News Nug
Data alignment for speed: myth or reality?

Published: 2025-07-14 | Origin: /r/programming

Daniel Lemire's blog focuses on software performance, where he emphasizes the significance of data alignment in memory processing. Citing his recognition as a top scientist and a leading developer on GitHub, he explores the practical implications of data alignment in his experiments. Lemire discusses how compilers often align data structures and questions whether this alignment truly impacts performance. He conducted tests using a program that initializes a long array and computes a hash value with different offsets from aligned boundaries. His findings indicate that unaligned data processing

Programming Language Theory has a public relations problem

Published: 2025-07-14 | Origin: /r/programming

The author expresses a deep appreciation for Programming Language Theory (PLT), highlighting its beauty and the valuable ideas it encompasses, yet notes that it is often misunderstood and deemed impractical by outsiders. This perception mirrors that of pure mathematics, leading to questions about its relevance and applications. The author explains that while PLT can be appreciated as a discipline of pure theory similar to mathematical constructs, it frequently faces challenges in communicating its practical implications. For instance, an experienced software engineer venturing into PLT may struggle

RubyLLM::MCP – A Pure Ruby Client for the Model Context Protocol

Published: 2025-07-14 | Origin: /r/ruby

The content discusses a Ruby client for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) designed to integrate seamlessly with RubyLLM for building structured, composable LLM workflows. It highlights the ease of using MCPs with Ruby and emphasizes the support for MCP protocol version up to June 18, 2025. The client facilitates connections to MCP servers, enabling access to tools, resources, and prompts for LLM conversations, including normal resources and parameterized resource templates. Users are encouraged to consult the RubyLL

How To Reduce The PWA Boilerplate Of You Rails App

Published: 2025-07-14 | Origin: /r/ruby

The article from Codeminer42’s Engineering Blog discusses how to streamline the service worker boilerplate in Rails applications for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). The author intends to eventually cover push notifications but focuses on reducing boilerplate code for offline capabilities. It emphasizes that the core business logic of the app remains unchanged regardless of caching strategies implemented. The article suggests using Workbox, a set of libraries that simplify offline functionality by providing pre-built solutions for caching, background sync, and other PWA-related challenges.

Rails On-Premise... At RailsConf! A Story of Whimsy, Free Kazoos, and Web-Sockets...

Published: 2025-07-14 | Origin: /r/ruby

Jon Sully from the Judoscale team shared their fun experience at RailsConf 2025, where they brought kazoos as an unconventional and playful element to their sponsorship. The team distributed free kazoos to attendees, aiming to add joy and silliness to the event rather than promote their product. They introduced a humorous video titled “How to Kazoo,” featuring clips of kazooing to classic songs, and played it loudly at the conference. The setup involved synchronizing a TV displaying

AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why.

Published: 2025-07-14 | Origin: /r/programming

A recent study by Metr highlighted that open source developers, when using AI tools on codebases they are familiar with, take 19% longer to complete tasks compared to when they are not allowed to use these tools. Despite this slowdown, developers believed that AI had made them faster, with expectations of a 24% improvement and a post-task belief of a 20% speed increase. The study emphasizes that these findings may not be applicable to all software developers, particularly due to the unique context of

Extending That XOR Trick to Billions of Rows

Published: 2025-07-14 | Origin: Hacker News

The article discusses how the XOR trick, which is historically used to find one or two missing numbers in a list, can be extended to identify thousands of missing IDs from a large dataset using an Invertible Bloom Filter (IBF). IBFs are efficient data structures that compare sets with a space complexity based on the size of the difference between them, allowing for effective identification of missing elements. The author proposes to build an understanding of IBFs from the XOR trick rather than the traditional explanation that begins with

Kiro: A new agentic IDE

Published: 2025-07-14 | Origin: Hacker News

The content introduces a new agentic Integrated Development Environment (IDE) designed to assist users throughout the development process, from initial prototyping to production deployment. The IDE aims to enhance productivity and streamline workflows for developers. The summary includes the names of Nikhil Swaminathan, the Product Lead, and Deepak Singh, the VP of Developer Experience and Agents, who are likely involved in the development and promotion of this IDE.

Zig's New Async I/O

Published: 2025-07-14 | Origin: /r/programming

On July 13, 2025, Andrew announced a new I/O interface in the Zig programming language, which represents a significant shift in its design. This new Io interface allows users to define their own I/O implementations, similar to how allocators are currently handled in Zig. This change empowers developers to customize I/O operations, even within dependency code, and is intended to enhance concurrency operations that are closely linked with I/O, particularly in event loops. The document contrasts two implementations of a data-saving

The Order of Things: Why You Can't Have Both Speed and Ordering in Distributed Systems

Published: 2025-07-14 | Origin: /r/programming

The scenario describes an online retailer that faces significant problems during a flash sale where they received 742 orders for a product with only 500 units available, resulting in negative inventory. This situation stems from the challenges of managing inventory in distributed systems where multiple servers are processing requests concurrently. The sequence of "check inventory then charge customer" creates a race condition due to the brief interval where other orders can be placed. The article explains that while stronger locking mechanisms could theoretically resolve this issue, they would also degrade

What Doesn’t Change

Published: 2025-07-14 | Origin: /r/programming

Alvin Toffler's quote highlights that the true illiterates of the 21st century will be those unable to learn, unlearn, and relearn. In the rapidly changing tech landscape, marked by frequent new frameworks and AI advancements, the enduring value lies in fundamental principles of technology that remain stable over time. Understanding core concepts, such as memory management, data transfer in networks, and algorithm efficiency, is crucial as these truths apply both now and far into the future. Contrary

Chesterton’s Fence and paralysing your organization

Published: 2025-07-14 | Origin: /r/programming

The author recounts a past experience with a lingering codebase element: a service that flagged certain users as part of an old application related to GDPR compliance. Although it was believed to be unused, it was still included in the “employee data” resource shared across the application landscape. The situation illustrates the principle known as Chesterton’s Fence, which emphasizes the importance of understanding the reasoning behind existing elements before deciding to remove them. In practice, the author highlights the challenge of verifying whether systems are truly obsolete

Dynamic ClassFile Generation To Save 15.5 Nanoseconds

Published: 2025-07-14 | Origin: /r/programming

The content discusses the limitations of the Foreign Memory Access (FMA) and Foreign Function Interface (FFI) introduced in Java 22, which replace Unsafe/JNI but lack type safety. It highlights the issues of using `MemorySegment` for pointer types and how enums are treated as integers, leading to potential programming errors. Although jextract can produce better type-safe bindings from C header files, it operates independently of the standard APIs. The article suggests that developers can create their own type-safe API,

Zig’s new I/O: function coloring is inevitable?

Published: 2025-07-14 | Origin: /r/programming

The blog post "What Color is Your Function?" by Bob Nystrom addresses challenges in handling asynchronous computations in programming language design, sparking discussions on platforms like Hacker News and Reddit. Although various solutions were proposed, none were universally accepted as perfect. In a 2026 roadmap announcement, Andrew Kelley introduced a novel I/O approach in Zig, detailed in Loris Cro's blog post. This approach is claimed to resolve the issue of function coloring. However, the author disputes this by examining function signatures

Let's Learn x86-64 Assembly! Part 0

Published: 2025-07-14 | Origin: /r/programming

The author shares their experience of learning x86 assembly language, noting that the education they received at university was outdated, particularly given the transition to 64-bit processors. Despite this, they gained enough knowledge to understand compiled code, though they had not written significant x86 assembly themselves. To improve their skills during a lockdown due to the pandemic, they decided to focus specifically on x86-64 assembly, intentionally avoiding legacy topics. They plan to share their learning process through tutorials on their blog, emphasizing a

Black hole merger challenges our understanding of black hole formation

Published: 2025-07-14 | Origin: Hacker News

The LIGO Collaboration has announced the detection of an unprecedented black hole merger, designated GW231123, which resulted in a black hole over 225 times the mass of the Sun—the largest known to date. Detected on November 23, 2023, this event involved two massive black holes of 137 and 103 solar masses that spun together at incredibly high speeds to form an even larger black hole. This discovery challenges existing models of stellar evolution and prompts questions about how such a merger could occur

Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs

Published: 2025-07-13 | Origin: Hacker News

arXivLabs is a platform that enables collaborators to create and share new features for the arXiv website, emphasizing values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. Individuals and organizations involved adhere to these principles. The platform encourages project ideas that would benefit the arXiv community. Additionally, users can receive operational status notifications via email or Slack.

Postman to Bruno: Weekend migration + AI workflow for automated API documentation

Published: 2025-07-13 | Origin: /r/programming

The team at Diversio migrated their Postman API collections to Bruno over a weekend, allowing for an efficient transition to AI-assisted documentation by Monday. The guide provided outlines a practical step-by-step process for migrating to Bruno and enhancing API workflows with AI. Postman had served as Diversio's primary API toolkit since 2018, offering features like scriptable requests, variable templating, and chained workflows that allowed for seamless end-to-end API flows without manual adjustments. It was user-friendly for both engineers

Zero JDK: Reproducible builds by default

Published: 2025-07-13 | Origin: /r/programming

The content describes a development environment that supports reproducible builds by default and allows projects to define their own JDK version for consistency across different stages. It provides access to a wide range of JDK versions from major vendors, facilitated by Foojay. An optional shell integration feature can automatically configure the correct JDK when entering a project directory. This setup is compatible with macOS and Linux on both x64 and ARM64 architectures. Additionally, users are prompted to run a specified command in their terminal.

OpenCut: The open-source CapCut alternative

Published: 2025-07-13 | Origin: Hacker News

The content emphasizes the importance of user feedback and provides instructions for setting up an open-source CapCut alternative. Users must ensure certain services are installed, start the database and Redis, and configure environment variables in a `.env.local` file. Specific commands are provided for running database migrations and starting the development server, with the application accessible at `http://localhost:3000`. However, contributors are advised to wait for project stabilization due to rapid developments and potential breaking changes. The document encourages contributions and references a