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.
We are excited to share that we are beginning work on a new onboarding experiment for #Mastodon: Default Server Recommendations.
Our intent for this experiment is to recommend the closest server geographically that is in the correct language during the sign-up flow. We will be running this experiment on our iOS and Android apps only to start.
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I gave a talk: Package Management Learnings from Homebrew
Homebrew 5.0.0 released in 2025. Walk through the major changes in 5.0.0, improving expectations based on other package managers and what they can learn from Homebrew's approach.
https://mikemcquaid.com/talks/package-management-learnings-from-homebrew/
A message regarding ICE's presence in Minnesota and the United States of America as a whole from Privacy Guides Program Director 
@jonahJonah Aragon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ5_4Li9Gsc
🎬 Clipped from This Week in Privacy Episode 38
@privacyguides
Well done. 💪💛@jonahJonah Aragon
Seeing the comments, I wonder if some people might also need a guide on how to detect and avoid propaganda.
Privacy Guides' Program Director @jonahJonah Aragon gave an amazing speech last night in our weekly livestream!
It's a truly moving speech,
and an incredibly important statement in our current troubled times.
Fighting for privacy rights is a battle for human rights. Nobody lives in a vacuum.
We must build our communities to fight collectively 💛✊
Please watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ5_4Li9Gsc
#USpol #HumanRights #Privacy #ICEout #ICE #MassSurveillance #Minnesota #StandWithMinnesota
Mobile carriers can get your GPS location
Link: https://an.dywa.ng/carrier-gnss.html
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46838597
졸려서 이만 자러 갑니다 안녕히 주무시고 좋은 꿈 꾸세요 고양이 사진 투척
I love my city so much https://syzito.xyz/@fkamiah17/115984045985382067
@inthehandsPaul Cantrell I wish you all much energy and safety. 💪
Know that the world hears about your protests - they are even in the main TV-news in Germany.
Often in the London-based independent Guardian with it's US edition: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/31/a-week-on-the-block-where-alex-pretti-was-killed and https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/31/ice-observer-document-immigration-agents
We read about it in different European media (only a few examples): https://www.eurotopics.net/en/351991/ice-killings-the-fallout?zitat=352143#zitat352143
Holocaust history
We learn the history of the Holocaust not just to remember the victims, but to prevent it from happening again. “Never again” is a call to ceaseless, eternal action. It is a call to recognize the trajectory of genocide •before• we reach the worst, to recognize that we are still in those precious years before, and to recognize that a Final Solution is coming again, unless •we• stop it.
And the way we stop it is not by making the concentration camp guards sit through a Powerpoint deck on de-escalation.
4/
Holocaust history
@inthehandsPaul Cantrell Precisely. This is also the spirit of the UN Genocide Convention of 1948, with its focus on genocidal intent. Every genocide starts with words. That is the time to act.
An absolutely awesome talk from 
@benpateBen Pate 🤘🏻 and highlighting just how early we all are in the journey of the Fediverse as a whole.
The LOLA data portability standard from W3C sounds really awesome and I really hope we see this sort of standard adopted across the fedi as it helps solve one of the bigger pain points where your posts are stuck on the instance you write it on.
There's a whole load of other really good points that again continue to align with the sorts of feedback I see regularly about "why fedi will never be mainstream" and the more talks I'm listening to today, the more confident I am things will become more mainstream and easier to adopt for those new to the network.
New illustrations in the article on DACs and ADCs. Learn everything you never wanted to know about how your computer / gramophone convert bits to sounds and vice versa: https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/blog/conversions/
Sagt mal 🏍️-Fahrende, wenn ich Camping-Zeug (Zelt, Feldbett, Klapptstuhl, was auch immer) auf dem Sozius bzw. über dem Seitenkoffer festmachen will, reichen wirklich Gurte mit so Klips-Schnallen (z.B. Rok Straps oder so), oder Ratschenzurrgurt und fertig?
@glyph Oh, that clarifies it. They assume the solution is already out there in some product or combination of products.
@mattMatt Campbell @glyph What many fail to reflect upon is whether the amount of effort to *learn* how to use the existing solution may exceed the amount of effort required to *write* a solution. The assumption is always that learning is free, but coding is expensive.
Nothing else to add to @benpateBen Pate 🤘🏻 at #fosdem #fosdem2026
"Every single thing you do to improve the #fediverse is a win for humanity"
#FediDeck needs more beta testers! Come check it out and play!
Had my exit interview with the new (started 4 days ago) CTO yesterday. Things that stood out:
1. He was surprised to learn that lines of test code should outnumber lines of actual code.
2. He suggested that if he defines a spec and gives that to a code generator, then it would be useless to have the same code generator generate all these unit tests.
3. He couldn’t understand why the number of tests would explode if he intended to thoroughly test the application at the highest level only, ie the output of his code generator.
4. Concepts he looked up during our chat: Testing Pyramid, DDD, Clean Architecture.
5. He studiously avoided saying AI, talking only about a mythical code generator that would unerringly translate his presumably complete spec to code.
Anyway, is it time yet to start a consultancy to help companies fix the problems caused by the parrot?
Well... time zones suck. Just realized that I missed all of the #Fosdem talks live today. I hope they're going to be posted later for On-demand watch'n
First time attending #fosdem after having been at a few different chaos associated events. The event seems to have a very different, much more technical atmosphere in my very limited experience. There seems to be a strong focus on sharing knowledge. Speakers in the devrooms often revered to people in attendance, it felt like rooms contained active members of the rooms topic.
Different to #ccc / #38c3 but equally nice. I will have to attend more things outside of chaos too.
Spam is the best breakfast meat.
I will not be taking questions.
☕ Hot cocoa time!
My latest experiment: creating a fairly shelf-stable powdered cocoa drink. This iteration is vegan, has a nice warming spice, and tastes pretty good! Hopefully it will prove useful for camping etc.
https://caolan.uk/kitchen/recipes/instant_spiced_cocoa.cm
The quantities are for a single mug to make it easy to experiment with. So make your own version and share your recipe.
NASA's WB-57 crash lands at Houston
Link: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/01/one-of-nasas-three-wb-57-aircraft-just-did-a-belly-landing-in-houston/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46792242
just now realizing that while "Ozymandias" is conventionally read as a parable about the fleeting nature of power, it works just as well as a manifestation of the orientalist need for the middle east to be a history-less tabula rasa ready to be overwritten by western colonialist expansion. i would say "in this essay," but i looked it up and of course there is already a bunch of scholarship about this!
Emissary along with 
@Bonfire and @swf are working on #MLS based e2ee messaging over #ActivityPub supported by Sovereign Tech Fund
@liaizonwakest ⁂ FOSDEM @Bonfire @swf more info here
https://socialwebfoundation.org/2025/12/19/implementing-encrypted-messaging-over-activitypub/
Implementing Encrypted Messaging over ActivityPub
One of the project areas of the Social Web Foundation for the last year has been end-to-end encrypted messaging. ActivityPub, the standard protocol that powers the Social Web, has privacy controls,…
socialwebfoundation.org · Social Web Foundation
Link author: 
雅さん
You can limit the depth of the displayed datasets in the "zfs list" output
using the -d parameter. To display only the first level of datasets below
mypool/usr and not the ones deeper than those, run this command:
zfs list -d 1 mypool/usr
-- Benedict Reuschling <bcr@FreeBSD.org>
🎥 The Unison 1.1.0 release has quite a few features improving the UCM workflow. Here's a highlights reel:
You can limit the depth of the displayed datasets in the "zfs list" output
using the -d parameter. To display only the first level of datasets below
mypool/usr and not the ones deeper than those, run this command:
zfs list -d 1 mypool/usr
-- Benedict Reuschling <bcr@FreeBSD.org>
It has been so long since I ran a #BSD that I don't even remember which BSD it was. (I could probably dig up that info...)
Circa 20 years ago I used to run BSD gateway/router machines.
I think I'd like to do this again, for a variety of reasons.
But which BSD should I run for this kind of network gateway. It won't host any applications, it won't be a NAS, it'll purely be network/gateway... it'll have the telco router on one side, internal network on another, and one or two DMZ/separate type networks (one for hosting external facing things like Mastodon, the other for untrusted IoT stuff.) It'll run dhcp, dns, and probably be a VPN endpoint.
I do not want to run some specialist gateway adapted customised thing with dashboards etc, just want a plain vanilla OS. (And no bullcrap like containers, docker, etc. Just an OS running on a physical box.)
So, what OS should I run on my network gateway: #OpenBSD, #FreeBSD, #NetBSD
Some interesting fediverse-related talks at this year's #FOSDEM open-source conference.
Live stream: https://live.fosdem.org/watch/h2215
Schedule: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/track/social-web/
All Democrats and two Republican senators voted for this. We need two more GOP senators to join. Fund healthcare, not the gestapo.
"Giving up upstream-ing my patches & feel free to pick them up"
Link: https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/hotspot-dev/2026-January/118080.html
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46835454
킥스탠드는 뭔가 특허같은게 있나.. 서피스처럼 다른 태블릿도 좀 킥스탠드가 있음 좋겟는데.. 그런 태블릿도 케이스도 업다..
I love my city so much https://syzito.xyz/@fkamiah17/115984045985382067
@benpateBen Pate 🤘🏻 is now showing off Atlas Maps
Emissary along with @Bonfire and @swf are working on #MLS based e2ee messaging over #ActivityPub supported by Sovereign Tech Fund
@benpateBen Pate 🤘🏻 is now showing off Atlas Maps
Emissary along with @Bonfire and @swf are working on #MLS based e2ee messaging over #ActivityPub supported by Sovereign Tech Fund
Nothing else to add to @benpateBen Pate 🤘🏻 at #fosdem #fosdem2026
"Every single thing you do to improve the #fediverse is a win for humanity"
Idly reflecting a bit this morning, and realizing that one of the key insights that I bring to a consulting engagement is the in-depth observation "you could write a computer program to do this"
졸려서 이만 자러 갑니다 안녕히 주무시고 좋은 꿈 꾸세요 고양이 사진 투척
Apple Platform Security (Jan 2026) [pdf]
Link: https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-security-guide.pdf
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46837814
Weird realization: when I help people online, I often talk like ELIZA, repeating back the asker's phrases as a question. That simple program was able to mimic empathy and fool people at the time.
Q: How can I find the try/except around my code?
Me: Why do you say there's a try/except around your code?
Em 
Tom Casavant
초무
@reiver ⊼ (Charles) 
Stefano Marinelli
🏳️🌈🖖🏽 
