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Maine's black market for baby eels

Published: 2026-01-10 | Origin: Hacker News

The provided content discusses the status of an account subscription for The Portland Press Herald, indicating both active and inactive statuses and providing customer service contact information. Subscribers are allowed to gift five articles per month. The main story focuses on Joshua Viertel, who became fascinated with the issue of illegal elver fishing in Maine after learning about its connections to the sushi he enjoyed in New York City. The elver fishery, which became highly profitable in the mid-2010s, faced challenges with overfishing

How we made Python's packaging library 3x faster

Published: 2026-01-10 | Origin: /r/programming

Damian Shaw and the author have improved the performance of the packaging library, which underpins many Python packaging tools, including pip. Using Python 3.15's statistical profiler and metadata from PyPI, they enhanced the speed of reading versions by up to 2x and SpecifierSets by up to 3x in the newly released packaging 26.0rc1. Additional optimizations increased performance by up to 5x for certain operations. The packaging library is highly utilized, being the

Java gives a status update about new language features -- Constant Patterns and Pattern Assignment!

Published: 2026-01-09 | Origin: /r/programming

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“Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”

Published: 2026-01-09 | Origin: Hacker News

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A very short introduction to secure coding - with lab examples on fixing IDOR, insecure file uploading, and SQL injections

Published: 2026-01-09 | Origin: /r/programming

The article emphasizes the importance of secure coding practices for software engineers deploying applications connected to the internet. It highlights that malicious hackers often exploit code injection vulnerabilities and other weaknesses in web applications to gain unauthorized access. The author aims to introduce secure coding concepts through a series of questions from a hacking lab designed to teach both offensive and defensive web application security strategies. Additionally, it notes that hackers frequently utilize social engineering and various hacking techniques to obtain confidential information or access targeted systems.

RTX 5090 and Raspberry Pi: Can it game?

Published: 2026-01-09 | Origin: Hacker News

The content discusses the possibility of attaching an external GPU (eGPU) to a Raspberry Pi 5 and explores its gaming capabilities compared to similar low-cost computers. The setup involves using an OCuLink dock for the eGPU, which allows the connection of a powerful NVIDIA RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics card. Different ARM and Intel-based machines are tested, focusing on their gaming performance, particularly considering their PCIe bandwidth differences: the Raspberry Pi 5 has much lower bandwidth than the Intel machine

I built an in-app purchase tool for Rails + Hotwire Native

Published: 2026-01-09 | Origin: /r/ruby

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JavaScript Demos in 140 Characters

Published: 2026-01-09 | Origin: Hacker News

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How Markdown took over the world

Published: 2026-01-09 | Origin: Hacker News

The content discusses the origins and significance of Markdown, a simple plain text format used widely in the tech industry for various applications, from AI systems to simple note-taking. Created by John Gruber in 2002, Markdown aimed to solve personal challenges related to blogging and the limited coverage of Apple at the time. Gruber's decision to focus on Apple and blogs was bold given the state of technology and online media back then. The piece highlights how innovative ideas, born out of personal necessity and generosity,

Boring Systems Earn Trust

Published: 2026-01-09 | Origin: /r/programming

The author reflects on the pitfalls of designing clever systems that prioritize efficiency and abstraction over trust and user-friendliness. While initial designs may seem elegant and scalable—utilizing smart inferences and minimizing explicit rules—they often lead to complex issues when real users interact with them. The experience with the AIGrantMatch system highlighted how cleverness can make a system difficult to understand and explain. This resulted in users facing confusion about grant availability, as the underlying inferences were too complicated and context-specific to be intuitive

An Interface Is a Set of Functions

Published: 2026-01-09 | Origin: /r/programming

This article discusses a unique perspective on interfaces in programming, suggesting they are not merely for abstraction but for managing types with diverse behaviors. An interface is defined as a type with a set of virtual functions, typically without implementation, though some languages allow implementation for generic error reporting. The article argues against the traditional view of interfaces as abstract objects (like generic collections) by illustrating their use in a specific codebase, where they serve simply as collections of functions. The author describes three main types of interfaces in this

Flock Hardcoded the Password for America's Surveillance Infrastructure 53 Times

Published: 2026-01-09 | Origin: Hacker News

A Default ArcGIS API key was found embedded in Flock Safety's public JavaScript bundles, which allowed unrestricted access to their ArcGIS mapping environment and 50 private data layers. This included sensitive information like license plate detections, patrol car locations, and 911 call data from approximately 12,000 deployments across the U.S. The API key was publicly accessible without any restrictions, appearing in 53 different front-end bundles, potentially exposing vast amounts of data. Flock Safety operates a significant network

Unit testing your code’s performance, part 1: Big-O scaling

Published: 2026-01-09 | Origin: /r/programming

The article by Itamar Turner-Trauring discusses the importance of implementing tests for algorithms, particularly focusing on performance testing through big-O notation. It emphasizes that while ensuring functionalities, assessing the scalability of algorithms is crucial. The article uses the example of searching for a value in an array to explain how algorithms can be expressed in terms of their scaling behavior—specifically, how runtime increases with input size. By utilizing big-O notation, one can effectively communicate the expected performance of an algorithm. For instance,

This Week in Rails: January 2, 2026

Published: 2026-01-09 | Origin: /r/ruby

Zzak shares updates on recent changes in the Rails codebase after the holiday season. Key updates include: 1. **Addition of `Rails.app.revision`** - A version identifier for error reporting and cache keys. 2. **Introduction of `ActionDispatch::Request#bearer_token`** - A method to extract bearer tokens from the Authorization header for API requests. 3. **Expansion of `Rails.app.creds`** - It can now access values from `.env` files in development

Revisiting YAGNI from an architectural perspective

Published: 2026-01-09 | Origin: /r/programming

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GitHub - stadia/youtube-transcript-rb

Published: 2026-01-09 | Origin: /r/ruby

The content discusses a Ruby gem that retrieves transcripts or subtitles for YouTube videos, including automatically generated ones. It is designed to function without a headless browser, unlike other selenium-based tools, and is based on the Python youtube-transcript-api. Users can add it to their application's Gemfile or install it directly. To get a transcript, the video ID (not the URL) must be provided. The gem allows fetching transcripts in various languages and supports raw data handling. Additional options include preserving formatting and

Doing Binary Search right is harder than you might think

Published: 2026-01-09 | Origin: /r/programming

Binary search is a well-known algorithm in computer science used to find the position of a target value in a sorted list. It operates efficiently by discarding half of the search space with each step, requiring approximately \(log_2(n)\) comparisons in the worst case. Despite its simple concept, implementing binary search correctly can be challenging, often resulting in errors. To ensure reliability, binary search should be implemented as a small program derived from clear specifications rather than merely as a memorized pattern. Given an

My C++ compiler just wrote its own fan-fiction (inference at compile-time)

Published: 2026-01-09 | Origin: /r/programming

The content discusses a project that utilizes C++ template metaprogramming to create a Language Model (LM) that performs inference entirely at compile time, rather than at runtime. The compiler serves as the inference engine, integrating the final generated string directly into the binary's data segment. The project challenges traditional notions of execution timing by emphasizing that it's not just hardware limiting performance but also how and when execution is defined. It showcases a character-level bigram model with transition probabilities encoded in a static constexpr matrix,

Interviewing Ruby Software Engineers Is Easier Than Ever in 2025!

Published: 2026-01-09 | Origin: /r/ruby

The content emphasizes that achieving mastery in coding requires a strong commitment and willingness to partake in challenging coding experiences.

The No Fakes Act Has a "Fingerprinting" Trap That Kills Open Source

Published: 2026-01-09 | Origin: Hacker News

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