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How does a screen work? Published: 2025-07-13 | Origin: Hacker News The article by Dan Hollick discusses the evolution of digital displays in computing, highlighting their crucial yet often overlooked role. It traces the technology from early electron guns to modern tiny electric crystals, emphasizing the significant advancements and innovations over the years that have transformed how we interact with computers. The author reinforces the idea that while these displays may not always receive the recognition they deserve, they are central to the functionality and user experience in computing. |
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Happy 20th Birthday Django Published: 2025-07-13 | Origin: Hacker News Django recently celebrated its 20th birthday, marking the first commit to its public repository on July 13, 2005. To commemorate this milestone, the Django community has launched a dedicated website that showcases various online and local events planned through 2025. Additionally, they aim to raise support for the project through donations, setting a goal of 200 new donors contributing $20 or more within 20 days, alongside at least 20 monthly donors. The overall fundraising target for 2025 |
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Scalability Published: 2025-07-13 | Origin: /r/programming Scalability is the capability of a system to handle increased demand—such as user traffic or data growth—while maintaining performance, reliability, and efficiency. A scalable system can adapt to changes without needing significant re-architecture or downtime, much like a well-planned city can accommodate population increases through expanded infrastructure. This content outlines various aspects of scalability, including: 1. **Definition and Importance**: Understanding scalability in modern system design. 2. **Core Techniques**: Key strategies for scalability, such |
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AI slows down some experienced software developers, study finds Published: 2025-07-13 | Origin: /r/programming Failed to fetch content - HTTP Status - 401 |
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Stop memoizing Hash lookups in Ruby Published: 2025-07-13 | Origin: /r/ruby The content discusses the use of memoization in Ruby, particularly regarding hash lookups. While memoization can optimize slow operations by storing results in instance variables, its application might not be necessary for simple hash lookups, as Ruby hashes are already well optimized. The author benchmarks a Setting class with both a standard method and a memoized version. The results show a slight speed improvement (1.31x faster) for existing keys, but a negligible performance gain (less than 20 nanoseconds) unless |
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TUI for Alias Management with Command Usage Tracking and Smart alias suggestions Published: 2025-07-13 | Origin: /r/programming The content discusses a tool called "Alman," which is a command-line interface (CLI) and text user interface (TUI) designed for managing shell aliases and enhancing command-line efficiency. It utilizes intelligent suggestions based on a user's command history and helps organize and manage aliases across different shell environments. Users are cautioned to configure their shells after installation by adding a specific configuration line to their shell config file (like .bashrc, .zshrc, or config.fish) for proper functionality. |
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Nuclear Explosion for Carbon Sequestration Published: 2025-07-13 | Origin: Hacker News arXivLabs is a platform for collaborators to create and share new features for the arXiv website, emphasizing values like openness, community, excellence, and user privacy. The initiative is open to both individuals and organizations that align with these values. Users are encouraged to propose projects that benefit the arXiv community. Additionally, users can receive operational status updates via email or Slack. |
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Edward Burtynsky's monumental chronicle of the human impact on the planet Published: 2025-07-13 | Origin: Hacker News Edward Burtynsky, born in Ontario, Canada, in 1955, has documented the dramatic transformation of the Earth due to a tripling population and tenfold economic growth, a phenomenon referred to as the “great acceleration.” His retrospective at the International Center of Photography showcases his evolution as a visual chronicler of this era, utilizing advanced photography techniques, including drones, to capture the changing landscapes influenced by human activity. His works, such as “Mines #23,” “Quarry # |
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Rails Blue-Green Deployments: How Database Migrations Work in Production Published: 2025-07-13 | Origin: /r/ruby Running database migrations during a blue-green deployment is crucial for achieving zero downtime, with the database acting as a key coordination point. In a production scenario, migrations are executed prior to deploying new application code, ensuring database schema compatibility with both the old and new versions. Using AWS ECS and CodeDeploy, migrations run as isolated, one-off tasks that require proper resource allocation due to their resource-intensive nature. Managing statement timeouts is vital, particularly in PostgreSQL, where long-running migration operations may exceed default time |
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Hacking Coroutines into C Published: 2025-07-12 | Origin: /r/programming The author reflects on their experience developing embedded software dominated by state machines, which made understanding and maintaining the code challenging due to its non-linear flow. They question whether there is a clearer way to express control flow, especially since the project couldn't use an RTOS, limiting conventional concurrency management. Inspired by their familiarity with coroutines in languages like Python and JavaScript, they propose using a coroutine pattern to achieve concurrency without the need for an operating system. They introduce a toy example involving an LED blinker that |
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A http parser single-header library written in C89 which is 50 lines total. Published: 2025-07-12 | Origin: /r/programming httplite is an ultra-lightweight, single-header HTTP/1.1 parser written in pure C, designed for fast performance with zero allocation and zero copying. It utilizes only pointer arithmetic and consists of exactly 50 lines of code. The parser can efficiently handle HTTP request and response lines, as well as headers, directly from an input buffer. Key functions include `http_parse_message`, which initializes message parsing, and `http_next_header`, which iterates through headers. The parser is released under |
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Ring programming language Version 1.23 Has Been Released! Published: 2025-07-12 | Origin: /r/programming Ring is a versatile, general-purpose programming language that supports multiple paradigms, including imperative, procedural, object-oriented, functional, and declarative programming. It is portable across various platforms, such as MS-DOS, Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, and WebAssembly, allowing the creation of a wide range of applications, including console, GUI, web, games, and mobile apps. Ring aims for simplicity, flexibility, and efficiency, operating as a Free-Open Source project under the MIT |
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Working through 'Writing A C Compiler' Published: 2025-07-12 | Origin: /r/programming An experienced programmer shares their journey of creating a C compiler for the Hack processor, inspired by the nand2tetris book. After several unsuccessful attempts, they discovered the book "Writing a C Compiler" by No Starch Press, which they find effective as it allows readers to develop a working compiler by the end of the first chapter. Subsequent chapters build on this foundation, adding features like unary operators. Unlike other compiler resources, this book focuses on a real programming language. The author appreciates the provided |
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Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update Published: 2025-07-12 | Origin: Hacker News Google Chrome is transitioning from Manifest Version 2 (MV2) to Manifest Version 3 (MV3), which involves changes that negatively affect adblockers by removing the webRequestBlocking permission that allows extensions to dynamically block requests based on content. This shift raises concerns since Google generates significant revenue from ads. In 2023, a bug was discovered that enabled webRequestBlocking to function in MV3, which the author humorously refers to as their funniest find. The bug relates to the way Chrome |
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How AI is actually making programmers more essential Published: 2025-07-12 | Origin: /r/programming The discussion of intelligence versus wisdom has gained new relevance with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in the context of software development. As professional knowledge becomes cheaper, the ability to apply this knowledge effectively is increasingly valuable. The focus is shifting from simply producing more code to understanding and implementing strategic goals within complex systems. Despite concerns that AI could replace software developers, the article argues that developers will remain essential due to their unique skills in navigating ideas, goals, and implementation. While AI can generate code, |
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Kimi k2 largest open source SOTA model? Published: 2025-07-12 | Origin: Hacker News Kimi K2 is a large language model developed by the Moonshot AI team, featuring a state-of-the-art mixture-of-experts architecture with 32 billion active parameters out of a total of 1 trillion. It is optimized for knowledge, reasoning, and coding tasks using the Muon optimizer. Kimi K2's API is accessible through https://platform.moonshot.ai, compatible with OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, with adjustments for temperature settings for better integration. Model checkpoints are available in |
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A closer look at the Model Context Protocol Published: 2025-07-12 | Origin: /r/programming The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has gained popularity due to its simplicity, functioning like other remote procedure call (RPC) protocols that enable external function calls across different processes or machines. Unlike previous RPC methods such as COM and JavaRMI, MCP is built on JSON-RPC, adding extensions tailored for large language model (LLM) capabilities. An MCP exchange begins with the client sending an initialization request to the server, specifying the MCP version and client capabilities. The server acknowledges this by indicating the |
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Github actions to support trunk based development with non-blocking reviews Published: 2025-07-12 | Origin: /r/programming The content discusses the implementation of GitHub actions designed to facilitate trunk-based development with non-blocking code reviews. It emphasizes the importance of user feedback and mentions the migration of a current solution to a dedicated repository. This repository will support asynchronous code reviews and requires the creation of specific labels or authorization through an app. Current features are in use within an organizational repository, and future improvements and enhancements are planned for the system. |
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Lost Chapter of Automate the Boring Stuff: Audio, Video, and Webcams in Python Published: 2025-07-12 | Origin: Hacker News Al Sweigart announced the release of the third edition of "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python," which is available for purchase or free online. This edition includes updated content and new chapters, though one chapter titled "Working with Audio, Video, and Webcams" was not included in the final version. Sweigart shares a 26-page rough draft of this chapter on his blog, teaching readers how to use Python to record and play multimedia content. The chapter addresses the growing trend of |
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Wu's Algorithm for anti-aliased line drawing Published: 2025-07-12 | Origin: /r/programming The chapter discusses the construction of a Physically Based Renderer from Scratch without relying on libraries, focusing specifically on Wu's line-drawing algorithm for anti-aliasing. It describes aliasing as the staircasing effect in digitized curves and outlines how anti-aliasing techniques aim to eliminate this issue. Prior to Wu's work in 1991, Bresenham’s line-drawing algorithm was popular but lacked anti-aliasing and integer handling. Wu introduced a faster anti-aliasing scheme |