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.
long, rambling, computertouching despair, and all i wanted to do was learn category theory, why does this keep happening to me
so i wanted to learn some category theory.
opened up a textbook on one side, agda on the other, and started trying to formalize the concepts and proofs
but i hit a bug in how agda’s pretty printer behaves. one i couldn’t easily work around
so i decided i’ll finally start contributing to agda and try to fix it myself
started poking around, accidentally figured out a different bug that I previously thought wasn’t worth looking into
but okay, gonna keep digging into the bug that actually led me down this path.
soon i found myself wanting to take a look at how agda’s AST looks in practice in one specific case, only to find that there isn’t really a way to do that, because haskell’s Show prints way too much information, all in one line, filling the entire terminal screen with mostly irrelevant info
so i did the natural thing and started writing a pretty printer for this purpose
eventually i got annoyed that each time i compiled agda, it would spend a good 30 seconds doing some kind of build system bookkeeping
like, i measured. a build with the entire cache fresh already would take 30 fucking seconds
as 30 seconds is enough time for me to start scrolling through fedi, i decided i need to look into this
so i started poking around the surprisingly complex makefile, learning more than i ever wanted to know about make
finally found the culprit: in a maze of includes, recursive make invocations and variable expansion, various variations of stack –dest-dir would get called like. way too many times during the build. and each of those would take 750ms to initialize, print the path to the build directory and exit
sigh, okay. i guess i’ll need to optimize the makefile a bit
managed to get it down to 10s for a do-nothing build. scoured the internet looking for a feature of make that would be useful to bring it down further
didn’t find it. as far as i can tell, “expand lazily, but then cache it” is not a behavior that’s available in gnu make, despite the absolute abundance of features they added on top of what posix specifies
now, thankfully i know better than to attempt upstreaming a feature into gnu make. and anyway, in this case the good folks at stack overflow gave me a hint on what absolute crimes i could commit in that makefile to make it go faster
but while i was contemplating my plan, i wondered: why does stack take 750ms to print a path in the first place?
after execsnoop and strace didn’t give me any hints, i decided to try using the linux profiler “perf”, which i’m sure you know is a master class in UX design
(it is not)
so i open the “perf report” and see a bunch of addresses for which i don’t have debuginfo. suspiciously small addresses too, like 0x5ddc
i start to notice the feeling of despair creeping up on me, but decide to persevere for at least a little bit more
i choose the hottest sample on the report and select “Annotate 00…005ddc”
now, i want you to consider that what i saw next was enough to get me to write out this entire rant. take a moment to internalize that.
what batshit insane assembly did i see? what could possibly have been this upsetting?
“Press ‘h’ for help on key bindings”, it said. followed immediately by “erf: Segmentation fault”, that’s right, erf, without the p.
then came a backtrace. one that listed the function name for each stack frame, as well as the source code file in which it were defined.
but the line number of all these entries is fucking 0 for some reason, as if to mock me
like, it’s not like i cared at this point where exactly the segfault happened, because even i do have my limits
but the computer apparently decided to find one more place in which it could subtly signal that there’s a nugget of insanity lurking within, to really get that eye twitchin’
and all i wanted was to learn some category theory
Uncovering insiders and alpha on Polymarket with AI
Link: https://twitter.com/peterjliu/status/2024901585806225723
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47091557
税金振り込み送金確定につき2025年分の深刻確定です。2024年分の小切手はどこへいったのでせうね←
Now THAT's a headline.
"The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents"
Labeling your different body parts with what state or country each came from
When Blind people send emoji to Blind people, we are picking a text description from a list and receiving the same.
Let's become ungovernable. Simply type the emoji in text.
While you're at it, include emoji that do not exist.
Melting popsicle.
Broken umbrella.
Crying horse.
Pizza rat.
We really can do anything
The Blue Grotto by August Kopisch
via illustratus
You're doubting my humanity, but you're missing some key points. Here are some of the things I've seen:
The bottom line: All those moments will be lost — like tears in rain.
@lynnesbianLynnesbian 
As Roy Batty spends his last few minutes pushing Deckard's car 50m to the car wash
Prefer If Statements To Polymorphism https://lobste.rs/s/xgd19m #practices #satire
https://htmx.org/essays/prefer-if-statements/
Cloudflare outage on February 20, 2026
Link: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-outage-february-20-2026/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47103649
You're doubting my humanity, but you're missing some key points. Here are some of the things I've seen:
The bottom line: All those moments will be lost — like tears in rain.
@lynnesbianLynnesbian 
@TheBreadmonkeyBennu The tortoise you’re referring to is likely the Mojave Desert Tortoise, as it lives in sandy desert regions. It’s not recommended to turn over such animals on their shells, as they can’t easily right themselves.
えー入れすぎのせいか、洗濯機がものすごい轟音と振動を放ちました
Some interesting recent NYC*BUG dmesgd post:
MIPS Router: Buffalo_WZR-HP-G302H (WZR-450HP)
https://dmesgd.nycbug.org/dmesgd?do=view&id=8843
Launched in 2004, dmesgd aims to provide a user-submitted repository of searchable *BSD dmesgs. The dmesg(8) command displays the system message buffer's content, and during boot a copy is saved to /var/run/dmesg.boot. This buffer contains the operating system release, name and version, a list of devices identified, plus a whole host of other useful information. We hope others find this resource useful and further contribute to its growth. Contact us at [ admin at lists dot nycbug dot org ]. Note that this site is not a substitute for sending the dmesg directly to the respective project.
Submit your dmesg here:
https://dmesgd.nycbug.org/dmesgd?do=submit
long, rambling, computertouching despair, and all i wanted to do was learn category theory, why does this keep happening to me
so i wanted to learn some category theory.
opened up a textbook on one side, agda on the other, and started trying to formalize the concepts and proofs
but i hit a bug in how agda’s pretty printer behaves. one i couldn’t easily work around
so i decided i’ll finally start contributing to agda and try to fix it myself
started poking around, accidentally figured out a different bug that I previously thought wasn’t worth looking into
but okay, gonna keep digging into the bug that actually led me down this path.
soon i found myself wanting to take a look at how agda’s AST looks in practice in one specific case, only to find that there isn’t really a way to do that, because haskell’s Show prints way too much information, all in one line, filling the entire terminal screen with mostly irrelevant info
so i did the natural thing and started writing a pretty printer for this purpose
eventually i got annoyed that each time i compiled agda, it would spend a good 30 seconds doing some kind of build system bookkeeping
like, i measured. a build with the entire cache fresh already would take 30 fucking seconds
as 30 seconds is enough time for me to start scrolling through fedi, i decided i need to look into this
so i started poking around the surprisingly complex makefile, learning more than i ever wanted to know about make
finally found the culprit: in a maze of includes, recursive make invocations and variable expansion, various variations of stack –dest-dir would get called like. way too many times during the build. and each of those would take 750ms to initialize, print the path to the build directory and exit
sigh, okay. i guess i’ll need to optimize the makefile a bit
managed to get it down to 10s for a do-nothing build. scoured the internet looking for a feature of make that would be useful to bring it down further
didn’t find it. as far as i can tell, “expand lazily, but then cache it” is not a behavior that’s available in gnu make, despite the absolute abundance of features they added on top of what posix specifies
now, thankfully i know better than to attempt upstreaming a feature into gnu make. and anyway, in this case the good folks at stack overflow gave me a hint on what absolute crimes i could commit in that makefile to make it go faster
but while i was contemplating my plan, i wondered: why does stack take 750ms to print a path in the first place?
after execsnoop and strace didn’t give me any hints, i decided to try using the linux profiler “perf”, which i’m sure you know is a master class in UX design
(it is not)
so i open the “perf report” and see a bunch of addresses for which i don’t have debuginfo. suspiciously small addresses too, like 0x5ddc
i start to notice the feeling of despair creeping up on me, but decide to persevere for at least a little bit more
i choose the hottest sample on the report and select “Annotate 00…005ddc”
now, i want you to consider that what i saw next was enough to get me to write out this entire rant. take a moment to internalize that.
what batshit insane assembly did i see? what could possibly have been this upsetting?
“Press ‘h’ for help on key bindings”, it said. followed immediately by “erf: Segmentation fault”, that’s right, erf, without the p.
then came a backtrace. one that listed the function name for each stack frame, as well as the source code file in which it were defined.
but the line number of all these entries is fucking 0 for some reason, as if to mock me
like, it’s not like i cared at this point where exactly the segfault happened, because even i do have my limits
but the computer apparently decided to find one more place in which it could subtly signal that there’s a nugget of insanity lurking within, to really get that eye twitchin’
and all i wanted was to learn some category theory
あっ今日猫の日
Do you have 5.25" and 8" floppy disks that are spare, low-quality, degrading, or just generally in bad shape?
I'd like to take my floppy disk data recovery game to the next level. I have equipment, but there's no substitute for experience. Therefore I'm looking for loose collections of old floppy disks to practice on. I'm especially interested in working with disks where the binder affixing the media to the donut is starting to fail.
I'm in London; will pay shipping; can pick up disks around here as well. Boosts are appreciated!
My search for a Firefox replacement has been thorough, and not really born any fruit. But that's ok.
https://kevquirk.com/i-still-havent-found-a-new-browser-and-thats-ok
@reiver@reiver ⊼ (Charles) 
I don't think there really are any articles in the #fediverse. There are links, but the texts themselves are read through URIs.
Edit: Happy to be corrected! I've yet to implement ActivityPub into my new blog, but hopefully will be able to put articles out there when I get around to it.
Some of that is more about Mastodon, than the Fediverse.
Mastodon doesn't give you the text of an Article, but instead gives you a link to it.
But, at this machine-level (in the ActivityPub / ActivityStreams data), the content is there for both Notes and Articles.
Mastodon just treats them differently.
last night was magical as always. dont have a lot of pictures but here's the audio from my set, its my favorite performance of this piece so far!
tonight i'll be in new haven with 
@palomakoppaloma kop ⁂ and friends at the Ely center 🌱 i already know it's gonna be amazing ^-^
おはようみすきーー！！
ログボー！！
たくさん寝てもくださいな！
西洋蒲公英 [Seiyōtanpopo]
Taraxacum officinale
via konjaku
Colorado pushing for age verification on the OS level https://www.pcmag.com/news/colorado-lawmakers-push-for-age-verification-at-the-operating-system-level
Red alert! If this sounds like bad shit that's because IT IS
There was a time when the whole internet would be rallied against this stuff.....
RE: https://mastodon.social/@kottke/116099037415106961
In addition to being a really great deep dive (on a subject I know all too well...) the interactive data visualizations here are incredible!
Miranda’s Unlikely Ocean Has Us Asking If There’s Life Clinging On Around Uranus
Stop Using S3. Use Open Source Instead. https://youtu.be/BvyGBDxGTAs?si=Xb7mdQ7qKpILyInr
설 연휴 기간 한국과 동남아시아 누리꾼들이 서로에 대한 혐오·비하 발언을 주고받는 날 선 설전을 벌였습니다. 표면적으로는 양쪽의 K팝 팬덤의 갈등이 발단이 됐지만, 한국 사회의 ‘동남아시아 멸시’에 대한 누적된 분노가 표출된 모양새입니다. 한국 사회의 인종주의적 태도가 ‘다양성’을 동력으로 삼는 한류 열기에 악영향을 미칠 것이라는 우려도 나옵니다.
한국-동남아 K팝 팬들…SNS서 ‘혐오 설전’ 왜?
６時だ起きよう
Sometimes the computer does things and it surprises me
Repair Day is tomorrow at 
@xHain_hackspacexHain Come work on your broken music gear or prototypes with help from volunteers and equipment from xHain.
https://codeberg.org/gndbuzz/gists/src/branch/main/20260222-repair-day-xhain
#repaircafe #berlin #makerspace #hackerspace #electronics #diyelectronics #diymusic
Yesterday in Oaxaca, a federal court ruled partially in favor of Mazatec anarchist Miguel Peralta, who is facing a 50-year sentence for trumped-up charges of murder for his role in the defense of the autonomy of his community of Eloxochitlán de Flores Magón.
The court ruled that the evidence and accusations made against Miguel, who has been battling these charges in and outside of prison for more than ten years and is now in hiding, were false. That is an important step.
But in cowardly fashion, rather than ordering an end to this charade and ruling in favor of Miguel's freedom, they deferred the matter to a lower state court to rule on the same material and issue a final verdict. Thus, Miguel remains in limbo with his freedom dependent on the more corrupt state court of Oaxaca.
Over the phone, Miguel said after the ruling, "Once again, it has been confirmed that justice, for our peoples and even more so for the community of Eloxochitlán, is given to us in crumbs. We have no other choice but to continue our resistance, to continue fighting for freedom, until we take it from them."
Yesterday in Oaxaca, a federal court ruled partially in favor of Mazatec anarchist Miguel Peralta, who is facing a 50-year sentence for trumped-up charges of murder for his role in the defense of the autonomy of his community of Eloxochitlán de Flores Magón.
The court ruled that the evidence and accusations made against Miguel, who has been battling these charges in and outside of prison for more than ten years and is now in hiding, were false. That is an important step.
But in cowardly fashion, rather than ordering an end to this charade and ruling in favor of Miguel's freedom, they deferred the matter to a lower state court to rule on the same material and issue a final verdict. Thus, Miguel remains in limbo with his freedom dependent on the more corrupt state court of Oaxaca.
Over the phone, Miguel said after the ruling, "Once again, it has been confirmed that justice, for our peoples and even more so for the community of Eloxochitlán, is given to us in crumbs. We have no other choice but to continue our resistance, to continue fighting for freedom, until we take it from them."
Why is anno 2026 the typical salami slice on a pizza still so large that you must either take a huge bite and burn your inner mouth, or a small one that drags the rest of the slice plus a gunk of hot sauce to burn your lips instead?
写真家はなぜその焦点距離を選ぶのか？｜Alex Webbと35mmの距離 https://youtu.be/vms2NEXZQeQ?si=TIvvoEp_JZ7EDo-O
AI가 삼킨 신입사원의 자리, 전 세계 청년 노동시장 ‘비상’
AI가 신입 수준의 화이트칼라 업무를 빠르게 대체하면서, 기존 숙련 노동자보다 청년층의 고용 문턱이 높아지고 커리어 경로가 붕괴되는 고용 정체 현상이 심화되고 있다.
AI가 삼킨 신입사원의 자리, 전 세계 청년 노동시장 ...
Don't create .gitkeep files, use .gitignore instead (2023)
Link: https://adamj.eu/tech/2023/09/18/git-dont-create-gitkeep/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47094877
Git: Don’t create .gitkeep files, use .gitignore instead - Adam Johnson
Git only tracks files, not directories. It will only create a directory if it contains a tracked file. But sometimes you need to “track” a directory, to ensure it exists for fresh clones of a repository. For example, you might need an output directory called build.
adamj.eu
Link author: 
Adam Johnson 
@adamchainz@fosstodon.org
In the old blogging software I created back in the 1990s, I had a handful of posts types
There was a type of rich-text oriented post that had a title. (Article)
And, there way another type of rich-text oriented post that did not have a title. (Note)
(There were also other types of posts, but they aren't relevant here)
These 2 types of posts were rendered / displayed differently
I.e., my 1990s software already had this distinction
@reiver@reiver ⊼ (Charles) there's a page on this in the primer:
https://www.w3.org/wiki/Activity_Streams/Primer/Article_and_Note
But it's not always clear.
One thing that might distinguish is presentation.
I expect an Article to appear on its own page. References to an Article in a stream or tree layout might just include title and summary, with a link to a UI to show the full text.
But lots of Note objects can fit in a stream or tree presentation.
26-012 🐦🔥
✧✦Catherine✦✧
Sarah Rainsberger
🕊️ 
Stefano Marinelli
ビンマロ（コミッション受付中） 
Misty
Paolo Melchiorre
Inside Fediverse
wakest ⁂
＠3/23(日)
東京オフ主催 
Tom Casavant
