News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

poidos

There isn't, right? Their gameplan is to state a need for evidence to delay, delay, delay while they and their backers enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else.
Re:Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @04:08PM (#49089229)
Don't know if one has or not, but a lack of announcement is not a lack of success.
Re:Prefer Strict Tables in SQLite on Saturday July 11, 2026 @03:55PM (#48875257)
Sure it is. If you encounter something that’s not an int, that could be a signal you have a bug in your writers. Or in the source of the data. That’s useful information compared to “oh, I have some ints and some strings, that’s ANY, everything is ok.”
Re:Prefer Strict Tables in SQLite on Saturday July 11, 2026 @03:43PM (#48875126)
Sure, but you lose the representation of the developer’s intention that way. I would be pretty pissed off if I inherited a project and the schema was all ANYs.
Re:Prefer Strict Tables in SQLite on Saturday July 11, 2026 @02:43PM (#48874550)
It’s a stated [0] goal of the project:

> SQLite strives to be flexible regarding the datatype of the content that it stores.

[0]: https://sqlite.org/stricttables.html

Re:Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't on Thursday June 11, 2026 @10:12AM (#48490644)
It only puts 90% of developers out of a job if the demand for software stays flat.
Re:Ghostty is leaving GitHub on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @11:53PM (#47944008)
Love sourcehut and want to see them succeed, but their build service (despite having some very cool ideas like allowing you to SSH into your build container) is pretty barebones / lacking compared to GH/GitHub actions. You either get no task parallelism (all your tasks are in one manifest) or you get up to N=4 parallelism (you have four manifests). As far as I can tell, you can’t specify job dependencies beyond just “when this job finishes, trigger this next job by deploying a manifest”. No build caching, and artifact sharing felt like a kludge.
Re:A case for Go as the best language for AI agents on Monday March 02, 2026 @02:17PM (#47222697)
Doesn't the high quantity of boilerplate pollute the context, thereby making agents less useful over time? i.e. go is not "token efficient"
Re:Terence Tao, at 8 years old [pdf] on Monday February 23, 2026 @11:23PM (#47132838)
Gwern hosts a lot of PDFs -- see https://gwern.net/archiving
Been meaning to cancel nitro and move off to Matrix or something, thanks for the push Discord!
Re:Fabrice Bellard: Biography [pdf] on Wednesday December 24, 2025 @03:50PM (#46379087)
Publishing ffmpeg and QEMU in a five year span that also included winning IOCCC (twice!) is absolutely bonkers.
Two excellent changes after ten wonderful years. Thanks for everything Eric! Cheers to many more
Re:Attention Is a Luxury Good on Saturday October 18, 2025 @01:08PM (#45628803)
It's worse. Attention is all we have.
It's because their main business (ads, tracking) makes infinite money so it doesn't matter what all the other parts of the business do, are, or if they work or not.
Re:I still love PHP and JavaScript on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @04:41PM (#45188670)
Where would one get started with PHP without picking up Laravel or Drupal?
Are you rotating flash drives and such? I would worry about something happening to me, then she goes to use the flash drive, and the data is corrupt or the drive is fried.
Just iCloud for now.
It's not about backing up. It's about non-technical family members being able to reliably recover the data.
Re:Pico CSS – Minimal CSS Framework for Semantic HTML on Monday September 08, 2025 @10:30AM (#45168774)
Thanks for the great tool! Appreciate it. :)
I would love to self-host this stuff (using Immich, or Ente) but my family's bus factor is 1 and the risk of losing all the pictures really prevents me from taking this step. Sure, maybe my wife could reach out to my techie friends but why create the problem in the first place?
Re:Pico CSS – Minimal CSS Framework for Semantic HTML on Sunday September 07, 2025 @04:51PM (#45162013)
Love pico. It’s my default starting point for nearly every side project. Sometimes I will reach for Neat [0] which is a great deal smaller.

[0]: https://neat.joeldare.com/

Re:The Grug Brained Developer (2022) on Tuesday June 17, 2025 @05:08PM (#44303969)
This is, I think, my favorite essay about building software. The style is charming (I can see why some might not like it) and the content is always relevant.
If you have the cash, you can pay them to do so! Scroll down to “SPONSOR A NEW EBOOK”:

https://standardebooks.org/donate

> Sponsoring a new ebook of your choice calls for a donation of $900 + $0.02 per word over the first 100,000

Re:What If We Made Advertising Illegal? on Saturday April 05, 2025 @02:29PM (#43595544)
Glad to see this, been noodling on it for a long time. My crazy proposal is to make advertising illegal, in the US... by nationalizing Craigslist. USList or some such.

No more billboards, no more ads on TV or radio or podcasts or when you're on a plane or when you're in an Uber and they have that screen. No more ads in something you've already paid for a la newspapers.

You want to advertise to, say, all the people in Arkansas? You have to pay them directly to post your ad on Arkansas USList. Want to target further? Great, you have to pay the county to post on their board. Then, people that want to see your ads can go to their local board, filter by their interests, and maybe see your ad. Want to target all the electricians in a county? Their union runs a board and you can pay them.

Cities/counties/states/${localeType}s could opt to, say, issue an advertising dividend to their residents.

My definition of advertising is the unwanted stealing of your attention by someone who wants you to buy something. Or be aware of something you could buy. It takes you out of a context you have put yourself in, stealing your attention (and therefore your time, which is all we really have in this life).

My stupid USList idea flips this on its head by making it possible to only see ads when you want to.

Movie trailers when you're at the cinema are ads, sure. But they are ads that fit the context you've put yourself in. If you're at the theater, it makes sense for the playbill to list other shows. If you're at a restaurant, the list of specials, or a wine recommended by your server are both appropriate. Even a list of specials or deals in the window of a restaurant, as long as it isn't 100x100ft and illuminaated, is fine by me.

But an LED billboard distracting you with a 2-for-1 meal deal as you drive down the freeway is out of your context (and dangerous! and needlessly polluting!) When we consider the tracking and spying that has become possible thanks to online advertising companies like Google, Facebook, etc... it's scary. And entirely needless.

Like I said, I've been noodling on this for a while and am definitely the crazy anti-advertising guy in my circles. But once I point out the prevalence of ads and how it's like being kicked in the knees all day, I've found people seem to start getting it. I've done more than a few pihole + wireguard installs, UBlock origin + Sponsorblock installs, etc.

Fuck ads.

Viagra is a famous example.
Re:VSCode's SSH agent is bananas on Friday February 07, 2025 @11:44PM (#42980447)
> You spent more time configuring Vim and Emacs than they saved you.

Doom emacs + Evil is basically free in terms of config time and it’s wonderful.

Very timely, thanks!

Was just yesterday working on chaining together `xlsx` and `tablemark` to accomplish this. I found `uvx markitdown my-excel.XLSX | sed 's/ NaN/ /g' my-markdown.md` to be just what I needed to get my spreadsheet into a reasonably-legible markdown table when rendered by GitLab.

Re:The Withering Dream of a Cheap American Electric Car on Monday November 18, 2024 @10:41PM (#42179915)
You said it yourself — their dwelling is the entire city. Those 400sqft are where they sleep and relax but most of their living probably happens outside. Different strokes and all that.

Older »