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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I have deeply mixed feelings about 's adoption of JSON-LD, as someone who's spent way too long dealing with it while building .

Part of me wishes it had never happened. A lot of developers jump into ActivityPub development without really understanding JSON-LD, and honestly, can you blame them? The result is a growing number of implementations producing technically invalid JSON-LD. It works, sort of, because everyone's just pattern-matching against what Mastodon does, but it's not correct. And even developers who do take the time to understand JSON-LD often end up hardcoding their documents anyway, because proper JSON-LD processor libraries simply don't exist for many languages. No safety net, no validation, just vibes and hoping you got the @context right. Naturally, mistakes creep in.

But then the other part of me thinks: well, we're stuck with JSON-LD now. There's no going back. So wouldn't it be nice if people actually used it properly? Process the documents, normalize them, do the compaction and expansion dance the way the spec intended. That's what Fedify does.

Here's the part that really gets to me, though. Because Fedify actually processes JSON-LD correctly, it's more likely to break when talking to implementations that produce malformed documents. From the end user's perspective, Fedify looks like the fragile one. “Why can't I follow this person?” Well, because their server is emitting garbage JSON-LD that happens to work with implementations that just treat it as a regular JSON blob. Every time I get one of these bug reports, I feel a certain injustice. Like being the only person in the group project who actually read the assignment.

To be fair, there are real practical reasons why most people don't bother with proper JSON-LD processing. Implementing a full processor is genuinely a lot of work. It leans on the entire Linked Data stack, which is bigger than most people expect going in. And the performance cost isn't trivial either. Fedify uses some tricks to keep things fast, and I'll be honest, that code isn't my proudest work.

Anyway, none of this is going anywhere. Just me grumbling into the void. If you're building an ActivityPub implementation, maybe consider using a JSON-LD processor if one's available for your language. And if you're not going to, at least test your output against implementations that do.

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Hey cool kids!

I like how this tool creates OpenBSD virtual machine images with a mix of a local mirror, signify, and QEMU, but it does not support EFI images, raw images, and is, while not fatal, in BASH.

github.com/hcartiaux/openbsd-c

Do you have any tools that check the above checkboxes?

❤️

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Verdict follows extended show-trial under deplorable arrest conditions

„German antifascist Maja T, alongside co-defendants Anna M and Gabriele M, were convicted in Budapest Wednesday (4 January) of involvement in attacks against neo-Nazi participants at the Day of Honour rally in February 2023. Maja now faces 8 years of imprisonment, following a long legal battle marked by illegal extradition to Hungary, detention in isolation, and a 40-day hunger strike to protest inhumane holding conditions.“

freedomnews.org.uk/2026/02/06/

Eight years are eight to Long!

Not the Last Word: Maja’s Statement on the End of the Trial

In court on 4.02.26

„For 16 days of hearings I sat shackled on the wooden bench behind me and listened attentively as my life was negotiated in this trial. I was silent about the charges. There were little more than two weeks of hearings, but when I look in the mirror, it seems like it must have been years. In my first attempt to find a “last word” for this trial, I described the person I am today as a fading flower because a person also needs sunlight to survive — and, above all, closeness, emotional security, and community.

Yet all of that is denied us, society’s incarcerated.
Esteemed prosecution, in my case, it did not work. Yes, even if I am shaking today, afflicted with anxiety and nightmares, if all emotions have left me after days of loneliness, even if it chokes me to see how many other people have to suffer under this political trial I nonetheless retain a friendly smile as well as a morality — a universal morality.

And when I lose my breath in my cell, I look up at the strip of sky where I saw wild geese in the autumn, and I hold onto the belief that solidarity is stronger than force….“

joseph-k.medium.com/not-the-la
Tranks to @ThatWeltschmerzWeltschmerz à Gogo

Eight Years are eight to Long!

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RE: mstdn.games/@britt/11601309470

So, I helped Britt out with moving her instance to a new server provider this week.

While the people at toot.io were relatively helpful in our email chain (once she was finally able to get a hold of them in the first place anyways), the setup at toot.io was a bit strange and not optimized for an instance of her size. The actual server itself was well *over*powered for her to be seeing the slowdowns she was, and Mastodon & especially Postgres just weren’t using those resources to a full extent.

Honestly the biggest red flag 🚩🚩🚩 to me isn’t what toot.io is doing now necessarily, but that it was apparently sold(?) to completely new management without notice to customers. In a niche service industry like this, that seems like a big problem to me, to not even explain who’s taking over and why you should trust them.

The previous ownership is probably more at fault for this relatively speaking, but it’s probably a good opportunity for toot.io customers to reevaluate their hosting options… Even if you ultimately end up sticking with toot.io, you simply might not be fully aware of what’s going on over at your own hosting company anymore, and that’s always worth double-checking 👀

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I don’t know success with LLMs yet? But the failures are still quite amusing.

I tried to have copilot (in GitHub code spaces) make me a mkosi config to build an Ubuntu image.

It produced something that didn’t work, and I tried to teach(?) it how to run mkosi so it could iterate on fixes, it arrived at the following conclusion:

“The terminal environment sees broken”

It was running ‘mkosi’ and ignoring the error messages and only checking the exit code (1), and then re-running with ‘sudo mkosi | head -100’ and again ignoring the text output *BUT* it did notice the zero exit code. And reported that the terminal must be broken? I dunno.

Friends, ‘head’ will exit zero in almost all cases.

I closed the code space because I was so baffled I didn’t know what else to try. Maybe next month I’ll try again and it’ll do something.

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TIL That Katee Sackhoff (“Starbuck” from the 2003 “Battlestar Galactia”) had never watched “Battlestar Galactica”

…until now (start “Cylon Theme”)

She’s watching it with her husband and posting through it, & it’s actually fun as hell to watch so far:

youtu.be/HK4wgx8TbrU

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유럽 여행 가기 3일 전부터 딸기시루, 싸이버거, 곱창, 마라탕 등으로 한식을 열심히 채워놧슨 한식이 많이 그리울 줄 알았는데 생각보다 유럽 음식이 입에 맞았는지 한식은 별로 안 땡겻슨 덕분에 열심히 모아둔 한식당 지도는 보지도 않앗슨 그치만 남들이 라면 떡볶이 등의 사진을 올릴 때마다 향수병이 차오르긴 햇슨

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複雑だなぁ。公開鍵暗号とぞの文脈での証明書についての知識が一般的になればもう少しすっきりした説明になるのかなぁ…そうでもないかなぁ…

マイナ免許証、スマホだけを持って運転は「不携帯」で取締対象に - CNET Japan
https://japan.cnet.com/article/35230914/

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Today and tomorrow only $5 books are back! Get all of these titles for just $5, no code required! We will be donating a portion of our weekend sales to the legal defense of those engaged in acts of resistance to ICE. Shop at pmpress.org.

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그런데 그…. 특이한 점은, 지중해 인근의 국가들(특히 이탈리아)은 선진국임에도 불구하고 그 나라 우체국이 제공하는 항공우편은 절대 이용해서는 안됩니다. 고가의 물품일수록 배송중 사라지는 빈도가 높습니다.
ところでその…特異な点は、地中海沿岸の国々(特にイタリア)は先進国であるにもかかわらず、その国の郵便局が提供する航空便は絶対に利用してはいけません。高価な品物ほど配送中に紛失する頻度が高くなります。
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In since post-Xcode Agentic coding we’re all having the “are LLMs compilers” conversation again…

It’s really helpful to think of LLM’s as databases of _someone else’s code._ That pretty quickly establishes good bounds of what they are and what they are not. They’re a bit more than that but still fundamentally constrained by the data.

That also gives you a good sense of the ethics, and the progress curve. They can really progress only as long as they have data to gobble up.

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내가 중동 항공사(오일머니로 돈이 많음)들을 타서 그런지 아님 운이 좋아서 그랬던 건지 모르겠지만 기내식이 다 맛있긴 햇슨 사진은 못 찍었지만 치킨 커리도 한 번 나왔는데 꽤괜이엇슨 근데 같이 가신 분은 옆에서 멀미로 고생하시고 계셨는데 내가 너무 눈치 없이 우적우적 처먹은 느낌이긴 햇슨 그치만 ㄹㅇ로 맛있긴 햇슨

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Much as you don't generally go auditing the bytecode or intermediate representation generated by your compiler, I think the idea of manually reviewing LLM-written code will fall by the wayside too. Like it or not, these agents are the new compilers, and prompting them is the new programming. Regardless of what happens with any AI bubble, this is just how things will be from now on; we've experienced a permanent, irreversible increase to the level of abstraction. We are all assembly programmers

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