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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Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is only the third object we've ever seen passing through our solar system from elsewhere in the galaxy. 3I/ATLAS doesn't pose a threat to Earth, and the closest it'll get to our home planet (on Dec. 19) is about 170 million miles—nearly twice the distance between Earth and the Sun.

This image of 3I/ATLAS was taken by our Hubble Space Telescope on Nov. 30, when the comet was about 178 million miles from Earth.



Image Description
An image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope showing the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. The comet is a small white dot in the center of the image, with a light blue halo of light that takes up most of the image. Other stars are shown streaking across the image as diagonal blue-white lines. Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, D. Jewitt (UCLA), M.-T. Hui (Shanghai Astronomical Observatory). Image Processing: J. DePasquale (STScI)
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Do you find yourself personally struggling not to use unwarranted intensifiers more than you did in the past (however you define that)?

(e.g. "very", "incredibly", "absolutely")

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A new Loops app release has been submitted to the App Store for public release, and it's coming to TestFlight and an APK later this weekend!

It's feature packed with several improvements, and this will be the last update until next year while I focus on Pixelfed.

Enjoy and happy holidays ❤️

New Loops mobile app
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I wonder if you could use/abuse Mastodon polls (FEP-9967) to distribute posts that provide near-real-time status updates (I'm thinking about severe weather alerts but I'm sure there are other use cases)?

Create a poll with an expiry far in the future and a token set of options (ideally just one—"Do you opt in?"—but poll implementations seem to require at least two).

Nothing seems to prevent the content of a poll from changing—and this is the key insight. The FEP says, "The type of a poll (single choice / multiple choices) and its options might be changed at any time. In that case the author of the poll MUST reset the vote counts." So broadcast updates via the content.

It would be a lightweight way to follow a single item without following the actor, built on top of implementations that already exist. 

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depth is kinda the forgotten dimension when buying rack-mounted computer equipment. if you're sticking it in a data center it's probably not going to limit you, but if you're like us and have a rack in your home, it's going to be the most significant constraint on what hardware you can use.

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: Displacement, hunger and suffering

Young Palestinians collecting aid. Since Hamas’s 7 October attack triggered the Israeli army’s military response in the Gaza Strip, life – above all for children – has turned into a living hell. The Palestinian photographer Saher Alghorra vividly depicts their plight.

Photograph: Saher Alghorra for the New York Times



Children carrying boxes of aid.
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: The journey home

Going to school in Cape Town can be risky, because some areas of the city are controlled by armed gangs. This is especially true in the Cape Flats, a plain where notorious townships were established during the apartheid era. High youth unemployment contributes to gang-related violence. The British photographer Laura Pannack accompanied teenagers on their way home from school.

Photograph: Laura Pannack/UNICEF Photos 2025


Children climbing a bus stop shelter.
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thinking about the time I ran a 2.5PB filesystem that was 18 racks of servers stuffed with 1TB disks. that much storage takes up about one quarter of one rack today.

I'm not old you're old
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