News Nug
Why Is Good Friday Called Good Friday?

Published: 2025-04-18 | Origin: Hacker News

Good Friday, commemorated annually on the Friday before Easter Sunday, marks the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, a pivotal event in Christianity despite its painful nature. Christians refer to it as "good" to signify its holiness and the monumental implications it has for sin absolution and human relationships with God, rather than implying a joyful occasion. The day is observed through events detailing Christ's suffering, including his arrest, flogging, and crucifixion, leading to his burial in a tomb. The term

The Size of Packets

Published: 2025-04-18 | Origin: Hacker News

The article discusses the size of packets in packet-switched networks, highlighting that while these networks have been in use for decades, the optimal packet size remains a debated topic. Currently, the default packet size in the Internet is between 20 and 1,500 octets. Packets larger than this can face fragmentation issues, while those smaller may compromise header integrity. Historical context is provided, noting that in 1981, the Internet Protocol Specification (RFC 791) recommended a maximum packet size of

What do I think about Lua after shipping a project with 60k lines of code?

Published: 2025-04-17 | Origin: Hacker News

Luden.io, an educational game developer, is in conversation with Ivan Trusov, the lead programmer of the game Craftomation 101, focusing on the Lua programming language. Craftomation 101 features around 60,000 lines of Lua code and was developed using the Defold game engine. The game involves self-replicating robots that use visual programming to craft resources on a frozen planet and has garnered a "Very Positive" rating on Steam after its Early Access release. It's also being utilized

I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs

Published: 2025-04-17 | Origin: Hacker News

The latest edition of the newsletter "Can’t Get Much Higher" features a discussion about a new dataset called "Chordonomicon," which compiles chord progressions from nearly 680,000 songs from Ultimate-Guitar. The term was coined by researchers last October as part of their project. The author, Chris Dalla Riva, explores the dataset without a specific hypothesis, aiming to uncover interesting patterns within the extensive collection of chord progressions. The piece begins by addressing the fundamental question of what constitutes

Pair Programmers Unite: A Quiet Rebellion

Published: 2025-04-17 | Origin: /r/programming

The author has been seeking ways for developers to protect themselves from ineffective productivity management methods, which often rely on arbitrary targets and metrics. They note the continual resurgence of these misguided approaches and express frustration with outdated management practices. However, they've identified pair programming as a potential solution. By making pair programming a requirement rather than an occasional practice, developers could collectively avoid individual performance scrutiny, as performance would no longer be tied to single individuals. To implement this, task management tools would need to be adapted so that

Potatoes in the Mail

Published: 2025-04-17 | Origin: Hacker News

The content highlights the fun and unconventional idea of mailing potatoes by simply writing addresses directly on them, similar to mailing coconuts. It emphasizes the joy of sending a unique gift like a potato. The document also includes various facts about the United States Postal Service (USPS), mentioning numerous trademarks associated with the organization, such as "Click-N-Ship®" and "Priority Mail®." Additionally, it references non-postal trademarks like those of Dollar General and Starbucks. Lastly, it notes that the

Nanoseconds-overhead C++ tracer

Published: 2025-04-17 | Origin: /r/programming

The feedback provided is taken seriously, and users are encouraged to consult the documentation for all available qualifiers. The repository features a lightweight tracing engine suitable for profiling multithreaded applications, offering low overhead (8-12 nanoseconds per event). It performs faster than other time-tracing methods but lacks portability, primarily supporting Windows 10+ and Ubuntu 20+ on x64 architectures. This tool is beneficial for observing complex multithreading issues that sampling profilers may miss, making it useful for diagnosing

Everyone knows your location, Part 2: try it yourself and share the results

Published: 2025-04-17 | Origin: /r/programming

The author provides an update on their exploration of location data sharing among third parties, following up on an earlier post. They have engaged in discussions with individuals from non-profit organizations focused on data privacy and employees from adtech companies. The author has since refined their approach to analyzing mobile app traffic, streamlining the process to save time while still allowing for in-depth digs into the data. They created a Python notebook and a guide to help others record mobile app traffic, with a link to a GitHub repository

Gemini 2.5 Flash

Published: 2025-04-17 | Origin: Hacker News

Google has released an early version of Gemini 2.5 Flash through the Gemini API, enhancing its predecessor, 2.0 Flash, with improved reasoning capabilities while maintaining speed and cost-effectiveness. This version introduces a fully hybrid reasoning model that allows developers to toggle the thinking feature on or off and set thinking budgets to balance quality, cost, and latency. Gemini 2.5 Flash excels in complex tasks requiring multi-step reasoning, demonstrating strong performance in more challenging scenarios. It offers the best price

Earthly shutting down Earthfiles

Published: 2025-04-17 | Origin: /r/programming

**Summary:** Earthly celebrates its 5-year anniversary, expressing gratitude to its community for their support and contributions. Since its launch, Earthly has successfully built a diverse community of developers and has been adopted by thousands of teams globally, delivering significant improvements in CI/CD efficiency and speed, with reported ROI benefits. However, the company faces challenges in commercializing its product and has indicated that, without commercial success, it cannot sustain further development. The note reflects on the slow adoption of new open-source

"Serbia: Cellebrite zero-day exploit used to target phone of Serbian student activist" -- "The exploit, which targeted Linux kernel USB drivers, enabled Cellebrite customers with physical access to a locked Android device to bypass" the "lock screen and gain privileged access on the device." [PDF]

Published: 2025-04-17 | Origin: /r/programming

The provided content is a partial excerpt of a PDF file formatted as binary data, specifically in the PDF 1.7 standard. It includes various objects related to the document structure, such as metadata, viewing preferences, and content streams. However, the stream data appears to be largely unreadable due to its binary nature, indicating it likely contains visual or text information encoded for PDF processing. The content is truncated and does not provide any descriptive information about the actual document, such as text or images.

Diskless Kafka: 80% Leaner, 100% Open

Published: 2025-04-17 | Origin: /r/programming

The Aiven Platform provides a comprehensive solution for streaming, storing, and serving data across various cloud services, allowing users to bring their own cloud (BYOC). It offers several integrations and connectors and customizable plans for different use cases, including AI, event streaming, and industry-specific applications like retail and fintech. Key products include streaming services (such as Aiven for Apache Kafka® and Aiven for Apache Flink®), storage solutions (like Aiven for PostgreSQL® and Aiven for MySQL

Crows can recognize geometric regularity

Published: 2025-04-17 | Origin: Hacker News

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iOS 18.4 - dlsym considered harmful

Published: 2025-04-17 | Origin: /r/programming

Last week, Apple rolled out iOS 18.4 for supported iPhones, and a bug was discovered in applications that utilize dynamic symbol resolution via dlsym() on devices with pointer authentication (PAC). This issue was first identified in a custom iOS app compiled for the arm64e architecture. The app uses dlopen() and dlsym() to dynamically load system function addresses, such as strcpy, which worked as expected. However, when attempting to resolve the strcmp function, the application

(All) Databases Are Just Files. Postgres Too

Published: 2025-04-17 | Origin: /r/programming

The content discusses the popularity of SQLite and DuckDB due to their simplicity, allowing users to easily manage them as files. It contrasts this with PostgreSQL, which, while powerful, often becomes a "black box" for users who install it through package managers without fully understanding its components. The author believes that by learning the basics of how PostgreSQL works, users can improve their workflow, efficiency, and debugging skills. The piece highlights common issues associated with detachment from the system, such as relying on

Making Software: An illustrated reference manual for people who design and build software

Published: 2025-04-17 | Origin: /r/programming

The content is a reference manual by Dan Hollick for individuals involved in software design and development. It addresses common curiosities about technology, such as how touch screens detect touches, explaining the role of metal electrodes and magnetic fields. It discusses Gaussian blur in image processing, where nearby pixels are weighted using a Gaussian distribution for a realistic effect. The manual also demystifies how design tools like Figma's pen tool work with bezier curves and the challenges of rasterizing these curves for pixel displays, including

Adding IP restriction to Rack app for specific accounts

Published: 2025-04-17 | Origin: /r/ruby

The content discusses implementing IP restrictions in a Rails application to allow corporate customers to whitelist specific IPs for their accounts. The approach involves storing the whitelisted IPs in a database due to the account-specific and optional nature of the requirement. While a simple solution using a `before_action` is considered, it poses performance issues since it requires querying the database for every request. To address performance concerns, caching the whitelisted IPs in Redis or Memcache is suggested, reducing database overhead and improving scalability.

An intro to DeepSeek's distributed file system

Published: 2025-04-17 | Origin: Hacker News

3FS (Fire-Flyer File System) is a distributed filesystem released by DeepSeek as part of their open-source release week on April 15, 2025. The blog highlights how distributed filesystems create an illusion for applications, making them function as if they are interacting with a standard local filesystem, despite the data being spread across multiple machines. This abstraction allows users to access files seamlessly, without needing to manage the complexity of underlying network calls or numerous storage devices. Distributed filesystems excel in

Development On Apple Silicon with UTM

Published: 2025-04-17 | Origin: /r/programming

UTM is an application that allows users to run alternative operating systems, such as Windows or Linux, on iPhones and iPads, but not iOS on other systems. This guide focuses on using UTM virtual machines (VMs) to set up Linux development environments on Apple Silicon devices. To begin, install UTM and necessary tools using Homebrew. You'll also need to obtain cloud images from sources like Fedora and Ubuntu for the VM. The setup involves creating an `init.iso` file

Zoom outage caused by accidental 'shutting down' of the zoom.us domain

Published: 2025-04-17 | Origin: Hacker News

The content is about a one-time password (OTP) verification system. Users can resend the OTP after a countdown of 30 seconds if they did not receive it, with an option to resend it. Additionally, there is information regarding a webhook URL for sending updates, and users can subscribe to receive notifications via email and text message for issues with Zoom services, including updates on incidents and resolutions.