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How to Write Useful Commit Messages

Published: 2025-03-07 | Origin: /r/programming

Michael Lynch discusses the importance of effective commit messages in software development, illustrating their role in simplifying code reviews and aiding long-term maintenance. He notes that many commit messages are vague or unhelpful, such as "Fix bug" or "Update UI." Through his 20 years of experience, he emphasizes that a good commit message should clearly describe the change and its impact. For example, he provides the message: "Delete comments for a post when the user deletes the post," which gives context about a

Mysterious tunnels sketched by Leonardo may have been found

Published: 2025-03-07 | Origin: Hacker News

Scientists have discovered hidden underground passageways beneath the medieval Sforza Castle in Milan, which were likely designed by Leonardo da Vinci as part of its defensive systems. This finding, announced by the Politecnico di Milano, results from surveys conducted between 2021 and 2023, utilizing nondestructive methods like ground-penetrating radar. The research, initiated as a doctoral thesis by Francesca Biolo, highlights the historical significance of the site's architectural heritage and Leonardo's potential influence on its development

Bring Back Shortwave

Published: 2025-03-07 | Origin: Hacker News

Clifford Beal discusses the risks of relying heavily on digital communications in times of war, emphasizing that the reality of conflict can lead to a loss of truth and information. He notes how Ukraine has faced significant challenges during its conflict with Russia, including cyber warfare, fake news, and attacks on communication systems. Beal warns that such vulnerabilities could blind societies to crucial information in future conflicts. He highlights the need for greater awareness and resilience against these threats in today’s digital landscape.

An Opinionated Guide to Configuring Rails on Heroku

Published: 2025-03-07 | Origin: /r/ruby

Jon Sully shares insights on deploying a new Rails application on Heroku, emphasizing the excitement of taking an app to production. He notes that his team at Judoscale, consisting of experienced Rails developers, endorses Heroku for its simplicity and straightforwardness. Sully plans to provide a comprehensive list of recommendations for configurations and setups for Rails apps on Heroku. He specifically highlights the use of Jemalloc, an open-source tool that enhances Ruby's memory management, making applications more memory-stable

Understanding and mitigating Tail Latency in using request Hedging

Published: 2025-03-07 | Origin: /r/programming

The content discusses the tail latency problem in distributed systems, where a small percentage of requests experience significantly longer response times, negatively impacting user experience. This issue can disrupt service-level agreements (SLAs) despite the majority of requests being processed quickly. The solution presented is "hedging," a technique employed by major companies like Google and Grafana to mitigate latency spikes. Hedging involves sending multiple requests for the same operation and using the fastest response, akin to a user trying to secure a concert ticket

HyperShell X Outdoor PowerSuit Exoskeleton

Published: 2025-03-07 | Origin: Hacker News

Experience the future of mobility with the Hypershell X, an advanced exoskeleton that enhances leg strength by 40% and reduces physical exertion by 30%. Weighing only 1.8 kg, this innovative suits combines state-of-the-art robotics, ergonomics, and AI to help users conquer various terrains and navigate daily life effortlessly. The system includes an 800-watt e-assist feature that enhances every step and uses high-precision sensors to optimize movement in real-time.

A Software Engineer's Guide to Reading Research Papers

Published: 2025-03-07 | Origin: /r/programming

Reading research papers is increasingly important for software engineers to stay updated on developments in their field. Although many find these papers daunting due to their dense and technical nature, adopting an effective approach can help make the process easier. The author suggests a multi-pass reading strategy: 1. **First pass:** Begin with the Abstract to grasp the problem statement and proposed solutions, allowing you to decide if the paper is relevant to your interests. 2. **Subsequent sections:** If the Abstract is intriguing, move

Deploying thousands of MySQL DBs using Rails and Kubernetes

Published: 2025-03-07 | Origin: /r/ruby

Sure! Please provide the content you'd like summarized, and I'll be happy to help.

Differentiable Logic Cellular Automata

Published: 2025-03-06 | Origin: Hacker News

The paper titled "From Game of Life to Pattern Generation with Learned Recurrent Circuits" by Pietro Miotti and colleagues from Google explores the potential of reverse-engineering complex patterns in cellular automata by learning the local rules that generate them. Traditionally, researchers approach cellular automata from a bottom-up perspective, defining local rules to observe emergent patterns. This study proposes an innovative, fully differentiable method that integrates Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) with Differentiable Logic Gates Networks to enable the

Spineless Traversal for Layout Invalidation

Published: 2025-03-06 | Origin: /r/programming

arXivLabs is a platform enabling collaboration to create and share new features for the arXiv website, emphasizing values such as openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. Those interested in contributing or suggesting projects that would benefit the arXiv community can learn more about arXivLabs. Additionally, users can receive operational status notifications via email or Slack.

Why I find diffusion models interesting?

Published: 2025-03-06 | Origin: Hacker News

A recent tweet highlighted the release of a new model called Diffusion LLM (dLLM) by Inception Labs. Unlike traditional autoregressive language models that generate text left to right, dLLMs generate words simultaneously for all parts of a sentence. This approach, which has been successful in image and video generation, is reportedly outperforming similar-sized LLMs in code generation. The author, who has spent two years in LLM evaluation, notes several advantages of dLLMs. Traditional L

How to distrust a CA without any certificate errors

Published: 2025-03-06 | Origin: Hacker News

The content discusses the concept of "distrust" regarding certification authorities (CAs) that issue HTTPS certificates. When a CA is removed from a root store due to a lack of trust, its certificates are invalidated, leading to potential browser errors for users. Distrust can arise from security issues, compliance failures, or general mistrust of the CA. Historically, the impact of distrust events varied based on the CA's size, but now, due to the requirement for public certificate transparency (CT

I made a cryptography tool that encodes secrets as cat and dog sounds

Published: 2025-03-06 | Origin: /r/programming

PurrCrypt is a playful yet secure encryption tool that encodes messages using real elliptic curve cryptography while disguising them as cat and dog sounds. It combines strong cryptographic techniques, similar to those used in Bitcoin, with an adorable presentation, appealing to pet lovers. PurrCrypt protects your secrets while ensuring that they appear as nonsensical pet sounds, making it both fun and secure. Users can generate key pairs, import friends' keys, and manage their keys while enjoying the lighthearted

Show HN: Rust Vector and Quaternion Lib

Published: 2025-03-06 | Origin: Hacker News

The content emphasizes the importance of user feedback, stating that it is taken very seriously. It provides an overview of operations related to vectors, matrices, and quaternions, which utilize f32 or f64 data types. Key points include: - There are various features available, such as a no_std feature for embedded systems that excludes certain implementations, and a computer_graphics feature for specialized matrix constructors and serialization for GPU communication. - Bincode encoding and decoding is supported through the encode feature. - Users

50 Years in Filesystems

Published: 2025-03-06 | Origin: /r/programming

This content is part 2 of a series that discusses the evolution of Unix and Linux file systems, following an introductory overview in part 1. It highlights the challenges of recognizing progress in technology, particularly in educational materials and research. The original Unix filesystem had numerous issues, which prompted improvements by BSD Unix, documented in "The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System." A key resource is the 1984 paper "A Fast File System for UNIX," authored by notable figures

Using GRPO to Beat o1, o3-mini and R1 at "Temporal Clue"

Published: 2025-03-06 | Origin: Hacker News

In the blog post by Brad Hilton and Kyle Corbitt, dated March 6, 2025, the authors discuss their use of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to improve performance in a reasoning-heavy game called “temporal clue.” They achieved results that surpassed several benchmarks (R1, o1, o3-mini) and came close to Sonnet 3.7, all while being over 100 times cheaper at inference time. The post highlights lessons learned in task design and

Lotus programming language

Published: 2025-03-06 | Origin: /r/programming

The content emphasizes the importance of user feedback and invites users to review available qualifiers in the documentation. It introduces "Lotus," a lightweight and beginner-friendly programming language created by two developers as a practice project to explore language design, compilers, and interpreters. Currently in development, installation instructions will be provided soon. A simple "Hello, World!" program is included, and the developers are committed to enhancing Lotus with planned features.

A Holistic View on APIs as an Ecosystem

Published: 2025-03-06 | Origin: /r/programming

The article, authored by Haim Kastner and Yuval Pomerchik from Check Point Software Technologies, discusses the complexities involved in building RESTful APIs beyond their apparent simplicity. While initially they seem straightforward as a client-server interaction, real-world applications face various challenges, including managing multiple consumers from different domains, handling authentication and authorization, validating inputs, managing errors, and implementing rate limits. As a product evolves, a comprehensive approach is essential for developing APIs that can scale effectively. The authors highlight

Succinct Data Structures

Published: 2025-03-06 | Origin: Hacker News

The author recounts their experience delving into computer science research to improve code performance, particularly encountering a 15-year-old paper on succinct data structures that introduced new concepts to them. Despite initial confusion, they sought additional papers for clarity, leading them to a source code website that was no longer available. The author reached out to the website's owner, a computer science professor named Gonzalo Navarro, who turned out to be a leading expert in succinct data structures. This interaction led the author to explore the

Mistral OCR

Published: 2025-03-06 | Origin: Hacker News

The text discusses the historical evolution of information abstraction and retrieval, highlighting the importance of each advancement in making knowledge more accessible. It introduces Mistral OCR, an Optical Character Recognition API that significantly enhances document understanding by accurately interpreting various document elements like text, images, tables, and equations. This API is designed to work effectively with multimodal documents, such as slides and complex PDFs, making it suitable for integration with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. Mistral OCR has become the