News Nug
Jemalloc Postmortem

Published: 2025-06-13 | Origin: Hacker News

The jemalloc memory allocator, created in 2004 and publicly available for nearly 20 years, has halted active development despite remaining accessible as open-source software. This summary outlines its development journey, beginning with the Lyken programming language, which aimed to incorporate a manual memory allocator. Although Lyken was ultimately not completed, its allocator was integrated into FreeBSD, leading to the removal of the allocator from Lyken in 2006. This decision stemmed from the realization that the system allocator only required

Being a Force Multiplier

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: Hacker News

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

A Dark Adtech Empire Fed by Fake CAPTCHAs

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: Hacker News

Security researchers discovered that Kremlin-backed disinformation campaigns are exploiting malicious advertising technology to evade moderation on social media. A report by Qurium revealed the resilience of this dark ad tech industry, focusing on a disinformation network called “Doppelganger.” This network promotes pro-Russian narratives by using cloned websites and sophisticated “domain cloaking” techniques, which allow it to serve different content to search engines and regular visitors. This method helps the disinformation maintain a longer online presence. Qurium's investigation

I Don't Want to Pay a Subscription To Program

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: /r/programming

The author expresses concern about the potential obligation for software engineers to pay subscription fees for AI coding tools. While many professionals can afford these fees, the author argues that the use of AI fundamentally alters the nature of coding and raises questions about the appropriateness of charging for tools that are essential to the profession. The comparison is made to other creative fields where tools are expensive, suggesting that such a shift could hinder efficiency and progress in software engineering. Ultimately, while AI tools could enhance productivity, the author wishes to

Bypassing GitHub Actions policies in the dumbest way possible

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: /r/programming

GitHub Actions, a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) tool, includes a policy mechanism to restrict the types of actions and reusable workflows that can be employed within repositories or organizations. However, this mechanism is easily bypassed, and the author believes this poses a security risk, a view that GitHub does not share. Users of GitHub Actions must be cautious about what actions and workflows they trust since CI/CD tools allow execution of arbitrary code, which can potentially access sensitive data or modify repositories

Frequent reauth doesn't make you more secure

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: Hacker News

The passage discusses frustrations with frequent re-login requirements and multi-factor authentication (MFA) challenges that disrupt workflow and lead to MFA fatigue, making users more vulnerable to phishing attacks. It highlights a shift in understanding security practices, noting that constantly changing passwords and frequent logins are not effective strategies. Instead, security should focus on how access is managed and the ability to quickly respond to policy changes. There are two main types of authentication: Identity Providers (IdPs), which verify user identity, and integrated authentication

Wrong ways to use the databases, when the pendulum swung too far

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: Hacker News

The author reflects on their time as a junior developer at a previous employer, sharing a cautionary tale from their experiences. They describe joining a team that had inherited a highly critical pipeline from an offshore group, which was essential to the company's financial performance. The development environment was challenging, with complex systems and a cumbersome build process that required extensive time and setup, including working within virtual machines. The infrastructure was fraught with issues, such as unreliable tests, frequent outages, and numerous undocumented features. A particular

Have a damaged painting? Restore it in just hours with an AI-generated "mask"

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: Hacker News

The MIT News office provides images for download under a Creative Commons license, allowing non-commercial use with appropriate credit given to "MIT." In the realm of art restoration, traditional methods involve meticulous repairs by conservators, which can take extensive time. Recent advances in digital restoration tools allow for the rapid creation of virtual representations of original works using computer vision and image recognition techniques. However, until now, there was no effective way to apply these digital restorations directly to the physical artwork. A new method

Faster coding isn't enough

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: /r/programming

The conversation around AI in software development has primarily centered on coding assistants and inline suggestions. However, as engineering organizations evolve their AI strategies, research from Dev Interrupted and LinearB reveals untapped opportunities and bottlenecks across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). A survey of over 400 engineering leaders and developers shows that while AI adoption in coding workflows is high, other critical phases of the SDLC remain underutilized. Experts, including Suzie Prince from Atlassian, Birgitta Böck

Solving LinkedIn Queens with SMT

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: /r/programming

The author discusses their upcoming talk at Systems Distributed, noting that they are behind schedule and their newsletter is brief. They reference an article claiming that SAT solvers are underutilized in the industry and connect this to previous discussions about the challenges of encoding SAT problems. A notable example is Ryan Berger's post on solving a variation of the N-Queens problem, termed "LinkedIn Queens," using SAT. The problem involves placing N queens on an NxN grid based on specific rules, which Ryan encoded as

Neovim and LSP Servers Working with Docker-based Development

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: /r/ruby

The author is updating their Docker-based Dev Environment Book to include instructions on setting up a Language Server Protocol (LSP) server worker within Docker, focusing on its integration with Neovim through the lsp-config plugin. Although the process is somewhat challenging, it is manageable. The author acknowledges limited familiarity with Neovim but hopes to assist fellow Vim users. The LSP, developed by Microsoft, enhances code editing in environments like VSCode by allowing semantic understanding of code, distinguishing it from traditional string

iPhone 11 emulation done in QEMU

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: Hacker News

The content emphasizes the importance of user feedback and indicates that technical documentation is available. It discusses QEMU, an open-source machine and userspace emulator that can emulate a complete machine without hardware virtualization support, achieving good performance through dynamic translation. QEMU can run operating systems designed for one architecture on a different architecture and provide userspace API virtualization. It integrates with hypervisors like Xen and KVM for enhanced performance and is utilized in various applications via the libvirt library. QEMU is licensed under the

Breaking My Security Assignments

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: Hacker News

The author discusses their experience with a security module assignment involving a barebones virtual machine (VM). The VM requires updates to be installed to complete assignments and obtain tokens for submission, but the update files are encrypted and appear as unreadable data. The author suspects that the update files contain the needed tokens and decides to investigate the decryption process. They examine the `installUpdate` executable in the VM, discovering that the updates are GPG encrypted tarballs. The executable references a file containing a pass

The international standard for identifying postal items

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: Hacker News

The Universal Postal Union (UPU), a UN agency, has established the S10 standard for tracking postal items, which defines a 13-character format used globally for parcel tracking numbers. A recent experience receiving a parcel from Switzerland highlighted that the format of the tracking number (UT038926726CH) aligns closely with the UK's tracking system. This prompted curiosity about the compatibility between different postal services. The S10 standard assigns each country's postal service exclusive rights to generate S10 codes, incorporating details about the

Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: Hacker News

The content suggests that users can load an example contract by navigating to the "File" menu and selecting "Open Example."

A receipt printer cured my procrastination

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: Hacker News

The author, who started a business at 21 and is now 39, focused on creating custom apps and consulting for accounting software. They struggled with procrastination, often needing stress from clients or financial pressure to motivate themselves. This led to burnout and eventually bankruptcy. They realized they could concentrate intensely on video games, prompting them to explore how to apply that focus to challenging tasks. The author attributes some of their struggles to ADHD, acknowledging its broad impact on people's lives. Using first-person shooters (

How JavaScript Was Written Back In the Day

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: /r/programming

Trevor I. Lasn, a Staff Software Engineer and Engineering Manager, reflects on his exploration of code from 2006-2015. Instead of finding outdated practices, he is impressed by the innovative solutions early web frameworks provided. During this period, web development had to tackle browser inconsistencies, particularly with Internet Explorer 6 dominating the market. The launch of jQuery 1.0 in August 2006 greatly simplified DOM manipulation by creating a consistent API that abstracted browser differences. Designed

Build a minimal decorator with Ruby in 30 minutes - Remi Mercier

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: /r/ruby

The author describes their process of creating a minimal decorator from scratch to add view-related methods to a Teacher object, due to incompatibility with the draper gem in their older Rails application. They aim to implement a `colour_coded_availability` method that generates CSS classes for a table of teachers based on their availability. To accomplish this, the author creates a decorator that accepts a Teacher instance and exposes the `colour_coded_availability` method. However, they encounter a `NoMethodError`

The Illusion of Thinking

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: /r/programming

The authors of the study, led by Parshin Shojaee and Iman Mirzadeh, explore the capabilities and limitations of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed reasoning processes before answering questions. While LRMs show improved performance on reasoning tasks, their scaling properties and fundamental abilities are not fully understood. Current evaluations focus on final answer accuracy, often overlooking the structure and quality of the reasoning traces. The researchers used controllable puzzle environments to assess both final answers and internal reasoning processes

Celebrating GitHub's 1 billionth repo

Published: 2025-06-12 | Origin: /r/programming

Failed to fetch content - HTTP Status - 404