Published: 2025-05-04 | Origin: Hacker News

The post discusses Brian Eno's views on democracy, emphasizing his commitment to its practice despite not having a formal theory. It references Adam Przeworski's influential 1991 work, "Democracy and the Market," which presents a theory of democracy centered on the concept that parties must accept electoral defeat for the system to function. Przeworski argues that self-interested political parties will relinquish power if they perceive the alternative—refusal to concede—as worse, particularly when they believe they

Published: 2025-05-04 | Origin: Hacker News

arXivLabs is a platform for collaboration that enables users to create and share new features on the arXiv website. Partners involved with arXivLabs are committed to values of openness, community, excellence, and user privacy. arXiv encourages project ideas that could benefit its community. Additionally, users can receive operational status notifications via email or Slack.

Published: 2025-05-04 | Origin: Hacker News

The content appears to be a fragment of a PDF file, specifically PDF version 1.4. It includes metadata such as timestamps and UUIDs, likely associated with document creation and processing by Adobe Acrobat 8.2. The file seems to contain an incomplete or truncated data stream, possibly indicating it is part of a larger document or file that has not been fully detailed.

Published: 2025-05-04 | Origin: Hacker News

The content discusses the concept of wireless USB technology, which was once a reality but ultimately fizzled out due to competing standards that fractured the market. It highlights the existence of several wireless USB devices from that time and aims to explore their functionalities and the reasons for their decline. The piece also touches on the differences between wideband and narrowband radio transmission, explaining how radio modulation works to encode signals. With an example of how FM radio operates within the regulated frequency bands in the United States, the discussion underscores

Published: 2025-05-04 | Origin: Hacker News

The content discusses Wirth languages, specifically highlighting various Pascal implementations such as UCSD, Turbo, Delphi, Freepascal, and Oberon. It includes a mention of jQuery code for a smooth slider on a website, which adds interactivity to the website's content. The site provides resources related to Pascal, including information on compilers, programming systems, and notable figures like Niklaus Wirth and Edsger Dijkstra. It covers programming on small machines, validation standards, and Pascal's

Published: 2025-05-04 | Origin: /r/programming

The author discusses their experience managing large SQLite databases stored on remote servers, highlighting the challenges of copying these databases to a local machine for analysis or backup, especially as they grow in size. Initially, transferring small databases using rsync is straightforward, but as databases become larger—sometimes several gigabytes—the process becomes slow and unreliable, mainly due to the presence of numerous indexes which slow down the transfer. The author has discovered an efficient method to bypass this problem: using SQLite's built-in `.dump` command

Published: 2025-05-04 | Origin: Hacker News

In February 2022, Zora Schelbert, the chief operating officer and tour guide at the Sonnenberg nuclear bunker in Lucerne, Switzerland, was surprised by a surge of inquiries from people seeking guidance on civil protection measures amid the escalating conflict in Ukraine. They mistakenly contacted her historical society, "Unterirdisch Überleben," instead of the local civil protection department. Switzerland, known for its extensive network of bunkers, has enough shelters for its entire population. The Sonnenberg bunker, initially

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: Hacker News

The content emphasizes the importance of community feedback and contributions in enhancing GRUB themes, a type of bootloader customization. It notes that many GRUB themes are available online, but they can be hard to navigate, particularly across various sites like Pling, where many themes may lack quality. The author has compiled a list of decent themes that showcase more effort in customization, including backgrounds, fonts, and colors. Customization of themes is encouraged, as users can easily modify layouts, images, and color schemes using

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: Hacker News

In the fifth post of a multipart series on memory management, the author (ekr) discusses Rust memory management, specifically focusing on iterators. The post builds on previous parts that covered C and C++ and introduced smart pointers in Rust. The author presents a simple Rust code example that creates a vector, iterates over it, and prints the elements and length. However, upon compilation, the code fails, prompting a discussion of underlying mechanics. The author explains that the `for y in x

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: /r/programming

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Synadia have announced an agreement to support the future of the NATS project within the CNCF ecosystem. Synadia will transfer its NATS trademarks to the Linux Foundation to ensure neutral governance and long-term stability for the project, which includes holding its infrastructure and assets under CNCF management. The NATS project will continue to develop as an open-source initiative under the Apache-2.0 license. While Synadia remains an active contributor, it retains

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: Hacker News

The author reflects on insights from the inaugural Cloud-Native Geospatial conference, emphasizing the importance of making geospatial data more accessible to a broader audience. A key focus was on the impact of DuckDB's spatial extension, which has simplified the process of working with geospatial data to just one or two lines of SQL code. This development has lowered entry barriers for data generalists, who previously faced challenges with installation and setup. The absence of a user-friendly approach may have hindered engagement with geo data

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: /r/ruby

The blog discusses the contributions of various Ruby implementations to the ruby/spec project, highlighting their historical involvement and impact. Rubinius initially started the project and was its primary contributor until around 2014, after which its contributions declined. In contrast, TruffleRuby emerged in 2014 and has since become the leading contributor, accounting for over half of all commits. CRuby consistently contributes about 20% of commits annually, leveraging its position to define new methods and behaviors. JRuby made notable contributions until

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: Hacker News

Marisa Kabas expresses frustration over her experience as an independent journalist after CBS News published a story about a deportation agreement between the Trump administration and Rwanda, failing to credit her for originally reporting the information. Despite reminding herself to remain focused on her work and the significance of the issues she covers, she reached a breaking point when her contributions were overlooked. Kabas detailed her investigation into a diplomatic cable that indicated Rwanda's willingness to accept deportees, which she confirmed through multiple sources before reporting on it on

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: Hacker News

Breeze PDF is a free, powerful PDF editor that operates entirely offline in your browser, ensuring complete privacy as your files are never uploaded to any server. Key features include the ability to add text and images, digitally sign documents, create fillable forms, merge multiple PDFs, and remove unwanted pages. It employs strong password encryption for sensitive documents and processes files locally using JavaScript. Although it's primarily designed for desktop use, it is accessible on mobile browsers, though screen size may impact usability. Breeze PDF

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: /r/programming

Wing Cloud, an infrastructure startup known for its programming language Winglang, recently shut down after securing a $20 million investment in 2023. The shutdown was not unexpected, as the concept behind Winglang conflicts with established principles in software development, particularly the importance of decoupling. Winglang combines application code with infrastructure code to create cloud infrastructure, which contradicts a long-standing lesson in software development that emphasizes the need for increased decoupling to minimize the impact of changes within a system. This

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: /r/programming

The author challenges the notion that career growth in software engineering is solely tied to working for large-scale organizations. They suggest that many tech-workers face significant challenges regardless of the scale and that respect for one's craft is crucial. The author emphasizes that personal and organizational growth can occur without managing vast amounts of traffic and that it's essential to change one's perspective on work. They also argue that many software engineers might not meet all basic expectations in their roles, hinting at the potential for growth in any environment.

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: /r/programming

This documentation is designed for users who want to implement clients to publish through the Portal Publisher API. For those aiming to publish components to Maven Central, the Maven client is recommended. It serves as a supplement to the OpenAPI documentation, offering an interactive environment for testing queries through a web client, with curl used in examples. To authenticate API requests, users must generate a user token via the Account page. This token is created by base64 encoding the username and password, which is then included in the

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: Hacker News

In April 2025, the author, who recently transitioned from Wallapop to RevenueCat, developed a Python library called "suite" for semantic unit testing. This innovative approach focuses on evaluating if a function's implementation aligns with its documented behavior, using large language models (LLMs) to assess code and documentation together, rather than traditional unit tests that compare input-output pairs. The aim is to leverage AI to identify bugs and discrepancies much like a human developer would, but more efficiently. The "

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: /r/programming

After seven years of development, researchers have successfully solved the Royal Game of Ur across the Finkel, Blitz, and Masters rule sets. This achievement includes finding the best move for every position in the game, as well as calculating each player's precise winning chances under optimal play, using an open-source library called RoyalUr-Java. The process of creating a perfectly playing bot involves maximizing its winning probability by evaluating all potential future moves influenced by the roll of the dice, making it more akin to poker than chess

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: /r/programming

The content describes a C++ framework designed for implementing machine learning models that operate reliably in radiation-heavy environments, such as outer space. The framework offers comprehensive radiation tolerance and has undergone rigorous testing to ensure its resilience. A specialized stress test simulates extreme radiation conditions, providing detailed statistics on error detection and correction rates, as well as overall system robustness. The framework includes a mission simulator for adaptive radiation protection and is documented for user access. It is fully integrated with test coverage, and all tests are passing,