News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

sjducb

Re:Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault on Monday November 02, 2026 @09:23AM (#50337224)
Logging is a very complicated security area. You often get sensitive data in the logs and it gets sent across the network to monitoring servers.

Also any part of the program can send data to the logger. This means the logger can receive malicious payloads from anywhere. Maybe your logger handles ascii control characters badly?

Re:Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault on Monday November 02, 2026 @08:08AM (#50336345)
Also the defender has to be right every time, the attacker just has to be right once.

(Defence in depth does mitigate this somewhat. The attacker has to be right two or three times)

Re:Postgres 19 is late, and it's AI's fault on Monday November 02, 2026 @07:08AM (#50335741)
Agreed. It’s the modern security through obscurity.

Security through obscurity protects you from low effort vulnerability scanners.

It makes you more vulnerable to a sophisticated targeted attack. A competent hacker or AI will quickly find vulnerabilities in your custom libraries.

Re:We Won't "Just Hang Out" on Saturday October 31, 2026 @01:25PM (#50318094)
I know the name of my child’s chess coach. He doesn’t have any titles, but he’s really good.

There’s lots of community amount lower ranked players. You don’t have to be the best.

Re:We Won't "Just Hang Out" on Saturday October 31, 2026 @12:27PM (#50317569)
I sort of did that. In October 2019 I started calculating my net worth every month. I have lots of graphs and charts.

Now I’m a FI millionaire who works because it’s the best way to meet interesting people my age. I look forward to when AI frees everyone from work and they have time to do fun stuff during the day too.

Re:Tesla Roadster on Saturday October 17, 2026 @03:38PM (#50134360)
The question of when to compress the air in the tank is an interesting one. Ideally you’d use the rockets for acceleration, breaking and cornering; which is all the time.

So probably the compressor will run all the time.

You’ll have to do a lot of modelling to work out the best time to use the rockets, my instinct is that fast cornering is the best use of the rockets. Maybe with a boost button to get you off the line fast at the beginning.

From the marketing materials it looks like straight line acceleration is being prioritised tho, so you charge the tank during braking and cornering.

Re:US Suspends Visa Program for Tech Firms Including Microsoft on Thursday October 08, 2026 @02:08PM (#50009573)
Agreed, if a company wants to fill roles it advertises on linked in. Maybe the rules need updating.
> Additionally, without pretty extensive work there is no means of physically disabling the telemetry

My car has a fuse for the antenna module. You can remove this fuse to block all data transfer. Have a look at the fuse box diagrams for the minivans you are interested in.

Re:Burning Man Death Rates – A Short Lesson in Statistics on Thursday October 01, 2026 @04:41AM (#49919287)
I find the rangers evolution into a proto police force fascinating.

It starts with being ready to help people who are having health crises. Then when a serious crime happens the community wants it to be investigated, and they call the only organised group that can help.

Alpha school struggles with the kids who are a bit slow.

If you’re the sort of kid who gets everything right first go then you join the “rocket ship” and spend 2hrs a day with AI then play for the rest of the day. You would do well in any school.

If you don’t get it right quickly then you join the “Pirate Ship” and have to spend all day grinding and obeying AI while your friends play. It seems pretty terrible.

https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/fourth-report...

I’m learning French and I’ve tried both AI and a remote tutor from Cameroon.

The tutor from Cameroon is much better.

She tells me when I’m getting the basics wrong and designs lessons to go back and fix the basics.

AI loves to tell me how great I am and do lessons at the frontier of what I understand to make me feel good about how much progress I’m making.

I think OP means the existing open source ecosystem, things like the Python requests library.

There’s a real risk that AI kills contributions to traditional open source projects, and we all move to custom libraries written by our own AI.

Re:Static Allocation, Constant Work on Thursday September 03, 2026 @02:50PM (#49554819)
Why is a try/catch wrapper clutter but a switch case is not?
Re:I Think the Military Commissary's Freezers Were Hacked on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @09:16AM (#49521589)
Manageable during peacetime.

In a war with another major power resources would be stretched thin and depriving bases of food would reduce combat effectiveness.

They go to meetings.
You absolutely can deny long term productivity gains.

Pre AI it took 100 engineers 5 years to get into a legacy code situation. Once you’re in a legacy code situation it’s very hard to add new features and your code is full of bugs. Fortunately most old companies with legacy code are making loads of money so they can pay the increased development costs to add features to their legacy code.

Now with AI five engineers can build a legacy codebase in six months.

Re:Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract on Wednesday July 22, 2026 @05:32AM (#49004000)
That’s because big developers drip feed the houses onto the market…
Re:Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract on Tuesday July 21, 2026 @08:43AM (#48991593)
Agreed, Thats why the planning system needs to change.
Re:Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract on Tuesday July 21, 2026 @08:42AM (#48991591)
If you dump 100 new houses onto a small town you will cause a crash.

My town has a population of 15000 people, ~250 houses are sold per year and there is a development with permission to build ~400 new homes.

Re:Postmortem of a British Startup: Tract on Tuesday July 21, 2026 @07:50AM (#48991038)
They get away with drip feeding because there’s no competition, because it’s really hard to get permission.

A simpler planning system would allow smaller developers to operate and they would buy, build and sell as fast as they can.

The reason big developers drip feed is that they have 100 identical houses in the pipeline so they don’t want the price to drop at all, because it affects the price of the houses in the pipeline.

The small developer sells quickly so that the cash is available for their next project.

Coming up with good French grammar quizzes. GPT5.6 is noticeably better.

Older models usually pitch the difficulty too hard/easy and rely on me remembering the gender of words.

I’ve not noticed a big programming improvement with the newer models.

Re:Africans Are Turning to Starlink on Saturday July 04, 2026 @07:08AM (#48784514)
Agreed. All racism is wrong. Would you like to take back your “And rightfully so” comment, where you support explicitly racist laws?
Re:Africans Are Turning to Starlink on Saturday July 04, 2026 @04:02AM (#48783577)
There are lots of white South Africans. I believe musk is one. Starlink is majority owned by a South African.

The law isn’t about foreign/doneatic. It’s about black/white.

Increasingly this state authorised racism is now extending to black people. The violent ethnic cleansing against black Milawians by black South Africans is terrifying.

Re:Many people misunderstand the purpose of code review on Thursday July 02, 2026 @10:15AM (#48761985)
Good programmers write code that’s so simple and obvious it looks like anyone could have written it.

Bad programmers make the simplest things really complicated.

Re:Europe's resistance to AC is driving it insane on Monday June 29, 2026 @02:59PM (#48723589)
Installing AC feels like admitting defeat. 30 years ago we thought we could stop this thing. Our world leaders came together, listened to scientists and agreed targets.

Sadly we failed. Now I’m going to have to buy AC and make an even bigger contribution to global warming.

Re:I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI on Monday June 29, 2026 @06:13AM (#48717237)
> Most people should have learned at a young age that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I’m fairly sure that there are no lions in my house. Lions are quite large and I’m capable of detecting lion sized objects with my eyes.

To demonstrate that something is not present you first define the object, then come up with a test that will reliably detect the object. If the test comes back negative then the object is not there.

In a strict philosophical sense I cannot prove that there are no lions in my house, the external world might not exist! A hypothesis that no one has thought of might be correct and that hypothesis could show that there are invisible lions in my house!

However I intend to act with the certainty that there are no lions in my house. Because I have no evidence of lions in my house.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Guidance in the UK is that you always attempt CPR with children and continue it until you get to hospital. This is mostly for the family. They have the knowledge that you did everything you could, and when the child is pronounced dead in hospital the family have a lot of support available in the hospital setting.
I think there will be a 50%-80% reduction in social media use by teens. This is good enough.

There will always be people who get round the ban.

If you are unable to empathise with people who support the ban and dismiss them (and me) as idiots then your political action is unlikely to be successful.

Every dad I know who works in tech supports some kind of restriction on social media/smartphones for kids. The argument is how to do it, not whether we should.

You’re taking my argument to it’s extreme and giving it the least charitable interpretation.

I want it to not be normal to spend all day on TikTok. If something is illegal and underground then it’s much easier for me as a parent to ban it for my kids

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