News Nug
The little bool of doom

Published: 2025-01-28 | Origin: /r/programming

The author expresses a fondness for the classic game DOOM, which remains enjoyable even after 31 years, and notes its availability on modern platforms due to open-source accessibility. They maintain several DOOM-related packages for Fedora Linux, which undergoes a mass rebuild before each new release. Ahead of Fedora Linux 42's release, the author encountered issues during the rebuild process, specifically with a package called chocolate-doom. Upon checking the build logs, they identified a compilation error related to the use of

Why Junior Developers Are Burning Out Before They Bloom: Surviving Tech’s Obsession With ‘New’

Published: 2025-01-28 | Origin: /r/programming

The author reflects on the evolution of programming skills from the late 1990s to today, highlighting a shift from deep understanding to reliance on instant resources like Stack Overflow. A recent experience with a junior developer struggling to fix a nearly functional AI-generated React component illustrates this issue. The author argues that modern junior developers are not lazy but are caught in an educational system that prioritizes the quantity of knowledge over the quality of skill. This leads to challenges such as increased debugging times for simple issues. The piece

Seven things I know after 25 years of development (EuRuKo'24 talk transcript)

Published: 2025-01-28 | Origin: /r/ruby

In a keynote delivered at the EuRuKo conference in September 2024, the speaker reflected on their 25 years of software development experience, with 20 years focused on Ruby. They noted their involvement in open source projects and their role as a principal engineer at Hubstaff. Importantly, the speaker also identified as a Ukrainian serving in the Armed Forces, emphasizing their commitment to protect their homeland rather than a desire for combat. The talk explored parallels between software development and the speaker's experiences as a

Assembly replacement language

Published: 2025-01-28 | Origin: /r/programming

The Bare Metal Language (BML) is a domain-specific programming language designed to be a high-performance and reliable alternative to assembly language for developing embedded systems. Unlike assembly language, which is complex and prone to errors, BML allows developers to write code that is more expressive and easier to maintain while still achieving optimal performance with minimal runtime overhead. Version 1.5 of BML, finalized on December 15, 2023, is considered production-ready and feature-complete, catering to various embedded

Breaking the Rules: RPC pattern with Kafka & Karafka

Published: 2025-01-28 | Origin: /r/ruby

The article discusses the implementation of Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) using Apache Kafka, a technology typically focused on event logging with high throughput rather than low latency. RPC creates the illusion of executing functions locally when they are executed remotely. Despite the unconventional nature of using Kafka for RPC, the authors present a proof of concept that demonstrated millisecond response times in testing. This exploration arose from the need for synchronous communication within event-driven architectures and serves as an alternative to adding more specialized tools to technology stacks. The implementation

Image replacement in Canva designs using reverse image search - Canva Engineering Blog

Published: 2025-01-28 | Origin: /r/programming

The content discusses the need for a scalable system to automate the replacement of images in Canva designs, particularly when a third-party media library expires. This is important for maintaining a high-quality library and enhancing user experience, but the current manual process is time-consuming. The solution involves using reverse image search to find and replace similar images based on a hierarchy of similarity factors, starting with the image subject (e.g., type of object) and extending to aspects like color, subject positioning, background, and emotional expression

Python 1.0.0, released 31 years ago today

Published: 2025-01-28 | Origin: /r/programming

The content promotes Python as a user-friendly, object-oriented scripting language that offers a readable syntax, making it a great alternative to Bourne shell syntax. It highlights Python's features, such as being interpreted, providing run-time checks, automatic memory management, and high-level data operations. Python supports modules, classes, exceptions, and includes a debugger. It can run interactively and has a rich standard library with numerous demo programs and interfaces to system calls and graphics libraries. Python is available for various Unix platforms

The Illustrated DeepSeek-R1

Published: 2025-01-28 | Origin: /r/programming

The draft post highlights the release of DeepSeek-R1, an important advancement in AI for the machine learning research and development community. Key features include its open weights model and a training method that enables the reproduction of reasoning models similar to OpenAI's O1. The post outlines the process of building DeepSeek-R1, detailing how large language models (LLMs) are trained, including steps such as using long chains of reasoning data, creating a high-quality interim reasoning model, and employing reinforcement learning techniques

DistroWatch reports a Facebook ban for Linux topics

Published: 2025-01-28 | Origin: /r/programming

The content consists predominantly of a series of asterisks arranged in groups, with a total of 52 comments mentioned at the end. There are no explicit details or themes provided in the content itself.

Machine Learning in Production (CMU Course)

Published: 2025-01-28 | Origin: Hacker News

Carnegie Mellon University offers a course focused on building, deploying, assuring, and maintaining software products that utilize machine-learned models, covering the full lifecycle from prototype to production. It addresses responsible AI concepts such as safety, security, fairness, and explainability, as well as MLOps practices. The Spring 2025 offering is aimed at students with some data science experience and basic programming skills, but not necessarily a software engineering background. The course will be offered every spring and potentially some

Why OpenAI's $157B valuation misreads AI's future (Oct 2024)

Published: 2025-01-28 | Origin: Hacker News

The article by Ashu Garg discusses the significant recent funding round for OpenAI, which raised $6.6 billion, highlighting the company's rapid growth and the transformative potential of AI. OpenAI's monthly revenue surged to $300 million in August 2023, marking a 1,700% increase since January, with projections of $11.6 billion in revenue for the next year. Garg emphasizes that OpenAI's evolution transcends being merely a tech company, likening its transformational nature to that

I trusted an LLM, now I’m on day 4 of my afternoon project

Published: 2025-01-28 | Origin: /r/programming

In a recent post titled "AI isn’t a co-pilot; it’s a junior dev faking competence," the author, nemo, reflects on their frustrations with AI tools while embarking on a personal project called Deskthang, designed to help manage notifications in a less distracting way. Nemo, who feels underutilized in their full-time software development job, recounts their fulfilling experience during COVID when they worked on an IoT prototype with a close-knit team, engaging deeply in hands-on engineering tasks

Go 1.24's go tool is one of the best additions to the ecosystem in years

Published: 2025-01-27 | Origin: Hacker News

The upcoming Go 1.24 release will introduce a new `go tool` command and a tool directive in the `go.mod` file, which aims to better manage project-specific tools. This change is seen as highly beneficial for the Go ecosystem. The author has been meaning to discuss this since the release candidate was made available, especially after reading Howard John's insights on the new feature. In Go codebases, additional tools are often needed for building, testing, and deploying projects. Previously, developers had

My Cat Mii

Published: 2025-01-27 | Origin: Hacker News

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We're bringing Pebble back

Published: 2025-01-27 | Origin: Hacker News

The founder of Pebble, Eric Migicovsky, expresses his ongoing love for the Pebble smartwatch, citing its unmatched features and long battery life. Despite trying numerous alternatives, he feels no other device has met his needs and is concerned about his dwindling collection of old Pebbles. To address this, he and a small team are developing a new smartwatch that will run on the open-source PebbleOS, preserving the original Pebble's features while introducing new ones. He notes that Google,

Google open-sources the Pebble OS

Published: 2025-01-27 | Origin: Hacker News

Google recently announced the availability of the source code for the Pebble smartwatch operating system, supporting volunteers who have maintained Pebble watch functionality since the original company's closure in 2016. Pebble, initially launched via a successful Kickstarter campaign, sold over two million units and fostered a robust developer community. Google acquired Pebble's IP when Fitbit, which had previously acquired Pebble, was also purchased by Google. The released source code includes the entire operating system, which features smartwatch functionalities like notifications, fitness

The Alpha Myth: How captive wolves led us astray

Published: 2025-01-27 | Origin: Hacker News

In 1947, animal behaviorist Rudolf Schenkel studied captive wolves at Basel Zoo, observing aggressive dominance and the rise of an "alpha" male, which led to misconceptions about power and leadership. These ideas were popularized by L. David Mech in his 1970 book, solidifying the alpha wolf concept. However, Mech later found that wild wolf packs in Minnesota functioned differently, relying on family dynamics and earned leadership through nurturing rather than aggression. Mech expressed regret for

My failed attempt to shrink all npm packages by 5%

Published: 2025-01-27 | Origin: /r/programming

In 2022, the author proposed a method to reduce the size of newly-published npm packages by about 5% using the Zopfli compressor, which provides smaller gzip-compatible files but is significantly slower than standard gzip. The idea aimed to enhance performance and lower storage costs while being backwards compatible. However, after pitching it to npm maintainers and waiting a few months, the proposal was ultimately rejected. The author agrees with this decision and shares insights about npm package distribution as tar archives compressed with

The Taylorator – All Your Frequencies Are Belong to Us

Published: 2025-01-27 | Origin: Hacker News

The author has been developing a software called the Taylorator, intended to broadcast Taylor Swift's music across the FM broadcast band, so that listeners can only tune in to her songs on various frequencies. While the Taylorator could theoretically broadcast any music, the name is meant to be humorous. The FM broadcast band ranges from 88 MHz to 108 MHz, with stations appearing on odd-numbered frequencies spaced appropriately to accommodate bandwidth needs. To achieve this, the author plans to fill 100 different frequencies with

Composable SQL

Published: 2025-01-27 | Origin: /r/programming

The article discusses potential improvements to SQL through the introduction of composable query fragments with statically-typed interfaces. It identifies two major challenges: testing SQL queries and reusing business logic. Firstly, testing SQL is described as nearly impossible, since even a simple query requires populating not just the directly relevant columns, but also every column in the associated rows, which creates a complex and unwieldy object graph. This necessitates extensive boilerplate code for test data insertion that is only marginally relevant