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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We plan to disable the "live feeds" of the local and federated timelines on mastodon.social within in the next couple of weeks. They are already disabled on mastodon.online. While these feeds can be useful on smaller, topical or regional servers, they have limited use on larger servers like ours.

The live feeds present all content on the server immediately and essentially pre-moderation, which presents a particularly poor experience to new users finding the fediverse for the first time.

Recommended follows, trending, and searching for hashtags all provide a far better discovery experience for newcomers, and we intend to improve discovery features more in 2026.

Note that we do have the ability to restore live feed access to individual users, and will consider this on a case-by-case basis. We will proactively reach out to trusted flaggers to offer this in advance.

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We plan to disable the "live feeds" of the local and federated timelines on mastodon.social within in the next couple of weeks. They are already disabled on mastodon.online. While these feeds can be useful on smaller, topical or regional servers, they have limited use on larger servers like ours.

The live feeds present all content on the server immediately and essentially pre-moderation, which presents a particularly poor experience to new users finding the fediverse for the first time.

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Over the weekend, did you see the much-shared story on Reddit by a supposed whistleblower?

It started like this: "I’m a developer for a major food delivery app. The 'Priority Fee' and 'Driver Benefit Fee' go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it. I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore."

Well, it was a fake.
platformer.news/fake-uber-eats

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When we design for disabilities, we make things better for everyone. This is called the Curb-Cut Effect. The term was coined by disability students and activists in the 70s, who added curb cuts to the Berkeley sidewalks to make access easier for those in wheelchairs. They discovered those also helped people with strollers, using trolleys for deliveries, etc.

Illustration of The curb-cut effect: a range of people of all ages next to a crossing, road, and park show how the curb cut design for disabilities benefits everyone.
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One coworker -- who I'll call Xavier -- does everything through LLMs. He's the kind of developer that managers who have never been programmers adore: 3000 lines of code per day.

I just realized that Xavier cannot read code, even code that he submits for review. He "understands" code by running it against test files and seeing whether results are reasonable. He can only say what the code does, not what causes it to behave in a way.

But that has several problems. An obvious first issue is that if a problem doesn't show up in the test file, then it will never be fixed. A less obvious issue is that his code is brittle and it generalizes very poorly.

Because Xavier doesn't read code, he has a very tough time imagining "What might go wrong?" And because he relies on the LLM, he misses very broad solutions, like using well-established libraries that solve dozens of problems at once.

Programmers who dive deep are still very, very useful.

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