News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

ploum

If Satoshi has at least half a brain (which we know he has), he knows that moving even one coin from this historical stack could crash the whole Bitcoin economy. So, no, he doesn’t have trillions of dollars.

(It is so basic, I’m still confused by people asking how could he not sell those coins. Because the answer is simple: to whom?)

My theory is that Satoshi is a persona created by Adam Back and Hal Finney.

They probably devised something where both needed to agree and sign something for Satoshi to act. This also allowed them to say "I’m not Satoshi Nakamoto".

They also probably ensured that anything that belongs to Satoshi required both of them. The death of Hal Finney ensure that Satoshi died definitely.

But they may have "killed" him before by burning the keys because, when Bitcoin started to become a success, they probably anticipated the need to "kill" satoshi (few remember but Bitcoin passing 1$ was considered as a crazy bubble at the time! Some become millionnaires and exited when BTC did the 30$ bubble. Satoshi’s stack was already closely observed, bright mind of that time would have anticipated the need to kill it). Or it was just that "satoshi" was not needed or they accidentaly deleted some keys.

Re:The Social Smolnet on Friday March 20, 2026 @03:16PM (#47459308)
try gemini://bbs.geminispace.org
Re:The Social Smolnet on Friday March 20, 2026 @02:05PM (#47458333)
is it because I was young? I still believe phpbb forums were the best!
Re:AI uBlock Blacklist on Monday March 02, 2026 @05:33AM (#47216126)
Your example is completely stupid: I’m talking about writing a website.

Would you go to rural Spain without knowing a word of Spanish and handle flyers with a Spanish text you had no way to check? Seriously?

Re:/e/OS is a complete "deGoogled", mobile ecosystem on Monday March 02, 2026 @05:28AM (#47216090)
Exactly!

If you can use GrapheneOS, good for you but what /e/OS offers is:

- Usable Android with your usual Android app (banking, etc) - No data sent to Google by default - Easier interface with nearly no bloatware - Available easily on many smartphones, including older ones - Extending the life of some smartphones

The price to pay is:

- Some Murena cloud bloatware - Android security patches are sometimes delayed - Security is not on par with GrapheneOS

If your main concern is protecting your privacy from Google and extending the life of your smartphone without breaking a sweat, /e/OS is probably the best option.

If your main concern is protecting against state actors attacks or very specific threats, then GrapheneOS might be better.

/e/OS works really great for non-techie users. I’ve done it in my family.

Re:AI uBlock Blacklist on Saturday February 21, 2026 @12:15PM (#47102651)
"One of my coworkers is EXTREMELY capable but functionally almost illiterate."

I cannot imagine what it means. To me it reads like "I know someone who can run very fast but has no legs."

Re:AI uBlock Blacklist on Saturday February 21, 2026 @12:13PM (#47102638)
nope, let the user does the translation, with his own choice of tool and being thus perfectly aware of the shortcomings.

I know that some people translate my French posts to read them. That’s really cool. But I would never post something I didn’t write myself (but I use spellcheking tools. I even sometimes disagree with them)

Re:"Nothing" is the secret to structuring your work on Thursday February 12, 2026 @06:02AM (#46987261)
Yet another text blog that doesn’t work without Javascript.

What kind of sick mind does it take to ensure a straight blog post requires Javascript?

Re:Offpunk 3.0 on Tuesday February 10, 2026 @04:27AM (#46957269)
Me too but I’m OP. Really happy to see I’m not alone!
Re:Offpunk 3.0 on Monday February 09, 2026 @04:34PM (#46951771)
see that contributed picture: https://offpunk.net/screenshots/resist.png
Re:Offpunk 3.0 on Monday February 09, 2026 @04:33PM (#46951747)
the "open" open outside.

So you go to a site. If the site is not complete, try "v full" (for "view full").

The reason is that there was no unmerdify rule for your site and that readability mistakenly assumes that lot of your site is spam/ads (readability doing that is the reason why we push for unmerdify)

Re:Offpunk 3.0 on Monday February 09, 2026 @12:41PM (#46948240)
well, indeed. If you use mutt and use the "reply" feature in Offpunk, you will see how well emails and blog/gemini posts merge well ;-) (this will be the subject of another post later)
Re:Offpunk 3.0 on Monday February 09, 2026 @10:21AM (#46946204)
I tried to add kiwix support to Offpunk in the early days but kiwix do not support incremental update of the wikipedia database, which makes it a huge pain point.
Re:Offpunk 3.0 on Monday February 09, 2026 @10:05AM (#46946006)
The cache is pure and straight files-in-folders. This makes it trivial to browse the cache by hand:

cd .cache/offpunk/https/news.ycombinator.com/item cat "id=46943752"

So it could be trivially shared.

The "netcache" tool gives you the cached content or, with --path, returns the path were to find the contentd.

The only point is to preserve the file-modification attribute, which serves to know the age of a cached ressource.

Re:Offpunk 3.0 on Monday February 09, 2026 @09:10AM (#46945377)
Contributions are welcome. I even believe that this whole code should be migrated from python-requests to curl.
Re:Offpunk 3.0 on Monday February 09, 2026 @08:01AM (#46944779)
OP here and Vim/UNIX fan.

I get the idea behind "reinventing Emacs".

But there are main differences:

- offpunk is an offline content browser/reader. Main component is fetching/caching/displaying ressources - offpunk is developed as a set of components that can be used separately (openk, ansicat, netcache) - offpunk delegates as much as possible to other UNIX tools (less for browsing/reading, chafa for images, grep to find in a page, $EDITOR for editing needs ) - offpunk is pure CLI tool. You type commands, results is displayed in your terminal or in less. There’s no "keyboard shortcuts" or "environment". It is a prompt on which you type commands - There’s no "configuration" in offpunk. The only (but powerful) way on configuring is having offpunk launch commands at starts (commands listed in offpunkrc). So no "configuration language" or syntax or plugins or whatever. - last but not least: basic use of Offpunk is simple. You are not required to learn much and you use only what you want. Lot of Offpunks users don’t use the Web/HTTP part and use it as a straight Gemini browser (for the record, Offpunk is a fork of AV-98, the very first Gemini browser)

Re:Offpunk 3.0 on Monday February 09, 2026 @07:43AM (#46944611)
OP here: Didn’t even come to my mind while writing this. This would be totally against the philosophy of the projects.

Don’t worry: I wanted to celebrate humans cooperating over good old emails to write code in their editor without any help ;-)

Re:Offpunk 3.0 on Monday February 09, 2026 @07:41AM (#46944597)
Try "gemini protocol", it helps a lot.

But, trully, there’s no much to search. The beauty of Gemini is how small it is: all technical informations should be there : https://geminiprotocol.net/

Re:Offpunk 3.0 on Monday February 09, 2026 @07:39AM (#46944582)
offpunk’s slowness has two main sources (while offline):

- loading modules at startup (will be solved in 3.1 with lazy loading, patch is pending)

- parsing HTML with lot of pictures (because we wait for chafa for each picture)

I’m not sure how multiprocessing could really help that much but I would be interested.

While online, sure, the blocking http calls are something that will be parallelized in the future

Re:Offpunk 3.0 on Monday February 09, 2026 @07:36AM (#46944560)
each tool needs very specific set of options so we can’t just let the user input any command. And offpunk has been built for use with chafa since the start. Timg is just an historical workaround were Chafa had some bugs.

But there are currently some discussions about that on the mailing-list.

Re:My thousand dollar iPhone can't do math on Sunday February 01, 2026 @05:52PM (#46850233)
Well it seems that, those days, instead of SUM(expense1,expense2) you ask an LLM to "make an app that will compute the total of multiple expenses".

If I read most of the news on this very website, this is "way more efficient" and "it saves time" (and those who don’t do it will lose their job)

Then, when it produces wrong output AND it is obvious enough for you to notice, you blame the hardware.

Re:How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills on Friday January 30, 2026 @08:49AM (#46824338)
It is also a matter of choice. I don’t remember any news trivia, I don’t engage with "people news" and, to be honest, I forget a lot of what people tell me about random subject.

It has two huge benefits: nearly infinite memory for truly interesting stuff and still looking friendly to people who tell me the same stuff all the times.

Side-effect: my wife is not always happy that I forgot about "non-interesting" stuff which are still important ;-)

Re:Text-Based Web Browsers on Monday January 26, 2026 @03:12AM (#46763058)
We use Chafa but I’m curious. Are you planing to contribute something related to w3m?
Re:Text-Based Web Browsers on Monday January 26, 2026 @03:12AM (#46763054)
Offpunk uses Chafa.
Re:Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots on Tuesday January 20, 2026 @03:55AM (#46689522)
OP here: Majority of professors became professors because there were very good at passing standard exam (and, TBH, some are not good at anything else).

I’m different because I was a bad student. Only managed to get my diploma with minimal grade, always rebel against everything. But some good people at my university thought that Open Source was really important and they needed someone with a good career in that field. I was that person (and I’m really thankful for offering that position)

Re:Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots on Tuesday January 20, 2026 @03:51AM (#46689490)
OP here: I teach Open Source Strategies.

The main strategy is collaboration. If you are smart enough to:

1. Identify your problem 2. Ask someone about it 3. Get an answer which improve your understanding

Then you are doing pretty good by all standards

Another trick I sometimes use. I take one student which has hard time articulate it a concept. I take student two who don’t understand that concept. I say to student 1: "You have 20 minutes to teach student 2 the concept. When I come back, you will be graded according to his answers"

(I, of course, not only grade that. But it forces both of them to make an extra effort, student 2 not willing to be the cause for student 1 demise)

Re:Text-Based Web Browsers on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @07:27AM (#46600091)
So you mean that someone use LLM to generate a website full of JS, post a text in it and then we use LLM to try to rebuild the original content?

If only we had a way to just share text without all those steps…

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