News Nug
C stdlib isn't threadsafe and even safe Rust didn't save us

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: /r/programming

The EdgeDB team is migrating a large part of their network I/O code from Python to Rust and is learning valuable lessons along the way. They are developing a new HTTP fetch feature using the reqwest library, which initially worked on x86_64 CI runners. However, they encountered intermittent test failures on ARM64 CI runners, appearing to be a deadlock but proving to be something different. The issue puzzled the team, particularly why it only affected ARM64. They speculated that the difference might

1,700 Year Old Egg Never Broke

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: Hacker News

The article discusses small-group adventures inspired by fascinating places and their histories, focusing on a wishing well located about 50 miles northwest of London called Berryfields. This ancient site, once used by Romans for both water extraction and ritual purposes, has revealed numerous artifacts from 270 to 300 AD, including coins, ceramic pots, and bones. Archaeological excavations from 2007 to 2016 uncovered evidence of nearly two millennia of human activity, including Iron Age and medieval artifacts. Notably

GPT-4.1 in the API

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: Hacker News

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Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: Hacker News

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The path to open-sourcing the DeepSeek inference engine

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: Hacker News

The organization values community feedback and has recently open-sourced several libraries, receiving positive responses that have led to collaborations and bug fixes. Encouraged by this support, they plan to contribute their internal inference engine to the open-source community, acknowledging the essential role of open-source tools like PyTorch and vLLM in their development of DeepSeek models. While initially considering open-sourcing the full engine, they identified challenges and opted to collaborate with existing open-source projects instead. They express gratitude for the open-source

How git cherry-pick and revert use 3-way merge

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: /r/programming

In this post, the author reflects on their misunderstanding of how the `git cherry-pick` command operates. Initially, they believed it simply applied a patch, but found this approach problematic when faced with merge conflicts. They note that this view, while mostly correct, is incomplete because it doesn't account for the underlying mechanics of the command. Upon investigating the Git source code, the author discovered that `git cherry-pick` actually performs a "3-way merge" rather than merely applying a patch. This

Python Performance: Why 'if not list' is 2x Faster Than Using len()

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: /r/programming

In Python, you can check if a list is empty using two methods: `if not mylist` and `if len(mylist) == 0`. The first method is generally preferred as it is considered more "Pythonic" and is around twice as fast as the second method. The performance difference arises from the underlying implementation in CPython, where `if not mylist` translates to fewer virtual machine (VM) instructions compared to `if len(mylist) == 0`. Specifically,

Why Pascal is Not My Favourite Language (1981)

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: /r/programming

The provided content appears to be a fragment of a PDF file encoded in binary format, which includes various object definitions and stream data. It does not contain coherent textual information or a clear narrative but rather raw, encoded data associated with a PDF document. Consequently, I cannot summarize it meaningfully, as it lacks accessible, understandable content within the provided excerpt.

Why is there a "small house" in IBM's Code page 437?

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: /r/programming

This post serves as a supplementary piece to the article "The Origins of DEL (0x7F) and its Legacy in Amiga ASCII Art." While the main article discusses the DEL character and its specific representation in AmigaOS's Topaz font, this bonus article examines how IBM's PC represents DEL as a "small house" (⌂) in its Code Page 437 character set. The author acknowledges contributions from Michael Walden and VileR and invites reader feedback via email.

Why Fennel? (a programming language that runs on the Lua runtime)

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: /r/programming

Fennel is a programming language that operates on the Lua runtime, which is recognized for its powerful yet lightweight nature. Lua's simplicity and minimalistic design make it fast and ideal for embedding in other applications, allowing users to reprogram software easily. Despite its strengths, Lua has some shortcomings that can lead to errors or confusion. Fennel addresses these issues by providing an alternative notation for writing Lua programs while maintaining compatibility with Lua libraries and tools. One key distinction of Fennel is its par

A hackable AI assistant using a single SQLite table and a handful of cron jobs

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: Hacker News

The article discusses the creation of a simple AI assistant named Stevens, designed for family use. The author emphasizes that while there is much hype around complex AI technologies, building useful personal tools can be achieved with straightforward methods. Stevens operates on a basic architecture consisting of a single SQLite table to store memories and uses cron jobs for gathering information and sending updates, all hosted on Val.town. Stevens provides daily updates via Telegram, including calendar schedules, weather forecasts, reminders, and details about incoming mail. Users

A protein folding mystery solved: Study explains core packing fractions

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: Hacker News

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Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: Hacker News

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Engineers who won’t commit

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: /r/programming

The text discusses the need for engineers, especially those with more experience and knowledge, to take clear positions during technical discussions rather than remaining non-committal. While some may believe that keeping an open mind is a virtue, this can lead to confusion and poor decision-making, as less knowledgeable team members may make uninformed guesses. Strong engineers have a responsibility to provide guidance, even if they are not completely confident in their decisions. The author acknowledges that fear of being wrong can hinder one's ability to commit

Short Ruby Newsletter - edition 131a

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: /r/ruby

The content is a newsletter recap by Vladut Cosmin and Lucian Ghinda, dated April 14, 2025, focusing on various updates and announcements in the Ruby development community. Key highlights include: - **Judoscale Launch**: A new tool that autoscales web and worker deployments on platforms like Heroku and AWS, along with guides for configuring Rails and scaling Sidekiq. - **New App Release**: Donn Felker launched "Gramifier," a utility app

Concurrency in Haskell: Fast, Simple, Correct

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: Hacker News

The author, after nearly a decade of experience in embedded systems programming using languages like C, C++, and Rust, finds themselves working with Haskell. They previously viewed functional programming as unpractical but became intrigued by its applications in real-time systems, where performance and correctness are crucial. The piece emphasizes the importance of concurrency, drawing parallels with the issues arising from using regular expressions and threads. It advocates for breaking down work into independent tasks to leverage multi-core processors and to optimize for slow external operations like

Hako: an embeddable, lightweight, secure, high-performance JavaScript engine.

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: /r/programming

As a birthday gift, the author is releasing Hako1, an early-access version of a JavaScript engine called Hako. Hako is a fork of PrimJS, designed for portability, security, and performance, and can be easily embedded in programs while allowing scalability. Unlike traditional C/C++ engines like PrimJS and QuickJS, Hako compiles to WebAssembly, which offers a memory-safe and sandboxed environment, reducing the risk of memory-related security vulnerabilities. Hako includes features to

JSLinux

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: Hacker News

The content is a list of available emulated systems. However, further details about the specific systems are not provided in the excerpt.

Show HN: Resurrecting Infocom's Unix Z-Machine with Cosmopolitan

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: Hacker News

The author has successfully created standalone executables of the Zork trilogy, originally from Infocom's UNIX source, and ported them using Cosmopolitan, allowing them to run natively on Windows, Mac, Linux, and BSD systems for both ARM and x86 architectures without requiring additional installations or files. The author also provides instructions for downloading Zork and running arbitrary .z3 text adventure files. Additionally, v3.0 of the project "Status Line," which enables Zork to run on

Demolishing the Fry's Electronics in Burbank

Published: 2025-04-14 | Origin: Hacker News

Rebecca Castillo is a video creator and special projects lead at the Los Angeles Times, working with High School Insider and various Public Affairs programs. She is originally from Southern California and holds degrees from Swarthmore College and USC.