alpha). Mostly Oracle DB and whatever they called their App development suite (horrible, horrible software) for a University's ERP system (called Banner) and infrastructure (Multinet on OpenVMS/VAX for DNS, DHCP, mail, etc). After that I moved on to AIX on Power5 for Oracle on HACMP and Veritas Cluster. Such a different world from what we have now.

I have an old AlphaServer ES47 running OpenVMS and Power5 560Q running AIX in my garage

Re:Excessive nil pointer checks in Go on Sunday June 21, 2026 @10:06PM (#48624768)
Rust tortures you into greatness.
Re:Excessive nil pointer checks in Go on Sunday June 21, 2026 @10:05PM (#48624763)
But you don't have to handle errors in Go. With multi-return you just don't bother with the "err" value and happily proceed with whatever is in the first return position.

IMHO, only languages with exceptions or Sum types that encode that a return is either a value or an Err (but not both) actually do what Golang says it does (make you handle errors).

Re:Billionaire Tax Officially Heads to Nov. 3 Ballot on Sunday June 21, 2026 @02:10PM (#48621146)
I mean, let's do it. But it seems more straightforward to tax wealth as capital gains when it's used as collateral for liquid assets (low interest loans, lines of credit, buying twitter).
Re:Introduction to UEFI HTTP(s) Boot with QEMU/OVMF on Friday June 12, 2026 @06:00PM (#48509937)
The worst thing about UEFI HTTP boot is the utter lack of information to debug anything that's gone wrong. Whether that's the DHCP filename option is some wrong format for whatever stupid mode the UEFI is in, or there's some dhcp relay issue. It literally tells you almost nothing besides "can't get NBP file size".

The error messages seem to be written by people on a happy path who don't know how utterly broken almost everything about networking and DHCP even is.

And this is all IPv4! The IPv6 stuff is even more cryptic with different DHCP options and dealing with RAs and managed-flag, other-flag, etc.

It's infuriating. And I work on a team that writes code to generate all these things for automating bare metal for a living.

Re:Hacker News, Sans AI on Friday June 05, 2026 @06:18PM (#48419082)
I agree with you, but haven't really left yet since there's still a good amount of discourse outside AI related topics. Seems a significant amount of contributors here are all to eager to fall over themselves putting themselves, their juniors, children, and colleagues out of work, long term.
Re:Jira Is Turing-Complete on Tuesday May 26, 2026 @12:10AM (#48274883)
I'm going to sound like a lunatic, but the best bug tracking software I've ever used was Apple's Radar internally. I wish they'd open source it. I've also had a bunch of fever dreams about re-implementing it as a product.
Re:Omarchy Is Not A Distro on Sunday May 24, 2026 @10:09PM (#48262816)
Maybe that’s why I get the 1Password UI _and_ the native password selection UI :-/
Re:Omarchy Is Not A Distro on Sunday May 24, 2026 @12:43PM (#48258810)
Quality in general seems to be going downhill, too.

Frequently the desktop app and the safari extension won't be in sync and missing a recently added password, or doesn't show up on my other devices hours later. I still have no idea how the extension vs desktop app actually work together, or if they do at all.

Sometimes 1password (safari extension) is "locked" - but the desktop app isn't locked? and No amount of clicking the little 1password icon, that's supposed to unlock it does anything. Just a completely no-op button. Quitting safari _and_ the desktop app seems to be what's required to fix it.

I've been thinking about just moving back to native macOS keychain, but I haven't bothered to check on linux+windows support.

You don't need other people anymore to find security issues, you can do it yourself with AI.
I don't think that's relevant. You can still find security issues in software nobody uses.

The question is a matter of impact because of how used the software is.

I agree with what OOP said. But it’s not my intent to “shut sites down.” I have this view to try to increase diversity of media consumption and break people out of echo chambers. If your business model is so shit you have to exploit weaknesses in human brains to keep people viewing ads and can’t adapt, then that’s your problem.

If you have an algorithm whose sole purpose is to “engagement” with your own platform (by intentionally and purposely pushing clickbait, ragebait, and media that keeps reinforcing your clicks) you should no longer get section 230 protections - you are no longer a neutral party. These algorithms exist to create echo chambers and keep you clicking so you can consume more ads.

I would love to hear other ways of solving the problems of social media.

Re:Commenting and Approving Pull Requests on Saturday April 25, 2026 @12:45PM (#47902747)
There's two kinds of reviews in my experience:

1. Does it work? Then ship it. This is great for early on, high-velocity where the goal is to get something working in the wild. AI and AI proponents love this option. It's easy to spot obvious problems, but very unlikely to lead to feedback on structural changes to abstractions and architecture to increase overall _long-term_ velocity.

2. We assume this works, but is it "correct"? This is where long-term code maintainability is created. The quality and effort put into a review like this is obviously far more involved than option 1. People working long term on a code base love this option.

We've been biased towards #1 for a long time, but I feel like we dont have enough people capable of doing #2.

Re:Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident on Friday April 10, 2026 @08:38PM (#47725819)
If only the American Colonies would just have petitioned King George just a few more times…
Re:Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident on Friday April 10, 2026 @08:31PM (#47725756)
> Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

- John F Kennedy, 1962.

I would be very happy to do so if we had working infrastructure, education, and health care not coupled to the generosity of your employer.

Isn’t it the case anyway that if you add state, federal, local, property, capital gains, and sales taxes, add the money that you and your employer pays for healthcare, that you’re basically paying slightly more in taxes all-in?

Re:Pam Bondi ousted as Attorney General on Thursday April 02, 2026 @10:56PM (#47622749)
Sources on the first paragraph? I can’t tell what you’re even trying at say.

DACA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Action_for_Childhood_...) was an exec order specifically because those individuals were brought over (as children, with no agency over their fate) after they were born, not before, so of course they weren’t citizens via the 14th. You’re correct that It wasn’t a law passed by Congress, but it’s irrelevant. I’m not sure what you’re saying, talking anything about DACA in this context is irrelevant.

Re:False claims in a widely-cited paper on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @11:00PM (#47526189)
Fair point! Makes complete sense.

But I wouldn't exactly call "professionals trying to make high brow media" exclusive alternative to Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, TikTok.

A lot of the propaganda (and sane washing) is coming from mass media, too. I feel like the only "legit" media outlets are like Reuters, AP, and some international ones, I guess.

Re:False claims in a widely-cited paper on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @10:23PM (#47525981)
That's really root cause in everything, isn't it?

- The consolidation of media (& social media in general) is about making money from outrage (emotions)

- Anti Vax (& other) movements is about people only receptive to people saying what they already feel (feelings)

- Accountability is gone because people care about being on the winning team and being "right".

Reason, Logic, and Evidence seems completely replaced by propaganda and mistrust of experts (fueled by the propaganda), but it's all rooted in comfort in people's own emotional validation.

Re:I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here's What I Handed Over on Saturday February 21, 2026 @11:05AM (#47102016)
being "hard-over on privacy" and regularly using google services is an astounding level of cognitive dissonance.
Re:Clean Coder: The Dark Path (2017) on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @11:16AM (#46887666)
Author argues against strong typing systems and language features to prevent classes of bugs and instead encourages developers to "writing lots of tests" for things that a type system would prevent.

The authors thesis seems to be that it's preferable to rely on the programmer who wrote bugs to write even more bugs in tests in order to have some benefit over a compiler or type system that can prevent these things from happening in the first place?

So obviously it's an opinion and he's entitled to it, but (in my own opinion) it is so so so, on-its-face, just flat out wrong, I'm concerned that that it's creating developers who believe that writing so many tests (that languages and compilers save you time (and bugs) in writing) is a valid solution to preventing null pointer defeferences.

Re:How ICE Knows Who Minneapolis Protesters Are on Friday January 30, 2026 @09:31AM (#46824842)
Propaganda.

The actual videos do not support this conclusion at all. You’re being lied to.

Re:Exploring PostgreSQL 18's new UUIDv7 support on Saturday October 18, 2025 @04:57PM (#45630294)
You describe a world where human skill is required to prevent these class of bugs, time and time again we've proven that people are people and bugs happen.

Systems must be _structurally architected_ with security in mind.

Security is layered, using a random key with 128-bit space makes guessing UUIDs infeasible. But _also_ you should be doing AuthZ on the records, and also you should be doing rate limiting on API so they can't be brute forced, either.

Re:Thoughts on Mechanical Keyboards and the ZSA Moonlander on Friday September 26, 2025 @06:59PM (#45391881)
I have two moonlanders but wound up giving up because I just couldn't adapt to it. And when writing code, finding the symbols like {, =, }, and other common coding ones was just too difficult to retain muscle memory. I tried many layouts, I tried to make my own, and at the end of the day it was just too different. I wish I had a better experience.

Any recommendations?

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