News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

dajonker

Let's all get rid of our personal means of transportation as well, super inefficient to have cars and bikes and such parked for the majority of the time! Some people even buy houses that they're never in! Or they buy kitchen equipment they only use once a month! Or clothes that people only wear for parties! Why even own anything at all!

I am pretty sure Sam has already sold the majority of his personal belongings and only rents whatever he needs when he needs it. What a great example for us all.

Re:Noctua Fan Swap on a Calnex Rb/GPS Frequency Reference on Saturday October 31, 2026 @06:29PM (#50320888)
I got a ThinkStation P8 thinking it would be a nice workstation, but the fan noise was just unbearable. Not loud (although it could get LOUD), but extremely annoying. A cooling solution created for a rack mount system where the person buying the machine will never hear it. Absolutely unsuitable at home. I was looking into doing a Noctua Fan Swap here as well, but after reading the fan specs, I found out that this would be impossible, or possibly melt the machine. The 60mm fans on the PSU were rated at something like 25 watt _each_ and push more air at way more pressure than the strongest 120mm Noctua fan.

The Mac Studio that replaced it is practically silent and very energy efficient, while not being significantly slower.

Re:Does Ruby on Rails still make sense? on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @08:57AM (#50180138)
I'm not really sure you understand what I meant with "abstractions" here. I definitely did not mean "human written abstractions". I am talking about all the abstractions in the software stack: application structure, frameworks, libraries, operating systems, programming languages. These are all abstractions that build on top of each other.

The question here is not whether we need human written code, it's whether we need abstractions. Perhaps I could have worded that better.

Re:Do Frameworks Matter Anymore? on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @12:04PM (#50089838)
If frameworks don't matter anymore, then maybe the standard library of your programming language don't matter anymore. And programming languages themselves don't matter anymore. In fact, you could then argue that operating systems don't anymore either. And for that matter, why stop at the software level? You could design and build your own hardware, too. Where do we stop?
Re:Leaving Tech on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @01:23AM (#50067109)
In many European countries you don't need a license for being an electrician, you may need to register somewhere although that won't be very hard. But you do need to follow the national rules and guidelines while working, which is why an education or applying to a large firm where they'll teach you on the job is not a bad idea.
Re:My Weird New Hobby: Wandering Around Tokyo on Google Maps on Thursday September 24, 2026 @02:54PM (#49835255)
This is a hobby of mine, too. It's one of the most fantastic things available on the internet. The ability to travel anywhere in the world and - as the author of the blog also said - the ability to travel back in time as well!

I did some road trips in 2009 and made pictures with a compact camera. I was able to determine the almost exact locations I shot these pictures thanks to street view, so I could see route that we took back then. One picture was shot in the dark but had a distinctive logo sign on the side of the road. Given the timestamp on the photo and the extremely blurry restaurant and motel logos on the sign, I had a good idea of where to look, but it turned out this sign was only up in a single year and it was quite hard to navigate to!

Unfortunately, I don't think you can "lock" the street view date? Nor does the map view on go back in time? I guess you can use Google Earth to view satellite images. There is a whole neighborhood in Seoul that's been completely leveled on the satellite pictures, yet you can still use street view from 2018 to travel around.

Re:Grim Fandango Puzzle Document (1996) [pdf] on Monday September 21, 2026 @08:21AM (#49786358)
Same here, I bought it when it came out in one of those nice carton boxes. It was rather buggy and hard to play without a walkthrough. The characters, the music, the story, the dialog, it's all so memorable and easily makes up for those bugs and hard puzzles. I played the remaster when it came out on PS4 as well, still great, but perhaps that's just the nostalgia.
Re:Htmx 4.0.0 has been released on Friday August 28, 2026 @04:28PM (#49483822)
Cheers! We've been running the various betas in production for a couple of months now. For our Rails app we replaced most of our Hotwired/Turbo with HTMX. For me at least, HTMX just makes more sense: you control the flow of content from the client, not from the server as you do with Turbo.

For pushing updates, we use ActionCable, but we do it in a different way from what we used to do with Turbo Streams: when a record is updated, instead of sending HTML from the server to the client with instructions on what to replace, we only send a small JSON payload with the ID of the element that was updated. On the client side, an event is dispatched that any DOM element with <hx-trigger="<resource-id>:updated from:body"> will trigger on. For the rest it's just basic HTMX, only the trigger is "custom".

Same, although my M1 pro has only 16 GB of RAM and that does seem to slow it down a bit with my current usage. I recently bought a used Mac Studio M2 Max with 64 GB RAM and it's much faster, both subjectively and objectively by looking at how long it takes to run the full test suite of the Rails app I'm working on.
Re:HTML Can Do That on Saturday August 22, 2026 @05:46AM (#49398131)
It's a small team of four, everyone works on the "full stack" which is Rails with HTMX and very little JS. As the lead dev, I am usually the one to make the decision that we should use the modern browser standards.

It's a niche B2B SaaS app and luckily we know most of our users personally. They all use modern browsers, usually Chrome or Edge on Windows. There is not a lot of mobile usage although we do support it.

Re:HTML Can Do That on Saturday August 22, 2026 @04:07AM (#49397660)
Thanks for giving me some confidence, I converted one of our popovers to use anchor positioning and it was actually rather easy. Just had to use anchor-scope which not all tutorials use!
Re:HTML Can Do That on Thursday August 20, 2026 @02:10PM (#49378108)
Popover, dialog, invoker commands, our entire production app uses these everywhere and it works really well! The fact that dialogs and popovers are rendered on the "top layer" and that nested popovers are also automatically stacked on top of each other and have 'cascading close' shows how well these standards were designed.

The only hard thing is still to position a popover near the element that triggers it, such as when you want to create a context menu that has to render above/below the button that triggered it. There is anchor positioning in CSS now but support is still limited and I find it hard to wrap my head around.

LLMs are also terrible at these new standards. If they even know about them, they often think they're not baseline yet and they have almost zero training data compared to the giant mountain of weird JS and CSS that people had to use before the introduction of these standards.

Did you read actually read the article and if so, did you read until the end? Let me just respond by quoting the article:

> When experts started speaking out about the Ocean Cleanup several years ago, I witnessed several of them endure online harassment from supporters of the organization, often phrased as “At least they’re trying to do something to help, all you do is complain.” (Note that this was being said to people who devoted their lives and careers to evidence-based solutions to cleaning up the ocean).

This feels like an uninformed, generalized opinion from someone with zero experience on the topic. Have you even used HTMX or a similar approach?

Besides the memes, it is absolutely not hype-driven, but hypermedia driven. It asks the question: could HTML be even more powerful than it already is?

The creators of HTMX even want to standardize core ideas of HTMX into the official HTML specification: https://triptychproject.org/ Please read this and reply when you still think it's hype.

For me personally, there is no point in using more reasoning than medium or sometimes high. It just gets so much slower and expensive, meaning that i have to wait longer to evaluate the results and provide feedback or continue to the next task.
Re:GPT‑Live on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @01:29PM (#48834726)
But does it generate good pelicans?
It's not OpenAI, that's what the memory industry wants you to think.
Re:Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left on Wednesday June 03, 2026 @01:47AM (#48380376)
> Some of these features can be turned off. Others can’t. Or if they can, it means also turning off useful long-standing features like automatic thread categorization.

This, I absolutely hate it. And like the author said, it must be intentional, so that someone at Google can show the usage numbers and get a promotion.

Re:Warm up your MacBook (2019) on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @05:36PM (#48301077)
I recently installed an app to manually activate the fans on my MacBook Pro M1 Pro as I've never been able to trigger them over the past 4+ years. Just to check whether the fans even work (they do).
Re:From Rust to Ruby on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @02:38AM (#48290528)
I can find it on rubygems but the link there to GitHub returns a 404.
Re:Flipper One Tech Specs on Wednesday May 20, 2026 @06:11PM (#48214932)
Plug a wifi module in the M.2 slot!
Re:Map of Metal on Wednesday May 20, 2026 @10:10AM (#48208125)
that's pretty cool, thanks!
Re:Map of Metal on Wednesday May 20, 2026 @09:11AM (#48207112)
Mike Shinoda is fine with not being classified as Nu Metal https://blabbermouth.net/news/linkin-parks-mike-shinoda-says...
Re:Halt and Catch Fire on Sunday May 17, 2026 @04:17AM (#48167011)
My father is a journalist and learned to type by himself on typewriters using his index fingers. He writes a lot and he is really fast. I don't have any issues with that.
Re:I am building a cloud on Friday April 24, 2026 @06:14PM (#47896465)
You hit the nail on the head here. Saying and doing are two very different things. It's also especially tempting to find an excuse to use some shiny new thing that everyone is always talking about. Both for personal learning and curiosity but also for future job prospects. The reality is that it's easier to get a k8s job if you have k8s experience.
Re:I am building a cloud on Thursday April 23, 2026 @03:50AM (#47873193)
I totally agree, but that's not what happens in reality: the average devops knows k8s and will slap it onto anything they see (if only so they can put in on their resume). The average manager hears about k8s, gets convinced they need and hires beforementioned devops to build it.
Re:I am building a cloud on Thursday April 23, 2026 @03:31AM (#47873073)
> Making Kubernetes good is inherently impossible, a project in putting (admittedly high quality) lipstick on a pig.

So well put, my good sir, this describes exactly my feelings with k8s. It always starts off all good with just managing a couple of containers to run your web app. Then before you know it, the devops folks have decided that they need to put a gazillion other services and an entire software-defined networking layer on top of it.

After spending a lot of time "optimizing" or "hardening" the cluster, cloud spend has doubled or tripled. Incidents have also doubled or tripled, as has downtime. Debugging effort has doubled or tripled as well.

I ended up saying goodbye to those devops folks, nuking the cluster, booted up a single VM with debian, enabled the firewall and used Kamal to deploy the app with docker. Despite having only a single VM rather than a cluster, things have never been more stable and reliable from an infrastructure point of view. Costs have plummeted as well, it's so much cheaper to run. It's also so much easier and more fun to debug.

And yes, a single VM really is fine, you can get REALLY big VMs which is fine for most business applications like we run. Most business applications only have hundreds to thousands of users. The cloud provider (Google in our case) manages hardware failures. In case we need to upgrade with downtime, we spin up a second VM next to it, provision it, and update the IP address in Cloudflare. Not even any need for a load balancer.

Re:I ran Gemma 4 as a local model in Codex CLI on Monday April 13, 2026 @05:10AM (#47749575)
I don't really have the hardware to try it out, but I'm curious to see how Qwen3.5 stacks up against Gemma 4 in a comparison like this. Especially this model that was fine tuned to be good at tool calling that has more than 500k downloads as of this moment: https://huggingface.co/Jackrong/Qwen3.5-27B-Claude-4.6-Opus-...
Re:The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it on Friday March 20, 2026 @05:43PM (#47461039)
> they're almost always people who already had some pull toward software

I think this is probably true, and basically how I got into software myself.

I always dabbled in writing software and things for the web, but for some reason I never thought studying computer science would be any fun and that a career as a software developer sounded boring. But then I got an actual full time office job and oh boy, did my perspective on things change fast.

That first job did not have anything to do with writing software at all. But I saw people struggle with things that seemed to me trivial to automate, such as making annotations on paper bank statements and entering them into the system line-by-line. The bookkeeping system did support electronic bank statements, but lacked features to match certain descriptions to certain cost places. In the end it was indeed faster to go the paper route... It took me a couple of hours to write something that saved hours every week and that basically kick started my software career.

Would AI have made much of a difference here? Yes, in terms of getting to the correct solution faster, but probably not in terms of who would have done that. People would still come to the person who came up with the solution to ask for maintenance and new features.

Older »