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.

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Tim Hergert @cjust@infosec.exchange
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Shared by Cat ๐Ÿˆ๐Ÿฅ— (D.Burch) :blobcatrainbow:

@catsaladCat ๐Ÿˆ๐Ÿฅ— (D.Burch) :blobcatrainbow: @cR0wcR0w :cascadia: Should we be tinkering with the very fabric of time and space with our curiosity and hubris?

I'll quote Terry Pratchett on this one:

Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH', the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.

โ€• Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

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internetarchive @internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org
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๐ŸŽฌ Enter the 2026 Public Domain Film Remix Contest!

Remix & reimagine treasures from 1930โ€”early sound films, cartoons, music, literature & artโ€”and turn them into unique 2โ€“3 minute films. Use the Internet Archiveโ€™s collections & your creativity to breathe new life into these cultural gems.

๐Ÿ“… Deadline: January 7, 2026
๐Ÿ’ฐ First prize: $1,500
โ„น๏ธ Details: blog.archive.org/2025/12/01/20

Poster for the Internet Archive's 2026 Public Domain Film Remix Contest, featuring the "Lockette," a cartoon character with an open lock, seated in a director's chair, legs crossed, and holding a megaphone. Projected on a screen to her right is a frame from the 1930 film "King of Jazz". Illustrated by Freya Morgan.
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Sara Joy :happy_pepper: @sarajw@front-end.social
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RE: hachyderm.io/@collinsworth/115

As I read through this, nodding, and @collinsworthJosh Collinsworth mentioned how it's possibly worse at generating front-end code for good reasons, it occurred to me that there is probably overlap between:

- the people happy to install and use all the packages and libraries for the DX (to hell with the bundle size or accessibility concerns), and

- the people who embrace LLMs in coding.

If you're already working many abstracted miles away from the web platform, vibe coding isn't such a leap.

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jignoah @jignoah@misskey.04.si
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Shared by zunda

ใ‚ใชใŸใฎFediverseใฏใฉใ“ใ‹ใ‚‰๏ผŸ

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ใƒžใƒชใ‚ช (Mario Menti) @mario@neko.cat
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Lol, I have zero intention to voluntarily travel to the US any time in the foreseeable future, but this will 100% guarantee I wouldn't be able to go there even if it was for work reasons.

theguardian.com/us-news/2025/d

โ€˜Censorship pure and simpleโ€™: critics hit out at Trump plan to vet visitorsโ€™ social media

Some warn proposal will decimate US tourism industry as free speech advocates say it will lead to people self-censoring

www.theguardian.com ยท the Guardian

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gio @giovan@mastodon.social
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Re: theverge.com/news/842573/disne
This is exactly the problem I've been warning about with IP protections for AI models. Disney licensing with OpenAI creates the appearance that a license is needed at all, which gives them grounds to attack others in an effort to monopolize art.

The Disney logo over a blue and black background with tiled circles in the style of Disneyโ€™s logo.

Disney accuses Google of โ€˜massiveโ€™ copyright infringement following deal with OpenAI

Disney just gave OpenAI the green light to use its characters in Sora.

www.theverge.com ยท The Verge

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Prof. Sam Lawler @sundogplanets@mastodon.social
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Two incredibly talented students led the project. We figured out a much less hand-wavy analytical way to calculate close approach rates using real data from public catalogues. And then we also ran n-body simulations to double check. They agree very well! And are really scary!!

In the densest part of LEO (Starlink), there are closer than 1km approaches every 15 minutes. 1km sounds like a lot, but remember everything in LEO is moving at 7km PER SECOND

A plot from Thiele et al. 2025 showing average time between encounters that are closer than 1km at different altitudes in Low Earth Orbit. It's mostly in the 1 day range, except where Starlink's very dense orbital shell are, where it goes down below every 15 minutes.
Prof. Sam Lawler @sundogplanets@mastodon.social
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Shared by Chao-c'

Starlink themselves report an average of 1 collision avoidance maneuver every 2 minutes between Dec 2024-May 2025. So that's another (terrifying) double check on this calculation. scribd.com/document/883045105/

SpaceX Gen1-Gen2 Semi-Annual Report (7!1!25)

SpaceX Gen1-Gen2 Semi-Annual Report (7!1!25)

SpaceX submitted its semi-annual reports for Gen 1 and Gen 2 satellite constellations, detailing their commitment to sustainability and safety in satellite operations. The report highlights SpaceX's conservative approach to collision avoidance and deorbiting, emphasizing the importance of transparency and collaboration among satellite operators for space sustainability. Additionally, it addresses challenges in collision avoidance processes and the need for consistent data sharing among operators to enhance overall safety in space.

www.scribd.com ยท Scribd

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Elaine Wong @elthenerd@fosstodon.org
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Shared by Hugo van Kemenade

RE: fosstodon.org/@kautumn06/11568

I really do appreciate that supports a variety of ways to showcase great Python community projects, including having a posters session.

The format is so welcoming for learning new things and being able to talk to the presenters 1 on 1!

If you're keen, you have until Dec 19th!

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Chilly :donor: ๐Ÿ›ก๏ธ :fedora: @chillybot@infosec.exchange
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Listen I am just going to say what we are all thinking. I don't care if I get cancelled for saying it lIkE iT Is.

Mace Windu totally would have defeated Darth Sidious if Anakin didn't betray him. He was the creator of the form VII lightsaber form called Vaapad which channels the dark side making it perfect against dark side users.

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Alexander Karn @xankarn@mastodon.online
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In the last few minutes of class, I asked whether there were big narratives circulating today that might require the kind of critical pushback that Lyotard described and advocated in 1979.

It took a few minutes of awkward silence before anyone would bite.

2/x

Alexander Karn @xankarn@mastodon.online
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Shared by Chao-c'

The first answer was from a young man who said, more or less, all of my feeds are filled with the same clips of Sam Altman telling people that AI is the only way forward for humanity.

I asked whether it was weird that the only way forward for humanity is the one that would make men like Altman even richer and more powerful than they already are.

Students agreed that was weird and troubling.

3/x

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Alexander Karn @xankarn@mastodon.online
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Shared by Chao-c'

My intellectual history students read Lyotard's, "The Postmodern Condition" (1979) for our final class meeting today.

Lyotard says the chief characteristic of postmodernity is its skepticism toward grand narratives.

He writes about the need for intellectual inquiry that challenges the rules and orthodoxies of the age and what disasters await if we allow ourselves to be guided by nothing more than uncritical consensus.

1/x

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social
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By the way, Atwood in this 2006 blog quotes a part of the paper that says, if we used this predictive test to only admit students who have no risk of failing, then the failure statistics of CS would transform. It kind of SOUNDS like a good thing.

But this is a very common fallacious argument about education and selection: student "failure risk" is not a static innate trait we're trying to detect and exclude based on, it's WHAT WE'RE SUPPOSED TO BE CHANGING WITH EDUCATION

Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social
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Shared by Paul Cantrell

The number one place I think about this type of reasoning being used was when the US was arguing against public education as a concept. Poverty is an exceptionally strong predictor of outcomes; so people said, why should we waste our time and money letting poor children go to school? This might seem absurd to us now but it was a very serious, very influential argument

That was immediately disproven by the fact that EDUCATION INTERVENES ON POVERTY

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social
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Studying computer science education as if it is a phenomenon that we discovered growing on our shoreline instead of a goddamn field that we are constructing every moment. JFC. Abundant evidence continues to emerge that says how we teach computing is extremely broken. Students' failures in the context of a failing educational experience are not some kind of untroubled measure of ability.

Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social
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Shared by Paul Cantrell

By the way, Atwood in this 2006 blog quotes a part of the paper that says, if we used this predictive test to only admit students who have no risk of failing, then the failure statistics of CS would transform. It kind of SOUNDS like a good thing.

But this is a very common fallacious argument about education and selection: student "failure risk" is not a static innate trait we're trying to detect and exclude based on, it's WHAT WE'RE SUPPOSED TO BE CHANGING WITH EDUCATION

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Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social
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As Cimpian and others have studied re: our beliefs about innate ability, constantly repeating the frame of innate ability even when arguing about it makes these beliefs feel commonplace and reasonable. Take a note of just how much airtime, how many features in blogs, how many times work like this gets amplified while work with millions of learners and global populations and far more careful interrogation of achievement evidence never does.

The "programming ability" stuff has a waiting audience

Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social
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Shared by Paul Cantrell

Studying computer science education as if it is a phenomenon that we discovered growing on our shoreline instead of a goddamn field that we are constructing every moment. JFC. Abundant evidence continues to emerge that says how we teach computing is extremely broken. Students' failures in the context of a failing educational experience are not some kind of untroubled measure of ability.

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Hacker News 50 @hn50@social.lansky.name
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An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions

Link: arxiv.org/abs/2512.09643
Discussion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4

arXiv logo

An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions

The number of objects in orbit is rapidly increasing, primarily driven by the launch of megaconstellations, an approach to satellite constellation design that involves large numbers of satellites paired with their rapid launch and disposal. While satellites provide many benefits to society, their use comes with challenges, including the growth of space debris, collisions, ground casualty risks, optical and radio-spectrum pollution, and the alteration of Earth's upper atmosphere through rocket emissions and reentry ablation. There is substantial potential for current or planned actions in orbit to cause serious degradation of the orbital environment or lead to catastrophic outcomes, highlighting the urgent need to find better ways to quantify stress on the orbital environment. Here we propose a new metric, the CRASH Clock, that measures such stress in terms of the time it takes for a catastrophic collision to occur if there are no collision avoidance manoeuvres or there is a severe loss in situational awareness. Our calculations show the CRASH Clock is currently 2.8 days, which suggests there is now little time to recover from a wide-spread disruptive event, such as a solar storm. This is in stark contrast to the pre-megaconstellation era: in 2018, the CRASH Clock was 121 days.

arxiv.org ยท arXiv.org

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Mirko Swillus @mechko@chaos.social
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Shared by Hugo van Kemenade

Dear Fediverse,

after some ups and downs over the past months and my departure from @sovtechfundSovereign Tech Agency, Iโ€™ve decided to move into freelance IT consulting. I even created a website ๐Ÿ˜…: swillus.eu.

I'm offering support around Open Source (as in OSPOs, policies, programm management), Supply Chain Security (also in terms of CRA readiness) and Engineering Management.

Let me know if you know someone who needs support. Thanks! โค๏ธ

Mirko Swillus - Engineering Consultant

Mirko Swillus, Engineering Consultant for Engineering Management, Open Source and Supply Chain Security

swillus.eu

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