News Nug
DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: Hacker News

The author reflects on insights from the inaugural Cloud-Native Geospatial conference, emphasizing the importance of making geospatial data more accessible to a broader audience. A key focus was on the impact of DuckDB's spatial extension, which has simplified the process of working with geospatial data to just one or two lines of SQL code. This development has lowered entry barriers for data generalists, who previously faced challenges with installation and setup. The absence of a user-friendly approach may have hindered engagement with geo data

Contributions to ruby/spec by Ruby implementation

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: /r/ruby

The blog discusses the contributions of various Ruby implementations to the ruby/spec project, highlighting their historical involvement and impact. Rubinius initially started the project and was its primary contributor until around 2014, after which its contributions declined. In contrast, TruffleRuby emerged in 2014 and has since become the leading contributor, accounting for over half of all commits. CRuby consistently contributes about 20% of commits annually, leveraging its position to define new methods and behaviors. JRuby made notable contributions until

“An independent journalist” who won't remain nameless

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: Hacker News

Marisa Kabas expresses frustration over her experience as an independent journalist after CBS News published a story about a deportation agreement between the Trump administration and Rwanda, failing to credit her for originally reporting the information. Despite reminding herself to remain focused on her work and the significance of the issues she covers, she reached a breaking point when her contributions were overlooked. Kabas detailed her investigation into a diplomatic cable that indicated Rwanda's willingness to accept deportees, which she confirmed through multiple sources before reporting on it on

Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: Hacker News

Breeze PDF is a free, powerful PDF editor that operates entirely offline in your browser, ensuring complete privacy as your files are never uploaded to any server. Key features include the ability to add text and images, digitally sign documents, create fillable forms, merge multiple PDFs, and remove unwanted pages. It employs strong password encryption for sensitive documents and processes files locally using JavaScript. Although it's primarily designed for desktop use, it is accessible on mobile browsers, though screen size may impact usability. Breeze PDF

Decoupling

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: /r/programming

Wing Cloud, an infrastructure startup known for its programming language Winglang, recently shut down after securing a $20 million investment in 2023. The shutdown was not unexpected, as the concept behind Winglang conflicts with established principles in software development, particularly the importance of decoupling. Winglang combines application code with infrastructure code to create cloud infrastructure, which contradicts a long-standing lesson in software development that emphasizes the need for increased decoupling to minimize the impact of changes within a system. This

Checklist for software engineers who think there's no growth without working at scale

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: /r/programming

The author challenges the notion that career growth in software engineering is solely tied to working for large-scale organizations. They suggest that many tech-workers face significant challenges regardless of the scale and that respect for one's craft is crucial. The author emphasizes that personal and organizational growth can occur without managing vast amounts of traffic and that it's essential to change one's perspective on work. They also argue that many software engineers might not meet all basic expectations in their roles, hinting at the potential for growth in any environment.

PSA: The MavenCentral Publish Portal API is stable

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: /r/programming

This documentation is designed for users who want to implement clients to publish through the Portal Publisher API. For those aiming to publish components to Maven Central, the Maven client is recommended. It serves as a supplement to the OpenAPI documentation, offering an interactive environment for testing queries through a web client, with curl used in examples. To authenticate API requests, users must generate a user token via the Account page. This token is created by base64 encoding the username and password, which is then included in the

Semantic unit testing: test code without executing it

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: Hacker News

In April 2025, the author, who recently transitioned from Wallapop to RevenueCat, developed a Python library called "suite" for semantic unit testing. This innovative approach focuses on evaluating if a function's implementation aligns with its documented behavior, using large language models (LLMs) to assess code and documentation together, rather than traditional unit tests that compare input-output pairs. The aim is to leverage AI to identify bugs and discrepancies much like a human developer would, but more efficiently. The "

How we solved the Royal Game of Ur

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: /r/programming

After seven years of development, researchers have successfully solved the Royal Game of Ur across the Finkel, Blitz, and Masters rule sets. This achievement includes finding the best move for every position in the game, as well as calculating each player's precise winning chances under optimal play, using an open-source library called RoyalUr-Java. The process of creating a perfectly playing bot involves maximizing its winning probability by evaluating all potential future moves influenced by the roll of the dice, making it more akin to poker than chess

Tolerant Machine Learning Framework for Space Applications

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: /r/programming

The content describes a C++ framework designed for implementing machine learning models that operate reliably in radiation-heavy environments, such as outer space. The framework offers comprehensive radiation tolerance and has undergone rigorous testing to ensure its resilience. A specialized stress test simulates extreme radiation conditions, providing detailed statistics on error detection and correction rates, as well as overall system robustness. The framework includes a mission simulator for adaptive radiation protection and is documented for user access. It is fully integrated with test coverage, and all tests are passing,

Connomore64: Cycle exact emulation of the C64 using parallel microcontrollers

Published: 2025-05-03 | Origin: Hacker News

The project is focused on achieving realtime cycle-exact emulation of the Commodore 64 (C64) using multiple microcontrollers in parallel. It's currently in a proof-of-concept phase and not ready for end-user deployment. The development builds upon the rp2040js emulator project and utilizes an optimized C64 emulation code based on the "chips" library, with HDMI/DVI output facilitated through the PicoDVI library. The custom PCB designed for the project fits within a C64 case

ePub-utils: A Python library and CLI tool for inspecting ePub from the terminal

Published: 2025-05-02 | Origin: Hacker News

The content emphasizes the importance of user feedback and mentions that all input is taken seriously. It also references documentation for available qualifiers and describes the tool as a Python command-line interface (CLI) and utility library designed for manipulating EPUB files.

GitDroid: A third party Android app manager for apps uploaded to GitHub releases

Published: 2025-05-02 | Origin: Hacker News

The content emphasizes the importance of user feedback, stating that all input is carefully considered. It also mentions the existence of documentation for available qualifiers. Additionally, it introduces a third-party Android app manager designed for managing apps uploaded to GitHub releases, effectively serving as an app store for those applications.

Strings Just Got Faster

Published: 2025-05-02 | Origin: /r/programming

In JDK 25, Oracle enhanced the performance of the String class, making the String::hashCode function mostly constant foldable. This improvement significantly boosts performance, particularly when using Strings as keys in a static unmodifiable Map. An example of this is demonstrated with a Map of native calls, where the keys are method call names and the values are MethodHandles for invoking system calls. The new performance enhancements allow for constant folding in both key lookups and values, yielding over 8x improvements in

Fast(er) regular expression engines in Ruby

Published: 2025-05-02 | Origin: /r/ruby

The content highlights the challenges faced by SerpApi in extracting data from complex modern websites, often resorting to traditional regular expressions (regex) for tasks like extracting embedded JavaScript data. It explores alternative regex engines that may enhance performance over the default Ruby engine, Onigmo, which has limitations regarding scan time. Among the alternatives discussed are: 1. **RE2:** Developed by Google, designed for safety against ReDoS attacks, and boasts efficient performance with well-maintained Ruby bindings. 2

Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry

Published: 2025-05-02 | Origin: Hacker News

Cosmos 482, a former Soviet satellite launched in 1972 as part of a failed Venus probe mission, is gaining attention as it prepares to reenter Earth's atmosphere. The satellite contains a lander module designed for Venus, which may survive reentry into Earth's atmosphere due to its sturdy construction. Satellite tracker Marco Langbroek estimates a reentry date around May 10, 2024, with a possible variation of a few days. Ralf Vandebergh, another tracker, has captured

Show HN: I built a synthesizer based on 3D physics

Published: 2025-05-02 | Origin: Hacker News

It seems like you might be referring to a specific topic, story, or concept named "Anukari," but there isn't enough context provided in your message for a summary. Could you please elaborate or provide more details about "Anukari"? This will help me give you a more accurate summary.

Bifurcate the Problem Space

Published: 2025-05-02 | Origin: /r/programming

In a recent newsletter, Hillel Wayne emphasizes the importance of asking broad questions to improve debugging skills, a technique reminiscent of Stuart Halloway's concept of "carving the world in half" from his 2015 talk, which promotes the idea of bifurcating the problem space. This involves conducting tests that eliminate numerous potential root causes, similar to starting a game of 20 questions by asking broad types of questions (e.g., "Is it a man or a woman?").

Create your own graphics library in C++

Published: 2025-05-02 | Origin: /r/programming

This guide provides a quick overview of creating a graphics library for a custom operating system in C++. It emphasizes the need for a VGA/VBE driver to interact with the framebuffer for drawing graphics. Key components include creating two files, GUI.cpp and GUI.hpp, and establishing a namespace called GUI which houses structures for graphical elements like points, rectangles, circles, and buffers. The guide suggests initializing basic functions such as clear, get_pixel, and put_pixel and demonstrates how to implement essential features, beginning with

Microsoft inserts ads for Copilot into the docs

Published: 2025-05-02 | Origin: /r/programming

The content emphasizes that all feedback is carefully considered and taken seriously. It advises users to refer to the documentation for a list of available qualifiers. Additionally, it notes that there appears to be an unsolicited advertisement for Copilor included in the documentation.