News Nug
CollectWise (YC F24) Is Hiring

Published: 2025-01-20 | Origin: Hacker News

CollectWise is a rapidly growing startup backed by Y Combinator, focused on automating consumer debt collection using generative AI. The company aims to improve the $35 billion US debt collection market by enabling creditors to recover funds efficiently while providing debtors with a personalized and empathetic approach. They are seeking their first founding engineer to join a dynamic team and contribute to building products from the ground up. This role allows for significant autonomy and influence over technology decisions, while fostering a top-notch engineering team.

Service Reliability Mathematics

Published: 2025-01-20 | Origin: /r/programming

Service reliability is commonly represented as a percentage, such as 99.9% uptime, which suggests approximately 8 hours and 46 minutes of downtime per year. However, this simplistic view ignores important nuances that engineers must consider. Notably, the nature and timing of downtime matter significantly; for example, one 8-hour outage can have different business impacts than multiple short outages, and downtime during peak hours can be far more costly than during off-hours. Additionally, achieving higher reliability often requires exponentially more

Why is Git Autocorrect too fast for Formula One drivers?

Published: 2025-01-20 | Origin: /r/programming

Git's autocorrect feature intentionally waits 0.1 seconds before executing a mistyped command, like "git pushy," allowing users to verify the intended command. This functionality, which has surprised users like @dhh, emerged from a combination of misunderstandings and historical decisions made by Git maintainers. It was not always a default behavior; initially, typing an unknown command produced a simple error message. In 2008, a patch was introduced to suggest similar commands, and subsequently, an option

Reverse Engineering Bambu Connect

Published: 2025-01-20 | Origin: Hacker News

All submissions to the site are governed by the CC 4.0 BY-SA license. Bambu Connect is an Electron App that follows Security through Obscurity principles, making it inherently insecure. To analyze or extract the private key stored in the app, one must decrypt it through a series of steps involving an encrypted string and RC4 decryption. An example Python script is provided to facilitate the extraction of these secrets by using a specific method to decode the content from the app's main.js file.

An illustrated guide to Amazon VPCs

Published: 2025-01-20 | Origin: /r/programming

The author discusses the importance of Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and their role in networking. Understanding VPCs is essential for grasping other AWS networking concepts. The motivation behind the creation of VPCs stems from challenges faced by companies considering a move to AWS, particularly concerns about shared networks where users might access each other's instances, and the potential for IP address conflicts with existing servers. The author provides a personal anecdote, stating they run a business called

UK's hardware talent is being wasted

Published: 2025-01-19 | Origin: Hacker News

In his article "Back Home," Josef Chen highlights the stark contrast in career trajectories for hardware engineering graduates from top UK universities like Imperial, Oxford, and Cambridge compared to their counterparts in Silicon Valley. While London graduates start with salaries between £30,000-£50,000, those in Silicon Valley can earn over $150,000. Many graduates are forced to accept lower-paying roles or switch to more lucrative fields like consulting or finance, leading to a significant waste of talent. Chen presents examples of

Ash Framework: New Home Page & Interactive Installer

Published: 2025-01-19 | Origin: /r/programming

The Elixir backend framework enhances productivity with declarative tools that eliminate unnecessary effort. It can be used alongside Phoenix LiveView or to quickly build APIs for any front-end application. Users can subscribe to a weekly newsletter and need to confirm their email. The framework offers various presets for easy installation, with PostgreSQL as the default database choice, recognized for its ease of installation and widespread support.

It's time to make computing personal again

Published: 2025-01-19 | Origin: Hacker News

The article discusses the evolution of home technology from a tool promoting personal freedom to one associated with corporate control and surveillance. In the early days of personal computing, individuals experienced a sense of tech liberty, having ownership and control over their devices. However, in recent years, the rise of internet surveillance, algorithmic bias in social media, and restrictive digital rights management (DRM) practices have shifted that control to large corporations. These changes have eroded the freedoms originally promised by personal computers. The author emphasizes

How do interruptions impact different software engineering activities

Published: 2025-01-19 | Origin: Hacker News

The content discusses the impact of interruptions on software engineers' productivity and stress, highlighting research findings on how different types of interruptions—like coworker questions and notifications—affect their work. It emphasizes that not all interruptions are equally disruptive, as factors like urgency and the authority of the interrupter play a role. The shift to remote work has changed the nature of interruptions, making it essential to understand their effects on engineers’ performance in tasks such as code writing, comprehension, and review. A study by

Understanding How Compression Works

Published: 2025-01-19 | Origin: /r/programming

The author embarked on a project to create their own Kafka Broker, MonKafka, which led them to explore the topic of compression, particularly for Kafka's record batches. Kafka currently supports four compression algorithms: GZIP, Snappy, LZ4, and ZSTD. Realizing their limited knowledge of compression beyond the basics from school, the author decided to delve deeper into the various compression algorithms. Compression is key to reducing storage requirements and transmission times by representing data with fewer bits, resulting in significant

MicroPie - An ultra-micro Python web framework that gets out of your way

Published: 2025-01-19 | Origin: /r/programming

MicroPie is a lightweight Python web framework designed for building dynamic, fast, and scalable web applications with ease. It features built-in Jinja2 templates, simple routing, and minimal bloat, making it ideal for developers who prioritize speed and simplicity. Inspired by CherryPy, it is licensed under the BSD three-clause license and was created by Harrison Erd. Users can report issues, fork the project, and access documentation and examples on its GitHub page, as well as find it on PyPI

TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users

Published: 2025-01-19 | Origin: Hacker News

TikTok announced on Sunday that it would be restoring its service to U.S. users after temporarily blocking access the previous evening. The decision followed assurances from President-elect Donald Trump regarding the company's service providers. TikTok expressed gratitude for Trump's support, emphasizing the importance of free speech and the need for a long-term solution to keep the platform operational in the U.S. Earlier, Trump had called for TikTok to remain available, indicating plans to issue an executive order to protect national security and prevent legal penalties for

Serializing Ruby datatypes in JSON

Published: 2025-01-19 | Origin: /r/ruby

Ruby's JSON library can convert native Ruby data types (String, bool, int, float, nil, Hash, and Array) into JSON. Non-native types, such as Range, Symbol, and Time, default to String during JSON serialization. A recent feature allows serialization of most core data types by requiring the `json/add/core` extension and using the `create_additions` keyword. This method has minimal performance overhead but does not resolve issues with Symbol hash keys, which remain a challenge for Side

Korah: A CLI Utility for Natural Language Queries

Published: 2025-01-19 | Origin: /r/programming

Korah is a user-friendly command-line utility that allows users to perform complex tasks using natural language queries. It currently features tools for searching files and monitoring processes, with plans for future enhancements. Users can quickly locate files and directories using flexible search criteria and can filter and monitor running processes with options for detailed or summarized output. Feedback from users is taken seriously, and documentation is available for all qualifiers.

Indentation-based syntax for Clojure

Published: 2025-01-19 | Origin: /r/programming

The content discusses an indentation-based syntax for Clojure, a dynamic functional programming language. It highlights that this syntax makes it easier for users transitioning from languages like Python. The project functions as both a transpiler and a Leiningen plugin, providing access to various Clojure features, including data manipulation and simple server capabilities. Users can integrate it into their projects by modifying the `project.clj` file and can compile Clojure code to a .jar format using the command `lein cwp

All Lisp Indentation Schemes Are Ugly

Published: 2025-01-19 | Origin: /r/programming

The content discusses the challenges of indentation in Lisp code, particularly focusing on how to manage parentheses and readability. While Lisp programmers tend to rely on indentation once they become accustomed to the syntax, there are alternative indentation-based syntaxes like Wisp and sweet expressions. The text highlights the problem of long lines of code being unreadable and the necessity for multi-line formatting with appropriate indentation. A common indentation style is presented, which aligns function arguments vertically to improve code structure visibility. However, this style can become cumbersome

UNLINK vs DEL - A deep dive into how it works internally in Redis.

Published: 2025-01-19 | Origin: /r/programming

The discussion revolves around the differences between Redis commands UNLINK and DEL. Most people believe that DEL is blocking while UNLINK is non-blocking, making UNLINK the preferable option. However, the author argues that this characterization is an oversimplification. Both commands aim to remove keys from Redis, but they differ in their memory deallocation techniques. UNLINK intelligently decides whether to free an object immediately (like DEL) or send it to a background queue for later processing, based on the deallocation

SRCL: Open-source React project to build web apps with terminal aesthetics

Published: 2025-01-19 | Origin: Hacker News

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Infinigen

Published: 2025-01-19 | Origin: Hacker News

Infinigen is a procedural generator of 3D scenes created by Princeton Vision & Learning Lab, designed specifically for computer vision research. It operates on a randomized mathematical framework using Blender, and is free and open-source under the BSD 3-Clause License. Infinigen generates diverse, high-quality 3D training data, focusing on natural environments such as plants, animals, terrains, and natural phenomena (e.g., fire, cloud, rain, snow). Users can customize the generation process by overriding

The "35-cent" Commodore 64 softmodem

Published: 2025-01-19 | Origin: Hacker News

The author reflects on their experience cataloging Convergent WorkSlate devices and recalls the challenge of connecting a Commodore SX-64 to the WorkSlate using an old program created by John, a previously active contributor to the Commodore community. Despite the WorkSlate's limited telecommunications capabilities, the author's efforts prove successful. They share limited information about John's background and contributions to the community, which include various software utilities. John's last known activity in the Commodore forums was in July 2000, and the