News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

rkachowski

I just got one of these, the ecosystem is so exciting right now. I just loaded the sloop firmware on it (super painless webusb) and it's crazy. From another DX7 machine to a simple little groove box with samples and sequences and a really quite lovely UX. So fun
realistically a large corporation or concern
Before knee jerk reacting to this

1. 60% of the Berlin population voted for nationalising (expropriating) apartments from major landlords in a referendum - this is a bipartisan issue

2. This only affects entities with 3000 or more apartments

It's not from people, it's from corporations that rent out 3000 or more apartments.
Re:I advertise malicious software on Google Ads on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @10:00AM (#49626725)
According to the article it's a static site served from cloudflare. That would be quite the compromise.
Re:Open Book Touch: open-source e-reader on Saturday July 18, 2026 @02:56AM (#48955842)
They're just blocked from OTA updates, you can flash whatever you want on the sdcard and then unlock OTA. (I did this yesterday with an aliexpress version x4)
> The corollary is that there are no morals once the stakes are in the $ billions, let alone hundreds of billions.

terrifying

Because this kind of behavior was rampant in the past - where one company owned everything and could leverage it's size and influence to crush competition across distinct market spaces. It prevented other companies from operating in the same space, which led to stagnation, outrageous human exploitation, inequality, and ultimately the great depression.

It is now illegal as laws have been introduced with the aim to prevent this from happening again. The effectiveness of these laws, with regards to how well they fit the current era, is a different matter.

Re:The cost YAGNI was never about on Sunday June 28, 2026 @05:35PM (#48711907)
I don't know what happened to Kent Beck, a few of his recent articles seem to be devoid of substance.
This is super cool, I love the idea of just having a $5 wifi UART
Re:The worst job interview I ever had on Wednesday May 27, 2026 @05:05AM (#48291591)
It's wild to see so many advocates of "the inexperienced should have experience already". You're put in an awful situation but it's your own fault because you went through it, you should have known better than to take questions at face value as presented.
it's all marketing wank, but how can they "supercharge the value delivered to customers" through company restructuring? whether they hire 50k more people or fire everyone, the value delivered to the customer depends on the quality of the product and the price - irrelevant of cloudflare's margins.
wero is a european initiative set up by a consortium of banks that is built layered upon instant payments. it's not a private company like paypal or visa, its an attempt at making European payment infrastructure
They are normal. They generally want to know if the ad spend resulted in an install. Health care data is radioactive and they would be fucking up very hard if sending this to an analytics service.
Re:Books Are Not Remotely Too Expensive on Thursday April 23, 2026 @06:34AM (#47874092)
This seems really quite confused in its message.

> Yes, the original price of To Kill a Mockingbird and Tolkien’s Fellowship were just $3.95 and $5. But those are nominal values. When we factor inflation, the picture changes dramatically. In today’s dollars—and you can run this exercise yourself—those cover prices would look more like $43 and $54.

I mean, yeah that's too expensive...

> Now compare that to housing, healthcare, or admission to sporting events, movies, and concerts

that's a pretty wild set of things to compare to..

> Don’t blame books for being too expensive. Everything else is more expensive, and that’s why you can’t afford books.

so they are _indeed_ too expensive, but it's not their fault?

> When people say they want cheap books, they forget there are many other interested players at the table: authors, agents, publishers, bookstores, book distributors, and so on.

I genuinely don't care about the middlemen and supply chain, the very expectation that a book purchase comes after careful and deliberate consideration of all the tertiary factors and relevant economic forces only reenforces the idea that *books are too expensive*

> I spent over a decade at Thomas Nelson Publishers.

There you go...

I would say I'm an avid reader and spend a lot more than the average person on books, but prices are absolutely wild. When you start comparing them to movies, sporting events and concerts (healthcare!?!) you're putting them appropriately in the category of big indulgence.

Re:Have a Fucking Website on Wednesday March 18, 2026 @02:36AM (#47422262)
Sometimes I get inspired to write something publicly, but then the fact that I'm providing another point of data to ChatGPTs training corpus which helps the american Department of War make shit memes about killing people - stifles that impulse pretty quickly.
Re:What does " 2>&1 " mean? on Friday February 27, 2026 @10:33AM (#47181716)
I've found recent claude code to be surprisingly good at dispelling false assumptions and incorrect framing. I say this as someone who experimented with it last summer and found it to be kinda stupid; since December last year it's turned the curve - it's not the sycophantic nonsense it used to be.
Re:What does " 2>&1 " mean? on Friday February 27, 2026 @07:42AM (#47179861)
> A Stack Overflow question matching my problem cleared that up for me.

Perhaps if there was no question already available you'd have had a different experience. Getting clearly written and specific questions promptly closed as duplicates of related, yet distinct issues, was part of the fun.

I find that AI hallucinates in the same way that someone can be very confident and wrong at the same time, with the difference that the feedback is almost instant and there are no difficult personalities to deal with.

Re:What does " 2>&1 " mean? on Friday February 27, 2026 @04:16AM (#47178429)
It's really jarring to see this wave of nostalgia for "the good old days" appear since ~2025. Suddenly these rose tinted glasses have dropped and everything before LLM usage became ubiquitous was a beautiful romantic era of human collaboration, understanding and craftsmanship.

I still acutely remember the gatekeeping and hostility of peak stack overflow, and the inanity of churning out jira tickets as fast as possible for misguided product initiatives. It's just wild yo

They're purposefully being vague, but this is Prince Andrew finally facing consequences in the face of the Epstein files (?)
Re:Microsoft's Azure Linux on Thursday January 29, 2026 @01:25AM (#46806512)
Are you speaking on behalf of Microsoft?
Re:Why Is There a Tiny Hole in the Airplane Window? on Friday January 09, 2026 @10:19AM (#46554791)
not with that attitude
Re:Recovering Anthony Bourdain's (really) lost Li.st's on Saturday December 13, 2025 @11:04PM (#46260657)
The idea that suffering will somehow make you noble is quite awful. Depression isn't some kind of cleansing fire that opens you to empathy. It affects good people and assholes and people in every phase of life.
Re:Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image on Monday December 08, 2025 @12:42AM (#46188791)
"Hello main office, I have seen a rumor on Instagram that a bridge has collapsed. Should I stop all traffic through this region due to this shitpost?"

"Hi please don't - we've had three different trains go through there already. There is no loss of signaling in the area, electrical and infrastructural connections are responding appropriately. We will be sure to contact other drivers and let them know about this"

Re:Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image on Sunday December 07, 2025 @07:53AM (#46181343)
> Network Rail said the railway line was fully reopened at around 02:00 GMT and it has urged people to "think about the serious impact it could have" before creating or sharing hoax images.

Perhaps Network Rail should have a system of asserting rail integrity that is independent of social media (?!!?)

for real, pick up the phone and ask someone (??)

It would be excellent to know who is pushing this and through what means. There is some unprecedented alignment across borders to restrict access and rights.
They are exactly the kind of mortgage broker mentioned in the parent comment.
Re:In Northern Scotland, the Neolithic Age Never Ended on Thursday December 04, 2025 @05:41AM (#46146057)
I'm born and raised in Scotland, we're keeping it.
Re:It’s been a very hard year on Monday December 01, 2025 @07:46PM (#46115821)
I don't think it matters. Whether it was a fault of incentives or some intrinsic nature of people given the environment, it was rarely a pleasant experience. And this is one of the reasons it's fallen to LLM usage.

Older »