News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

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Re:Hackintoshing as a Sustainable Environmental Practice on Tuesday March 11, 2025 @01:59AM (#43329582)
Seems AI-written. Doesn't give any justification for MacOS being better for older hardware than Linux or even Windows. You won't be getting updates for your Intel hardware on MacOS, so you're right back where you started with Windows 10 going EOL.
Web software is incredibly simple. Having someone's ruby code doesn't really help you much. Hackers just try a few SQL injections, stuff script tags into all of the form fields, and call it a day. More advanced hacks on webapps are virtually unheard of. Certainly custom-designing a hack for some company isn't going to happen. It's a waste of time, because chances are you won't find some complicated hack that wasn't already exposed through the spamming techniques I mentioned above. And most larger, "worthwhile" companies tend to run their own in-house CI and not use Circle.
Most people will just update their keys, so I doubt anyone is going to burn botnet cycles on trying to use the keys.
Re:Programmer Salaries in the Age of LLMs on Thursday January 19, 2023 @06:21PM (#34447043)
Who said I was scared? I'm just pointing out that the phrase you used it very vague and some interpretations can be scary. It pays to be specific, especially in tech and medicine, you know? Winkyface.
Re:Lisa Source Code Release on Thursday January 19, 2023 @06:18PM (#34447024)
I'm not sure why it took so long, but I think that lawyers dragging their feet probably wasn't it. I'm guessing that they would have never announced the release, unless the lawyers had already signed off on it. I think instead, it took them 5 years to make the landing page (something like this would normally take two years, but the pandemic wasted three years of that time.)
Re:Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy (2008) on Thursday January 19, 2023 @03:25PM (#34445131)
Then you just need to find an angel investor. The capital has to go somewhere. The wealthy aren't just going to leave their money in publicly-traded stocks, they want some risk in their portfolio.
Re:Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy (2008) on Thursday January 19, 2023 @02:59PM (#34444841)
This. People underestimate how much technological progress has been slowing every decade. 2008 was even slower than 1998, which was even slower than 1988. Meanwhile almost nothing new has happened since 2013.
Re:Lisa Source Code Release on Thursday January 19, 2023 @02:44PM (#34444663)
> You may not and you agree not to:

> publish benchmarking results about the Apple Software or your use of it

Damn, there goes my Apple Lisa vs Amiga comparison video! I was going to get so many YouTube views! Meh, maybe I'll make it anyway. So sue me!

> the Apple Software may not be exported or re-exported (a) into any U.S. embargoed countries

I'm sure keeping Iran from getting this valuable software from 1983, which runs on a completely dead CPU architecture that Linux doesn't even support anymore, is very important!

(But seriously, as a license geek, and not a lawyer, the wording of this license is really interesting. It seems to have completely different disclaimers than you usually see in open-source licenses...)

Re:Stop Building on Corporate-Controlled Languages on Wednesday January 18, 2023 @01:39PM (#34430939)
I was there in those days too. VB was a very beginner-friendly language, more akin to what we call today "low-code" than other languages. Those developers didn't have to "re" learn software development, as you think, instead they probably never knew software development well enough to use languages like VB.NET (which is what all of the VB devs I worked with ended up on). "C# and .NET" is equal to any language you can think of in terms of complexity, so C# devs are going to be just fine.
Re:No Start Menu for You on Wednesday January 18, 2023 @01:11PM (#34430498)
What? The comments here are very on-topic as far as I can tell.
Re:No Start Menu for You on Wednesday January 18, 2023 @01:10PM (#34430479)
Source availability.
Re:No Start Menu for You on Wednesday January 18, 2023 @01:10PM (#34430468)
The Windows team probably has laptops with high-speed SSDs, and tons of RAM, a fast CPU, and a fast internet connection. So now already with that, 13 seconds is probably down to 3 seconds, and they are probably also okay with (sometimes) waiting 3 seconds while the search box opens after pressing the windows key.
Re:No Start Menu for You on Wednesday January 18, 2023 @01:07PM (#34430435)
Woah woah woah, who said this is "secret"? Were you expecting a big red skull and crossbones to take over your screen whenever a phone home occurs?
ChatGPT thinks it knows everything, god.
Re:Programmer Salaries in the Age of LLMs on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @12:10AM (#34409369)
This is correct. This also excludes contractors, which there are tons of in the Bay Area, and they make a lot less than a regular employee, even at places like Google.
Re:Programmer Salaries in the Age of LLMs on Monday January 16, 2023 @11:55PM (#34409300)
> There is research [1] that suggests using GPS navigation could impact your brain function negatively.

Wrong, that research only shows that when you use a GPS, you don't learn routes as quickly. That is only equal to "impacts brain function negatively" in a narrow sense, which you should specify rather than use such a broad and scary-sounding phrase!

Workday is cheaper, right? I think that's the ultimate answer.
Re:Windows 98 Icons are Great on Monday January 16, 2023 @03:24AM (#34398261)
> navigate a ridiculous start menu tree

That's not true, the start menu tree was usually relatively clutter-free until the XP era, where companies went absolutely insane and started putting things like manuals and links to the website inside of the start menu tree... yuck!

Re:SQLite: 35% Faster Than the Filesystem on Monday January 16, 2023 @03:22AM (#34398242)
Interesting, I suspected some of those things. Thanks.
Law of averages. If I am hacked, then likely millions of other people are hacked, and I haven't heard about millions of people being hacked. QED.
Murphy's Law in action. With this many flights per day, you need tons of safety measures to ensure that mistakes like this are extremely unlikely. Like "defense in depth", you can't rely on just a few layers of countermeasures, the more the better. So yes, red lights at every intersection are good, but retrofitting planes with a gps-style map that shows exactly where to go and when to turn is even better (and of course probably insanely expensive).
Re:SQLite: 35% Faster Than the Filesystem on Sunday January 15, 2023 @03:20AM (#34387760)
How does it do this? Does it cache changes and only write them every so often? Does it keep a file open to write uncommitted changes?
The sad part is, the damage this does to companies won't be felt for years (which is how long it'll take someone to take the stolen source code, analyze it, and make a convincingly-distinct clone), so companies will think that nothing came of this, and they'll keep using CircleCI (and other similar platforms which put everyone's eggs in the same basket, how appealing to hackers that must be).
Re: on Friday January 13, 2023 @03:25PM (#34373400)
I love software engineering AND programming. But too often working "in software" involves neither.
Re:Nintendo 64 Java on Thursday January 12, 2023 @11:27PM (#34363949)
There are knockoffs for a lot less, the author here is even using one. But then you aren't supporting the inventor of the thing, just a factory that's churning them out somewhere.

Nobody asked, but I'll list differences I've noticed between the real everdrive and the knockoffs: Games that require a cartridge battery won't won't work correctly on the clones, the SD card slot is a lot cheaper on the clones, and the clone doesn't have a USB port (which I think is used for live game dev debugging?)

Re:Nintendo 64 Java on Thursday January 12, 2023 @05:41PM (#34361278)
There's a fun conspiracy theory that Nintendo intentionally made the default RSP binary they provided sub-optimized, so that later in the console's life they could release an optimized version so that games continue to appear to get better. This is likely entirely rubbish, of course.
Re:U.S. Cancer Death Rate Has Dropped by a Third Since 1991 on Thursday January 12, 2023 @02:59PM (#34359455)
Now remove lung cancer and see if the numbers have changed that much.
I think that technical communication isn't the same as other communication, so I don't think it's a logical given that people "on the spectrum" would be bad at it. Technical communication is about conveying technical information, at various levels, with just a few constraints. It's a solved problem, really. It just needs to be followed to the letter.
Most companies either do too little documentation (they have a little page with the bare minimum high-level overview), or they do way too much (detailed change request forms for every change, which go into a file cabinet, and are never looked at again). Alas, it's really hard to get people to understand that documentation is good and necessary when they've only ever been exposed to one or both of those systems.

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