News Nug
Process-Based Concurrency: Why Beam and OTP Keep Being Right

Published: 2026-03-02 | Origin: /r/programming

The article from Variant Systems discusses the unique aspects of process-based concurrency as implemented by the BEAM virtual machine, emphasizing its long-standing efficacy since 1986. It highlights the recurring trend in AI and distributed systems, where new frameworks often replicate the BEAM architecture of isolated state, message passing, and supervision hierarchies due to shared challenges in managing concurrency. The author, Dillon Mulroy, notes that the convergence on similar patterns is a necessity dictated by the nature of the problems developers face. The

Incentives Drive Everything

Published: 2026-03-02 | Origin: /r/programming

The content discusses the historical financial strategy of early modern France, where the monarchy sold offices to raise funds for wars without increasing taxes. This practice provided immediate cash but led to a bloated administrative structure over time. It parallels trends in the tech industry, where companies aggressively hired and expanded until reaching saturation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies hired additional workers only to face layoffs later. The author highlights the challenges of measuring long-term resilience versus short-term growth. In environments with information asymmetry,

AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them.

Published: 2026-03-02 | Origin: /r/programming

In a newsletter from Elizabeth at SigNoz, the focus is on the current conversation surrounding observability, OpenTelemetry, and software engineering. The author explores two contrasting views in the tech industry: one predicting that Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) will be essential as AI takes over coding, and another suggesting that AI will eliminate tech jobs, including SREs. Instead of speculating on the future, the discussion shifts to the present impact of AI on SREs, questioning whether reliance on

Implementing Burger-Dybvig: finding the shortest decimal that round-trips to the original IEEE 754 bits, with ECMA-262 tie-breaking

Published: 2026-03-02 | Origin: /r/programming

The article discusses the challenges of achieving byte-deterministic JSON output as required by RFC 8785, specifically addressing the serialization of IEEE 754 floating-point numbers. The challenge lies in generating the shortest decimal string that accurately represents these values while adhering to ECMA-262 format specifications. Go's built-in `strconv.FormatFloat` is noted as a good formatter but not compliant with ECMA-262. To address this, the author implemented the Burger-Dybvig algorithm from scratch in Go, including

SOLID in FP: Liskov Substitution, or The Principle That Was Never About Inheritance

Published: 2026-03-02 | Origin: /r/programming

The author discusses the Liskov Substitution Principle (LSP) and how it applies outside of traditional inheritance models, particularly in the context of Elm, which doesn’t utilize inheritance. They highlight that LSP is more about sub-typing rather than inheritance itself. Uncle Bob, who popularized LSP, clarifies that it focuses on ensuring implementations of an interface behave consistently, preventing confusion in code that expects a certain functionality. The author reflects on their previous misunderstanding while connecting it to the classic Rectangle

RubyConf Austria 2026: Scholarship Program & Discount

Published: 2026-03-02 | Origin: /r/ruby

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Optimizations

Published: 2026-03-02 | Origin: /r/ruby

The content is a curated list of educational resources, including non-instructional videos on technology, infrastructure, hardware, and software, as well as articles and tutorials. It encourages engagement and support while offering an opportunity to ask questions or discuss topics. Additionally, it mentions quality Ruby screencasts focusing on optimizations.

Computer-generated dream world: Virtual reality for a 286 processor

Published: 2026-03-02 | Origin: Hacker News

In "Virtual Reality for a 286 Processor," Nagy Krisztián explores the concept of virtual reality through the lens of a vintage 286 processor. He draws parallels between the computer's processor and the brain, suggesting that just as our brains interpret electrical signals to define reality, a processor could form the backbone of a simulated environment. Reflecting on his own experiences, he recalls starting this project two years ago with two Harris 80C286-12 processors, chosen for their resilience to

Everett shuts down Flock camera network after judge rules footage public record

Published: 2026-03-02 | Origin: Hacker News

The City of Everett has shut down its network of Flock license plate reader cameras after a judge ruled that footage from these cameras is considered public record under Washington law. This decision followed a public records request from Jose Rodriguez, who sought to understand what data the cameras were collecting. The ruling allows anyone, including potential criminals, to request the footage, leading Everett's Mayor Cassie Franklin to express concern over safety risks. In response, the city has temporarily disabled its 68 Flock cameras. Concurrently

Show HN: Timber – Ollama for classical ML models, 336x faster than Python

Published: 2026-03-02 | Origin: Hacker News

The content outlines the features of Ollama, a tool designed for classical machine learning models. It includes an Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) compiler that transforms models from frameworks like XGBoost, LightGBM, scikit-learn, CatBoost, and ONNX into optimized native C99 inference code, resulting in a performance increase of 336 times faster than Python for single-sample inference. Ollama allows for easy loading and serving of these models via a simple command interface. Additionally,

If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?

Published: 2026-03-02 | Origin: Hacker News

The content describes "git-memento," a Git extension that records AI coding sessions associated with commits. It allows users to store a cleaned markdown version of their coding conversations as notes on new commits. Key features include the ability to initialize per-repository settings, track commits, share notes with remote repositories, and sync notes during pushes. It also provides functionalities for managing rewritten commits, auditing note coverage, and configuring the extension's behavior through environment variables. Users can access documentation for additional qualifiers, and the tool

Hacking Super Mario 64 using Algebraic Topology

Published: 2026-03-01 | Origin: /r/programming

In "Hacking Super Mario 64 using covering spaces (+ hyperbolic geometry)," Luca Leon Happel explores the concept of covering spaces in topology, emphasizing their connection to hyperbolic geometry, especially through universal covers of surfaces with genus \(g \geq 2\). The article defines key terms such as covering spaces, homeomorphisms, and universal covers, highlighting that a covering space is a topological space that locally resembles the base space through a continuous surjective map. A

Right-sizes LLM models to your system's RAM, CPU, and GPU

Published: 2026-03-01 | Origin: Hacker News

The content outlines a tool designed to help users identify large language models (LLMs) that are compatible with their hardware specifications. It features a terminal interface that assesses a user's CPU, RAM, and GPU capabilities to recommend models based on quality, speed, and fit. The tool also supports multi-GPU setups, various quantization methods, and includes an interactive terminal user interface (TUI) as well as a classic command-line interface (CLI). Additionally, it allows users to switch to a planning mode

WebMCP is available for early preview

Published: 2026-03-01 | Origin: Hacker News

The content describes a CSS stylesheet for author profiles, featuring two classes: `.wd-authors` and `.dcc-authors`, both of which define the layout and appearance of author avatars and their associated links. Key features include flexbox for layout, circularly cropped images, and adjustable avatar sizes. Additionally, it introduces WebMCP, a new standard designed to enhance the interaction between websites and AI agents. WebMCP provides two APIs that enable AI agents to perform tasks on websites more efficiently, making

Custom Data Structures in E-Graphs

Published: 2026-03-01 | Origin: /r/programming

E-graphs are advanced data structures used for reasoning about program equivalence, which play a crucial role in optimizers and compilers. However, their efficiency can diminish when many equivalent expressions arise, especially due to algebraic identities like associativity, commutativity, and distributivity (A/C/D). One approach to address this issue is to embed these identities within the e-graph's underlying structure, like Philip Zucker’s work on Gröbner bases and bottom-up e-matching. Instead of

January in Servo: preloads, better forms, details styling, and more

Published: 2026-03-01 | Origin: /r/programming

Servo 0.0.5 has been released with numerous enhancements to web platform features. Key updates include: - Support for OGG media playback in `<audio>` elements has been restored after previous bugs in GStreamer were resolved. - Non-pixel sizes for width and height attributes in `<svg>` elements are now supported. - Inactive documents will properly reject fullscreen mode changes. - The `navigator.sendBeacon()` feature is enabled by default, with the related preference removed. - Implemented keepalive

The real cost of random I/O

Published: 2026-03-01 | Origin: /r/programming

The blog discusses the outdated default setting of the `random_page_cost` parameter in Postgres, which has been set at 4.0 for about 25 years. With advancements in storage technology, particularly with flash storage's improved performance in handling random I/O, the default may no longer reflect current realities. Some suggest lowering it to 1.0, the same as `seq_page_cost`. To investigate this, the author proposes an experiment to measure the cost of reading a random page versus a

Fooling Go's X.509 Certificate Verification

Published: 2026-03-01 | Origin: /r/programming

The content discusses two X.509 certificates: a Certificate Authority (CA) root certificate and a leaf certificate signed by the CA's private key. When using a tool like OpenSSL, one can verify that the leaf certificate is indeed signed by the CA. The post suggests that if you were reading it from the year 2126, you would find the continued use of OpenSSL unexpected. The author proposes a Go program to verify the chain of trust but highlights that it might produce surprising results when using

Why is the first C++ (m)allocation always 72 KB?

Published: 2026-03-01 | Origin: /r/programming

The author shares insights on experimenting with custom memory allocators in C++, specifically regarding exception handling and memory allocation behavior in their environment. They explain how the C++ standard library allocates an "emergency pool" for exceptions if memory runs out. By creating a debug tool to log memory allocation requests, the author discovered that all programs tested begin by allocating 72 KB of memory (73728 bytes). They detail the process of overriding the default `malloc` in Linux using LD_PRELOAD and emphasize the

Decision trees – the unreasonable power of nested decision rules

Published: 2026-03-01 | Origin: /r/programming

The article by Jared Wilber & Lucía Santamaría discusses the process of using a Decision Tree to classify trees based on their Diameter and Height. They illustrate this with a hypothetical scenario where, after making an initial classification based on Diameter, subsequent splits are made according to Height and other features to refine the classifications into Apple, Cherry, and Oak trees. While splitting the data into more specific regions can lead to better classification, there's a risk of overfitting the model to the training data, making