News Nug
Ugly Code and Dumb Things

Published: 2025-02-20 | Origin: /r/programming

In a recent conversation, an engineer and I discussed "shitty code," prompting me to share my inspiration, Flamework, a pseudo framework created at Flickr. My work is driven by two main passions: creating elegant, reusable code for Open Source projects and building quick, pragmatic solutions for end users, often in product development where speed is vital. I have learned that the aims of creating reusable code and solving user problems can conflict. This realization began during my work on the German ubuntuusers website,

The Anatomy of a Durable Execution Stack from First Principles

Published: 2025-02-20 | Origin: /r/programming

The article, authored by Stephan Ewen, Ahmed Farghal, and Till Rohrmann, provides an in-depth exploration of Restate, a Durable Execution engine designed without reliance on databases or logging systems. This post is the second in a series discussing the development of a durable execution system based on fundamental principles. The previous article, "Every System is a Log," highlighted the advantages of a unified log architecture for simplifying distributed coordination. In this installment, the authors describe the design of the log-based runtime

Helix: A vision-language-action model for generalist humanoid control

Published: 2025-02-20 | Origin: Hacker News

Helix is a pioneering Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model designed to address significant challenges in robotics by integrating perception, language understanding, and control. Key features of Helix include: 1. **Full-Upper-Body Control**: It provides high-rate continuous control over a humanoid robot's entire upper body, including fingers and torso. 2. **Multi-Robot Collaboration**: Helix enables two robots to work together on complex, long-term tasks with unfamiliar objects. 3.

Marty Haught: Rethinking Technical Debt, Is It Really Just Drift? [audio]

Published: 2025-02-20 | Origin: /r/ruby

In the episode of the Maintainable Software Podcast, Marty Haught discusses the sustainability of open-source projects and the challenges surrounding RubyGems, proposing the concept of "drift" instead of "technical debt" to describe how software can become misaligned with its intended purpose over time. The conversation also addresses security issues in package management, highlighting a collaboration between Ruby Central and Trail of Bits to audit RubyGems. They touch on the potential impacts of the EU Cyber Resilience Act on open-source maintain

Append-only programming

Published: 2025-02-20 | Origin: /r/programming

The author has adopted a new methodology called "append-only programming," which emphasizes defining interfaces before implementations, promoting the writing of small functions, and enhancing code readability. This approach mimics a stream-of-consciousness style, but it comes with challenges: correcting errors requires appending new functions and possibly retyping entire programs. The author prefers using a shell command to write code, which enforces the append-only rules. While the concept is framed as a fun challenge rather than a practical programming method, it highlights

Brazilian Ship Sunk by WWII U-Boat Located

Published: 2025-02-20 | Origin: Hacker News

The Brazilian Navy has confirmed the location of the shipwreck of the Vital de Oliveira, which sank 28 miles off the coast of Rio de Janeiro after being torpedoed by a German U-boat on June 19, 1944. The ship was transporting supplies and soldiers during World War II and was the Brazilian Navy's greatest loss, with 99 of the 270 individuals aboard perishing. The wreck, first reported 14 years ago, was identified using advanced sonar technology. Brazil was

CAP Theorem explained with a horse and carriage

Published: 2025-02-20 | Origin: /r/programming

In the scenario, a king or queen faces a dilemma when attempting to communicate new laws to their subjects amid a flooding issue that blocks road access to some cities. Understanding the importance of everyone being aware of the laws to ensure justice, the ruler sends messengers with tablets containing the laws. However, the flood prevents full delivery, leading to a decision point influenced by the CAP theorem from network theory, which discusses the trade-off between consistency and availability in decentralized systems. Consistency is likened to ensuring all

Creating a chrome extension with rust + leptos -> wasm

Published: 2025-02-20 | Origin: /r/programming

Of course! Please provide the content you'd like me to summarize, and I'll be happy to help.

How I made a "Choose Your Own Path" AI Generated Game

Published: 2025-02-20 | Origin: /r/ruby

The content discusses the author's experience with creating "Choose Your Own Adventure" style stories using various large language models (LLMs). These interactive stories allow readers to make choices that influence the narrative. The generation process starts with Title Generation based on user-selected prompts, followed by Narrative Generation, where the LLM creates the story's text creatively. For Image Generation, a specific formatted prompt for a Stable Diffusion model is created from the narrative, rather than directly using the narrative itself. The process for generating

Magma: A Foundation Model for Multimodal AI Agents

Published: 2025-02-20 | Origin: Hacker News

The content describes the Magma pretraining pipeline, which involves tokenizing texts and encoding images and videos through a shared vision encoder. This process results in discrete and continuous tokens that are input into a large language model (LLM) for generating outputs related to verbal, spatial, and action types. Two key prompting methods are introduced: 1. **Set-of-Mark (SoM)** – This method aids action grounding in images across various applications, helping the model identify clickable UI buttons or robot arms by

Build your own SQLite in Rust, Part 5: Evaluating queries

Published: 2025-02-19 | Origin: Hacker News

In this post, the author discusses the integration of previously covered concepts related to the SQLite file format and a basic SQL parser to create a query evaluator, focusing on handling basic SELECT statements. The evaluator won't yet include features such as filtering, sorting, grouping, or joins, but will serve as a foundation for future enhancements. To begin evaluating queries, the author suggests creating a simple database with a single table (table1) containing two columns: id and value. A caution is provided against using existing

Cursed fire or #define black magic

Published: 2025-02-19 | Origin: /r/programming

The content discusses the feasibility of writing functional code solely using the `#define` directive in C, drawing a comparison to C++ templates, which are Turing complete. It hints at the complexity of the question and introduces a personal project: a simple compiler for a newly invented language named "wend." The author seeks to create engaging and illustrative examples, avoiding conventional examples like Fibonacci calculations. Instead, they aim to create a bonfire animation using terminal escape sequences for output. The author plans to first implement

TinyCompiler: a compiler in a week-end

Published: 2025-02-19 | Origin: /r/programming

The author introduces a series of articles aimed at those curious about how compilers work. Motivated by personal interest, the author created a simple programming language called "wend" (short for weekend) and wrote a translator that compiles wend code into GNU assembly. The goal is to produce a minimal compiler in about 500 lines of Python. The author notes that wend is a basic, strongly typed language similar to C or Java, but lacking features like pointers, arrays, and dynamic memory.

1972 Unix V2 "Beta" Resurrected

Published: 2025-02-19 | Origin: Hacker News

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

Five Kinds of Nondeterminism

Published: 2025-02-19 | Origin: Hacker News

The author notes that there will be no newsletter next week due to teaching a TLA+ workshop and reflects on their focus on formal methods (FM) and TLA+ as their primary revenue source. They express that while most readers may not engage with FM, they prefer to share ideas that are relevant across different fields. One concept discussed is "property strength," which relates to the varying strength of tests. The author explores the theme of nondeterminism in system modeling, categorizing it into five types

Quick Tip: Fix ActiveRecord Connection Pool Errors For Good

Published: 2025-02-19 | Origin: /r/ruby

The article by Adam McCrea addresses the "ConnectionTimeoutError" that often occurs in Ruby on Rails applications, specifically when the application cannot obtain a database connection from the pool in a specified time. This error arises not from the database itself, but from insufficient configuration of the connection pool within Rails. Each Rails process maintains a pool of database connections to support multiple threads, preventing contention for a single connection. To resolve the error, one typically needs to increase the connection pool size, which is set

When Imperfect Systems are Good, Actually: Bluesky's Lossy Timelines

Published: 2025-02-19 | Origin: /r/programming

In system design, achieving perfect consistency, availability, latency, and throughput simultaneously is challenging, if not impossible. Instead, each property should be balanced to find the appropriate fit for the application. The author discusses recent trade-offs made in the design of Bluesky's Following Feed/Timeline to enhance write performance, resulting in a significant reduction in latency while maintaining a user-friendly experience. When a user posts, it is indexed and stored in a database, and a reference is sent to their followers' Timelines

Starpath is 55 bytes

Published: 2025-02-19 | Origin: /r/programming

Lovebyte 2025 was an online sizecoding competition held from February 15 to 16, featuring various size-restricted categories ranging from 32 bytes to 1024 bytes. Coders worldwide anonymously submitted entries, with the 64-byte competition won by "Starpath (Youtube capture)," a small animated raycaster displaying curved 3D geometry and ambient sound. The competition included a download archive with different versions and commented source code, highlighting a version that is only 55 bytes. For newcomers

Restrict Destroying Dependent Rails Associations with dependent: :restrict_with_error Option

Published: 2025-02-19 | Origin: /r/ruby

The `dependent: :restrict_with_error` option in Rails is an effective way to maintain data integrity by preventing the deletion of parent records that have existing associated records. This feature not only preserves historical data but also provides users with clear error messages regarding dependency management. When utilizing associations in Rails, it’s crucial to manage referential integrity. The `dependent: :restrict_with_error` option ensures that records cannot be deleted until their dependencies are adequately addressed, unlike alternatives such as `:destroy`, `

Tetris in PostScript

Published: 2025-02-19 | Origin: /r/programming

The content emphasizes the importance of user feedback and invites readers to refer to the documentation for available qualifiers. It features a Tetris game implemented in PostScript, noting that users can play using the arrow keys and space bar in a specific window, and mentions that the implementation draws inspiration from another project called MeatFighter, while being tested on GhostView for macOS.