News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

spragl

...and thereby making new legacy code.
Re:The Future of CSS on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @04:17AM (#50177550)
I warmed up to CSS this year. Before that it was this cryptic thing with seemingly infinite change-try cycles. What happened was that I discovered some of the new features, and was able to greatly simplify and beautify my CSS. I might end up liking it.

It has this maddening amount of features though, and as it needs to be backwards compatible, this amount can only grow going forward. But if you look at a well chosen subset of the whole thing, it actually is a quite nice language.

Re:Denmark Data Breach Exposes 8.8M People's Personal Data on Monday October 05, 2026 @08:42AM (#49964101)
Doing well has two dimensions (at least). One is the degree of digitalization, and here I think youre right, Denmark is doing well. The other dimension is security, and here Denmark is not doing so well.

As all security professionals know, people dont care about security, until they are hurt, and often even after that. Lost privacy doesnt hurt if you dont think too much about it.

What we are also seeing is that governments/administrations dont care about security (with exceptions). They really want to go ahead in the digitalization dimension, but not so much in the security dimension.

Re:Denmark Data Breach Exposes 8.8M People's Personal Data on Monday October 05, 2026 @08:26AM (#49963956)
What you write is correct, but it wouldnt make any difference in this case. The information would have been leaked anyway.

It will take a whole new approach to confidential information to really make a difference. I think we need to go the SSI way, and I think at some point we will.

Re:Denmark Data Breach Exposes 8.8M People's Personal Data on Monday October 05, 2026 @08:21AM (#49963901)
That is also my impression. So I wonder how they caught this. It will be interesting if they are going to say so at some point.
Re:Denmark Data Breach Exposes 8.8M People's Personal Data on Monday October 05, 2026 @08:19AM (#49963867)
According to their announcement, the names and addresses of people with protected address, were not leaked.
Re:Demystifying Tufte's data-ink ratio – Tufte's Razor on Monday October 05, 2026 @08:10AM (#49963780)
A zoom button would have been cool for this one :-)
Re:Human brain is two separate organs, research finds on Saturday September 19, 2026 @03:58AM (#49764385)
His theory was that the two brain halves communicated through inner voices. Wernickes Area, on the left side, communicated with the similar area on the right side. WA is where we comprehend speech, so Jaynes theorized that was why bicameral people experienced the communication as inner voices.

The research in the new research paper is about a split between front and back of the brain. So something entirely different. That split is an old idea. Jaynes would most likely have known about it. But it wasnt part of his theory.

Re:Statichost.eu – European static site hosting on Saturday September 05, 2026 @03:10AM (#49573939)
Greenland is not part of Europe. But they are part of "Rigsfællesskabet" (The Kingdom of Denmark). So part of Denmark but with a high degree of autonomy.

Regarding "European values", I think they are just Western values but with a twist away from the US version. In my layman view, that means: Europe values citizen privacy more, US values citizen freedoms more, Europe values environment more, US values businesses more.

Until recently I would have said Europe values diplomacy more, while US values military power more. But now I dont know about that.

Re:Solving the Flat Cube on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @04:02AM (#49533238)
That is a puzzle thing. The word cube is used very loosely. Douglas Hofstadter wrote about it back when Rubiks Cube was still new.

In this case it is a stretch, but the Rubiks Cube inspiration is so clear, that I think it sort of makes sense.

Re:Writing by hand is good for your brain on Friday July 24, 2026 @03:31AM (#49032282)
I agree, and the very low price of used books that have writing in them, suggests that this is how people feel in general.

I have begun to write a page (by hand) summarizing my thoughts after reading a book, and put it in the start of it. That was a tip I saw on HN some time ago.

Re:LinkedIn is a cesspool of scammers and identity theft on Wednesday July 15, 2026 @03:56AM (#48917612)
I basically agree with you, and I have a profile on LinkedIn.

A number of companies only announce job openings on LinkedIn, and if you are looking for a job (as I am) you would handicap yourself by not having a profile there. HR departments around the World are infatuated with LinkedIn, unfortunately.

My strategy is to give LinkedIn a minimum of information, use it for job search, and filter away most of their emails.

I look forward to the day where I can close down my LinkdIn account. But until then I have to put up with it.

Re:Computation as a Universal and Fundamental Concept on Saturday July 11, 2026 @01:18PM (#48873808)
Yes I know.

When I wrote Turing Machine, I was thinking about the classical determinstic Turing Machine.

Im not super knowledgable about Quantum Turing Machines, but as far as I know, they dont do better than the classical deterministic Turing Machines when we are talking about computability.

Re:Computation as a Universal and Fundamental Concept on Saturday July 11, 2026 @02:34AM (#48869373)
Both P and NP are computable. That is, a Turing machine can compute both of them.

Those quantum processes are interesting. Take the random numbers generated from radioactive decay. They are (after some cleanup) truly random. That is what we think. But how could we tell the difference from pseudorandom numbers, generated by a sufficiently advanced algorithm? We couldnt. So particles could simply be Turing Machines running sufficiently advanced algorithms that we cant reverse engineer. If so, quantum mechanics is computable even if we cant compute it.

(Particles being TMs doesnt mean they are FAs with an infinite tape, but that they are computationally equivalent to TMs.)

Re:Free the Icons on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @12:55PM (#48749837)
I dont know what to say. I relate a personal experience. Yours was different. Good for you.

My problem was not using apps, but the other stuff. I did as I was used to, stubbornly bumbling around, feeling sure I would run into the solution. But I never did. I had to look up instructions, several times. That was never necessary with my old iPhone.

Re:Free the Icons on Tuesday June 30, 2026 @07:22AM (#48731084)
Im an iPhone user. I want it to take as little space as possible physically and mentally, and try to use it as little as possible. My experience has been that it was easy learning to use it by just bumbling around.

That is, until two weeks ago when I got my new iPhone. I had to, the old one couldnt upgrade to the newest iOS.

I feel ashamed to admit, that I had one or two days of extreme frustration just learning to do basic stuff. It was not about the shape of icons, but more along the lines of what you write. Swiping patterns, button press sequences, and the time you should hold down a button. It is ridiculous.

Some of the blame is on me for not being mobile phone savvy, but it is indisputable that the UX has deterioted significantly. I suspect it will just get worse going forward.

I think what is much more important, is that it exposes the shortcomings of the Danish SSN system.

It was introduced in 1968, when Denmark was a high-trust society. It was used as a sort of password and key for looking up your information. If you wanted to create a bank account, you told them your SSN. If you wanted to buy a car, you told them your SSN. If you had any contact with the authorities, you told them your SSN. And so on.

The usage has changed, but not that much. So today, when trust in Danish society is not as high, the system falls short. Identity theft. Privacy. Scamming. They have to be detected and stopped by other means.

The proper path forwards would be to radically change the system (or the society).

Yeah, he seems confused to me. Well meaning, but not so consistent.

What is good is that he is a wrench, that throws itself in the works repeatedly. This is a healthy thing to have.

Re:Many Let's Encrypt renewals had errors today on Friday June 19, 2026 @02:04AM (#48595330)
That is right, but one thing is not like the other. You have always been free to set expiry low on your own certificates, but that is not the same as enforcing it on everyones ceritificate.
Re:DNS Is for People – Not for IT Infrastructure on Thursday June 04, 2026 @02:24AM (#48394767)
/etc/hosts scales like a lead balloon.

For small groups of servers, with limited egress communication, it might nevertheless make sense. And then go for it, by all means. As a general replacement for DNS, not likely.

It is hard to see how Ansible should be simpler than DNS. Maybe if you have worked with Ansible and not DNS, you might think so.

I havent looked into the details of either, but what would prevent Germans from using the Austrian implementation?
You can get that, even if you have a phone with the app on it. MitID is perfectly okay with that. At login time you will be prompted for your token code, but there is an option to switch to the app ("Skift til MitID app" in the bottom of the box).

The MitID design is strange, but in this regard it is well done.

That sounds like an unnecessary EU standardization. Having the same timezone in Poland and Spain possibly made sense 30 years ago, but now that all communication goes through computers of one kind or another, time conversion is seamless.

For those companies that have offices in both countries, and for which the synchronicity matters, it is not that difficult to just have special office hours.

Re:Simple Screw Counter on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @03:08AM (#47229590)
Solvespace can also be used for 3D.

It is sad that FreeCAD gets all the attention. If Solvespace had some of it, and the development time following from it, it could get improvements and some of the cool stuff in their pipeline. That would IMO make it a much better CAD program than FreeCAD could ever become.

Re:Lil' Fun Langs on Saturday February 21, 2026 @03:34AM (#47098713)
I really loved Miranda back when I learned about it. I still have the book. I think it never took off because it was quite expensive for universities to use. Im sure David Turner regrets his price model today. Now he has made Miranda available here https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/
Re:Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild on Thursday February 19, 2026 @03:08AM (#47071196)
I think you are right that the shady actors pretty much can use existing bugs.

But you are also right that this is not the only way they work. With the XZ Utils backdoor (2024), we normal nerds got an interesting glimpse into how they create a zero-day. It was luckily discovered by an american developer not looking for zero-days, just debugging a performance problem.

Re:Four Column ASCII (2017) on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @03:51AM (#47045166)
Modern keyboards = some keyboards. In the Nordic Countries modern keyboards have parantheses on 8 and 9.
I assume by third party you mean the authority, and yes, the authority would need to know your personal information. At least enough of it to verify your age. So the ideal is that the authority is the entity that already knows your personal information. Like the entity that issued your passport to you, or the one that issued you drivers license.

But even if the authority was a private company, I think it would be an improvement compared to the current situation. In this situation your personal information would be held by this one company, and not whatever provider that needs to verify your age. Also, you would be able to use the commitments, that this private authority gave you, without any coordination afterwards. The authority would not know about your transactions.

That is what the example uses. In the real world that would be a digital signature. Look under the heading "Fitting the parts together" to see what the real world solution could be like.

Older »