News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

jdsnape

Re:The State of Context Engineering on Monday October 26, 2026 @02:17PM (#50248417)
Yeah I thought the same here
Re:Project Blinkenlights on Friday September 11, 2026 @07:18PM (#49666740)
I have a letterpress print of this from the Cambridge (UK) museum of technology when I was a kid (so about 30 years ago I guess!). I love the juxtaposition between letterpress and the idea of relaxen und watschen der blinkenlichten
For sure, but it doesn’t pervade public consciousness in the same way. Not sure why, perhaps because the memory of mass-scale war has faded with the previous generations.
Re:Pint in England on Sunday July 05, 2026 @08:51PM (#48799543)
I love that I see this on hacker news of all places. As an east-anglian I would definitely second this opinion. Times are a bit harder now but there are still so many great breweries.
Re:Kids Act Would Require Age Checks to Get Online on Monday June 29, 2026 @01:53AM (#48715350)
I didn’t say God only wants people to have sex for reproduction. There are two purposes in this philosophy: reproduction, and the deepening of marital unity
Re:Kids Act Would Require Age Checks to Get Online on Sunday June 28, 2026 @12:33PM (#48708919)
I’m not supporting it, but how is it inconsistent?

I can speak more to the Catholic view than the evangelical, but if you accept the initial premise that there is a creator God then the rest follows fairly naturally (you can look the ‘the theology of the body’ if you want to read more)

Re:Kids Act Would Require Age Checks to Get Online on Sunday June 28, 2026 @09:46AM (#48707222)
Because in their philosophy sex serves a purpose (procreation and the deepening of the marital union).

Anything that doesn’t support those two aims (contraception, abortion, gay marriage, pornography etc.) is therefore immoral but there’s nothing wrong with sex in its ‘proper’ context.

I don’t have hard evidence, but when I was a kid I enjoyed the children’s book ‘Five children and it’, written ~1900

The children cart their two year old sibling around with them everywhere (sans parents) and it’s totally unremarkable.

Re:John Carmack on Fabrice Bellard on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @02:48AM (#48551498)
I knew of Fabrice, and have admired him for many years…but who is DHH?
That’s great! It’s very much not the norm here in general tho, in my experience two weeks would be the max people would take off contiguously.
Re:UK set to announce social media ban for under-16s on Sunday June 14, 2026 @11:43AM (#48528454)
I think the idea is that while individuals will absolutely find ways round it, it should help to reduce the network effect of everyone a kid knows being already on it. How true that is remains to be seen.

One campaign I’ve liked is one in the UK to try and get the parents of whole year groups in school to agree to not buy phones until their children are a certain age. This removes a lot of the peer pressure of ‘my friends all have one’.

Re:Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Later on Sunday June 14, 2026 @08:08AM (#48526436)
I agree, another example is the line ‘lots of things had to be done by hand’. I think a more human narrative would be describing the discovery that thing X that we take for granted was missing and tell the story of figuring it out.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt though, perhaps they were aiming for brevity.

Maybe there are different sized pints, but in the uk a pint of beer is about 200 calories.

Depends on your social circle of course, but it’s pretty standard to have two or three pints if you meet up with friends in a pub.

Re:Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses on Saturday May 23, 2026 @04:48PM (#48251359)
Thank you for sharing!
Re:Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses on Saturday May 23, 2026 @06:47AM (#48246564)
I’m interested in how this works in practise - I guess you’ve written a skill to do code review, then your Claude.md file tells it to use it after every change as a bg task? So does this work as a background task while Claude is working on the next ‘feature’?
Re:The two oldest printing presses on Wednesday May 20, 2026 @09:15AM (#48207178)
It’s also a very western view - block printing was a thing in China well before this. I don’t know, but I suspect there are older surviving presses there or in Asia more generally.
Re:Nostalgic Electronics Kits Central on Wednesday May 20, 2026 @06:26AM (#48205571)
Yeah I’ve had the same thought. You can get cheap kits but the instructions tend to be vague/machine translated from Chinese.

I think there’s a gap in the market for quality kits with good educational instructions - but I think the market size would be very small

Plants are nice…but, from your link:

“These results are not applicable to typical buildings, where outdoor-to-indoor air exchange already removes volatile organic compounds (VOCs) at a rate that could only be matched by the placement of 10–1000 plants/m2 of a building's floor space.[2]

The results also failed to replicate in future studies”

I also agree co2 levels are super important, but I’m wondering: in your situation isn’t air pollution from the motorway a concern? Not sure how to balance that one
I am probably one of the few people here that used this ‘in anger’. Around 15 years ago I would typeset orders of service in tex for our college chapel, and enjoyed typesetting the chant - this tool made it really easy and I could produce IMO beautiful documents.

Most of the time people used bitmaps which would be blurred/pixelated or not resize well

You can…but, won’t the frequency will be stable across the UK grid and these are all in London. Secondly, pretty sure they all use DC motors, so no hum
Re:Books of the Century by Le Monde on Saturday March 21, 2026 @11:43AM (#47468041)
Out of interest, why does that seem a strange methodology?
Out of interest, why does it sound kind of crazy?

Here, pets have always had to be identifiable: historically with a collar, but microchips have been required for some years now as a more effective method.

(That applies nationally, not some city thing)

Re:Vim 9.2 Released on Saturday February 14, 2026 @01:37PM (#47017053)
I used to work for a large enterprise, and tried to get vim ‘approved’ for internal use. I remember this charityware clause caused our legal department to get tied up in all sorts of arguments about how we could be opening ourselves to liability if we used it without donating. It was my first lesson in navigating large company processes.

In the end I just kept quiet about the fact that it ships in all the Linux package repos.

(Just to be clear, I fully support what Bram did here)

Re:DNS Explained – How Domain Names Get Resolved on Friday February 06, 2026 @07:45AM (#46912145)
I think this is probably quite dependent on what’s normal for ISPs in the region. In the UK for example, every ISP router I’ve had runs a DNS server and it’s that which is given out via DHCP. It then forwards onto the ISPs DNS platform.
Re:That's not how email works on Thursday January 29, 2026 @06:41PM (#46818527)
HTTPS does encrypt query parameters, all of the HTTP request goes inside the encrypted session.

The only thing outside is the hostname, if the connection is not using the latest versions

Owned by Tesla but leased to the public. In the UK it’s common to lease a new car rather than purchasing it, and often the car manufacturer has a financial services arm that manages the lease.
Re: on Sunday January 04, 2026 @01:53PM (#46490969)
probably not so useful in practise, but still fun and interesting.

Yes, centralised C2 is definitely still a thing in the malware space, for commodity malware it works well enough that there's little real incentive to move to anything more complex.

Re:My Home Network Domain Name Resolution Plan on Thursday November 20, 2025 @06:07PM (#45999120)
Not quite, it talks about configuring your home network to resist those things (as per the title). It’s just that the home network happens to be in China.

It’s a useful writeup, I’ve done similar things outside of China to facilitate split tunnelling or bypass geoblocking.

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