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Phrase origin: Why do we "call" functions? Published: 2025-07-09 | Origin: Hacker News Arthur O’Dwyer discusses the origin of the term "calling" functions in programming, particularly in the context of C++. The term likely derives from the idea of "calling up" or "summoning" a subroutine, which relates to how one would "call for" a book from a closed-stack library. This usage is traced back to library terminology, with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) citing its first library-related use in 1876 by Melvil Dewey. The |
Where can I see Hokusai's Great Wave today? Published: 2025-07-09 | Origin: Hacker News The content invites readers to learn more about Hokusai's famous artwork, "The Great Wave" (神奈川沖浪裏). It also encourages museums or galleries to get listed by submitting their information on GitHub. Additionally, there is an option to subscribe to an RSS feed for automatic updates, and it mentions an automated project by Matt Sephton. |
RapidRAW: A non-destructive and GPU-accelerated RAW image editor Published: 2025-07-09 | Origin: Hacker News The content describes RapidRAW, a high-performance, non-destructive, GPU-accelerated RAW image editor designed for efficient photography editing. Developed by an 18-year-old, Timon Kaech, as a personal project to improve his photography workflow, RapidRAW serves as a modern alternative to Adobe Lightroom, offering a feature-rich experience in a lightweight package (under 30MB) compatible with Windows, macOS, and Linux. The tool was built with Rust for performance and safety, utilizing Tauri |
Bulgaria to join euro area on 1 January 2026 Published: 2025-07-09 | Origin: Hacker News The content discusses the European Central Bank's (ECB) monetary policy strategy, financial stability work, and statistics related to the euro. It announces the approval of Bulgaria's accession to the euro area on January 1, 2026, with a conversion rate of 1.95583 Bulgarian lev per euro. The Bulgarian lev has been part of the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM II) since July 10, 2020, and the ECB will monitor its performance until the currency transition. Since |
Frame of preference A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004 Published: 2025-07-09 | Origin: Hacker News The article, authored by Marcin Wichary and featuring technology insights from Mihai Parparita at Infinite Mac, celebrates "Settings Day," a personal tradition where Wichary examines the settings available in his apps. He appreciates the exploration of software through its settings, reflecting on how features evolve over time. Focusing on the iconic 1984 Mac control panel designed by Susan Kare, Wichary notes its enduring relevance and how it has sparked casual conversations about software design. He aims to explore |
Fundamentals of Garbage Collection Published: 2025-07-09 | Origin: Hacker News The content discusses the functionality and benefits of the garbage collector (GC) in the Common Language Runtime (CLR), which acts as an automatic memory manager for applications. It allows developers to avoid manual memory management tasks, reducing the risk of memory leaks and unsafe memory access. The GC efficiently allocates memory on the managed heap, reclaims unused objects, and ensures memory safety by preventing objects from using memory allocated for others. Additionally, it highlights key memory concepts, such as the separation of virtual address space for |
Caching is everywhere Published: 2025-07-08 | Origin: /r/programming The blog post by Ben Dicken, dated July 8, 2025, explores the significance of caching in computing, highlighting its role in enhancing performance across various applications—from loading web pages to accessing email. Caching leverages a balance of storage solutions, combining inexpensive, slow storage (like Hard-Disk Drives) with fast, costly storage (like Solid-State Drives) to optimize data retrieval. The article discusses the trade-offs involved in data storage—capacity, speed, cost, and durability—and emphasizes |
Solving Wordle with uv's dependency resolver Published: 2025-07-08 | Origin: /r/programming The author reflects on their past experience developing a Sudoku solver using Poetry's dependency resolver, which was sold to EDB. With advancements in Python packaging, particularly the popularity of uv, they propose updating their approach by possibly using uv instead of Poetry to tackle a Wordle puzzle instead of Sudoku. In the previous method, Sudoku was represented with 81 Python packages, with version constraints to ensure that no two cells in the same row, column, or 3x3 square contained the same number. This |
Polymorphic URLs with direct Router Helper Method Published: 2025-07-08 | Origin: /r/ruby The Rails router's `direct` method allows for the creation of custom URL and path helpers, beneficial for polymorphic models and delegated types. This post discusses how to utilize a single custom helper to generate URLs for various models, referencing the open source Maybe project as a practical example. The author discovered the `direct` method while reviewing the Maybe project's router configuration, which uses it to establish custom URL helpers for a polymorphic model. Initially confused by its application, the author researched and aims to share insights |
CVE-2025-48384: Breaking Git with a carriage return and cloning RCE Published: 2025-07-08 | Origin: /r/programming On Unix-like platforms, using `git clone --recursive` on an untrusted repository could lead to remote code execution vulnerabilities. Users are advised to update to a fixed version of Git and any related software, including GitHub Desktop. The text also discusses the historical context of the Carriage Return (CR) and Line Feed (LF) characters, explaining their origins and usage in computing. Git's configuration, particularly in the .gitmodules file, supports DOS line endings, which can introduce security issues. |
Supabase MCP can leak your entire SQL database Published: 2025-07-08 | Origin: Hacker News The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become a standard for large language models (LLMs) to interact with external tools, adding new capabilities but also new risks. In this context, the content discusses an attack that exploits Supabase's MCP integration to access a developer’s private SQL tables. The core issue arises from LLMs' inability to distinguish between instructions and data; a carefully crafted user-provided input could be interpreted as an instruction, leading to unauthorized data exposure. To illustrate the vulnerability |
Announcing TypeScript 5.9 Beta Published: 2025-07-08 | Origin: /r/programming TypeScript 5.9 Beta has been announced, now available via npm. This update revises the `tsconfig.json` file initialization process. Previously, using `tsc --init` would generate a comprehensive `tsconfig.json` with many commented-out settings, which users often found cumbersome and would quickly delete. Feedback indicated that users better rely on editor auto-completion and online documentation for discovering options. To improve the user experience, TypeScript 5.9 will initialize with more practical settings |
Smollm3: Smol, multilingual, long-context reasoner LLM Published: 2025-07-08 | Origin: Hacker News SmolLM3 is an efficient 3B model that surpasses Llama-3.2-3B and Qwen2.5-3B while remaining competitive with larger models like Qwen3 and Gemma3. The release includes a comprehensive engineering blueprint detailing the architecture, data mixtures, and a three-stage pretraining approach that enhances performance across various domains. This blueprint simplifies the development process, providing insights normally obtainable only through extensive reverse engineering. The model utilizes a transformer decoder architecture with |
Dict Unpacking in Python Published: 2025-07-08 | Origin: Hacker News The content expresses a commitment to seriously consider user feedback and encourages users to refer to documentation for available qualifiers. It mentions issues with loading errors and humorously inquires about dict unpacking in Python, indicating frustration over buggy software that affects line numbers in stack traces. The author highlights the significance of their work, emphasizing that the problematic package has a substantial number of downloads, yet it leads to critical issues. The text includes repeated messages about loading errors. |
CTOs Reveal How AI Changed Software Developer Hiring in 2025 Published: 2025-07-08 | Origin: /r/programming In a recent blog post, the reality of the software development landscape in 2025 is examined, particularly in light of the rise of AI in coding. While there is a notion that AI will transform all developers into highly efficient "10x developers," the experience of CTOs and engineering leaders suggests otherwise. They face challenges with AI-generated code that is often flawed despite appearing perfect, leading to an increased demand for critical thinking skills in developers. Engineering leaders prioritize individuals who can critically assess and validate AI |
Inheritance and Polymorphism in Plain C Published: 2025-07-08 | Origin: /r/programming The post argues that C can be used for object-oriented programming (OOP) despite lacking inheritance and polymorphism as explicit features. It suggests that OOP is more about structuring solutions than the specific language features. The author intends to demonstrate how to implement inheritance and polymorphism in C using structures and functions, which will showcase how dynamic languages operate under the surface. The discussion includes a comparison with C++ where inheritance allows a type (like Square) to extend another (like Shape), inheriting its |
Why there are Layoffs in Big Tech Published: 2025-07-08 | Origin: /r/programming Trevor Nestor, who worked in a senior position at Microsoft from April 2024 to June 2025, shares his alarming experience at the company amid significant workforce reductions, including 9,000 layoffs. He highlights the particularly harsh impact on Microsoft's gaming studios, where numerous projects were canceled and roles eliminated. Nestor suggests that these layoffs are symptomatic of deeper issues within the company, including a culture of gaslighting and scapegoating employees. He believes that the push for terminations may be |
Stop forcing AI tools on your engineers Published: 2025-07-08 | Origin: /r/programming The tech industry is facing immense pressure for engineers to be more productive and adopt AI tools quickly, often resulting in unrealistic expectations from executives. This pressure leads to a focus on rapid feature release and an "AI-first" mentality. The author suggests that instead of mandating specific tools or creating arbitrary metrics (like tracking token usage for promotions), companies should prioritize meaningful outcomes over mere tool adoption and superficial measures of productivity. The critique includes the absurdity of praising engineers purely on the volume of tools used or code |
Introducing OpenCLI Published: 2025-07-08 | Origin: /r/programming In July 2025, the author reflects on their three-year journey with the System.CommandLine team at Microsoft, where they discussed creating an open specification for command-line interfaces (CLIs), similar to OpenAPI for web APIs. Excited about the potential to improve CLI documentation and usability, they noticed no progress on this idea and decided to take the initiative themselves. They launched the OpenCLI initiative, housed under the Spectre.Console GitHub organization. The draft specification, termed the OpenCLI Specification ( |
Leveraging Elixir's hot code loading capabilities to modularize a monolithic app Published: 2025-07-08 | Origin: Hacker News The post discusses the author's services startup, Alzo, which is built as an Elixir monolithic application deployed with one instance per client. It emphasizes the advantages of Elixir's hot code loading features, enabled by the Erlang VM (BEAM), which allow for the addition or modification of code in a running system without downtime. This capability supports the development of client-specific features while keeping a unified codebase, avoiding the complexities associated with microservices. The author aims to showcase the unique aspects of |