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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Today's #calligraphy practice: this now-classic copypasta from @lynnesbianLynnesbian :bune_ylw: (CC4.0-BY-NC-SA)

I think this nib probably needs replacing, it keeps chewing up the paper and as you can see the fibres occasionally caught in the nib drag the ink on certain strokes like the tails of "h", "k", and "a". It is a Hunt 22, on the stiffer side, not capable of the dramatic changes in line width you get with a 101 or my beloved Leonardt Principal, but good for smaller writing.

Written in English round hand on a graph paper pad: 
Friday, February 20, 2026 Hunt #22 nib, India ink

"i use linux as my operating system," i state proudly to the unkempt, bearded man. he swivels around in his desk chair with a devilish gleam in his eyes, ready to mansplain with extreme precision. "actually," he says with a grin, "linux is just the kernel. you use GNU+linux."
i don't miss a beat and reply with a smirk, "i use alpine, a distro that doesn't include the GNU coreutils, or any other GNU code. it's linux, but it's not GNU+linux."

the smile quickly drops from the man's face. his body begins convulsing and he foams at the mouth as he drop to the floor with a sickly thud. as he writhes around he screams "I-IT WAS COMPILED WITH GCC! THAT MEANS IT'S STILL GNU!"
coolly, i reply "if windows was compiled with gcc, would that make it GNU?" i interrupt his response with "and work is being made on the kernel to make it more compiler-agnostic. even if you were correct, you won't be for long."

with a sickly wheeze, the last of the man's life is ejected from his body. he lies on the floor, cold and limp. i've womansplained him to death.

—@lynnesbian@fedi.lynnesbian.space, Jan. 14, 2019 CC4-BY-NC-SA
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Hey, you, reader:

Ever been browsing someone's blog, website, repo -- even their social web profile -- and thought to yourself "Wow, that's really neat. I love what they did here!"

Consider telling them! Someone on here made a post a while back encouraging people to do just that, and I've tried to make a conscious habit of contacting the authors of neat little indie and smolweb sites.

Email, guestbook, comment; whatever it might be, consider reaching out somehow to share your appreciation. You might be surprised at how much it makes their day.

You might also be surprised to discover how much making their day makes yours, too.

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I have another thing you can do to help people in Minneapolis!

These kids are raising funds to go to Space Camp. It’s a beautiful structure: families pay what they can, then •all• the families fundraise the remaining total for •all• the kids together. Either everyone goes or no one goes.

The ICE invasion really knocked the fundraising on its heels this year: everyone diverted, one major fundraising event cancelled. It’s looking a little dire; maybe no one goes this year. They could use some help.

mpsspacecamp2026.com

1/

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@Mastodon is changing course when it comes to how people join the platform. In late 2022, the team decided to send sign-ups directly to their server in order to make onboarding more straightforward. But that didn't align with the promise of decentralization. Here, Community Director @haubleshannah aubry explains the new approach to server recommendation, along with some other ways Mastodon is helping build community.

flip.it/1bWN26

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きょうもさむうい :saba:

6ba6285a73 (upstream/main) Reject unconfirmed FASPs (#37926)
7b85d21823 Re-use custom socket class for FASP requests (#37925)
3d33294870 Collection accounts editor: Show info badge on accounts that haven't posted in over a week (#37928)
68a7cd404d Require following accounts before being able to add them to a collection (#37927)
4d2ca8c92a New Crowdin Translations (automated) (#37924)
cc1e65dcec Add `GET /api/v1/profile` (#37912)

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It's super exciting to see so many libghostty-based projects popping up (two were on HN yesterday alone). This was always the REAL goal of Ghostty that I've been transparent about since the first public talk I gave.

Ghostty the app has always really been a glorified tech demo for libghostty which I planned/hoped would really take over the world eventually with a diverse set of terminal-adjacent things focused on specific goals/ideals. And that's exactly what's happening.

Awesome.

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While writing my article, it became clear to me how much responsibility — and especially experience — is required to touch areas like UVM or NPF inside NetBSD.

I’ve learned a lot over the past weeks. But I’m also honest enough to say: I don’t yet have the depth of experience needed to modify those subsystems responsibly.

So I made a conscious decision.

I’ve created a new experimental branch for secmodel_jail / jailctl / jailmgr that is strictly additive:

- No changes to existing kernel code paths

- No UVM hooks

- No NPF integration

- No hidden coupling between subsystems

It adds new code only.

The reason is simple: even without deep UVM or NPF integration, the security model already delivers significant practical value for me. And in this reduced, explicit form, the attack surface is clear and the audit scope sharply defined.

This feels like the right first alpha candidate: understandable, bounded, and reversible.

github.com/MatthiasPetermann/n

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@deadsuperheroSean Tilley

Right now extensibility of shapes up as custom app-by-app app-centric development where individual devs just pragmatically throw new stuff on the wire, and when their app gains any popularity or other apps to integrate in a similarish application, things are bolted onto that in random ways. That whole story really constitutes a Big Ball of Mud anti-pattern that only introduces protocol decay, tech debt, and whack-a-mole programming, that is very hard to get rid of once there exists an installed base.

The reason that we do things that way is very understandable. It works in a grassroots environment where indivualist devs find it very hard and not valuable to collaborate at scale in what amounts to a kind of design-by-consensus process. But it comes at a high cost, where interoperability is basically out the door and any app has to be shaped as a pretzel and adopt all the quirks introduced by predecessors in a particular app domain to fit itself on the wire.

@deadsuperheroSean Tilley

It does not need to be that way. I am quite happy after all (after being initially frustrated) by how has disrupted things, and opened the eyes of devs in the ecosystem that we must act or lose out (stay niche, which may be fine too) to the Atmoshpere and how it enables devs to focus on service and product delivery instead of low-level wire plumbing and continuous breakages.

ATProto also shows the way that we can now follow on the to catch up again: cocreate a similar robust basis for people to build on. had the advantage of a greenfield start and dedicated team unburdened by past decisions. And they build this whole Lexicon system and ways to introspect functionality.

We can do that too, solve the conundrum, and create an extensibility mechanism that allows devs to focus on service modeling. The more introspection this mechanism allows for, the less design-by-consensus is required, easing expansion to new domains.

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I started planning a new app for Pixelfed/Loops/Sup admins.

It's really complex to try and add admin support to the main apps, due to oauth scopes (users don't need to be more confused), and the fact they aren't designed for that.

Having a separate admin app would allow them to manage multiple instances, get push notifications and keep the main apps lighter.

Likely won't be ready until Q4, I have a few other things to finish first 🤠

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