Hacker News: beej71

New comment by beej71 in "Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages"

beej71 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:29:04 +0000

The wrapper will give you a nice diff of what changed. You can do that by hand, too, though.

New comment by beej71 in "Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages"

beej71 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:26:16 +0000

There are 15k orphaned packages on AUR. I just adopted 3 rarely-updated ones this morning (sorting by most popular) and got them built. If you're using an orphaned package, consider adopting it so the baddies can't.

New comment by beej71 in "Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages"

beej71 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:24:12 +0000

This makes me want to adopt more packages. Lots of the orphans barely need updating.

New comment by beej71 in "Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages"

beej71 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:17:53 +0000

I hear you, but consider xz. I'm a professional with decades of experience and I'd be lying if I said I'd have caught that. How long would an audit have taken, realistically? You're not wrong, but I don't think the GP is, either.

New comment by beej71 in "Arch Linux Now Believes Malware Incident Under Control: More Than 1,500 Packages"

beej71 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:07:16 +0000

There's some big stuff in AUR like the binary VS Code and Chrome, fwiw.

New comment by beej71 in "A dumpster arrived behind my university's library"

beej71 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:34:35 +0000

Also, when I (GenX) open my ereader on my phone, I read it just like anything else. And I read paper books, on two e-readers, my phone, and my computer screen.

If it's some online article, though, I definitely skim. And I'd skim if it were printed, too.

New comment by beej71 in "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort"

beej71 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 02:40:36 +0000

FMFL. I'm going to build a paper-based social network where non-handwriting is prohibited. Like in the 70s.

New comment by beej71 in "Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension"

beej71 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:56:29 +0000

I feel for people who have this issue--wish I could help you solve it, but I can't repro. My 10-year-old laptop with 16 GB runs it great with low memory usage.

New comment by beej71 in "Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension"

beej71 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:52:59 +0000

Doesn't happen in my case, either. Pixel 9a, Android 16.

New comment by beej71 in "Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension"

beej71 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:49:35 +0000

I don't know what uBO on FF is doing, but it seems like ages since I've been blocked for using it. Maybe I've just gotten lucky with the sites I visit.

New comment by beej71 in "The Cypherpunk Library"

beej71 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 01:16:09 +0000

While I don't claim to follow the whole thing, it does have a section titled "Liberating democratic civilization from the State", which certainly smells cypherpunky.

New comment by beej71 in "New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker"

beej71 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 04:30:54 +0000

Prevailing wisdom is that we need to increase supply.

New comment by beej71 in "New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker"

beej71 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 01:02:52 +0000

We're building like mad in our town. Have been for years. Thousands and thousands of new units. Prices ain't budging. It's odd.

New comment by beej71 in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

beej71 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 03:50:28 +0000

Admittedly, I went to school when such classes cost more like $250 in today's dollars.

New comment by beej71 in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

beej71 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 03:48:23 +0000

> At some point, execution speed starts to matter more than the elegance of the code.

Also: at some point the elegance of the code starts to matter more than execution speed. :)

New comment by beej71 in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

beej71 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 03:46:11 +0000

This is a lot of it for me. "All users care about is that they can drive a car across the bridge. They don't care if an AI built it."

I want a solid, proud, well-engineered bridge, goddammit!

New comment by beej71 in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

beej71 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 03:43:37 +0000

> They care that the product works

This reminds me of Anthropic's post where they say they ship 8x as much code as they used to.

And I stopped to consider how many times I've used an app and thought, "You know what this needs? More code!"

New comment by beej71 in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

beej71 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:10:40 +0000

> something has gone horribly wrong with primary sources of education and lived experience if someone reaches the university level before being prepared for the world

I think the GP's idea is that university is part of getting prepared for the world. And for many students, university is the final culmination of their preparation.

New comment by beej71 in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

beej71 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:59:42 +0000

> Undergrad still has a lot of required courses that aren't directly related to your major, and it can be draining.

This is why I LOVED getting my MS. Just computer science all the time! Heaven! None of those pesky, worthless general ed classes!

I was just a dumb college kid. I'm convinced I'd have done better in life overall if I'd taken those GE courses seriously and made the effort to be a more well-rounded individual. How many chances do you get where your whole job is just learning shit? Youth is wasted on the young, as they say.

New comment by beej71 in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

beej71 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:55:40 +0000

After 20 industry years, I've been teaching CS for the last 7. I sincerely hope that I figure it out before I retire. :) Doing this job effectively is more challenging than anything I've done in my career. I've read a lot about teaching, and it's amazing how much of it doesn't resonate for me. What has been the absolute best is sitting in on other instructors' classes and learning from them. And being completely flexible in how I teach--there really is no single solution to everything. "Be like water".

As for the students who don't apply themselves, I know exactly who you are talking about, of course. And often they're among the most capable people in the class. There's also no single thing that works here. But I've had some success with asking them point-blank, "What's your plan for passing this class?" But that doesn't work with everyone.