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We’ve Been Here Before

Published: 2024-12-14 | Origin: /r/programming

The quote "Humans are allergic to change" by Grace Hopper reflects the resistance to new technologies, exemplified by the emergence of COBOL in the late 1950s. COBOL was designed to enable non-programmers, like business professionals, to write and understand code in an English-like syntax. This idea unsettled many experienced programmers who feared for their careers, leading to speculative notions that programming might become obsolete. However, rather than eliminating the need for programmers, COBOL increased the demand for

Avoid interruptions when programming in emacs

Published: 2024-12-14 | Origin: /r/programming

The author summarizes their experience with a paper on reducing workplace interruptions, particularly for programmers, and their efforts to create a personal version of a device called FlowLight. This device aims to help indicate when a programmer is in a state of "flow," which is characterized by focused work without distractions. The author highlights that disruptions, such as inquiries from coworkers, can hinder concentration and extend the time needed to regain focus. They reference the concept of flow as described on Wikipedia and mention that one key condition for achieving

Yozefu: A TUI for exploring data of a kafka cluster

Published: 2024-12-14 | Origin: /r/programming

Yōzefu is an interactive terminal user interface (TUI) application designed for exploring the data in a Kafka cluster. It serves as an alternative to tools like AKHQ, Redpanda Console, or the Kafka plugin for JetBrains IDEs. Key features include the default configuration of the Kafka consumer with auto-commit disabled, meaning offsets are not published back to Kafka. For enhanced visual experience, users are encouraged to install Powerline fonts, and pre-built binaries are available for download. Additionally

Show HN: A simple web game to help learn chords and basic progressions

Published: 2024-12-14 | Origin: Hacker News

The content encourages users to learn and practice piano chords and common chord progressions in major and minor keys. It also suggests selecting a MIDI keyboard and the desired key for practice.

Breaking the Cycle: Solving Circular Dependency Problems in Spring Boot

Published: 2024-12-14 | Origin: /r/programming

In Spring Boot development, circular dependencies often pose a challenge, as they occur when two beans rely on each other, which leads to an inability for Spring to determine the correct injection order during startup. The article discusses strategies for resolving these circular dependency issues, using an example of two interdependent classes, A and B, which depend on each other through their constructors. A scenario is presented involving an e-commerce application for freelancers, where categories of services are managed. A new feature to softly delete a category is

Computing Inside an AI

Published: 2024-12-14 | Origin: Hacker News

Since the launch of ChatGPT, two main areas of exploration have emerged: technical capabilities and interaction design. Technical advancements focus on enhancing model size, effectiveness in tasks (like answering SAT questions), and efficiency in serving the model. Interaction design, on the other hand, seeks to improve how users engage with models and utilize them for practical work, introducing various metaphors for understanding their functionality. While technical capabilities receive significant attention and investment, the exploration of interaction design remains essential and largely unexplored. The author

Silicon Valley Tea Party a.k.a. the great 1998 Linux revolt take II (1999)

Published: 2024-12-14 | Origin: Hacker News

The narrator recounts an encounter with Microsoft personnel at a planned event. David and the narrator expected Microsoft to monitor Linux-related discussions about their event. Instead, two Microsoft representatives, Dan Frumin and Mike, approached them at a café, concerned about a potential influx of Linux enthusiasts disrupting their proceedings. They offered five SVLUG badges to allow some attendees inside at a time, claiming that only invited individuals could RSVP for the event, which was later found to be untrue as many who RSVPed were

I built for the problem I have today

Published: 2024-12-14 | Origin: /r/programming

Max Rozen reflects on a common issue he faces as a developer: the tendency to overcomplicate solutions as a means of procrastination. He shares an example where he initially wanted to create a complex entitlements system for user limits but realized after discussing it with a friend that he only needed a simple solution – a single variable in a shared package. He acknowledges that while his proposed solution may not scale well or be easy to update, it effectively addresses the immediate problem. Rozen emphasizes the importance of

Biodiversity loss due to agricultural trade three times higher than thought

Published: 2024-12-14 | Origin: Hacker News

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macOS 15.2 breaks the ability to copy the OS to another drive

Published: 2024-12-14 | Origin: Hacker News

macOS 15.2 has a significant issue: it breaks the replicator, causing it to fail with a "Resource Busy" error during the Data volume replication process. Unlike previous versions, there is no workaround for most systems, rendering OS copying impossible until Apple resolves the bug. Users are advised to use the "Backup - all files" option with "Smart Update" as a temporary solution, which will back up applications, data, and settings but exclude the OS. The author expresses frustration over

Coercing a Magic MIFARE credential into being an iPhone-compatible NFC tag

Published: 2024-12-14 | Origin: Hacker News

The author describes their experience using NFC cards as virtual business cards, including a notable instance of embedding one in a conference badge for networking. While most NFC cards worked well, some Magic MIFARE cards were incompatible with iPhones. The author discovered that this was due to the specific attributes of these Magic MIFARE cards, which are not readily recognized by iPhones. They then provide a step-by-step guide to make a Magic MIFARE card readable by an iPhone, demonstrating the process with

Algorithms for high performance terminal apps

Published: 2024-12-14 | Origin: /r/programming

The author reflects on their experience working full-time on the FOSS project, Textual, for over three years. Throughout this time, they faced numerous programming challenges, particularly in building a modern User Interface for terminal applications, as traditional terminal specifications offer limited guidance. Despite the frustration, the process has been engaging, requiring the development of various UI components from scratch, such as buttons and a syntax-highlighted TextArea. As they recently reached a 1.0 milestone, the author intends to document their

Show HN: Performant intracontinental public transport routing in Rust

Published: 2024-12-14 | Origin: Hacker News

The content discusses a multimodal routing project in Rust, which features a fast RAPTOR implementation optimized for memory-constrained environments. The primary aim of this project is to enhance OpenTripPlanner in underserved areas. It utilizes memory mapping for timetables to facilitate broad coverage with minimal hosting costs and includes support for GTFS-RT. While it will not support custom per-request walking/cycling costing model adjustments due to RAPTOR's pre-computation requirements, it plans to offer predefined models for various travel

Luon programming language

Published: 2024-12-13 | Origin: Hacker News

Luon is a high-level programming language that draws inspiration from Oberon+ and Lua, targeting the LuaJIT VM. It integrates features from these languages while being statically typed. Luon supports declaring "external" procedures that can be implemented in Lua, promoting library reuse. The language avoids pointers, using reference semantics for structured data types, and includes ARRAY, HASHMAP, and immutable STRING types. Luon addresses specific limitations found in Lua and aims to provide a robust programming environment. A compiler

Sharing new research, models, and datasets from Meta FAIR

Published: 2024-12-13 | Origin: Hacker News

Meta is sharing its latest research and resources from its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) division, focusing on advancements in machine intelligence. This release includes new models, code, and datasets aimed at improving agent capabilities, robustness, safety, and learning efficiency. Highlighted projects include an open-source video watermarking model called Meta Video Seal and a foundation model for guiding virtual agents' behavior. Meta emphasizes its commitment to open and reproducible science, encouraging the research community to utilize these resources to foster innovation in AI

Rust's incremental compiler architecture

Published: 2024-12-13 | Origin: /r/programming

A subscription to LWN allows you to stay updated on the Linux and free-software community, with a free trial available for potential subscribers. Traditionally, compilers operate in a linear pipeline consisting of parsing, type-checking, optimization, and code generation. However, modern programming languages are shifting away from this model to support incremental compilation and low-latency responses, especially for integrated development environments (IDEs). Rust, in particular, has made significant strides in improving compile times over the past

C++ exception performance three years later

Published: 2024-12-13 | Origin: /r/programming

The blog discusses performance issues encountered with C++ exception unwinding, particularly in systems with multiple cores, where contention could significantly degrade performance. To address this, a group explored both language changes and less invasive solutions. A key improvement came from Florian Weimer's modification to glibc, which introduced a lock-free mechanism for accessing unwind tables, resulting in much better scalability of simple C++ programs. With this update, performance tests demonstrated significant improvements, although some slowdowns were observed at high thread counts due

The secret life of DNS packets

Published: 2024-12-13 | Origin: /r/programming

The content outlines a range of payment solutions and financial services provided by a company, likely Stripe, including: - **Payment Options:** Online and in-person payments, as well as customer financing and virtual/physical cards. - **Fraud Prevention:** Tools to enhance security and prevent fraudulent transactions. - **Optimization and Integration:** Services for acceptance optimizations and payments for platforms, alongside accounting and sales tax automation. - **Financial Management:** Features like online invoices, custom reports, data synchronization, and access to

"Rules" that terminal programs follow

Published: 2024-12-13 | Origin: /r/programming

The author reflects on terminal interactions, specifically the combination of the operating system, shell, terminal emulator, and the various programs run within the terminal. While the first three components are relatively standardized and predictable, the behavior of the programs can vary widely without any real standards. The author aims to compile a list of consistent behaviors observed in terminal programs based on 20 years of experience. This list will serve as guidelines that help users anticipate program behavior, even though exceptions exist. While the focus is on behaviors that

What every systems programmer should know about concurrency [pdf]

Published: 2024-12-13 | Origin: /r/programming

The provided content is a fragment of a PDF file, indicated by the initial `%PDF-1.5` line. The text appears to be largely encoded binary data rather than readable content. This type of data is commonly found in PDFs where the actual textual information and formatting details are compressed or encoded for storage, typically not meant for direct interpretation in a human-readable format. The summary is: it is a section of a PDF file containing encoded data, which does not convey any meaningful information in its current