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COMPILERS ARE (TOO) SMART

Unexpected assembly code discovered in a function using std::unordered_map::find turned out to be a complex method for counting set bits used by the Clang compiler to optimize the conversion of large hash values.

HOW TO USE COREPACK

Corepack, a tool bundled with Node.js, simplifies package manager usage by making sure the correct version is used for each project and providing error messages for mismatches.

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HOW DEEP IS YOUR DOM?

Excessive DOM size in websites can negatively impact performance, especially on lower-end devices. Deeper DOM trees, while not affecting page load time significantly in a simple experiment, slow down rendering when combined with many elements and complex CSS. This is because the browser needs more time to calculate styles and update the positions of each element, which potentially blocks the main thread and makes the site unresponsive.

WHAT IS GOOGLE ZANZIBAR?

Google Zanzibar is a globally distributed authorization system designed to address the complex access control needs of Google's software ecosystem. It combines the granularity of Access Control Lists (ACLs) with the simplicity of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to make handling permissions simpler. By modeling permissions as data in a graph, Zanzibar allows for querying and derivation of relationships between objects. It uses standard functions like Read, Write, Watch, Check, and Expand to interact with the graph, and a tuple-based language to describe resources and relationships.

SOFTWARE MVPS CAN NO LONGER BE LOW QUALITY

The traditional philosophy of shipping a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with compromised quality is no longer viable in today's software-saturated market. Software developers must focus on creating truly differentiated products with exceptional craft and taste to stand out from the competition as users have numerous alternatives today.

COMPROMISED VISIONS ARE SUPERIOR

Constraints can foster creativity and lead to better products. A system where product owners set clear constraints on scope and time is much better than unconstrained product backlogs that lead to complexity and project overruns.

YOU SHOULD KEEP A DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL

Keeping a developer's journal helps you write better code by forcing you to clarify your goals and plan your work. It also helps you learn from your experience by tracking your thought process and solutions to problems.

FONTSOURCE

This website allows users to search for fonts by sentence. There are many fonts available, including variable fonts.

SVG GOBBLER

SVG Gobbler is a browser extension that allows you to locate SVG content on your current tab and provides options to optimize, download, copy, edit, or export it.

BROWSER EXTENSION MARK SCROLL POSITIONS

This extension saves your scroll positions, making it easy to resume reading later. You can save unlimited scroll positions, add notes, rename them, and view all your saved spots on a dedicated page.

HOW I LEARNED VULKAN AND WROTE A SMALL GAME ENGINE WITH IT

This professional programmer learned Vulkan in 3 months and created a small game engine with it. The engine is suitable for smaller level-based games and was initially a project for learning Vulkan. They recommend starting with OpenGL and learning the latest OpenGL 4.6 practices before moving to Vulkan.

ADA LOVELACE'S 180-YEAR-OLD NOTES PREVIEWED THE FUTURE OF COMPUTERS

Ada Lovelace's annotations to a paper about the analytical engine, the world's first general-purpose computer, are considered foundational to computer science. In her notes, Lovelace demonstrated a deep understanding of the engine's capabilities and envisioned the machine manipulating symbols according to rules to create music and other forms of media. Despite her insights, the analytical engine was never built due to a lack of funding.

SURPRISE $96K VERCEL BILL

A social media app called Cara, built by volunteers, went viral and racked up a surprise $96k bill from its Vercel function usage (which spiked at 56 million invocations a day).

DEVELOPER POSTS SECRET KEY ON GITHUB, LOSES $40K IN 2 MINUTES

A Web3 developer lost $40,000 within two minutes after accidentally making his wallet keys public on GitHub.

COST-EFFICIENT NLP WITH OPENAI'S GPT-3.5-TURBO

Prompts should be crafted to minimize token usage by formatting inputs and specifying concise outputs.

AWS CLI ESSENTIALS

This list provides commonly used AWS CLI commands for core services like EC2 and S3.

Postman Collections

LOAD BALANCING ALGORITHM CRASH COURSE

Load balancing algorithms distribute network traffic across multiple servers based on specific criteria. Round Robin sequentially distributes requests, while Weighted Round Robin considers server capacity. Least Connections prioritizes servers with fewer active connections. IP Hash uses client IP addresses for session persistence. Advanced methods like Least Response Time and Weighted Least Connections combine multiple algorithms together.

ARCHITECTURES FOR CENTRAL SERVER COLLABORATION

This blog post explores different architectures for building real-time collaborative applications with a central server. It discusses the challenges of server-side rebasing and solutions. The post also delves into the complexities of handling text and list editing in collaborative apps and recommends using optimistic local updates to improve user experience.

HOW I FINALLY QUIT ABANDONING MY SIDE-PROJECTS AND LAUNCHED MY FIRST PAID SAAS PRODUCT (REDDIT THREAD)

This Reddit poster overcame their habit of abandoning side projects and successfully launched their first paid SaaS product by identifying and addressing the reasons they usually quit. They tackled the complexity of projects by keeping the scope small and sticking to familiar technologies. Time constraints were overcome by creating dedicated time in the mornings and weekends, making sure the project could be completed within a month. To prevent burnout, they delegated tasks at work, took a vacation before starting the project, and used different technologies than their day job.

OPINIONS AFTER A DECADE OF PROFESSIONAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

This author has changed her opinion a lot after a decade of professional software engineering. They believe that there's no single "right" way to do things, code isn't the most important aspect of software engineering, and software development is inherently political. Communication and empathy are more important in the industry than she initially thought.

REFLECTING ON ONE YEAR OF BEING AN ENGINEERING MANAGER

Engineering managers need to understand and tailor their approaches to each team member's unique needs and communication styles. Being a manager means that the business impact of your team's output is even more critical than before. Meetings are not always bad - they are valuable for aligning stakeholders and transferring information faster than other methods.

MESOP

Mesop is a Python-based UI platform used at Google to build internal UIs quickly for demos and other apps. It helps Python devs skip the frontend learning curve so that they can deploy their apps quickly.

BLOCKNOTE

BlockNote is a React Rich Text Editor that's block-based (Notion style) and extensible. It comes with features like animations, drag-and-drop blocks, a slash menu, a format menu, helpful placeholders, and real-time collaboration support.

EXPERTS.JS

Experts.js simplifies the creation and deployment of OpenAI's Assistants, allowing them to be linked together to form a Multi-AI Agent System with expanded memory. It uses OpenAI's Assistants API, which allows for larger context windows, more complex interactions, and better integrations with tools.

APPLE PUT A THREAD SMART HOME RADIO INTO ITS NEWEST MACS AND IPADS

Apple has secretly included Thread radios in many of its newest products, such as the iPads, MacBooks, and iMacs. The Thread radio is a low-power, low-bandwidth mesh networking protocol ideal for smart home devices. While Apple hasn't commented, the inclusion of Thread in these devices could mean they could serve as home hubs, connecting directly with smart home devices, and act as Thread border routers.

WHAT AREN'T THE OPENAI WHISTLEBLOWERS SAYING?

A group of current and former OpenAI employees, along with two from Google DeepMind, have published an open letter criticizing OpenAI's prioritization of profits and growth over AI safety. The whistleblowers claim that OpenAI has used restrictive agreements to silence employees' concerns. While some see the letter as evidence that AI safety concerns are valid, others criticize it for lacking concrete details and focusing on hypothetical risks.

FROM SCRATCH - GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORKS

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a generative AI method consisting of two models: a generator and a discriminator. The generator tries to create realistic samples from a training data distribution, while the discriminator aims to distinguish between real and generated samples. The two models are trained in a competitive process, with the generator improving its ability to generate realistic samples and the discriminator enhancing its ability to differentiate them. This article goes through building GANs from scratch.

LAUDSPEAKER

Laudspeaker is an open-source customer engagement and product onboarding platform that can be used to design product onboarding flows and send emails to customers.

VSCODE EXTENSION 5-MINUTE DEVELOPMENT SPEEDRUN

This is a fast walkthrough on building a VSCode extension with screenshots and code examples.

OPHIUCHI

Ophiuchi allows devs to set up SSL on localhost automatically.

THE STATE OF AI IN EARLY 2024: GEN AI ADOPTION SPIKES AND STARTS TO GENERATE VALUE

Generative AI adoption increased a lot in 2024, with 65% of organizations regularly using it.

Postman Collections

FLAKY TESTS OVERHAUL AT UBER

Uber developed Testopedia, a centralized system for managing flaky tests in its CI pipelines, to address the issue of flaky tests in its legacy system. Testopedia focuses on tracking test entities identified by Fully Qualified Names (FQNs). It uses a finite state machine model to capture their states. Testopedia supports scalable data ingestion, flexible partitioning for efficient cone queries, and customizable analyzers and ticketing systems.

THE GAP

Using CSS margins to manage spacing in web layouts can be complex with dynamic or changing content. The CSS gap property simplifies spacing between items in flexbox and grid layouts and works well with both left-to-right and right-to-left designs. Combining CSS gap with margins and logical properties can make layouts more responsive and easier to maintain.

AWS LAMBDA UNDER THE HOOD

AWS Lambda supports trillions of invocations per month for millions of customers. It has components like Firecracker, a lightweight virtual machine manager, which is used to secure and fast-boot microVMs for running functions.

ASK HN: GOING LOW-LEVEL – WHAT TO LEARN NEXT? (HACKER NEWS THREAD)

The author of this thread wants to go lower level in development out of their own curiosity. Commenters recommend various paths, like CUDA programming, writing an OS kernel module, going deep into Android/iOS, working on game engines, and more.

YOU'LL REGRET USING NATURAL KEYS

“Natural keys” (pre-existing unique identifiers like chassis numbers or social security numbers) shouldn't be used in database design. This is because uniqueness is not guaranteed and there are often clerical errors, like errors in data entry or data conversion. Synthetic keys like UUIDs are always a more reliable choice.

NOT JUST SCALE

Modern computers aren't powerful enough to negate the need for distributed systems. While many workloads can fit on a single powerful machine, distributed systems still offer advantages like improved availability, durability, and isolation. Single-machine systems may seem simpler, but coordination issues start to arise in larger organizations.

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YAMADA UI

Yamada UI is a React UI component library with a range of components that can be easily combined to construct complex user interfaces. It has features like color modes, animations, and theme switching.

LUDIC

Ludic is a lightweight framework for building HTML pages with a component approach similar to React. It is built to be used together with HTMX so that developers can write minimal JavaScript to create dynamic web services.

TLBROWSE

tlbrowse is an infinite canvas for an imagined web. You can create web pages by entering URLs and clicking on links creates new pages.