What are your Favorite Lobste.rs Comments?
156 points by veqq
156 points by veqq
The forum has been around for a long time and I occasionally find old gems, I wonder what great insights etc. I've missed from the past.
anytime you're paying people to churn out boilerplate instead of letting the computer do it for you, you've significantly misunderstood what computers are actually good for.
"always using the default configuration is like living in a motel your whole life"
—@hydrargyrum (link)
showing up to the money party late is worse than showing up early in the wrong clothes.
I had the misfortune of having to run Windows when I worked there and these days Windows is basically an electronic billboard that makes a half-arsed attempt to run applications as a sideline.
Q —How was God able to create the world in only six days?
A —No installed base.
—@rikthevik (link)
There's a great saying by chess grandmaster Morphy: "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."
SQL: Normalize until it hurts, denormalize until it works.
Regular code: Pure until it hurts, impure until it works.
people who come from the world of agentic coding have a certain digital smell that is not obvious to them but is obvious to those who abstain. It's like when a smoker walks into the room, everybody who doesn't smoke instantly knows it.
I'm not telling you not to smoke, but I am telling you not to smoke in my house.
always using the default configuration is like living in a motel your whole life
Partial ouch. But I gravitated to this mode with some things and could not be more happier for it. The excitement/productive feeling/chaos has been taken over by personal things. Backup and restoreb of a system seemed to be easier the closer I am to defaults.
I think the key is moderation. A tiny bit of configuration is very useful to customize software. But, as with all code, it's a liability as it needs to be maintained and it's fragile to updates.
Fragility is a choice. I have some cursed stuff in my Vim and my StumpWM configuration, and neither is fragile on updates. On the flip side, not so few software products abruptly abandon what was their entire differentiating feature in the default setup.
I think i saw that on reddit long ago and it just pops in my mind every time i open medium link lol
So many people in this thread have discovered the secret to not needing Cloudflare: don’t host interesting or important content.
These are somewhat recent, but I'd like to show appreciation for @Internet_Janitor's eloquent criticism of LLMs:
On
This comment by @munificent on the human cost of the beloved resource Crafting Interpeters has stuck with me since I read it.
Papers are a thing you do to communicate science, not a thing that you are evaluated on. -@david_chisnall
I would really love to see papers become just a thing you do to communicate science, not a thing that you are evaluated on.
full quote (link)
@mtset, on being polite:
Human communication is filled with redundancy; English especially. We do not communicate using minimal ASTs because the signal-to-noise ratio in all of our communication channels is very poor. Adding some additional information requires adding many additional words. When the post suggests "Hmm, I haven’t had anyone mess with prices today. What products are involved? I’ll check it out", that's communicating more than "The prices have changed?". It communicates, "I am surprised to hear this and doubt it's related to anything I have control over. Give me some more information so I can work on it - but it's not a bother and I'm not trying to get rid of you, which would be a reasonable reading of that question."
-link
this is perhaps not the most charitable or constructive comment to be a personal favorite but for whatever reason i have found it incredibly refreshing to reflect on @aphyr calling @friendlysock out for his behavior half a decade before sock was eventually banned from this site.
I've been reading your comments for something like seven years now and I remain consistently disheartened. Engaging with you is the missing stair of this community, and I'm not going to follow up on this thread, but I want you to know that your oh-so-civil, "trying to do better", "just raising questions", "why won't you be rational", socially regressive trolling is a big part of why I don't spend more time here, and why I caution people who ask me for invites to lobste.rs.
i guess the state of the tech industry, and the communities like this one that are inescapably linked to its trends, has really gotten me down lately and it’s been a welcome reminder that there are good people in our field willing to point out when someone with clout is engaging in the most thinly veiled attacks on our social infrastructure despite the tendency of tech-adjacent social media platforms to shout down these complaints as being irrelevant or off-topic.
From AWS Middle East Central Zone (UAE) down, apparently struck in war:
ianloic: ProTip: avoid hosting based in military dictatorships.
puffnfresh: But us-east-1 is mandatory for some services/functionality.
This is a nice description of the low level thing, but on the high level, I think there's value in stopping of thinking of utf-8 as describing "characters", but rather to think of it in terms of commands for some kind of printing virtual machine. This isn't new to unicode: ascii also works this way.
Consider the backspace "character". This is a code point that is encoded by code units which are represented as octets. But what is it really? Well, I'd say it is a command to the printing machine to go back a space.
When you get into the more complicated grapheme clusters, this mental model continues to work: what's the meaning of something like the gender or skin tone markers in emojis? They're just commands to the printer to change what it is doing. They're the adjectives in the printer command sentence.
Thinking of strings like this also helps to explain why you might not be able to easily jump around them or reverse them and so on - and again, it is nothing new to unicode!
This is a bit personal, but a couple of years ago there was this comment: https://lobste.rs/s/lxbh8i/github_security_update_revoking_weakly#c_tcngi7
In the context of a vulnerability in a javascript RSA library generating weak private keys, user jornane commented: "There is no haveibeenpwned for public keys as far as I know"
Well, my reaction to that was: sounds like a good idea, I should build it. Which I did: https://badkeys.info/
That's a cool project, and one I've thought off-and-on about building for a while. Nice work!
You've got some new keys to add:
https://blog.trailofbits.com/2026/06/12/factoring-short-sleeve-rsa-keys-with-polynomials/
The discovery of those Short Sleeve or polynomial RSA keys was a collaboration between Keegan Ryan and myself, they're already detected in the latest version of badkeys: https://badkeys.info/docs/rsapoly.html
Very nice. (And thanks for your work on that. It was a new wrinkle that I wasn't expecting in 2026.) I didn't spot it from the name in the bullet list. I was looking for "short sleeve" specifically.
My favorite Secret Fourth Option to the "Free as in beer /speech / puppy" trifecta is "free as in mattress": look, it's all yours if you really want it, but I'd prefer a little more assurance of where it came from before I sleep on it.
I really appreciated this comment about the Jevons' Paradox:
Old CRT screens were horribly inefficient - they were large, clunky and absolutely guzzled power. Modern LCDs and OLEDs are slim, flat and use much less power, so that seems great ... except we're now using powered screens in a lot of contexts that would be unthinkable in the CRT era.