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Token Ruby - Issue 3 Published: 2025-08-21 | Origin: /r/ruby The third issue of Token Ruby has reached over 100 subscribers. The author is experimenting with a new AI stack, transitioning to Zed and Claude Code from Cursor and using Gemini instead of ChatGPT for daily tasks, noting an improvement in Gemini Pro. They invite readers to share their AI coding setups by replying to the email. The author has also recognized excessive time spent on X and YouTube and decided to use a timed lockbox to reduce screen time, recommending it for others. A humorous note is |
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'Reading crisis' prompts Denmark to end 25% tax on books Published: 2025-08-21 | Origin: Hacker News Denmark's government plans to eliminate the 25% sales tax on books in response to a "reading crisis." This tax is the highest in Europe and contrasts with countries like Britain, which have no sales tax on books. Culture Minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt highlighted the urgency of addressing declining reading skills, noting that 24% of Danish 15-year-olds can't understand a simple text, a rise over the past decade. The tax cut, which will cost the government approximately 330 million kroner ($51 |
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Contrasting Data and Objects (2018) Published: 2025-08-21 | Origin: Hacker News The author expresses skepticism about the efficacy of current programming languages, suggesting they fundamentally fail in important ways. They emphasize a distinction between data and objects, highlighting the complexities involved in representing values versus entities with identity. The text discusses issues such as mutability, the necessity of getters and setters, serialization, and deserialization, which can alter object identity. Additionally, the author points to design choices that languages make regarding the representation of objects, such as fixed behaviors (interfaces) versus fixed variants (algebraic |
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how to decide on the sequence of computable numbers Published: 2025-08-21 | Origin: /r/programming Academia.edu has ceased support for Internet Explorer, advising users to upgrade their browsers for better performance and security. The paper discussed refutes points from Alan Turing's work on computable numbers, particularly the application of the diagonal process. It presents an alternative method for computing direct diagonals that avoids infinite recursion and decision paradoxes. By utilizing techniques for resolving halting paradoxes, the paper aims to correct Turing's decision machine (đť““) to compute a direct diagonal, while also |
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I've never had a real adversary Published: 2025-08-21 | Origin: Hacker News The text discusses the misconceptions around adversarial situations in everyday life, single-player video games, and online gaming. The author argues that interactions in daily life, such as negotiating prices for donuts, are not truly adversarial since both parties generally want a mutually beneficial outcome. Similarly, in single-player games, challenges presented by antagonists (like an evil emperor) are not real adversaries, as they are designed by developers to provide players with a challenge that the player actually desires. While online games like chess |
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A statistical analysis of Rotten Tomatoes Published: 2025-08-21 | Origin: Hacker News The author reflects on their recent experience with hotel cable television, where they observed numerous commercials promoting upcoming movies, all boasting "Certified Fresh" ratings from Rotten Tomatoes. This led the author to question the validity of these ratings, considering two possibilities: either cinema has reached a peak of excellence, or Rotten Tomatoes itself has been compromised, potentially due to corporate influence. The author suggests that the situation may lean towards the latter, indicating that the site's reputation as an objective judge of film quality may have been undermined |
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Code review can be better Published: 2025-08-20 | Origin: Hacker News The author discusses their dissatisfaction with GitHub’s code review process, highlighting specific shortcomings, particularly its poor support for stacked pull requests and interdiff reviews. They propose an alternative approach using a tool called git-review, noting that their main reason for exploring this tool is not interdiff but rather their preference for reviewing code in a local environment, akin to how they write code. The author prefers to pull the source branch locally where they can manipulate the code seamlessly using their sophisticated editor, which allows for thorough |
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A Brief Look at the Mathematics of Structure Packing Published: 2025-08-20 | Origin: /r/programming The content discusses the necessity of JavaScript for rendering math equations using MathJax, highlighting that viewing raw LaTeX is not visually appealing. The author considered server-side rendering as an alternative but prioritized supporting accessibility features for MathJax instead. In a separate discussion, it addresses the memory layout of structures in C and how it can vary based on the order of member declarations. The author notes that while typically, organizing members from largest to smallest alignment can minimize size, this is not a universal |
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How can AI ID a cat? Published: 2025-08-20 | Origin: Hacker News The article discusses the challenges and advancements in programming computers to recognize images, such as cat photos. While humans can effortlessly identify a cat in a picture, developing a computer program to do the same is complex and involves identifying key traits of cats amidst various backgrounds and angles. Modern advancements have enabled computers to recognize images using neural networks, which learn by analyzing millions of examples rather than being explicitly programmed for each recognition task. These networks are also capable of generating coherent text, excelling at games, and solving complex |
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Vibe Coding Experiment Failures Published: 2025-08-20 | Origin: /r/programming Al Sweigart has been experimenting with "vibe coding," where he prompts large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to create complete apps without assuming any programming ability. His focus is on determining how well these models can produce functioning software and identifying specific failure patterns. Using Python and the tkinter library for the GUI, he aims to create small applications, including one that displays a map of Africa and challenges users to click on a country. While LLMs excel at |
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The theory and practice of selling the Aga cooker (1935) [pdf] Published: 2025-08-20 | Origin: Hacker News The content appears to be a partial and corrupted representation of a PDF file, containing binary data and some recognizable PDF structure elements. Specifically, it includes references to PDF objects (like `obj`), media boxes, and procedural sets which characterize the layout and content of a PDF document. The text is largely gibberish due to the binary format and encoding, making it difficult to extract any coherent information or summarize meaningful content. |
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Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel? Published: 2025-08-20 | Origin: Hacker News Tavis Ormandy discusses his experience with Anubis, a project that uses hybrid art and network security measures to protect websites from AI crawlers. Anubis employs anime catgirl avatars to represent its blocking mechanism, which has impacted Ormandy's access to important Linux kernel resources. Unlike traditional security measures like CAPTCHAs, which are designed to be challenging for bots but easy for humans, Anubis reverses this approach. It requires users to solve a computational problem that’s easy |
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Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization Published: 2025-08-20 | Origin: Hacker News The content explores the topic of moving objects in 3D space, beginning with a personal curiosity that led to research and experimentation. It introduces the concepts of positioning objects using three axes: x (horizontal), y (vertical), and z (depth). Through mathematical functions, the text explains how to move objects, using a cube as an example. The x position can oscillate using a cosine function, causing the cube to move back and forth, while the y position can do the same vertically. |
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That's not refactoring Published: 2025-08-20 | Origin: /r/ruby The content discusses the common misconceptions surrounding refactoring in software development. It highlights that refactoring should involve changing the design of existing code without altering its behavior, contrasting this with the experimental approach some developers take, where they unintentionally change functionality. The author emphasizes that refactoring should be a conservative process, aimed at making effective investments in code improvements. While experimentation has its place in development, such as through "spikes," it should be approached cautiously during refactoring. The key takeaway is that refactoring |
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Physics of badminton's new killer spin serve Published: 2025-08-20 | Origin: Hacker News The spin serve in badminton, where players add pre-spin to the shuttlecock before contact, has proven to be highly effective—so much so that it was deemed "impossible to return" and was banned by the Badminton World Federation (BWF) in 2023 until after the 2024 Paralympic Games. This decision was made to prevent concerns about unfair advantages and to avoid making international tournaments a testing ground for the serve, similar to the previously banned "Sidek serve." Recent |
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GitHub - carter2099/dsa.rb: A CLI test suite to practice implementations of core algorithms in Ruby Published: 2025-08-20 | Origin: /r/ruby The content highlights a CLI test suite designed for practicing core algorithm implementations in Ruby. It emphasizes the importance of feedback and directs users to documentation for additional qualifiers. The test suite is described as a preparatory tool for platforms like LeetCode, with an emphasis on focused application rather than exhaustive performance testing. Users are encouraged to practice implementing algorithms efficiently, ideally mastering five default algorithms in under 10 minutes. The suite supports adding new algorithms and contributing to its development. The recommendation to check out the "pick |
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Shader Academy: Learn computer graphics by solving challenges Published: 2025-08-20 | Origin: Hacker News Of course! Please provide the content you'd like me to summarize. |
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The Four Stages of Objective-Smalltalk Published: 2025-08-20 | Origin: /r/programming The content discusses the challenges associated with using multiple programming languages, particularly focusing on Objective-C and its complexities when integrated with WebScript, an interpreted language part of WebObjects. WebScript resembles Objective-C closely, allowing for code compatibility and dynamic implementation of features like categories on Objective-C objects. However, it also highlights the syntactic complications that arise from Objective-C's hybrid nature. For instance, Objective-C uses special characters for strings and message sending due to constraints from C syntax. In contrast, Objective-S |
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DeepSeek V3.1 Base Suddenly Launched: Outperforms Claude 4 in Programming, Internet Awaits R2 and V4 Published: 2025-08-20 | Origin: /r/programming DeepSeek has launched a new V3.1 version, which features an extended context length of 128k, an open-source model with 685 billion parameters, and support for various precision formats (BF16 to FP8). Key highlights of the update include: - **Programming Capability**: V3.1 has excelled in programming tasks, achieving a leading score of 71.6% on the Aider benchmark, outperforming other models like Claude Opus 4, with improved inference |
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Type-Machine Published: 2025-08-20 | Origin: Hacker News The content describes a PhD student's work in computer science with a focus on using Template Haskell to derive record structures and simulate structural subtyping in Haskell. They highlight the limitations of Haskell's nominal type system, particularly in managing records with many fields. The introduction of record syntax in GHC 7.4.1 improved field naming, but challenges remain regarding constraints and field manipulation. The student draws inspiration from TypeScript's structural subtyping and utility types to create a Haskell library called |