News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

factotvm

I love that this is open source, thank you. My issue is the choice of TypeScript on Node. Now, I'm not a JavaScript developer, but for a gatekeeper on money, I'd want a program that can't modify itself from external sources. Programs in this runtime can rewrite themselves while running, and the Dockerfile doesn't set the flag that locks this down. So as it stands, nothing at the runtime level prevents prototype pollution. And a configuration defect is the kind of bug that keeps on giving, not to mention that the flag itself is still experimental.
No, it’s a lost sale.
Re:Pentagon threatens to make Anthropic a pariah on Tuesday February 24, 2026 @04:55PM (#47143767)
It probably started with the Third Amendment to the Constitution, continued with the Posse Comitatus Act, and was alive and well last November under the leadership of Mark Kelly.
Re:Pentagon threatens to make Anthropic a pariah on Tuesday February 24, 2026 @04:49PM (#47143685)
The important words are, American citizens. In times past, the thought of "waging war" against your own citizens would be a bad look.
Re:Cosmologically Unique IDs on Wednesday February 18, 2026 @03:00PM (#47065571)
> In order to fix this, we might start sending out satellites in every direction

Minor correction: Satellites don't go in every direction; they orbit. Probes or spaceships are more appropriate terms.

Re:FBI tries to unmask owner of archive.is on Thursday November 06, 2025 @09:12PM (#45842862)
The laughable thing here is the "argument" that one cannot judge the societal impact of the FBI unless one has worked in law enforcement.
Re:I made my AI think harder by making it argue with itself on Wednesday April 30, 2025 @12:32AM (#43841299)
Read The Fine Prompt, more or less, right?
Re:Have Gemini stage and write commit messages for you on Sunday February 02, 2025 @11:21PM (#42914944)
Don’t forget that most modern version control systems are distributed. The same can not be said for ticketing systems.
Re:Have Gemini stage and write commit messages for you on Saturday February 01, 2025 @10:44PM (#42905605)
Not to mention, the best commit messages are about the code that isn’t there.

As you say, we know what’s there. I need the author to tell me why it’s there, and perhaps what other alternatives were abandoned because they didn’t work.

You know, so I don’t waste a day finding out for myself why you didn’t just do ${obvious}.

Re:Have Gemini stage and write commit messages for you on Saturday February 01, 2025 @08:30PM (#42904650)
> 2. Margin of commit messages is often too small for documenting the rationale - this job is better left for tickets.

The commit message lives with the code. The number of times in my career that a company has migrated, changed, consolidated, or otherwise made all those links in commit messages obsolete, well I don't quite yet need two hands. But I see a lot of dead ends to context in code bases.

Only if gun manufacturers are liable for murders.
Re:Humble Tech Book Bundle: Head First 2024 by O'Reilly on Sunday August 18, 2024 @09:37PM (#41287070)
I read Head First Design Patterns years and years ago. I'm a fan of the series. It's less for dummies and more using ideas from psychology to help you learn the material. I'll forever recall the power and conciseness of the Decorator pattern for computing the price of coffee drinks when there are as many variations as there are people. Starbuzz...

From my memory banks after close to 20 years:

    SoyDecorator: CoffeeDecorator {
        price: Cents { price + 90¢ } // Soy adds 90 cents to the price
    }
Edit: My regret is lending it to someone and never getting it back. I believe I might get this bundle.
You can disambiguate two types with the same name from different libraries, e.g. `Factotvm.URL` and `Foundation.URL`. Do you mean something more full-featured? You are not prefixing types with three letters, if that's what you think has to be done.

I don't know if it's still the case, but there was an annoyance where you couldn't have a type with the same name as the package. But that is hardly a lack of namespaces.

Re:Code reviews don't usually find bugs on Tuesday May 14, 2024 @03:25PM (#40359101)
I'd like to see the difference in bug detection between "pull requests" vs. "over-the-shoulder code reviews".

Edit: or, rather, in my experience the author of the code often finds the bugs when explaining it to the person standing next to them. This goes away in the GitHub-style pull request.

I would imagine consciousness shrinks in the presence of an all-powerful god.
Slack is web-first at best. It has nearly zero platform conventions, at least on desktop. (It’s been some time since I’ve used the mobile app.)

A quick couple of examples: multi-selection and drag-n-drop, both all but broken on desktop.

Re:Geography of Kansas (2022) on Saturday May 06, 2023 @09:02PM (#35846841)
Kansas, birthplace of the Lynx browser.
Re: on Wednesday April 26, 2023 @12:28AM (#35709641)
It’s been great in many ways, but the user interface is horrible. Why they show the scores on the thumbnail for replays is beyond me. Time shifting is all about not knowing the outcome beforehand. It’s as if this was created by people who don’t understand sport ball at all. But I don’t know what excuse they can use for burying the replays in the first place such that I found others on the web thinking the same as me—that only recaps are available for past matches.
Your talk of audio reminds me of how the climax of The Last of the Mohicans (1992) is so powerful because of its restrained sound. The silence of Chingachgook's inaudible wail makes me want to weep. The slicing of knives and reports from rifles are second to the score:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BxDpOu3cD0&t=320

(It won the Oscar for Best Sound that year.)

Re:Book Review: The Programmer's Brain on Sunday April 03, 2022 @11:18AM (#30897555)
I'm here for this, but not to declare empathically my position. Rather, I'd like to ask a question: Say I'm learning a new language that is opinionated about casing. Suppose it was easier to read one style, but the language in question adopted another style. Would you buck the trend of that ecosystem and adopt it, or follow convention?
For me, it’s because I’m on my work machine. I don’t move my personal credentials to my work machine. (In fact, I moved over to my phone to write this comment.)

We could discuss that aspect—sharing accounts on computers that don’t belong to me—but that’s why I’m often thwarted from reading content. I have the account, just not on me.

Did you miss the part about kids?
Re:What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars? on Saturday January 30, 2021 @01:44PM (#25971685)
Yes, I believe we do. I only need think of the math discovered solely to predict the stars to know that without the night sky, we are different. To say nothing of the poets.
Re:What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars? on Saturday January 30, 2021 @01:10PM (#25971349)
You have chosen poorly.

If we lose that essence of humanity where we feel wonder and awe looking up into the night sky, then we lose one of the prime movers of discovery and science. Or do you think cat videos can do the same?

Re:What Did We Lose When We Lost the Stars? on Saturday January 30, 2021 @01:07PM (#25971323)
Please check out The International Dark-Sky Association and consider donating.

https://www.darksky.org/

Note: I am only a donor and not affiliated with them in any way.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Re:The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire on Saturday December 12, 2020 @12:45PM (#25400013)
But one is about the past and one is about the future.

And those items in the past have been heavily investigated, brought to the courts, and due to no evidence, summarily rebuked.

Apples and oranges.

Don’t get me wrong, the world ending in 12 years is a silly thing to say.

Re:Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPv4 addresses on Saturday December 12, 2020 @12:13PM (#25399733)
You’re off by about 20% on the take home.
Re:The YouTube ban is un-American, wrong, and will backfire on Saturday December 12, 2020 @12:04PM (#25399659)
According to the downvotes, my statement must be false and predictions are the same as lies.

If it’s been proven false, don’t say it. If it can’t be proven false, carry on, as that’s not against the terms and conditions.

Or, a false equivalency between saying the election was stolen, and saying the world will end in 12 years if we don’t do something.

Older »