News Nug
Faking a JPEG

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: Hacker News

The author discusses a web application called Spigot, which creates a fake hierarchy of web pages using a Markov Chain to generate nonsensical content aimed at deceiving aggressive web crawlers. Spigot has been operational for several months and generates over a million pages daily. During periodic checks of its logs, the author notices that some crawlers employ tactics to obscure their identities, likely indicating they are running through a botnet. Recently, a new high-traffic crawler named "ImageSiftBot"

Placing functions

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: /r/programming

The author discusses their recent exploration into "placing functions," a concept designed to enhance memory management in programming. About a year ago, they noticed the simplicity of in-place construction and separated value creation in memory from writing to memory. Six months later, they developed the "placing crate," a prototype that showcases placing functions—functions that create return types in the caller’s stack frame rather than within the function’s stack frame. This method ensures stable addresses upon construction, potentially improving performance and enabling features like async functions

OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: Hacker News

Key researchers from the AI coding startup Windsurf, including CEO Varun Mohan and cofounder Douglas Chen, are transitioning to Google DeepMind instead of a planned acquisition by OpenAI. Google will hire these individuals and some R&D staff to focus on agentic coding efforts, primarily for their Gemini project. Although Google will obtain a non-exclusive license for some Windsurf technology, it will not have ownership or a stake in the company. Following this move, Jeff Wang has been appointed as Windsurf

Glimmer Web Components (+ Championship Win & General Recipe for Success)

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: /r/ruby

The blog post begins with the author celebrating their victory in the 2024-2025 TGIF Curling League championship with their team, Brooms Up, at the Royal Montreal Curling Club, despite having only learned Curling 2.5 years ago. This win exemplifies the successful application of skills from Software Engineering to sports. The author subsequently shares their journey of learning baseball, a sport they’ve loved but never played well, focusing on their recent achievements in Softball. The main topic

Coupdoeil - a Ruby gem for popovers

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: /r/ruby

The author has released a new Ruby on Rails gem called "coupdoeil," designed to simplify the addition of interactive popovers to applications. This gem focuses on performance and modularity, allowing users to display details about resources, menus, or forms without navigating away from the current view. Inspired by Wikipedia popups, which provide quick context without losing focus, the author highlights similar features on platforms like GitHub, where hovering over links can reveal extra details about directories, users, and pull requests.

Preliminary report into Air India crash released

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: Hacker News

A preliminary report on last month's Air India crash reveals that both fuel control switches were in the cut-off position just before the incident, typically indicating engine shutdown. Cockpit voice recordings indicate confusion between the two pilots, with one questioning why the cut-off was initiated, while the other denied it. The crash resulted in at least 260 fatalities, with the only survivor being British national Vishwashkumar Ramesh. The victims included a British couple, Fiongal and Jamie Greenlaw-Meek,

Study finds that AI tools make experienced programmers 19% slower. But that is not the most interesting find...

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: /r/programming

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An (almost) catastrophic OpenZFS bug and the humans that made it (and Rust is here too)

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: /r/programming

The author recently fixed a critical bug in OpenZFS related to the function handling data size conversions for virtual device drivers. OpenZFS uses three different notions of "size" for written data, and the specific function in question is for the raidz vdev type, which is complex due to considerations like parity and stripe width changes. The core issue was the potential for returning an incorrect allocation size, which could lead to data corruption by writing past the allocated space. The discovery of the bug took nearly

Regarding Prollyferation: Followup to "People Keep Inventing Prolly Trees"

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: /r/programming

Last month, the author published a blog post discussing the independent invention of Prolly Trees, a type of data structure similar to Merkle Trees. The post detailed how Merkle Trees are generated by using a content-defined chunker on a file, hashing the resulting chunks, and recursively applying the chunker to the list of hashes until one chunk remains. This method effectively stores the version history of a dataset while maximizing data deduplication. Due to the post's popularity, the author revisited some

Concurrent Programming with Harmony

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: /r/programming

Concurrency in programming, while it can increase performance, introduces complexity due to multiple threads reading and updating shared variables simultaneously. This complexity arises for at least two main reasons. This book aims to assist readers in understanding and developing concurrent code, particularly for distributed systems, and introduces a tool called Harmony for testing such code. Harmony employs model checking, which systematically explores all possible executions of a test program to uncover potential bugs, even rare ones. Unlike formal verification that proves overall correctness, model checking verifies correctness within a

ETH Zurich and EPFL to release a LLM developed on public infrastructure

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: Hacker News

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jank is C++

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: Hacker News

The author discusses the progress made in enhancing C++ interoperability using the jank tool in a recent quarter. Initially, in April, jank could not access C++. Now, thanks to individual sponsors and support from Clojurists Together, as well as contributions from Vassil Vassilev and Lang Hames in Clang and LLVM, significant advancements have been achieved. Key improvements include the implementation of manual memory management using `cpp/new` and `cpp/delete`, leveraging jank's garbage collection

I built a vector-value database in pure C: libvictor + victordb (daemon) — AMA / Feedback welcome

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: /r/programming

The content emphasizes the importance of user feedback, stating that all input is taken seriously. It mentions various software development kits (SDKs) available for different programming languages, including C++, Python, Golang, C#, and a .NET SDK for interoperation between C and C#. The .NET SDK has exceeded 1,000 downloads on NuGet, reflecting community trust. Additionally, there are several instances of loading errors mentioned with no further details provided.

Switching to Claude Code and VSCode Inside Docker

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: Hacker News

The author recently transitioned from their old AI coding setup to using Claude Code in Docker with VSCode's "Dev Container" feature. They discuss their motivations for the switch, particularly frustrations with their previous tool, Cursor, which had recently changed its pricing model and faced performance issues such as slow response times. Despite previously being satisfied with a monthly plan, the inadequacy of Cursor's rate limits led the author to reevaluate their options. Consequently, they opted for a $20 subscription to Claude, which they

Fsyncgate: errors on fsync are unrecoverable

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: /r/programming

The archived "fsyncgate" email thread discusses a data corruption issue encountered by a user involving PostgreSQL and a storage error. The key takeaway is that PostgreSQL should "PANIC" when it receives an EIO (input/output error) from fsync(), rather than retrying it, especially on Linux systems. The thread outlines how PostgreSQL's handling of the fsync() EIO caused a checkpoint to succeed despite an underlying write failure, leading to data loss. The retry cleared the error

Active Agent with Justin Bowen - Episode 03 of The Ruby AI Podcast

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: /r/ruby

The Ruby AI Podcast focuses on the intersection of Ruby programming and artificial intelligence, featuring expert insights and interviews. In a recent episode, hosts Valentino Stoll and Joe Leo welcomed Ruby veteran Justin Bowen, who introduced Active Agent—a Rails-native framework designed to integrate LLMs, vector search, and business logic into the MVC architecture. The discussion also covered practical aspects of deploying AI, including the importance of defining ground-truth datasets, evaluation harnesses, and maintaining production quality to avoid AI hallucinations. The

Not So Fast: AI Coding Tools Can Actually Reduce Productivity

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: /r/programming

A fireside chat will take place in San Francisco on July 16, featuring primary authors of a paper discussing AI coding tools. Despite the ongoing hype about these tools being able to assist startups and non-programmers, a study by METR conducted in spring 2025 reveals that experienced developers working on mature projects experienced a 19% decrease in productivity when using AI tools. The study's participants initially believed their productivity had increased by 20%, highlighting a discrepancy between perception and reality. While the findings

Forget Borrow Checkers: C3 Solved Memory Lifetimes With Scopes

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: /r/programming

The post discusses memory management techniques in modern programming, focusing on the C3 language's new default, the Temp allocator, which uses memory allocation regions or arenas. The Temp allocator strikes a balance between the simplicity of garbage collection and manual memory management, helping to reduce memory leaks, improve performance, and simplify code. It distinguishes between stack allocations (compact and automatic) and heap allocations (larger and customizable). Traditional memory management methods like RAII, reference counting, and garbage collection have their trade-offs,

Australia is introducing age checks for search engines like Google

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: Hacker News

Starting December 27, 2023, Google and Microsoft will be required to implement age-assurance technology for logged-in users in Australia as part of a new regulation aimed at preventing children's access to harmful content such as pornography. This mandate follows rules introduced in June that compel tech companies to verify user ages. Experts have expressed concerns that this change could compromise privacy and may not effectively protect young users. Lisa Given, a professor specializing in age-assurance technology, noted the unprecedented nature of such regulations globally and

Chrome's hidden X-Browser-Validation header reverse engineered

Published: 2025-07-11 | Origin: Hacker News

The text discusses the analysis of Chrome's private `x-browser-validation` header, which is thought to serve as an integrity signal to verify user agents and detect spoofing attempts. The author outlines a method for reverse engineering this header, stating that it involves concatenating two strings, hashing the data with SHA-1, and base64 encoding the result. The process is described in detail, including steps to access Chrome's source code using IDA, specifically focusing on a master routine that constructs the `X