Published: 2025-01-31 | Origin: Hacker News

The arXiv LaTeX Cleaner is a tool designed to help users prepare their LaTeX code for submission to arXiv by cleaning up their files and creating a new folder ready for upload. Users can install the tool on MacOS via Homebrew or download the source code for direct command-line installation. The tool addresses the 50MB submission limit on arXiv by preventing the upload of certain file types and allowing users to revert custom LaTeX commands to standard LaTeX using

Published: 2025-01-31 | Origin: /r/ruby

The article discusses effective strategies for managing database migrations in Rails to maintain a consistent and organized database schema across different environments (development, staging, and production). Migrations are temporary tools designed for incremental changes and should not be relied upon once they have been executed; the schema file then becomes the definitive representation of the database state. In production and staging, migrations don't need to run repeatedly, and instead, developers can use the command `bin/rails db:schema:load` to sync the database.

Published: 2025-01-31 | Origin: /r/ruby

In the previous sections, you learned how to enable Signed Exchanges (SXG) and allow Google to prefetch your website's HTML and subresources, which should lead to instant page loading from the browser cache when a user clicks on a link in search results. This eliminates wait times for HTML, CSS, images, and JavaScript execution. However, there are scenarios where this process may not work as intended, especially with subresources, which are crucial for performance as they are larger and take longer to

Published: 2025-01-31 | Origin: /r/programming

The content discusses the importance of effective communication in engineering, specifically in relation to product outcomes. It highlights a scenario where a well-delivered presentation on technical optimizations fails to connect with a VP who questions its relevance, emphasizing that technical expertise alone is insufficient. Successful communication is positioned as a crucial aspect of engineering, essential for aligning teams, informing product decisions, and instilling stakeholder confidence. The article advocates for treating communication as a key component of the engineering toolkit, akin to product development. It suggests that

Published: 2025-01-31 | Origin: /r/programming

The excerpt discusses the challenges developers face with flaky tests during the final moments before shipping code in a project. Flaky tests can lead to inconsistencies in test results, causing frustration, especially when builds fail unexpectedly. The authors highlight timing and ordering issues as common causes of flaky tests in Go programming. To address timing issues, it's suggested to avoid fixed sleeps in tests and instead implement wait times that are strictly necessary. When testing timing functions, use the shortest effective intervals. For time-related tests, injecting

Published: 2025-01-31 | Origin: /r/programming

The article discusses the misconceptions surrounding null pointers in programming, highlighting their deceptively simple appearance and the increased risk of bugs and vulnerabilities due to compiler optimizations and platform-specific behaviors. It begins with common fallacies, detailing how these misunderstandings can affect both novices and experienced programmers alike. 1. The first misconception addressed is that dereferencing a null pointer immediately crashes a program. In lower-level languages like C, C++, or Rust, this often results in errors like segmentation faults. However, higher-level languages

Published: 2025-01-31 | Origin: /r/ruby

The blog discusses testing mock arguments using RSpec, following a previous post on creating custom matchers. It emphasizes the ability to mock method calls with `expect().to receive()` and verify that methods are called with the correct arguments. The post highlights that, beyond exact arguments, RSpec allows for pattern matching and more complex checks, such as verifying the properties of objects or the length of arrays. Additionally, it notes that RSpec enables testing of arguments passed to methods that accept blocks. Overall, R

Published: 2025-01-31 | Origin: /r/programming

Joel Spolsky is a software developer based in New York City and the co-founder and CEO of Stack Overflow, the largest online community for programmers, where over 40 million users engage monthly. Stack Overflow provides job resources through Stack Overflow Jobs, catering to developers looking for new opportunities, and Stack Overflow Talent, which helps employers find qualified candidates. Additionally, Spolsky founded Fog Creek Software, known for creating influential software products like FogBugz, Trello, and Gomix. The company emphasizes

Published: 2025-01-31 | Origin: /r/programming

Nate Bennett discusses the growing prominence of React in UI development, likening it to the foundational Linux kernel for front-end frameworks. He uses React for various projects, including video games and mobile apps, and believes that declarative, component-style frameworks represent the future of UI development. However, he notes that React has shortcomings, particularly in unit testing, which he finds challenging. Testing with React is complicated by its asynchronous UI updates and the nature of its rendering, making it hard to determine the state of

Published: 2025-01-31 | Origin: Hacker News

The release of Deepseek R1 has made a significant impact in the industry as it presents an open model capable of competing with OpenAI's offerings in complex reasoning tasks. Using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and a reinforcement learning (RL)-focused multi-stage training method, Deepseek R1 was introduced alongside a research paper detailing its development. A key highlight from the paper is an "aha moment" where DeepSeek-R1-Zero, the model's initial version, autonomously learns to

Published: 2025-01-31 | Origin: Hacker News

Adam Joseph's talk introduces the public release of **sixos**, an operating system built on **nixpkgs** that replaces **systemd** with **skarnet's s6 supervisor**. He criticizes systemd's monolithic design for conflicting with UNIX principles, suggesting it contributes to *platform decay* and lacks proper stability in Linux-grade ABI, making it vulnerable to deterioration in software quality. **Sixos** aims to simplify service management by utilizing the **infuse combinator**

Published: 2025-01-31 | Origin: Hacker News

The text discusses an experimental X11 window manager written in pure Ruby, emphasizing that it should be approached with caution due to its instability and potential to cause various issues, including data loss and crashes. Designed for tiling but allowing floating layouts, the window manager lacks window decorations and features like draggable or resizable windows. It requires external tools for keyboard handling and communication occurs via X11 ClientMessage events. Currently offering minimal multi-monitor support and relying on user input for development, this minimalist window manager is aimed

Published: 2025-01-31 | Origin: Hacker News

arXiv is seeking input from the community to improve its platform and invites ideas for new features through arXivLabs, a collaborative framework for development. Participants must align with arXiv's core values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. Additionally, users can subscribe to receive operational status updates via email or Slack.

Published: 2025-01-30 | Origin: Hacker News

The content discusses Jane Street's experiences with building and releasing developer tools, particularly focusing on their build systems. It highlights their initial dissatisfaction with the OMake build system, which led them to create their own, called Jenga, around 2012. However, Jenga was not widely adopted due to compatibility issues and the requirement for users to embrace Jane Street’s specific development practices. Consequently, they decided to un-open source Jenga. In 2016, Jane Street developed Jbuilder, a simpler

Published: 2025-01-30 | Origin: /r/programming

Idempotency is an important yet often overlooked concept that enhances the resilience and performance of distributed systems, particularly for low-latency APIs facing stringent SLAs. It refers to the property of an action that yields the same outcome regardless of how many times it is performed. For APIs, this means that repeat requests result in the same effect as a single one. In contrast, non-idempotent actions, like incrementing a counter, produce different outcomes with each execution. Distributed systems are prone to various

Published: 2025-01-30 | Origin: Hacker News

The content emphasizes the importance of user feedback for the Stats application, which allows macOS users to monitor their system. Users can download the application from a provided link, with instructions for installation via both direct download and Homebrew. Stats supports macOS versions starting from 10.15 (Catalina) and requires certain configurations for optimal performance, particularly for M1 and Intel-based Macs. Data collection is energy-intensive; therefore, users are encouraged to disable some modules, like Sensors and Bluetooth, to reduce

Published: 2025-01-30 | Origin: /r/programming

Let’s Encrypt provides TLS certificates to over 550 million websites, having grown 42% in the past year. They issue approximately 340,000 certificates every hour and rely on a rate limiting system to manage high traffic. Initially using MariaDB, the old system faced challenges such as straining servers and long reset times. To address these issues, they implemented a new rate limiting system based on Redis and a virtual scheduling algorithm, capable of supporting over a billion active certificates. In 2015,

Published: 2025-01-30 | Origin: /r/programming

The blog post emphasizes the importance of "provenance" in pointer usage within programming languages like C, C++, and Rust. The author argues that even when two pointers refer to the same memory address, they are not necessarily interchangeable due to different contextual meanings. This post illustrates potential issues in optimizing compilers when provenance is overlooked, specifically using LLVM as an example, though the problems are not unique to it. The author presents a series of compiler transformations that seem intuitively correct but ultimately result in incorrect

Published: 2025-01-30 | Origin: /r/programming

The "Feisty Duck’s Cryptography & Security Newsletter," authored by Ivan Ristić, highlights the recent decision by Let’s Encrypt to discontinue support for online certificate status checking (OCSP) starting in May 2025. This change follows the realization that OCSP does not significantly enhance security, as many browsers either ignore it or implement it inadequately. Let’s Encrypt, which processes 12 billion OCSP requests daily, finds this service costly without security benefits. Consequently, once its current certificates

Published: 2025-01-30 | Origin: /r/programming

The content introduces new subscribers to TNS, inviting them to expect daily updates on news and trends, and encouraging them to check their inbox for a confirmation email to customize their preferences. It also suggests following TNS on social media, particularly LinkedIn, and exploring featured stories while awaiting the first newsletter. Additionally, it highlights the work of Jeaye Wilkerson, who has transitioned to full-time development of a new programming language called "jank," designed to integrate features of Clojure with native