hyperman1

2 hour train ride with flaky internet. Yes we do.

I live near part of the WW1 trenches. Most mines, bombs, etc. have been removed for decades now. Still, there are patches where the ground is so polluted with e.g. lead that nothing would grow. We tend to use that ground for companies and industrial things, but no worries, its completely safe for your health, citizen.

Conversation I heard recently:

We needed a new account on $MAJORSITE and we just could not get trough the captcha - I know, it's getting insane - In the end, we gave up, and just told $AI to make the account for us.

Something is going seriously wrong on the internet.

I've read somewhere how the English people industrialized because they had problems that could not be fixed by human or animal power. Mines became too deep, pumping too hard. The ancient greek knew about steam engines, but had no use for them. The English did, in their mines. Necessity as mother of invention. Then machines freed us from hard labour and gave us free time.

This article in Dutch gives a whole list of Trump USA ambassadors being trolls:

https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2026/02/23/amerikaanse-ambassad...

Belgium, France, Poland, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Canada

It's clearly a pattern where the USA puts obnoxious people in an ambassador role.

I wonder if we look at it from a too narrow perspective. We use the C ABI because it's the only game in town. We should be aiming for a safe cross language ABI. I'd love to make Rust, C, PHP, Swift, Java and Python easily talk to each other inside 1 process.

It should extend the C ABI with things like strings, arrays, objects with a way to destruct them, and provide some safety guarantees.

As an example, the windows world has COM, which is at the core pretty reasonable for its design constraints, even if gnarly sometimes.

I know of 1 smaller Cobol company. They alone had 10 to 100 million lines, after a decennium of trying to move to Java. Source files containing 1 routine were easily a few KLoc. The number in the article is probably too low.

The main problem with these code bases are they predate modern coding practices, so the sheer size, incomprehensability and untestability will crush you. You can easily spend your whole carreer reading the source code and reach pension age before you finish. Also, the organisational difference between 2 code bases is much bigger than modern code bases, as every company invented their own practices, and people rarely switched companies so didn't know what others were doing.

Farmers have a saying: Eating the seed grain.

Western European countries got dominant, then got arrogant, letting the USA eat their lunch.

USA got dominant, got arrogant, letting China eat their lunch.

China is indeed getting dominant. They will get arrogant one day. Meanwhile, Western Europe and the USA are still very good places to live.

Franz Ferdinand proves we are this bonkers.

Isn't this the standard EU way? First, they publish a statement, declaring what they want to see. 'Deal with addictive design', in this case. We've had 'Deal with the zillion different connectors on cell phones' in the past. It is now up to the industry to do this, in whatever way they see fit. If this happens, no law will be written. However, if the industry doesn't deal with it adequately, Laws will Follow, and the industry will not like them.

European companies know this pattern, and tend to get the hint. US companies tend to try and maximize what they can get while claiming there is no law against it, then go very pikachu-faced when the consequences hit them.

No. I remember a phone app ( Whatsapp?) doggedly supporting every godforsaken phone, even the nokias with the zillion incompatible Java versions. A developer should go where the customers are.

What does help is an industry accepted benchmark, easily ran by everyone. I remember browser css being all over the place, until that whatsitsname benchmark (with the smiley face) demonstrated which emperors had no clothes. Everyone could surf to the test and check how well their favorite browser did. Scores went up quickly, and today, css is in a lot better shape.

Years ago, HN had an article 'Hacking my vagina'. It contains a line 'I was in the market for a $GADGET’.

With that one line, the author managed to put my view of buying things upside down. Not a passive consumer. Not: I bought a $GADGET. She had an active relation with a bunch of sellers, and she was boss. You saw the megacorps begging and pleading to her, from that one line. That's how you deal with them.

I am $GADGET guy? Shudder.

In my experience, the 70+ are bad at driving in ways that do lighter accidents. Typically: Drive 50 km/h everywhere, even if the road is 30 or 70. General weird behaviour. Swerving slowly left right left forever.

They do cause a lot of cursing, but they are signalling hard enough they're bad at driving and other drivers leave huge margins, overly grant right of way, don't cross the road, etc...

AFAIK this story started in France, and has been going on for a while already in multiple countries.

e.g. here is the recall in Flanders,Belgium,for 2026-01-05, so more than a month ago:

https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2026/01/05/nestle-nan-babyvoedi...

Here is one English source about the deaths in France:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-nestl...

Indeed, the post-Trump period will have a choice to make. Either they continue the chosen path and dont regain trust no matter the next president, or congress and court add some serious limitations to the presidential powers so future dems and reps will never go Trump again.

I wonder if both parties see the need for that at this point. There still seems a lot of 'but we are the good guys' in both partys blocking deep reform. If I'm honest, it took 2 world wars to partially whack that attitude out of Europe, and it's slowly coming back.

Story I've told here once. A director I worked under had climbed up from the bottom.

Now one weekend, us 3 ITers were going to replace the building switches and fix and cleanup the network cabling and move all servers. Massive weekend job. We start saturday morning, and deadline is monday morning or 400 people cant work. A second team is doing the phones. He promised to be there to open the door for us.

Junior me comes in, and he is at the door, with breakfast! We begin. He's not technical, so he resigns himself to sitting in the corner, popping ethernet cables out of bags as we request them.

He sees what we do, where we struggle. He sees IT take out the plan and execute it steadily, while the phoners are missing their team lead and every phone forgot its number. I learned PBXing on the fly there and had more fun than a job is supposed to be.

At the end of the weekend, all is well and monday is actually boring (except the emergency phone in the elevator wont stop ringing and connects random elevatees to customers. Oops. My bad. Forgot to reprogram that one.)

The next weekend, the bookkeepers have to do some mysterious all weekend bookkeeping thing. Director is not a bookkeeper at all. He was there, doing the bookkeeper equivalent of unbagging ethernet cables.

Now that smiling, helpfull man turns out to be a wolf in every exec meeting. He knows just enough about every job in the company. You can't fool him for 1 millimeter. You flood him with jargon, he jargons right back at you. In his circle of evil backstabbers, with life changing decisions to make, he's an absolutely scary steamwaltz. I admire him and don't want the job even if he makes a fortune.

The number of times I heard this joke: Oh, nobody goes to FOSDEM anymore, it's way too crowded. But it's true. They have a serious overcrowding problem, with the queue outside longer than the number of seats, while the room is already packed.

The app had nice indicators of where the overcrowding was, though. It pushed me to less popular talks, where I discovered some hidden gems. I also came home with a big list of recordings to check out.

I've heard that PC-DOS 1 had no directory support, and got drive letters as a replacement. DOS 2 found this already limiting, and introduced dirs, but the drive letters already existed.

The fact that devices like CON exist (virtually) in every dir is also a consequence of this.

As a Linux GOG user, I hope they don't change too much. It works very well already.

I remember reading 'Raising Steam' with more and more alarm and dispair. I loved all the other books, and there was something so obviously going wrong mentally in this book. Dementia sucks.

Strangely, 'The shepherds crown' was much less impacted, even if wikipedia places it a bit later in the timeline.

I tend to have many tasks in parallel, as there are always multiple blocked on input from someone else. E.g.

* 2-3 big programming tasks as focus for this week: I push one forward until I hit a wall, then task switch.

* A backlog of about 5 dumb non-urgent tasks for when the brain is not braining or in meeting filled days.

* 4-5 tasks where I keep asking people questions until the problem is understood. These tend to wake up when receiving information, take priority with 10-30 minutes of writing mails and looking up interesting cases, followed by a few days of waiting for an answer.

In my experience, it's a superior approach for code you wrote yourself in a repeatable crash. You have the whole programming language at your disposal for building a condition corresponding to your bug, and any kind of data dumping.

I fall back on debuggers when the environment is hostile: Half understood code from someone else, unreliable hardware (like embedded), or debugging memory dumps.

But before both, the initial approach is thinking deep and hard, and reviewing all available evidence like logs. If this is not enough, I try to add better troubleshooting abilities for the future.

Something I learned on this site: We're bad at estimating the average duration, but reasonable for the mean duration.

If you get 10 tasks of seemingly equal duration, 9 will go well and 1 will hit a reef of unexpected troubles and take forever.

So the practice of doubling is not that stupid. It leaves time in the first 9 to deal with the unexpected disaster.

In Belgium, Maestro card was halted and my bank switched to MasterCard. Then I paid on some USA website and they managed to pull money from my account based on only the card number, without using the bank website's chip+pin. I was flabberghasted on how we silently managed to get such a huge setback in both security and national independence. I stopped payments using non-EU entities.

If it is pure marketing, I wonder why docker couldn't play the same game and be better at it?

E.g. for your most damning example: If docker published this story, blogged about it, made noice in places like HN, it is exactly what the press would love: RH breaks docker security while claiming to be more secure! The Emperor has no clothes! If you take security serious, accept no fake substitutes!

I always assumed this to be marketing, as reversing the formula has been easy since the '90s. I know someone with acces to a university lab, and he reverses and recreates popular tastes as a hobby. Also, in double blind taste tests, pepsi tends to win from Coca.

Their real genius was always marketing, associating sugar water with freedom, free time, summer AND christmas, ... Not to look down on them, good marketing is both very hard and very powerfull.

I assume mrustc is capable of bootstrapping rust?

https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc

In my country, there are little parks where dogs do their business. If you walk with a dog in public places, you are expected to have means for cleanup with you. If your dog soils the road, you're expected to pick it up in a tiny plastic bags and throw it in a garbage can. Violating either rule carries a fine. There is markedly less dog poo than there used to on the roads.

Which demonstrates grandparent's point. There are solutions to the problem. Nobody got rid of the dog, and dogs still pee and poo. There just are technical and legal means to keep the problem managed, even if not perfect.

This is a great idea.

Where I live, a biking organisation gave out yearly awards for the golden and silver spokes for the best bike adaptions, and the rusted spoke for the most dangerous road setup for bikes. The government rarely collected their rusty award, but the local press loved it. If the government fixed the bad roads, the rusted spoke could be requested back to some smiling official, again for some press attention.

It worked. Fixing your worst road every year and reminding designers not to forget bikers had a remarkedly long term good influence.

Writing this, I wonder if iFixit is planning to take back awards if vendors do better.