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Don MacKinnon: Why Simplicity Beats Cleverness in Software Design [audio] Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: Hacker News The content from EP-215 discusses various aspects of software maintainability and the challenges faced in development. Key points include: 1. **Complexity Barrier**: Don emphasizes that unnecessary complexity significantly hinders software maintainability, referencing themes from "A Philosophy of Software Design." 2. **Clever Abstractions**: A case study from a Node.js API illustrates how an unnecessary abstraction layer around MongoDB complicated the project without adding value. 3. **Team Structure**: Don explains how the Search |
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Create A Module of Utility Functions in Ruby Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: /r/ruby The content discusses the `module_function` feature in Ruby's Module class, which creates class methods (singleton methods) on a module while also making the original methods private instance methods for any class that includes the module. This allows utility functions within the module to be used as if they were private methods in the class itself when mixed in, without exposing them in the class's public interface. The text illustrates how these markdown utility functions can help in a class such as `Post`, where they can be utilized |
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Beautiful Rails confirmation dialogs (with zero JavaScript) Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: /r/ruby This content is a collaboration with Stephen Margheim, who created a course on building quality Rails applications. It discusses the limitations of the traditional `confirm()` prompt for confirmation dialogs in web applications, suggesting that it appears outdated. Instead of relying on extensive JavaScript for creating styled confirmation dialogs, recent browser updates, specifically Invoker Commands in Chrome and Safari, enable developers to create elegant, animated dialogs with minimal coding. For instance, a confirmation dialog for deleting an item can be built using these modern features without |
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IPC Mechanisms: Shared Memory vs. Message Queues Performance Benchmarking Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: /r/programming The content describes a performance issue faced when using message queues for inter-process communication (IPC) at high message rates (500K messages per second). The system's CPU usage is significantly impacted due to the overhead from syscall operations related to `mq_send()` and `mq_receive()`, which dominate profiling data, historically leading to 40% CPU utilization. This situation reflects an actual challenge encountered by LinkedIn's Kafka producers, where extensive use of message queues resulted in reduced throughput due to syscall overhead. |
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Excel: The World’s Most Successful Functional Programming Platform By Houston Haynes Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: /r/programming Of course! Please provide the content you would like me to summarize. |
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Hash tables in Go and advantage of self-hosted compilers Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: /r/programming The author discusses their experience with the Go programming language, specifically regarding tracking unique values using maps. Initially, they used `map[int]bool` but later considered switching to `map[int]struct{}` due to its zero-sized type, which theoretically saves memory. Despite this change, they observed no decrease in memory consumption in production. They researched the implications of this change and found that since Go 1.24, a new map implementation called Swiss Tables has been introduced, which reportedly uses less memory |
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Rejecting rebase and stacked diffs, my way of doing atomic commits Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: /r/programming The author recently learned about atomic commits after reviewing a pull request, admitting it took them too long to discover the concept. They explain that atomic commits involve making single, cohesive changes in code that can independently pass continuous integration (CI) tests, ensuring that each commit leaves the codebase in a working state. This approach helps others easily understand commit histories without needing to analyze multiple commits together. The author compares the process to saving progress in a video game at logical checkpoints. They mention that their current development |
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gRPC in Spring Boot - Piotr's TechBlog Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: /r/programming The article discusses the integration of gRPC services into Spring Boot applications using the newly released Spring gRPC project (1.0 GA). gRPC is an open-source Remote Procedure Call framework that relies on Google’s Protocol Buffers for data serialization. Prior to this release, Spring projects lacked native gRPC support, often requiring third-party solutions that are now outdated. The article also draws comparisons with Quarkus, offers access to the author's sample GitHub repository containing related applications, and outlines steps for generating |
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GitHub - kettle-rb/tree_haver: 🌴 TreeHaver is a cross-Ruby adapter for the tree-sitter parsing library that works seamlessly across MRI Ruby, JRuby, and TruffleRuby. Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: /r/ruby TreeHaver is a cross-Ruby adapter for the Tree-sitter parsing library, compatible with MRI Ruby, JRuby, and TruffleRuby. It offers a unified API for parsing source code with Tree-sitter grammars, allowing developers to write their code once and run it across different Ruby implementations, similar to how Faraday operates for HTTP. TreeHaver simplifies the integration of Tree-sitter into Ruby applications by automatically selecting the relevant backend, making it easier to manage parsing across various environments. |
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Jubilant: Python subprocess and Go codegen Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: /r/programming Jubilant is a Python API developed for Juju, a deployment and operations tool by Canonical. The article discusses key design decisions in Jubilant, such as employing Python’s subprocess.run for invoking Juju commands, generating Python dataclasses from Go structs, and using Make and uv for build automation. The author usually refrains from discussing work-related topics but chose to share insights since Jubilant is open source, and the name was inspired by colleague Dave Wilding. The article contrasts Jubilant |
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Part 2 of backend driven badge system Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: /r/programming In Part 1, a badge system was created to track progress and award achievements, but it had a significant design flaw: each feature required manual updates to badges, leading to scattered badge logic and reliance on human memory. This resulted in several problems, as the current approach required features to notify the badge system about events like quiz completions or user logins. The proposal is to shift to an event-driven system. In this new approach, the feature code only emits events without needing to manage badge logic |
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Fuzix on a Raspberry Pi Pico Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: Hacker News The author discovered Fuzix, a lightweight operating system derived from UNIX tailored for the Z081 Zilog microcontroller, while exploring hobby operating systems. With a Raspberry Pi Pico on hand, they decided to try Fuzix. The recommended host operating system for compiling Fuzix is Debian Bookworm, which they didn’t have, so they created a Dockerfile to set up the necessary build environment. They checked out the version v0.4 of Fuzix and removed a game from the |
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Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015) Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: Hacker News Working quickly has multiple benefits beyond just completing tasks more efficiently. When you work faster, the perceived cost of starting new tasks decreases, making you more likely to take on additional projects. Conversely, slow work can lead to a lack of motivation, as tasks seem too daunting and contribute to a cycle of procrastination. This is true for any to-do list—when items accumulate without being crossed off, it can discourage further additions. This principle also applies to communication, such as email responses; quick replies lead |
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Read Something Wonderful Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: Hacker News Of course! Please provide the content you'd like me to summarize. |
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The Whole App is a Blob Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: Hacker News The author reflects on their experience with learning French, highlighting the disconnect between classroom knowledge and real-life usage. They recall a trip to a cafe in Chartres where, despite successfully ordering coffee in French, they became flustered when faced with the total price, leading them to revert to using their phone instead of attempting to engage further in the language. The author emphasizes that language apps often fail to prepare learners for real-time conversation, particularly under pressure. Years later, while preparing for a move to Québec |
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Arborium: Tree-sitter code highlighting with Native and WASM targets Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: Hacker News The content discusses the Arborium project, which enhances Tree-sitter highlighting by providing curated grammars and updated highlight queries, facilitating better code parsing and highlighting for multiple platforms including native (macOS, Linux, Windows) and WebAssembly (WASM). Arborium includes a sysroot that simplifies the use of WASM with C code, addressing the challenge of compiling Rust with C's standard library dependencies. The project offers compact HTML markup for highlighted code, omitting JavaScript requirements, and supports ANSI true |
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John Varley has died Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: Hacker News John Varley, the renowned science fiction writer, passed away on December 10, 2025. He first gained prominence in the mid-1970s with his "Eight Worlds" stories, set in a dark future where powerful aliens have wiped out humanity on Earth. Despite the bleak setting, his stories were vibrant and imaginative, showcasing ideas like gender fluidity, the ephemeral nature of wealth, and the ability to bank memories for a fresh start after death. Varley was prolific, often publishing |
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CapROS: Capability-Based Reliable Operating System Published: 2025-12-15 | Origin: Hacker News CapROS is a new operating system that combines traditional concepts of capabilities with modern performance and resource management techniques. It is designed to be a small, secure, real-time OS featuring orthogonal persistence. CapROS is a continuation of the EROS project, with significant contributions from Jonathan Shapiro and others involved in that initiative. The CapROS project is hosted on GitHub, which is acknowledged for its support of open source software. |
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Carolina Cloud – One third the cost of AWS for data science workloads Published: 2025-12-14 | Origin: Hacker News Of course! Please provide the content you'd like me to summarize. |
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The Problem of Teaching Physics in Latin America (1963) Published: 2025-12-14 | Origin: Hacker News In his keynote speech "The Problem of Teaching Physics in Latin America," delivered at the First Inter‑American Conference on Physics Education in 1963, Richard Feynman addresses the challenges of teaching physics, not only in Latin America but globally. He emphasizes that the difficulties in teaching physics are part of a broader educational issue that lacks effective solutions. While many new teaching approaches are proposed, their effectiveness is often untested, whereas traditional methods have been critiqued over time for their faults. Feyn |