News Nug
Building the heap: racking 30 petabytes of hard drives for pretraining

Published: 2025-10-01 | Origin: Hacker News

The content discusses the establishment of a storage cluster in downtown San Francisco to manage 90 million hours of video data for pretraining machine learning models. Unlike text-based language models that require around 60 TB of data, the video data necessitates significantly larger storage, leading to costs that would be unfeasible using cloud services like AWS, which could total $12 million annually. Instead, the company opted for a colocation center, reducing costs to approximately $354,000 per year. The project's unique

Show HN: Autism Simulator

Published: 2025-10-01 | Origin: Hacker News

Of course! Please provide the content you would like me to summarize.

The Temporal Dead Zone, or why the TypeScript codebase is littered with var statements

Published: 2025-10-01 | Origin: /r/programming

The content discusses the evolution of variable declarations in JavaScript, contrasting the older `var` declaration with the modern `let` and `const`. `var` is criticized for its mutability and for leaking beyond block scope, while `let` and `const` offer better block scoping and variable immutability. The author points out that while TypeScript is a modern language built to improve JavaScript, its codebase still contains many `var` declarations. This is attributed to concerns over

Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing

Published: 2025-10-01 | Origin: Hacker News

In Noah Brier's September 2025 piece, he describes his deep appreciation for Claude Code, which has evolved from a supplementary coding tool to a central operating system for managing various workflows, especially using Obsidian for note-taking. Unlike other note-taking applications like Notion or Evernote, Obsidian's Markdown files are stored locally, making them particularly compatible with AI coding tools. Brier has set up a home server to easily access his Claude Code and Obsidian setup remotely. Recently

Going down the rabbit hole of Postgres 18 features

Published: 2025-10-01 | Origin: /r/programming

PostgreSQL 18 has been officially released, featuring significant new capabilities such as Async IO infrastructure and OAuth 2.0 support, alongside performance enhancements like the btree skip scan and the introduction of native UUIDv7 support. This version includes over 3000 commits, resulting in approximately 30 notable features documented in a comprehensive blog post. The shift from synchronous to asynchronous IO is a key change, aiming to enhance performance and reduce resource utilization, particularly for storage solutions capable of high parallelism.

F3: Open-source data file format for the future [pdf]

Published: 2025-10-01 | Origin: Hacker News

The content is a PDF file header indicating it's a document associated with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). It includes details like the version of pdfTeX used (3.141592653-2.6-1.40.24), creation and modification dates, and identifiers like DOI (info:doi/10.1145/3749163). The document appears to focus on topics related to Columnar Storage, File Format, Compression, and Extensibility, with authors including X

The Crete Fleet – Concrete Tugs and Barges from WWI

Published: 2025-10-01 | Origin: Hacker News

The website is an online encyclopedia dedicated to the Concrete Ships of World War I and World War II, as well as the Mulberry Harbours. It offers a comprehensive index to help users find information easily, including blogs with detailed content. The authors share their personal connections to the subject, highlighting significant concrete ships like 'Cretegaff' and 'Hans Martin,' and cover various vessels and their history, complete with a photo gallery. During World War II, 495 ferro-concrete barges were

How to Read Code from the Showcase Ruby on Rails Engine

Published: 2025-10-01 | Origin: /r/ruby

Alexandre Ruban's article from October 1, 2025, discusses the benefits of reading code from experienced Ruby on Rails developers as a means to enhance one's skills. He introduces a three-part series focused on the Showcase Rails engine, a tool for documenting design systems, primarily developed by Kasper Timm Hansen. In the first part, the author guides readers through setting up Showcase within a Rails application and running it locally. He emphasizes the importance of practical application for understanding the engine's functionality.

Happy 29th Birthday to Squeak!

Published: 2025-10-01 | Origin: /r/programming

The Weekly Squeak celebrates the 29th anniversary of Squeak Smalltalk, recognizing the contributions from its community that have kept the platform vibrant and innovative. The anniversary serves as a moment of gratitude and encouragement to continue exploring, refining, and creating within the Squeak environment. The author reflects on their long-term use of Squeak and Smalltalk, emphasizing the joy of live programming compared to other languages. They express appreciation for the collaborative journey and look forward to future developments in the

What .NET 10 GC Changes Mean for Developers

Published: 2025-10-01 | Origin: Hacker News

Starting with .NET 10, several key concepts about garbage collection (GC) have evolved, offering significant improvements in memory usage and processing speed—potentially doubling or tripling performance. These enhancements come through new runtime switches and optimization behaviors, but they require careful consideration of trade-offs before implementation. The post explores these new GC features, the rationale behind them, and provides actionable guidance, including code and measurement tools, to determine whether to adopt these improvements or adjust settings based on specific scenarios. Historically

Intelligent Kubernetes Load Balancing at Databricks

Published: 2025-10-01 | Origin: Hacker News

Databricks, in a blog post by Gaurav Nanda, Vincent Cheng, and Rohit Agrawal published on September 30, 2025, discusses the importance of Kubernetes in their internal systems. While default networking features like ClusterIP services and kube-proxy suffice for basic service traffic routing, they encounter limitations in performance and reliability, especially in high-throughput, latency-sensitive environments. Databricks operates numerous stateless services using gRPC, which poses challenges in service-to-service

An informational website about why I went to prison

Published: 2025-10-01 | Origin: Hacker News

The author explains that their informational website about their prison experience was unintentionally made public after being shared on HackerNews. Due to being on house arrest, they have taken the site offline to avoid issues with their probation officer, as it was originally intended for potential employers and informal discussions. They invite readers to connect with them on Twitter, Instagram, or via email and mention that their GitHub account was hijacked during their prison sentence, seeking assistance in recovering it.

Blockdiff: We built our own file format for VM disk snapshots

Published: 2025-10-01 | Origin: Hacker News

The article discusses the development of an open-source tool called **blockdiff**, which enables rapid block-level diffs and snapshots of virtual machine (VM) disks. The creator, primarily a researcher in reinforcement learning for coding agents, built a VM hypervisor named **otterlink** to address slow VM startup times. Otterlink, which supports both research and production workloads, offers full isolation for untrusted user workloads, making it preferable to Docker for certain applications. The startup time for VMs

The gaslit asset class

Published: 2025-10-01 | Origin: Hacker News

David Rosenthal is discussing his work in Digital Preservation and invites others to engage by posting comments.

CDC File Transfer

Published: 2025-10-01 | Origin: Hacker News

The text discusses tools for syncing and streaming files from Windows to Linux, developed from the experience gained during the Stadia project. The tools, cdc_rsync and cdc_stream, use Content Defined Chunking (CDC) to optimize file transfers, allowing developers to quickly update their games without sending full files repeatedly. This is particularly useful for developers who typically work on Windows but need to deploy to Linux instances. The cdc_rsync tool enhances the standard rsync functionality by enabling faster transfers through a

Our Stewardship: Where We Are, What’s Changing and How We’ll Engage

Published: 2025-09-30 | Origin: /r/ruby

Shan Cureton, the Executive Director of Ruby Central, expresses gratitude to the Ruby community for their support and concerns regarding the Ruby Gems ecosystem. He emphasizes the organization's commitment to ensuring stability, safety, and trustworthiness in the language and its infrastructure. Cureton acknowledges shortcomings in communication and pledges to improve transparency about changes and their implications. He assures the community that efforts are being made to resolve ongoing issues while recognizing the importance of regaining their trust. The message concludes with appreciation for the community's

San Francisco Ruby Conference: November 19-21. A discount inside.

Published: 2025-09-30 | Origin: /r/ruby

The San Francisco Ruby Conference is now live, with tickets available for purchase. This event is aimed at Ruby and Rails enthusiasts, featuring two days of technical talks, hands-on workshops, a CTO roundtable discussing successful Ruby ventures, and product demos from innovative Ruby startups. Attendees can connect with teams from notable companies like Chime, Bolt.new, and Cisco Meraki, and receive expert support from Evil Martians on Ruby and Rails queries. The conference will host approximately 600 Rubyists at the Fort

Diff Algorithms

Published: 2025-09-30 | Origin: Hacker News

The author, a software engineer, discusses their journey in creating a Go library for generating diffs to visualize changes in files, stemming from dissatisfaction with existing free diff libraries. Throughout their professional and private projects, the need for an effective diff representation arose frequently, prompting the author to modify a personal library repeatedly. Encouraged by a colleague, they decided to publish their own library, which is a port of a C++ version. The author highlights attributes they look for in a diff library, noting a common

On How to Handle a Redesign

Published: 2025-09-30 | Origin: /r/programming

In a post by Radosław Miernik, published on September 30, 2025, the author discusses the frequent changes to product interfaces over recent years, noting that while some changes are improvements (like those seen in PostHog), others can be frustrating or simply ineffective (such as with Jira). Miernik shares insights from a developer’s perspective, detailing the challenges involved in implementing interface changes, regardless of whether the modifications are minor or extensive. He emphasizes the importance of user feedback

Evaluation Driven Development

Published: 2025-09-30 | Origin: /r/programming

Engineering teams are increasingly integrating Generative AI into their workflows, but this shift introduces new challenges that extend beyond traditional software development methods. To avoid stagnating in the proof-of-concept (PoC) stage, a "Scientific Approach" is recommended. The article discusses the impact of generative tasks, particularly those utilizing large language models (LLMs), on the software development lifecycle. It emphasizes the transition from PoC to a refined product, highlighting the need for a new framework called Evaluation Driven Development.