What is Hackers' Pub?

With the @openuk Awards coming up, we're excited to spotlight that Rustls — a memory-safe, performance-focused TLS library — is shortlisted in 2 categories!

Joe Birr-Pixton, Creator of Rustls, is also shortlisted for his leadership in secure computing.

Rustls’ continued growth will be supported by the Rust Foundation’s Rust Innovation Lab, which exists to help sustain+scale crucial Rust projects. We're thrilled to champion this remarkable project in its next era.

https://rustfoundation.org/media/rustls-shortlisted-for-two-2025-openuk-awards/

Please join us in thanking @sovtechfundSovereign Tech Agency for committing to a €86,000 investment to improve the security of CPython and the Python Package Index (PyPI). We're thrilled to partner with them to improve security for all users. Read more here:
https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/12/sovereign-tech-agency-and-psf-security.html

I work at @freedomofpressFreedom of the Press and I'm told it's some sort of holiday for donating to nonprofits. Some holidays are shams but, as someone very biased, I think Giving Tuesday is totally legitimate and an exception.

My team supports journalists with their digital security needs, including protecting their devices and communicating securely with sources. In 2025, I really do think this matters more than ever. If this is something you care about, support our work. https://freedom.press/donate

@schwaJonathan Wight it was *perfect*

"Through abstraction, we wield an amazing power: it renders workable the general case so we may extend our reach. But, despite how important it is to programming, we programmers rarely think about it critically."

I think I undersold this by just linking to it yesterday. So I'm going to be a bit cheeky and share it again. I'd really like to hear your thoughts on the topic!

Here, I consider the implications for: democracy, diversity, and sustainability.

https://caolan.uk/notes/2025-12-01_abstraction_a_critical_perspective.cm

#Programming

anecdotal reports are that this makes Firefox noticeably faster

that list of settings to disable:

browser.ml.enable
browser.ml.chat.enabled
browser.ml.chat.menu
browser.ml.chat.page
browser.ml.chat.page.footerBadge
browser.ml.chat.page.menuBadge
browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled
browser.ml.pageAssist.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled
extensions.ml.enabled
browser.search.visualSearch.featureGate

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hf7ezrajxadu7v3tzcyij424/post/3m6zn2tlqbs2u

424-word hot take: “You Can’t Make Something Accessible to Everyone”
https://adrianroselli.com/2025/12/you-cant-make-something-accessible-to-everyone.html

#accessibility #a11y

All I want for Christmas is executive function.

FreeBSD 15.0 released with pkgbase

The FreeBSD team has released FreeBSD 15.0, and with it come several major changes, one of which you will surely want to know more about if you're a FreeBSD user. Since this change will eventually drastically change the way you use FreeBSD, we should get right into it.

Up until now, a full, system-wide update for FreeBSD - as in, updating both the base operating s

https://www.osnews.com/story/143942/freebsd-15-0-released-with-pkgbase/

#FreeBSD

Has anyone evaluated headless #activityPub servers? I'm thinking of something that could be used with Ghost subscriptions giving posting access to a site forum and blog comments. I suppose it doesn't have to be truly headless as long as there's some sort of authentication API.

The Past, Present and Future of Programming Languages https://lobste.rs/s/ljvlcu #video #plt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-3QwoAmyuk

FreeBSD 15.0 released with pkgbase

The FreeBSD team has released FreeBSD 15.0, and with it come several major changes, one of which you will surely want to know more about if you're a FreeBSD user. Since this change will eventually drastically change the way you use FreeBSD, we should get right into it.

Up until now, a full, system-wide update for FreeBSD - as in, updating both the base operating s

https://www.osnews.com/story/143942/freebsd-15-0-released-with-pkgbase/

#FreeBSD

OH: Any sufficiently advanced User Agent string is indistinguishable from a stroke.

"Even Carrington would be impressed" 😬

https://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=02&month=12&year=2025

Hopefully we just get "someone should check on our satellites" levels of auroras and not "A bunch of open questions in solar-terrestrial physics are about to be answered"

secret number 2: there's no clearly defined point where the development stops and the buying starts. it's kind of a gradient. and suddenly you're shipping something

About that AI Winter again... 🍿

https://bun.com/blog/bun-joins-anthropic

New post: a defense of lock poisoning in #rust.

Followup to recent discussion: decided to write about lock poisoning, looking at the arguments on each side, and informed by our experience at @oxidecomputerOxide Computer Company dealing with the parallel problem of unexpected async cancellations in critical sections.

Please give it a read!

https://sunshowers.io/posts/on-poisoning/

📰 Check out who's in the latest Future of Coding Weekly newsletter!
https://newsletter.futureofcoding.org/posts/future-of-coding-weekly-202512-week-1/?utm_source=mastodon

The last coal plant delivering electricity to California has closed.
California's energy system is now coal free.

https://www.climatecoloredgoggles.com/p/ding-dong-coal-dead

my approach to software engineering is like that character from an anime, you know the one, she’s in a lot of anime

you walk into her workshop and it’s full of tools and unfinished projects randomly lying wherever there was free space, and you can tell she lives, works, and sleeps there

she’s sitting on the floor loosely cross-legged, taking apart a strange contraption of some sort, hears you come in and twists around to greet you. she’s wearing a lab coat over a skirt, either a uniform or just a random skirt paired with a random shirt, slightly messy white hair

you tell her what you need fixed and she gets a sparkle in her eyes, says “i’ve never seen one of these before!”, goes and fetches an unsettlingly large wrench (you have no clue what she’ll use it for but you know it’s the only tool she’s going to use today) and shoos you out so she can get to work. you come back a day later, it’s ready for you, and you daren’t ask any questions

Saw two of these wee guys on the pavement. The one that was not knocked over said something like "you have been detected and are being observed on cctv, please leave the area".

Seems quite strange to ask folk to leave a public pavement? Maybe I should have tried talking to it?

Crow road Glasgow.

Claude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document

Link: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/2/claude-soul-document/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46125184

Every robot demonstration these days seems to be folding laundry. Chris Paxton of Agility Robotics says its because robots couldn't do this before, it looks cool and is usefu, and it avoids showing what robots are bad at. https://spectrum.ieee.org/robots-folding-clothes?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=fedica-Mastodon-Daily-Pipeline

Edit: I missed some and will correct it later.

Five of the largest verified accounts of #news organizations in the #Fediverse are:
@arstechnica
@mediapart
@tazgetroetetaz
@heiseonline
@tagesschau

Interested in where the followers are? Have a look 👇🏼

And find a larger table over at:
https://fingolas.eu/fediverse/overview.html

📢 Academics of mastodon,

We are recruiting one author to contribute to our edited book "A Research Agenda on Critical AI Studies". We are looking for someone who could write a chapter on LLMs from a critical perspective (copyright, surrogation, etc.).

If you are interested, DM or email me at ana.valdivia@oii.ox.ac.uk.

#CriticalAI

With the @openuk Awards coming up, we're excited to spotlight that Rustls — a memory-safe, performance-focused TLS library — is shortlisted in 2 categories!

Joe Birr-Pixton, Creator of Rustls, is also shortlisted for his leadership in secure computing.

Rustls’ continued growth will be supported by the Rust Foundation’s Rust Innovation Lab, which exists to help sustain+scale crucial Rust projects. We're thrilled to champion this remarkable project in its next era.

https://rustfoundation.org/media/rustls-shortlisted-for-two-2025-openuk-awards/

Amazon launches Trainium3

Link: https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/02/amazon-releases-an-impressive-new-ai-chip-and-teases-a-nvidia-friendly-roadmap/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46125155

#amazon

Kahoot! Dub cover! #dub #reggae #cover #quiz youtu.be/r6anFqYAKec

So I somewhat blindly guessed that the "PCIe" address space block contained a PCIe Base Spec compliant configuration register space starting at base address 0x00.

I'm now printing a bunch of info about the root complex which seems plausible. But I need to figure out how to enumerate the link partner still.

I've seen this article a bunch today, and I'm not at all convinced that the article's analysis of Google's announcement is actually true? Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of reasons to criticize Google and their approach to Android, but I also don't want to fall prey to panic-baiting. Both can be true.

If anyone with infosec experience knows more about what's going on here, I'd absolutely love your insight.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/12/02/google-starts-sharing-all-your-text-messages-with-your-employer/

My kid, back in 3rd grade. So proud.

With the @openuk Awards coming up, we're excited to spotlight that Rustls — a memory-safe, performance-focused TLS library — is shortlisted in 2 categories!

Joe Birr-Pixton, Creator of Rustls, is also shortlisted for his leadership in secure computing.

Rustls’ continued growth will be supported by the Rust Foundation’s Rust Innovation Lab, which exists to help sustain+scale crucial Rust projects. We're thrilled to champion this remarkable project in its next era.

https://rustfoundation.org/media/rustls-shortlisted-for-two-2025-openuk-awards/

Just released! 🚀🐍

Python 3.14.1

Waiting for the .1 to upgrade? This one's especially for you!

🥧 Deferred type annotation evaluation!
🥧 T-strings!
🥧 Zstandard!
🥧 Syntax highlighting in the REPL!
🥧 Colour in unittest, argparse, json and calendar CLIs!
🥧 UUID v6-8!
🥧 And much more!

https://discuss.python.org/t/python-3-14-1-is-now-available/105163

#Python #CPython #Python314 #release

I knew trying to work with Oauth was a bad idea…

ASWebAuthenticationSession and at least one swift compiler setting can crash your app.

If Dynamic Actor Isolation(DAI) is on the app will crash when it tries to resolve the callback with your token.

Turn DAI off and it works fine. The default is off.

However in my large project it's on and even turning it off still results in the same crash from another cause I've yet to isolate.

Probably punting on this feature for now.

#Swift

It's that day again: time to run https://github.com/glyph/mopup

🌧️ #rain #weather #gif

My kid, back in 3rd grade. So proud.

Recently, in a fit of annoyance about some big players in tech and particularly AI, I posted a slide about how AI needs more ethics across my usual social media channels, and it caught the attention of none other than Jeff Atwood (@codinghorrorJeff Atwood).

He asked for a link to the slide deck, which I shared, after which he said that I should post in a more web-friendly format. I thought it was a good idea, and I told him I’d do just that.

And here it is!

https://www.globalnerdy.com/2025/12/02/centaurs-vs-minotaurs-my-2023-presentation-on-ai-at-socialcode-x-tampa/

I have a December gift for you all 🎁

I am finally able to open up a general call for ADVANCE READERS for my book: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SOFTWARE TEAMS (coming 2026). I cannot tell you how much it means to me to share this!

I am able to select a handful of folks to receive a free advance copy, and I would love to ensure this group represents a broad range of perspectives and experiences.

You can indicate your interest here. And you are welcome to share this form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdMFf2RbEOYqbWLB4XqXThUPlqlt0uiA_mIBqcFBuwZMwJxHw/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=101137009349226307307

Tower defense game that teaches cloud architecture. Build infrastructure, survive traffic, learn scaling. Are you ready to play? 🤔

https://github.com/pshenok/server-survival

"All programmers, from hobbyists to those working at Microsoft or Google, use open-source software, which is present in between 70% and 90% of the computer applications we use today"
#FOSS #DigitalSovereignty
https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-11-30/adriana-groh-the-internet-works-thanks-to-a-shared-infrastructure-that-nobody-owns-but-that-we-must-take-care-of.html

For this #GivingTuesday I'm going to make the (biased) argument for why you might consider donating to @spritelyThe Spritely Institute, especially if you care about a healthier future for the internet! https://spritely.institute/donate/

Here's a little thread explaining more... 🧵

You’re absolutely right — you are Pagliacci. It would certainly be difficult for you to attend your own performance! I should not have given such paradoxical advice, and I apologize deeply for the error. There is no excuse for my failure.

Nevertheless, comedy is a powerful healing force. My recommendation is to seek out live entertainment. For example, great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up. 🔗 Sponsored Reply (Great Clown Productions, Ltd.)

The Junior Hiring Crisis

Link: https://people-work.io/blog/junior-hiring-crisis/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124063

It's a blessing and a curse.

I don't feel I understand some mathematics until I think I could have invented it myself and I often work hard to reach that stage. Well that's an illusion so I should qualify it a lot - I need to feel like if I was suitably "primed" I could have invented it. There's no way I could have explicitly invented monads, say, without lots of clues from all the papers I tried to read.

I feel like a good textbook or paper should lead you to a point where you can see what the main "trick" is going to be just before the big reveal. It allows you to develop pattern recognition for the type of problem.

But it does mean I waste a lot of time on stuff people may think is trivial. Machine learning papers are full of derivations like "log(A) = log(A/B) + log(B), now apply Jensen's equality" where B has magically appeared out of a hat. I can easily follow the argument but unless I know why this B was chosen I haven't learnt a reusable skill.

Unix - BSD developers : this code should run and be maintained as long as computers exist.

Linux - GNU dev : this code should run and be maintained as long as someone is willing to do the work

Consultant: this code should run until the end of my contract.

Enterprise grade B2B software : this code should run till the end of the demonstration to that big customer.

Vibe coding : You are perfectly right. The code doesn’t run. Try this one. You are right, it deleted your hard disk, I’m sorry.