Published: 2024-12-04 | Origin: /r/ruby

A recent language comparison repository by @BenjDicken shows that CRuby is the third slowest programming language in performance benchmarks, only surpassing R and Python. The repo features two benchmarks: a nested loop iterating 1 billion times and a naive Fibonacci implementation. On an M3 MacBook Pro, Ruby 3.3.6 took 28 seconds for the loop and 12 seconds for Fibonacci, while node.js performed significantly faster, taking just over a second for both. On an

Published: 2024-12-04 | Origin: Hacker News

The Yamaha DX7 synthesizer was a defining sound of 1980s popular music, offering a recognizable range of textures despite most musicians using only its 32 built-in presets. Its distinctive sound is exemplified by the theme from "Twin Peaks" and is prevalent in many successful albums of the mid-80s. The DX7, introduced in 1983, was robust and designed for transport, but its membrane keypad was difficult to use. The synthesizer's innovative approach to sound generation set

Published: 2024-12-04 | Origin: Hacker News

Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones included a "Send to YouTube" button in the Photos app, resulting in many uploads retaining their default IMG_XXXX filenames. This created a collection of raw, unedited moments from various lives. Inspired by Ben Wallace, the author developed a bot that crawled YouTube and discovered 5 million of these videos, which can be watched in random order.

Published: 2024-12-04 | Origin: Hacker News

The pilot version of a particle physics course for high school students, developed by CERN’s Physics Education Research team, consists of 16 chapters featuring videos and quizzes. The course introduces fundamental concepts in particle physics, addressing questions like "What is a particle?" and "What is a particle accelerator?" It aims to engage students and enhance their understanding of the subject, incorporating feedback questions in each chapter to gather input for future improvements and topic additions. The total course length is 3 hours and 50 minutes,

Published: 2024-12-04 | Origin: Hacker News

EmacsConf 2024 will be held online on December 7-8, 2024. The conference celebrates GNU Emacs and Emacs Lisp, and organizers invite community participation to enhance the event. There is an option for satellite events, with one planned in Lucerne, Switzerland. Discussions can take place in designated mailing lists and on an IRC channel. The event will maintain a commitment to free software for its infrastructure and streaming. For those who missed the proposal deadline, there may still be

Published: 2024-12-04 | Origin: /r/programming

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Published: 2024-12-03 | Origin: /r/programming

Amazon recently introduced Aurora DSQL, a serverless, globally distributed database unveiled at Re:Invent 2024 in Las Vegas. This new service aims to fill a gap in Amazon's scalable database offerings, which have previously been limited despite Aurora’s existence. Aurora DSQL boasts several features including high availability with an SLA exceeding 99.999%, multi-regional capabilities, PostgreSQL compatibility, and impressive speed, reportedly four times faster than Google Cloud's Spanner. A key innovation in Aurora DSQL

Published: 2024-12-03 | Origin: Hacker News

The content appears to be a brief phrase, "Choose your opponent," which likely suggests making a selection regarding whom to compete or engage with, possibly in a game, debate, or competition. If there's more context or additional information you'd like me to summarize, please provide that!

Published: 2024-12-03 | Origin: Hacker News

The speaker reflects on their upbringing in a Calvinist environment, which shaped a belief in hard work leading to a bleak existence. Influenced by the book "Hackers & Painters," they initially adopted a somewhat abrasive attitude. The talk focuses on their journey toward personal improvement, sparked by witnessing two individuals with different careers supporting one another, which led to transformative insights and a realization that misery isn't a reliable indicator of value. They express gratitude to several key inspirations in their life and invite the audience to explore

Published: 2024-12-03 | Origin: Hacker News

The content describes the creation of a modern 8-bit computer designed using recycled 1950s vacuum tubes. This "Tube Computer" emits heat and light, contributing to the warmth of the room. The construction process involved extensive soldering and was described as enjoyable. The computer features high-voltage vacuum tubes capable of high-speed switching and runs simple applications such as an airship flight simulator and a Fibonacci sequence calculator. The author, who has built three tube computers, notes that their first model was built

Published: 2024-12-03 | Origin: /r/programming

The author recounts their experience working at a fintech startup that overlooked the importance of accurate financial tracking, resulting in the loss of small amounts of money—referred to as "dancing cents"—on transactions. Despite the engineering team's focus on rapid development and prioritizing speed over proper accounting practices, these discrepancies began to frustrate users who noticed minor inconsistencies, particularly when dealing with stock purchases. The company's initial lack of attention to these issues hindered user growth and satisfaction. In response to user

Published: 2024-12-03 | Origin: /r/programming

The content discusses the author's journey into creating a trading Gameboy, which started unexpectedly and evolved over time through various learning experiences. The inspiration came from the author's child, who enjoyed using a Raspberry Pi, although it became damaged. In searching for a replacement, the author discovered the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller and an electronics kit suitable for younger users. The Pico, being a microcontroller rather than a full computer, runs code instantly upon powering up and consumes less power, making it ideal for battery-operated projects

Published: 2024-12-03 | Origin: Hacker News

Intel has officially announced its next-generation Battlemage graphics cards, succeeding the two-year-old DG2/Alchemist series. The new Arc B-Series cards will be available starting next week and continue to offer fully open-source graphics driver support on Linux. The Battlemage cards utilize the Xe2 graphics architecture, which is also featured in the recent Lunar Lake integrated graphics. The initial release includes the BMG-G21 GPU, which boasts 20 Xe cores, 160 XMX engines, 20

Published: 2024-12-03 | Origin: Hacker News

The content discusses the concept of varying levels of abstraction in visual and textual information. Using the example of a fish, it illustrates how zooming in reveals detailed features, while zooming out provides broader context, similar to how maps show different layers of information about a location. The same principle is applied to text, using the opening paragraph of "The Metamorphosis" as an example. Initially, it presents a detailed description of the main character's transformation, then abstracts the detail for a more concise

Published: 2024-12-03 | Origin: /r/programming

LeetArxiv is a leading learning platform designed for programmers looking to switch to careers in AI research, with a focus on their preferred programming languages.

Published: 2024-12-03 | Origin: Hacker News

Skia Canvas is a Node.js implementation of the HTML Canvas drawing API that operates without a browser. It leverages Google’s Skia graphics engine, offering output similar to that of Chrome’s <canvas> element. Designed for both desktop and server environments, it enables rendering of hardware-accelerated graphics and supports various image formats. While its main aim is to faithfully imitate the standard API, Skia Canvas also enhances it by utilizing Skia's advanced graphical features, thus creating a more expressive coding experience

Published: 2024-12-03 | Origin: Hacker News

The article discusses research on spinal cord injuries (SCI) that affect walking due to disrupted neuronal connections between the brain and spinal cord. The study aims to identify specific brain regions that can enhance recovery of walking post-incomplete SCI. A detailed brain-wide atlas revealed the lateral hypothalamus (LH) as a crucial area. The researchers found that glutamatergic neurons in the LH promote walking recovery, and enhancing their activity through deep brain stimulation therapy (DBSLH) showed immediate and lasting positive

Published: 2024-12-03 | Origin: /r/programming

The author discusses a problem with terminal output when using pipes, particularly when monitoring log files. They noticed that commands like `grep` would sometimes produce no output, even with matches present. Initially, they thought it was due to "stuck" pipes but later learned that this behavior results from output buffering in programs for performance efficiency. Programs often wait to accumulate a certain amount of data (like 8KB) before writing to a pipe. This explains why `tail -f file | grep thing`

Published: 2024-12-03 | Origin: /r/ruby

The content outlines a podcast series that releases new episodes on the first Tuesday of each month, focusing on Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, and related topics. Each episode addresses three main questions: what the hosts are working on, what challenges they face, and what cool things they want to share. In an upcoming episode, Stan Lo from Shopify's RubyDX team discusses his journey from Taiwan to London, his contributions to the Ruby development community, including his work on the debug gem, IRB, Sor

Published: 2024-12-03 | Origin: /r/programming

Beeks Group, a UK-based cloud operator, has transitioned most of its 20,000 virtual machines (VMs) from VMware to OpenNebula, an open-source cloud platform. This move was motivated by significant cost increases following Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, which resulted in a licensing bill that was ten times higher than before. As a result of the migration, Beeks reported a 200% increase in VM efficiency and has been able to allocate more of its 3,000 bare