What is Hackers' Pub?

Hackers' Pub is a place for software engineers to share their knowledge and experience with each other. It's also an ActivityPub-enabled social network, so you can follow your favorite hackers in the fediverse and get their latest posts in your feed.

A few years ago I designed a way to detect bit-flips in Firefox crash reports and last year we deployed an actual memory tester that runs on user machines after the browser crashes. Today I was looking at the data that comes out of these tests and now I'm 100% positive that the heuristic is sound and a lot of the crashes we see are from users with bad memory or similarly flaky hardware. Here's a few numbers to give you an idea of how large the problem is. 🧵 1/5

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Minimal VM base config, for when I want to quickly spin up something disposable to reproduce a problem.

After writing something similar two or three times, I figured it was time to do the job properly and commit it somewhere I'd find it next time I go looking.

github.com/me-and/nixos-minima

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  • Level 1: A trans person
  • Level 2: A giga-trans person
  • Level 3: A fleet of heavyweight trucks boldly proclaiming to be full of trans people
Five huge trucks labeled “TRANS MOVING” are approaching, with the center truck carrying an enormous ladder lift
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Ok that took a little longer than I thought. Do I want it to be on letterhead? Will my university be annoyed? I *am* writing as part of my job as a researcher who requires access to dark skies, but I am not writing on behalf of my university. Will go with blank background for this one.

Now working my way through the instructions here: aas.org/posts/advocacy/2026/02

I already have a Cores account, signed in and clicking on things...

Submitted!

I am an astronomer who has asked nicely for years for SpaceX to be safer in orbit, think about ways to use fewer satellites, think about the consequences of burning up so many satellites, and think about ways to make their satellites darker. This filing proposing a million satellites is a clear "fuck you" from SpaceX to the entire astronomy community, as well as the entire planet.

So, fuck you, too, SpaceX!

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It's the weird cases where shines. I've been a bit sick lately and wanted to replay an old game (Baldur's Gate II). It depends on openssl 1.0.x . Pretty much no modern distro ships that (for good reasons).

In other distros there's a few paths:
* Compile the lib yourself, override LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the built dir
* Build/use a binary package, hope for the best and pollute your system with super old shared crypto library

NixOS let me builld + inject it for Lutris/game itself.

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Minimal VM base config, for when I want to quickly spin up something disposable to reproduce a problem.

After writing something similar two or three times, I figured it was time to do the job properly and commit it somewhere I'd find it next time I go looking.

github.com/me-and/nixos-minima

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Ok that took a little longer than I thought. Do I want it to be on letterhead? Will my university be annoyed? I *am* writing as part of my job as a researcher who requires access to dark skies, but I am not writing on behalf of my university. Will go with blank background for this one.

Now working my way through the instructions here: aas.org/posts/advocacy/2026/02

I already have a Cores account, signed in and clicking on things...

Submitted!

I am an astronomer who has asked nicely for years for SpaceX to be safer in orbit, think about ways to use fewer satellites, think about the consequences of burning up so many satellites, and think about ways to make their satellites darker. This filing proposing a million satellites is a clear "fuck you" from SpaceX to the entire astronomy community, as well as the entire planet.

So, fuck you, too, SpaceX!

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Apple: “we’ve unified the design language across all of our operating systems!”

iOS 26: no ui chrome ever. Only floating buttons. Less. Even less. So minimal. Content is king

macOS 26: every part of the UI needs to be in a separate container with padding between them. Content? No. More ui chrome. So much. Add another container with more padding while we’re here

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