News Nug
Failure Mechanisms in Democratic Regimes – An Army's Role

Published: 2025-05-25 | Origin: Hacker News

The content discusses the evolution of American perspectives on democracy, tracing its roots from the founding of the United States, which sought to establish a republic free from monarchial rule, to the 20th Century, where democracy began to symbolize the American ideal. While the Founders had concerns about the dangers of pure democracy and favored a system of governance led by enlightened delegates, later Americans came to embrace democracy more wholeheartedly, particularly in the context of combating fascism and communism. This shift was exemplified by

Redis bets big on an open source return

Published: 2025-05-24 | Origin: /r/programming

Redis has returned to its open source roots with the launch of Redis 8 under the AGPLv3 license, a move paralleling Elastic's licensing shift in August 2024. This change reflects a complex licensing journey for both companies, which may have never intended to abandon open source. According to Redis CEO Rowan Trollope, the licensing adjustment has leveled the playing field, allowing Redis to compete on product quality against AWS and Google, who now maintain their own forks of Redis. With a focus

Why old games never die, but new ones do

Published: 2025-05-24 | Origin: Hacker News

Pawlicker's blog discusses the current state of video games, criticizing modern multiplayer titles for being disposable and often reliant on microtransactions. Many games either become abandoned with servers shut down or endlessly updated as “live service” games, prioritizing profit over the player experience. This has led to campaigns, especially in the EU, urging developers to stop killing games when they take down servers, rendering them unplayable. In contrast, older games, like Epic Games’ Unreal Tournament, have shown longevity despite

Reinvent the Wheel

Published: 2025-05-24 | Origin: Hacker News

The author argues against the common advice to not "reinvent the wheel," stating that this notion, often well-intentioned, can stifle curiosity and exploration. They emphasize the importance of understanding concepts by recreating tools or technologies, likening this process to how wheels have evolved over time. By urging readers to engage in building their own versions of complex systems—such as protocols or libraries—the author highlights the educational value and deeper comprehension that comes from hands-on experience. They acknowledge that while such endeavors

Tachy0n: The Last 0day Jailbreak

Published: 2025-05-24 | Origin: Hacker News

In a blog post dated May 23, 2025, the author reflects on their absence and discusses the "tachy0n" exploit, which was a significant zero-day jailbreak for iOS 13.0 to 13.5. Released in unc0ver v5.0.0 exactly five years prior, it was notable for being a zero-day affective the latest iOS version, prompting Apple to quickly patch the vulnerability. The author highlights that while the exploit was released as

A response to "Programmers Are Users": stopping the enshittification

Published: 2025-05-24 | Origin: /r/programming

The article discusses the trade-offs that come with prioritizing developer experience (DX) over application performance, particularly in the context of using frameworks like React Native. The author, who primarily works with "full stack TypeScript," highlights how React Native, while allowing web developers to build mobile apps more efficiently and with a single codebase, comes with significant performance drawbacks. These include larger binary sizes and the need for apps to run within a JavaScript runtime rather than utilizing the more efficient native environments like Swift and

A new custom font file format called Grayscale Raster Font (.grf) for hobbyist operating systems.

Published: 2025-05-24 | Origin: /r/programming

The Grayscale Raster Font (GRF) is a simplified font file format aimed at hobbyist operating system developers who want better font rendering without the complexity of modern formats like TrueType (.ttf). The GRF format addresses the limitations of bitmap fonts by providing aliasing, kerning, and alignment while storing raw pixel data in an 8-bit grayscale format. This allows for improved visual quality over traditional bitmap fonts, which are often pixelated and lack features like antialiasing. The GR

You Can Choose Tools That Make You Happy

Published: 2025-05-24 | Origin: /r/programming

The author critiques blog posts on Hacker News and Lobsters that argue why obscure technologies are superior to popular ones. They suggest that such arguments are often based on emotional and identity-driven reasons rather than purely rational technical assessments. People may prefer obscure tools to align with a certain aesthetic or to feel a connection to tech history, such as using certain outdated languages for nostalgia. The author believes that many who champion these obscure technologies tend to downplay their downsides and invent exaggerated benefits, while critiquing popular tools

ELI5: CAP Theorem in System Design

Published: 2025-05-24 | Origin: /r/programming

The CAP Theorem explains the trade-offs in distributed systems regarding three properties: Consistency (C), Availability (A), and Partition tolerance (P). Consistency means all users see the same data, Availability ensures users can always access data, and Partition tolerance allows the system to function despite network issues. The theorem states that, when faced with network partitions, you must choose between maintaining consistency or availability; you can't have both during such faults. In non-distributed systems, consistency and availability can coexist,

Brainfuck to RISC-V JIT compiler written in Zig

Published: 2025-05-24 | Origin: /r/programming

The content discusses Brainiac, an interactive Brainfuck compiler and interpreter. It emphasizes the significance of user feedback and includes links to documentation for available qualifiers. Brainiac is a user-friendly tool that provides an optimizing interpreter and native code compiler for architectures like riscv64 and x86_64. It also features a profiler and a transpiler supporting C and Zig. Brainfuck, the minimalist programming language Brainiac works with, consists of only eight commands and is notable for its Turing-completeness,

Unlocking Ractors: class instance variables

Published: 2025-05-24 | Origin: /r/ruby

In a recent post discussing Ruby's ractors, the author expresses skepticism about running entire applications within ractors but acknowledges their potential benefits for offloading CPU-bound tasks and improving parallel algorithms. However, numerous known bugs and the presence of a global lock in the Ruby VM hinder ractor performance, often making them slower than single-threaded execution. The author highlights a benchmark that demonstrates this issue: when using multiple ractors to read class instance variables, the expected performance improvement doesn't materialize. Instead of being

Good Writing

Published: 2025-05-24 | Origin: Hacker News

Of course! Please provide the content you'd like me to summarize.

I used o3 to find a remote zeroday in the Linux SMB implementation

Published: 2025-05-24 | Origin: Hacker News

In this post, the author discusses discovering a zero-day vulnerability in the Linux kernel using OpenAI's o3 model, achieved solely through the o3 API without any additional tools or frameworks. The author was auditing ksmbd, a Linux kernel server for SMB3 protocol file sharing, and utilized o3 to benchmark its capabilities against bugs found in ksmbd. The vulnerability identified is CVE-2025-37899, a use-after-free issue related to the SMB 'logoff' command

A First Successful Factorization of RSA-2048 Integer by D-Wave Quantum Computer

Published: 2025-05-24 | Origin: /r/programming

The content discusses a significant advancement in attacking RSA encryption through quantum computing. Researchers have utilized quantum annealing (QA) to transform the integer factorization problem, which is foundational to the RSA algorithm, into a combinatorial optimization problem. This approach was applied using a D-Wave quantum computer to successfully factor RSA-2048, a notable achievement as it marks the first time RSA-2048 has been factored through quantum methods. The study highlights the advantages of QA's quantum tunneling capability in solving

How to Make a Living as a Writer

Published: 2025-05-24 | Origin: Hacker News

The piece discusses the author's multifaceted freelance career, focusing on their work in "Horse News." Each weekday, they wake up early to curate a newsletter highlighting the latest American horse racing news from various sources. The author finds humor in the often bizarre headlines they come across and discusses the importance of their role, particularly in relation to recent laws aimed at improving safety in horse racing, such as the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act. The author's job is complex and cannot be easily summarized, leading to lengthy

Show HN: HNRelevant – Add a "related" section to Hacker News

Published: 2025-05-24 | Origin: Hacker News

The content details a browser extension designed to enhance Hacker News by adding a "Related Submissions" section, which helps users discover relevant discussions. The extension utilizes the HN Algolia search API and employs the submission title for initial queries. It is available under the MIT License. The text also emphasizes the importance of user feedback and directs users to documentation for additional qualifiers. Additionally, there are several error messages indicating loading issues.

The GCC compiler backend can now fully bootstrap the Rust compiler

Published: 2025-05-24 | Origin: /r/programming

Failed to fetch content - HTTP Status - 403

Visual Studio Code: Text Buffer Reimplementation (2018)

Published: 2025-05-24 | Origin: /r/programming

The blog post by Peng Lyu discusses the performance improvements introduced in Visual Studio Code 1.21, particularly focusing on the new text buffer implementation that enhances speed and reduces memory usage. The development team explored several options, including the possibility of a C++ implementation, but ultimately decided against it due to the high costs of converting between custom native strings and V8’s strings, which negated expected performance gains. Instead, they opted to enhance the existing JavaScript/TypeScript code by utilizing better-s

Modification of acetaminophen to reduce liver toxicity and enhance drug efficacy

Published: 2025-05-24 | Origin: Hacker News

Chloe Yehwon Lee, a 17-year-old student at Plano East Senior High School in Texas, researched ways to reduce the toxicity of acetaminophen (Tylenol) while maintaining its pain-relieving effects for her Regeneron Science Talent Search project. Acetaminophen is widely used but is also the leading cause of acute liver failure in the U.S. Chloe investigated modifications to the molecule's benzene ring and developed computer models to test these changes. She discovered and synthesized a modified

Root for your friends

Published: 2025-05-23 | Origin: Hacker News

The post discusses the importance and benefits of supporting friends, termed as "hypemen" or "hype friends," and how this positivity can lead to mutual success—a concept described as a "friend flywheel." This involves creating a positive feedback loop where encouragement and sharing of information help both parties grow and succeed. The writer emphasizes that recognizing and fostering relationships with friends who celebrate your achievements is crucial, as life is not a zero-sum game but rather one where collective upliftment benefits everyone involved. Although