news
Programming Leftovers
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[Repeat] Daniel Stenberg ☛ Open Source security in spite of AI
The title of my ending keynote at FOSDEM February 1, 2026.
As the last talk of the conference, at 17:00 on the Sunday lots of people had already left, and presumably a lot of the remaining people were quite tired and ready to call it a day.
Still, the 1500 seats in Janson got occupied and there was even a group of more people outside wanting to get in that had to be refused entry.
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Jim Nielsen ☛ Saying “No” In an Age of Abundance
It’s never been a good idea to ship everything you think of. Every addition accretes complexity and comes with a cognitive cost.
Maybe we need to reframe the concept of scarcity from us, the makers of software, to them, the users of software. Their resources are what matter most: [...]
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Eric Bailey ☛ You probably shouldn’t be annotating focus order
Yes, many accessibility annotation kits do come with the ability to specify focus order. And yes, being able to place focus on the interactive parts of your website or web app is an important thing.
However, interactive elements allow you to place focus on them without needing to do anything else. This includes buttons, links, form fields, checkboxes and radio buttons, expand/collapse toggles, tab panels, etc.
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Derek Kędziora ☛ Unintended values
If I go into a bookshop or library, there’s no urgency. I can leisurely look around, read what I want, and go on. Apps with notifications and counters operate on a completely different principle.
And this is where design comes in. I’d happily pay for better software that has had more thoughtful design, but it’s hard to find. Everything is nagging me, shouting about some minor updates, prodding me to use it not how I want to use it.
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Open Collective ☛ Game of Trees Hub's web interface is live. And we need more subscribers!
Thank you all for the continued support since we started out in June 2024.
Support for gotwebd is now live in production. With this, repositories can be served from our hosting service to the web. Serving static web sites directly from repositories is also possible. See https://gameoftrees.org/gotsys.conf.5.html#WEB_SERVER_CONFIGURATION for how this can be configured.
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R-Script
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Rlang ☛ Announcing New Statistical Software Peer Review Editors: Natalia da Silva and Andrew Heiss
At rOpenSci we’re continually grateful for the support and engagement of our community who help make our open-source ecosystem stronger, more inclusive, and more collaborative. The software peer review program is one of the best examples of this: bringing together people from diverse expertise and backgrounds to improve the quality, reproducibility, and usability of scientific software across the R ecosystem.
Today we’re excited to welcome Natalia da Silva and Andrew Heiss as new editors for our Statistical Software Peer Review team. Their expertise and dedication will help grow and sustain this important program, ensuring that statistical software reviews maintain high standards and continue to improve in quality and impact.
Meet our new editors!
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Python
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Rui Carmo ☛ Python
Python is one of my favorite programming languages due to its terseness and amazing flexibility, and after decades using it I find it quite amusing that it is now the language of choice for data science and machine learning.
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Philip Zucker ☛ Calling Lean Functions As Python Functions
Maybe especially as a programming language. Got lots of fun doodads, cool compiler to fast code, metaprogramming, and then some day maybe you can prove something if you feel like it as a treat.
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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University of Toronto ☛ I prefer to pass secrets between programs through standard input
There are a variety of ways to pass secrets from one program to another on Unix, and many of them may expose your secrets under some circumstances. A secret passed on the command line is visible in process listings; a secret passed in the environment can be found in the process's environment (which can usually be inspected by outside parties). When I've had to deal with this in administrative programs in our environment, I have reached for an old Unix standby: pass the secret between programs through file descriptors, specifically standard input and standard output. This can even be used and done in shell scripts. However, there are obviously some cautions, both in general and in shell scripts.
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