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Subtleties of SQLite Indexes: Understanding Query Planner Quirks Yielded a 35% Speedup

Published: 2025-09-29 | Origin: /r/programming

Over the past six months, Scour has significantly increased its content ingestion from 330,000 to over 1.4 million items monthly. This surge has resulted in slower ranking times for users' feeds, prompting an investigation into performance enhancements. The author learned about SQLite's query planner and implemented optimizations that improved a primary query's speed by approximately 35%. Scour functions as a personalized content feed, retrieving articles and blog posts tailored to user interests. Ranking occurs dynamically, typically within 100

Loadmo.re: design inspiration for unconventional web

Published: 2025-09-29 | Origin: Hacker News

loadmo.re is a mobile website gallery that highlights innovative design inspirations for unconventional web experiences. With the rise of smartphone usage, digital design practices need to adapt to mobile-first designs, even as designers primarily use computers for their work. The platform aims to showcase unique smartphone websites to encourage designers to utilize the mobile interface effectively and foster discussions about mobile-first design within the digital community. Follow their updates on Instagram for more inspiration.

How Reference Counting Works Internally in Swift

Published: 2025-09-29 | Origin: /r/programming

The article delves into the intricacies of Swift reference counting, which is crucial knowledge for iOS developers, particularly in interviews. It discusses key concepts such as value types versus reference types, weak versus unowned references, and the implications of reference counting on performance and application behavior. Key topics include: - **Reference Types**: Understanding strong, weak, and unowned references in Swift. - **Performance**: Exploring why weak references are generally less performant due to factors like indirection, cache misses

Why SW Architecture is Mostly Communication • David Whitney, Ian Cooper & Hannes Lowette

Published: 2025-09-29 | Origin: /r/programming

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Rails 8 upgrade story: duplicate keys sneaking into our JSON responses

Published: 2025-09-29 | Origin: /r/ruby

The upgrade from Rails 7.2.2.2 to 8.0.2.1 appeared to be seamless at first, with no immediate exceptions or stability issues. However, issues arose when an external application consuming the JSON API began receiving identifiers as integers rather than strings. Upon rolling back the changes, debugging revealed that the problem stemmed from code that serialized an ActiveRecord object, where a key intended to be a string was inadvertently merged as a symbol. In earlier Rails versions,

Constitent Hashing

Published: 2025-09-29 | Origin: Hacker News

This post introduces consistent hashing, an algorithm designed to minimize the amount of recomputed keys in a hash table when its size changes. It addresses the challenge of distributing a cache across multiple servers in a web proxy when storage demands exceed a single machine's capacity. The post highlights the limitations of straightforward hashing methods, especially in dynamic environments where servers can be added or removed, leading to frequent cache misses. For example, if a cache has a certain number of slots and a new server is introduced, all previously

Cumulative Statistics in PostgreSQL 18

Published: 2025-09-29 | Origin: /r/programming

PostgreSQL 18 introduces a significant overhaul of its statistics and monitoring subsystem, featuring extended cumulative statistics, per-backend I/O visibility, and enhanced capabilities for extensions to manage statistics. Key enhancements include improvements to Grand Unified Configuration (GUC) controls and better snapshot/caching behaviors, facilitating more effective performance analysis and integration with extensions. The update addresses historical limitations in the statistics system, such as clearing relations statistics and the absence of a C API for cumulative statistics. The new features are designed to provide

The Death of Utilitarian Programming

Published: 2025-09-29 | Origin: /r/programming

The content discusses the evolution of coding practices over the last decade, emphasizing a shift from utilitarian coding—where programmers directly addressed user needs through specific applications—to a more abstract and separated approach with libraries and frameworks. It argues that while libraries provide reusable functionalities, they lead to a disconnection from the direct impact on users and the domain knowledge that coders once gained. The author believes that focusing solely on technical skills has caused many developers to lose sight of the broader context of life and learning. This transformation

Zero ASIC releases Wildebeest, the highest performance FPGA synthesis tool

Published: 2025-09-29 | Origin: Hacker News

Zero ASIC, a U.S. semiconductor startup, announced the release of WildebeestTM on September 17, 2025, claiming it to be the highest performance FPGA synthesis tool in the world. The software addresses a previously observed gap in quality of results (QoR) between open source and proprietary synthesis tools in hardware development. While the software community has successfully transitioned away from proprietary compilers to open-source options like LLVM and GCC, open source FPGA synthesis has lagged due to limited funding and

Test Driven Development: Bad Example

Published: 2025-09-29 | Origin: /r/programming

The author expresses mixed feelings about Test Driven Development (TDD), noting that it is not consistently defined in the industry, leading to confusion in discussions. They acknowledge that terminology can change over time and focus on Kent Beck's 2003 book, "Test Driven Development: By Example," which offers a practical guide to TDD with real-world examples. The book aims to inspire developers by illustrating how TDD can significantly enhance the quality of their work through a process known as the "Red-Green-

Programming a Cyberpunk Soundscape with Sonic Pi / YT@CodeWithCypert

Published: 2025-09-29 | Origin: /r/programming

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F-Droid and Google's Developer Registration Decree

Published: 2025-09-29 | Origin: Hacker News

F-Droid has been a reliable platform for Android users to find and install free and open-source apps for the past 15 years. Unlike commercial app stores, such as Google Play, which often harbor spyware and scams, F-Droid prioritizes user safety and transparency. It only distributes apps that have been vetted to ensure they are open-source and free from harmful features like ads and trackers. The review process involves developers publicly hosting their source code, which F-Droid inspects before compiling and signing the

Primer on FedEx's Distribution Network (2024)

Published: 2025-09-29 | Origin: Hacker News

FedEx, founded in 1971 as an express delivery service with the motto "When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight," gained a significant advantage in the logistics industry following the Federal Aviation Act of 1977, which enabled the use of larger aircraft. This allowed FedEx to centralize its operations in Memphis, which has since become the largest cargo airport in the U.S. and the second largest globally. Today, FedEx operates 741 aircraft, outpacing UPS's

Go ahead, write the “stupid” code

Published: 2025-09-28 | Origin: Hacker News

The author reflects on their journey since graduating high school in 2010, where they initially pursued a career in music but were guided by their mother to explore education as a backup. They attended a local TAFE, drawn to computing and gaming courses, despite initial doubts about their ability in programming. After overcoming early challenges and immersing themselves in programming through various education and experience, they developed a strong passion and aptitude for it. Now, they are exploring JavaScript/TypeScript and runtimes like Node

Should Salesforce's Tableau Be Granted a Patent On 'Visualizing Hierarchical Data'?

Published: 2025-09-28 | Origin: /r/programming

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Play snake in the URL address bar

Published: 2025-09-28 | Origin: Hacker News

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just nuked 120+ unused npm deps from a huge Nx monorepo

Published: 2025-09-28 | Origin: /r/programming

John James shares his experience cleaning up a large Nx monorepo with around 500 dependencies. By utilizing a tool called Knip, which is designed to identify unused dependencies while accommodating modern setups, he was able to prune approximately 120 packages. This effort not only reduced the Yarn install time by about a minute but also minimized security alert warnings, leading to an overall improvement in development efficiency. Initially, James performed a baseline scan with Knip, which flagged many dependencies as "unused." He noted that

My early years as a programmer: 1997-2002

Published: 2025-09-28 | Origin: /r/programming

The author reflects on their journey in software development as a primary source of income, expressing gratitude for the creative outlet it provides. Despite spending extensive time in front of a computer, they did not connect with programming early in life. Their initial experience was programming their TI-89 graphing calculator to store formulas for physics class, which later evolved into creating simple programs and visual outputs, fueling their enjoyment of front-end programming. Although they initially pursued a career in art, influenced by 20th-century sci-fi

[OC] Lessons learned from profiling Flink Apps

Published: 2025-09-28 | Origin: /r/programming

The writer undertook an investigation into why their Flink applications were experiencing out-of-memory (OOM) errors, initially attempting to solve the issue by increasing the heap size of Task Managers, which did not address the root cause. They found the problem-solving process rewarding, as it required deep dives into application code and experimentation. Over a span of 3-4 weeks, the author profiled over ten heap dumps to analyze Flink application behavior under varying traffic loads. Key observations included: - Flink

Spider-Man: The Movie Game dissection project - Introduction

Published: 2025-09-28 | Origin: /r/programming

The post details the author's experience in starting a dissection project for the PC port of "Spider-Man: The Movie Game." It aims to help others learn how to decompile Windows NT binaries, including identifying compiler versions and managing Visual Studio versions. The project benefits from the availability of the Japanese GameCube version's symbols and the public source code of a similar game, which streamline the decompilation process. There are also exclusive Xbox levels for Kraven The Hunter, with existing game code across all versions