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GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder

Published: 2025-12-29 | Origin: Hacker News

The GOG Team announced that Michał Kiciński, co-founder of CD PROJEKT and GOG, has acquired GOG from CD PROJEKT. GOG aims to ensure that classic games remain accessible for players, emphasizing the importance of ownership and independence in an industry increasingly dominated by DRM and closed ecosystems. The platform's commitment to being DRM-free will be strengthened, allowing users to access and enjoy their libraries fully. GOG will continue its partnership with CD PROJEKT, maintaining the

What does the software engineering job market look like heading into 2026?

Published: 2025-12-29 | Origin: /r/programming

The article from Final Round AI discusses the current landscape of the software engineering job market and its projected state in 2026. Once considered a secure career, software engineering has become increasingly vulnerable to layoffs, exacerbated by the rise of AI technologies capable of coding. The article highlights a significant hiring surge in mid-2022 attributed to a push for digital transformation across industries, where companies rapidly moved online due to the pandemic. This surge, driven by competitive pressure and low interest rates, led to over

The Mythical Man-Month at 50

Published: 2025-12-29 | Origin: /r/programming

Fred Brooks's landmark book, *The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering*, published in 1975, has had a profound impact on the field of software development. Fifty years later, a reflection on its enduring ideas and relevance indicates that while many concepts remain applicable, the challenge of managing complexity in software projects still resonates. Brooks uses the metaphor of great beasts struggling in tar pits to illustrate the multifaceted difficulties encountered in large-scale software development. He argues that these challenges are not isolated

How Nx "pulled the rug" on us, a potential solution and lessons learned

Published: 2025-12-29 | Origin: /r/programming

Nx has deprecated custom task runners, prompting controversy among users who relied on these for remote caching without paying for Nx Cloud's additional features. In response, one user developed "portable-nx-cache," a Go binary that offers remote caching via CI's filesystem cache, which is open-sourced under MIT. Their organization, which has used Nx effectively for over five years, finds the new Nx Powerpack solution impractical due to procurement hurdles. Following community complaints, Nx released an OpenAPI specification to allow users

Tor staying ahead of censors in 2025

Published: 2025-12-29 | Origin: Hacker News

In a blog post from December 3, 2025, authors Meskio and Shelikhoo discuss the challenges faced by Tor's anti-censorship tools amidst significant internet censorship events, particularly in Iran during the June conflict with Israel. The Iranian government's intensified censorship efforts included temporary internet blackouts aimed at limiting communication and consolidating political power. Tor's anti-censorship team, utilizing a network of monitoring locations within Iran, adapted their strategies by implementing an automated testing tool to optimize domain-front

John Simpson: 'I've reported on 40 wars but I've never seen a year like 2025'

Published: 2025-12-29 | Origin: Hacker News

The article describes the troubling state of global conflicts in 2025, highlighting the potential for escalation into a world war, particularly due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, as remarked by President Volodymyr Zelensky. The author, a seasoned war correspondent, expresses concern over Russia's aggressive actions, including threats to undersea communication cables and cyberattacks on Western nations, as well as state-sponsored violence against dissidents. This year has seen significant conflicts, notably the war in Ukraine, which has

Why I Think Valve's Retiring the Steam Deck LCD

Published: 2025-12-29 | Origin: Hacker News

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Demystifying DVDs

Published: 2025-12-29 | Origin: Hacker News

Hidden Palace and Last Minute Continue have released a collection of video game prototypes in celebration of the holiday season. Featured in the collection are several prototypes of "Shadow the Hedgehog," including versions from May and September 2005, along with notable prototypes from other games such as "Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg," "Sega Classics Collection," and various entries in the "Sonic" series. The announcement encourages discussion on a Discord server and invites viewers to watch a Twitch stream of the release event

You can make up HTML tags

Published: 2025-12-29 | Origin: Hacker News

The content discusses the advantages of using custom HTML tags with descriptive names instead of generic tags like `<div>` or `<span>`. It highlights that browsers treat unrecognized tags as generic elements, which is a standardized behavior. Including hyphens in tag names ensures they won't conflict with future HTML versions. Using meaningful tags enhances readability and simplifies manipulation of the document structure compared to relying solely on class names.

Every Test Is a Trade-Off

Published: 2025-12-28 | Origin: /r/programming

The author reflects on the complexities of software testing, noting that while testing is effective at identifying bugs, it is inadequate for proving their absence, as expressed by Edsger W. Dijkstra. With nearly two decades of experience in software development, the author aims to clarify their thoughts on testing methodologies, acknowledging that opinions on the subject can be polarizing and dogmatic. The author observes the common scenario of a codebase that, over time, accumulates a large test suite that can create an

As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

Published: 2025-12-28 | Origin: Hacker News

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What an unprocessed photo looks like

Published: 2025-12-28 | Origin: Hacker News

The author describes the process of capturing and processing a Christmas tree image with a camera sensor. Initially, the image appears gray due to limited sensor data range, so they adjust the values to enhance contrast. However, the image remains monochromatic, as camera sensors detect light intensity rather than color. Color filters on the sensor provide color, but each pixel only receives one-third of the RGB value. To improve this, the author averages pixel values with neighboring pixels, adding some color. Despite these adjustments,

Researchers discover molecular difference in autistic brains

Published: 2025-12-28 | Origin: Hacker News

Yale School of Medicine scientists have identified a significant molecular difference in the brains of individuals with autism compared to neurotypical individuals. Their study, published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, reveals that autistic brains have fewer receptors for glutamate, the brain's primary excitatory neurotransmitter. This reduction in receptors may be linked to various behavioral traits associated with autism, such as difficulties in social interaction and repetitive behaviors. James McPartland, co-principal investigator and Harris Professor of Child Psychiatry and Psychology,

The tricky parts of building a reliable job scheduler: leases, idempotency, and timezone-aware cron

Published: 2025-12-28 | Origin: /r/programming

The content discusses Spooled, a high-performance job queue and worker coordination service built with Rust, capable of handling over 10,000 jobs per second using PostgreSQL and Redis. It features multi-tenant isolation, REST and gRPC APIs, production monitoring, and sensible pricing plans (Free, Starter, Pro, Enterprise) that can be customized via environment variables. The service ensures reliability and scalability while enforcing tier-based limits to prevent abuse. It includes a demo, documentation, and notes on configuration for

Tim van der Lippe steps down as Mockito maintainer

Published: 2025-12-28 | Origin: /r/programming

The author expresses their commitment to reviewing and valuing user feedback, emphasizing the importance of input. They announce that in March 2026, they will have been the maintainer of Mockito for a decade and plan to pass on maintainership, ensuring a smooth transition. The author highlights recent changes in Mockito 5, particularly the move to a main artifact as an agent due to JVM 22's updated dynamic attachment of agents, which is framed as a necessary security measure. However, they voice concerns about

Unity's Mono problem: Why your C# code runs slower than it should

Published: 2025-12-28 | Origin: Hacker News

The author discusses the performance issues related to executing C# code within Unity's Mono runtime, noting that it is significantly slower than modern .NET implementations. Their game demonstrates performance improvements of 2-3 times faster on modern .NET, with some benchmarks showing speedups of up to 15 times. The article highlights the history of Unity's reliance on the Mono framework, which was a viable multi-platform option when it was adopted in 2006. However, since Microsoft's open-sourcing of .NET

Software engineers should be a little bit cynical

Published: 2025-12-28 | Origin: Hacker News

The author discusses the perception that they are a cynic for suggesting that engineers should prioritize making their managers happy and recognize that large tech companies control project assignments. Alex Wennerberg's post critiques this stance, arguing that it reduces engineers to mere tools in organizational politics and neglects their role as professionals solving meaningful problems. The author acknowledges that while following managerial directives can help one navigate bureaucracy, it may not lead to producing high-quality work. Despite the cynicism, the author expresses a genuine enjoyment of working

MongoBleed vulnerability explained simply

Published: 2025-12-28 | Origin: /r/programming

MongoBleed, designated as CVE-2025-14847, is a severe vulnerability found in MongoDB that affects nearly all versions since 2017. This vulnerability exists within the zlib1 message compression path, allowing attackers to read uninitialized heap memory. The flaw, introduced in 2017, can be exploited easily, requiring only connectivity to the database and no authentication. MongoDB uses a proprietary TCP wire protocol and BSON format for messages, utilizing a command called OP_MSG, which

Parsing Advances

Published: 2025-12-28 | Origin: /r/programming

The author is developing a toy parser during their Christmas break, influenced by the Resilient LL Parsing Tutorial. They prefer this approach as it allows for creating a syntax tree and diagnostics rather than stopping at the first parsing error. However, a significant challenge is the risk of infinite loops or recursion, especially when the parser fails to consume tokens. They illustrate this problem with an example involving function argument parsing, emphasizing the danger of a non-consuming expression causing endless loops. To address this, they employ two techniques

Unix "find" expressions compiled to bytecode

Published: 2025-12-28 | Origin: /r/programming

The author is exploring the `find` utility in Unix, which navigates file system hierarchies using a specialized expression language with unary and binary operators. To enhance performance, the author developed a bytecode compiling technique that prepares operations beforehand and reduces workload for each file. Contrary to the author's method, most existing implementations of `find` utilize tree-walk interpreters. The article outlines how the author's compiler functions, providing an example and discussing potential improvements. The syntax requires at least one path, default