News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

kamma4434

Re:Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault on Monday November 02, 2026 @04:14AM (#50334608)
Explain that to the auditors… on whose lap does the decision fall?
Re:Advanced coding in low-resource programming languages on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @12:55AM (#50176242)
Symbolasm looks interesting. Without having tried it, the first thing that comes to my mind is that it would be a bit more complex for debugging, because you are using two different representations to do the same thing (one for writing code, one for reading it back). Not sure if this is an issue in practice.

Of course, the same issue exist in any compile language, say C, but you don’t expect to see C in a disassembly. Here you are working at the assembly level.

Re:Bark: The Toll-Free BBS for 90s Teens on Friday October 16, 2026 @02:18PM (#50122216)
BlueWave - so many memories. I totally forgot about it.

Pangea chose WorldGroup over FirstClass because it had QWK. https://github.com/l3nz/pangea-2023/blob/main/Storia_en.md

Re:Food processing influences metabolism and brain activity on Sunday October 11, 2026 @03:39AM (#50040568)
It does not take a metabolic chamber to guess that the plate on the right is choked full of added sugar, while the one on the left has none. The plate on the left has some fiber while the one on the right has none, and fiber act as a sponge for sugar release.

They should have compared natural and ultra processed food matching the same glycemic indexes to understand if there is some kind of procedure in manufacturing that changes it significantly even the same amount of sugar and fiber

Re:Orkut.com on Friday October 09, 2026 @06:57AM (#50018751)
We still have it running somewhere. Not pretty but zero issues for a largish GUI
Re:Beauty in DVD Menus on Friday October 09, 2026 @01:24AM (#50016328)
I am happy to see that many people liked DVD menus back in the day. I thought that DVD menus gave DVD the distinction of being the first technology on which a pirate rip was better than the original, because you could play it with with something sane like VLC you didn’t have to wait for all the animations and stuff to load.
Re:La Cueva BBS in Mexico in 1993 (session replay) on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @04:11AM (#49989762)
You may also like https://github.com/l3nz/pangea-2023/blob/main/Storia_en.md - it tells the story of a Worldgroup BBS system that was run as a “Civic network” between the 1996 and 1999
I fear the vast majority of projects never went with any kind of code review but somebody high on Red Bulls at 9 PM looking at the code and saying “looks good to me”.

And this is the best of cases. I fear many times in a smaller projects it was “it compiles at last, let’s see if anybody complains”. That’s why LLM’s are so damn effective today.

(been there, done that – I’m not pointing fingers, but we are human, we get tired, and we don’t have the NASA budget to complete things and ship them)

Hello, my name is Lamer Exterminator, pleased to make your acquaintance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamer_Exterminator

Re:Asking Authors About Their Own Papers on Sunday September 20, 2026 @06:38AM (#49774464)
Makes sense, but first and last author should be able to answer on all the work
Re:Why is Google still serving dodgy ads? on Monday September 14, 2026 @12:52AM (#49692133)
They also invented the whole big data Ai industry, and managed to become a second tier company there. So…
Re:Why is Google still serving dodgy ads? on Monday September 14, 2026 @12:49AM (#49692113)
While this says nothing about Google as a company, I am sure AdSense is feeling the same pain as everybody else which livelihood depends on page views - just n orders of magnitudes bigger. So it would not surprise me if they were scraping the bottom of the barrel, so to speak, for any revenue opportunity.
Re:The revolt of the reader on Sunday September 06, 2026 @01:17AM (#49583536)
I found it an improvement too
Re:Kale: A Transformation-Safe Spreadsheet System on Saturday September 05, 2026 @10:08AM (#49576670)
In fact, everyone will ask their llm to write their own app, and it better be correct…
Re:Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns on Saturday September 05, 2026 @02:11AM (#49573555)
With or without the original interface, twitter is still a dumpster fire
Re:A better SQL in 11 lines of code on Monday August 31, 2026 @01:06AM (#49505812)
One wonders if that’s an ORM at all or a query composer…
Re:A better SQL in 11 lines of code on Sunday August 30, 2026 @01:50AM (#49496041)
There is no good ORM -like it says here https://github.com/l3nz/ObjectiveSync “Bad practice - if you hide the database, you may get something done quickly, but it's a bad idea. If yor Java code expects to have a collection of one million objects as an array, it does not matter if they are lazily loaded or not - some code somewhere might want to iterate over them, and this will kill the process. You cannot really forget that there is a database somewhere, and you should not do it.”
Re:A better SQL in 11 lines of code on Sunday August 30, 2026 @01:45AM (#49496024)
I’m not sure how they come up with the 20-line example anyway - it’s one join.

Traditionally SQL uses a lot of lines because you put one thing per line, but so what?

Re:How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @07:12AM (#49431914)
Me too - I get the feeling it’s the same garbage at a different price point.
Re:A theory for decades of C vulnerabilities on Thursday August 20, 2026 @02:27PM (#49378332)
I’m no rustacean but it’s high time we do better than C.
Re:A theory for decades of C vulnerabilities on Thursday August 20, 2026 @02:25PM (#49378304)
This is one of the beauties of Clojure’s spec. You can define a ‘type’ that is a string which length is a prime number and contains only Ascii characters but ‘x’. To put those invariants in code and not in your head is so liberating.
Re:The Java Story – The official documentary [video] on Friday August 14, 2026 @02:39PM (#49302884)
I totally forgot about “applets”. Those were really bad! The browser would freeze for seconds while they were loading. Good riddance!
Re:Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't on Thursday August 06, 2026 @03:45AM (#49193746)
+1 for Flora Incognita. This is what apps should be.
New pop-ups and more unreadable clauses you have to agree to. Remember GDPR?
Re:Golang proposal: container/: generic collection types on Sunday August 02, 2026 @01:07PM (#49146278)
I personally do not care about GC - in the last 15 years it’s been a solved issue. Where imho the JVM rocks, is that you can instrument it in production
Re:Golang proposal: container/: generic collection types on Saturday August 01, 2026 @01:42AM (#49131395)
> Go without generics was ok. I say that as a fan of generics in other languages.

Well kinda. I found it very annoying every time you want to print a sorted map which keys are strings that you could not abstract the operation. It felt like paying a stupidity tax. (And I quite like go. It’s the only language where write once run everywhere actually works. Cross compiling for all targets is as easy as creating a local binary)

Re:Golang proposal: container/: generic collection types on Saturday August 01, 2026 @01:35AM (#49131350)
Welcome to Java, where Collections are the bread and butter of every programmer since 1998.

While you are at it, I humbly suggest to add composable streams too, that we had in 2014, and that make working with collections way more pleasant.

(Jokes aside, in Java it is very nice that you can start with a generic ArrayList and turn it into a linked list with one single keyword change and no code needs changing, or that you can turn any collection into a synchtonized or readonly doppelganger with one line of code. Collections are nice and I miss them in Golang)

Re:The Glass Famine on Thursday July 30, 2026 @12:20PM (#49112165)
I lived all of my life in metric countries and I never felt that was missing. One foot is 30cm, two is half a meter, three one meter.
Re:The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (1984) on Thursday July 30, 2026 @11:59AM (#49111873)
Not sure what happened but I did not post this three hours ago, as the page header says. I posted it a couple of days ago. What happened?
Re:MCP 2026-07-28 Specification: transport going stateless on Wednesday July 29, 2026 @12:39AM (#49093479)
Thank goodness johnny-comes-late saw the light!

Who ever thought a the semantycs of a pipe was a good idea after 30 years of everything else becoming HTTP?

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