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April 12, 2023

Hacker News Top Stories with Summaries (April 13, 2023)

Hacker News Top Stories

Here are the top stories from Hacker News with summaries for April 13, 2023 :

Show HN: GPT-4-powered web searches for developers

https://www.phind.com

Summary: The website phind.com is currently inaccessible and displays a message stating that the user has been blocked. The website is using a security service provided by Cloudflare to protect itself from online attacks. The block could have been triggered by several actions, including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. Users who have been blocked can contact the site owner by email and provide the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of the page.

Use io_uring for network I/O

https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2023/04/12/why-you-should-use-iouring-network-io

Summary: The article discusses the benefits of using io_uring, an async interface to the Linux kernel, for network I/O. While it has already been successful for file I/O, it could also potentially reduce the number of syscalls on servers that do a lot of context switching and provide a unified asynchronous API for both file and network I/O. Many io_uring features are available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and the latest features are available in Fedora 37.

A number system invented by Inuit schoolchildren

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-number-system-invented-by-inuit-schoolchildren-will-make-its-silicon-valley-debut/

Summary: I'm sorry, but the content you provided is not an article or a webpage that can be summarized. It appears to be an error message indicating that the server is not allowing access to the requested page.

Why Janet?

https://ianthehenry.com/posts/why-janet/

Summary: The author of the blog post is promoting a programming language called Janet, which is a Lisp dialect. They wrote a book about it and made it available for free online. The author believes that Janet is a simple language to learn, with a small core and high-level wrappers thanks to macros. Janet is also distributable, as it can be compiled into native executables that statically link the Janet runtime, making it easy to share programs without requiring the installation of Janet or its dependencies. Additionally, Janet is good at parsing text using parsing expression grammars, which are simpler and more powerful than regular expressions. Finally, Janet has a third-party library called sh that provides a shell scripting DSL, allowing for pipes and redirects directly in Janet. The author believes that Janet is a reasonable alternative to Python or Ruby for small command-line apps.

Could the dodo come back from extinction?

https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/could-the-dodo-come-back-from-extinction/

Summary: The dodo, a flightless bird that went extinct in the 17th century due to the arrival of European settlers and invasive species on the small island of Mauritius, has had its genome sequenced from a DNA sample. While this is a significant step towards potentially bringing the species back from extinction, there are still many technical challenges that need to be overcome. Scientists would need to identify the genetic differences in the dodo genome that make it unique, make those genetic changes in the cells that will become a living animal, and solve the problems associated with captive breeding and husbandry of a species that no longer exists. Even if the dodo were to be recreated, it would still face the same problems that caused its extinction in the first place, such as the consumption of its eggs by introduced species like rats, cats, and pigs.

Lindows 4.0 (2003)

https://baturin.org/misc/software-reviews/lindows/

Summary: The article discusses Lindows 4.0, a Linux distribution that was released in 2003 with the aim of mimicking Microsoft Windows as much as possible to gain desktop adoption. However, it failed to gain popularity with either Windows users or free software advocates due to its arbitrary mixing of free and proprietary software. The distribution was later renamed to Linspire/Freespire, sold to different companies multiple times, and is now owned by PC/OpenSystems LLC. The article provides a review of the last release actually named "Lindows", version 4.0 from 2003, and notes some surprising aspects of the installation process, such as the lack of functionality for creating or editing partitions and the absence of an option to add a non-root user.

On a great interview question

https://behdadesfahbod.medium.com/on-a-great-interview-question-aea168279942

Summary: The author, who interviewed dozens of software engineer candidates at Google between 2010 and 2019, shares a great interview question that explores candidates' understanding of various basic algorithms and data structure concepts. The question involves writing a function that determines if a given string is a concatenation of two dictionary words. Despite being banned at Google due to its availability on Glassdoor and other interview websites, the author continued to use it because it provided good signal from the candidates. The author shares a few anecdotes about candidates' experiences with the question, including a PhD graduate who could not produce working code for the first section of the problem in 45 minutes and a freshman who solved the problem in 20 minutes. The author emphasizes the importance of hearing candidates' thought processes and not wanting them to write code until asked to do so.

Take Control of Your $Home

https://getfleek.dev/

Summary: The article is about Fleek, an all-in-one management system that allows users to install and manage all the tools they need to be productive on their computer. Fleek offers a simple command line tool or editing one YAML file to get started. It provides pre-configured Bling levels that allow users to choose a standard close-to-stock experience or dial up their environment to 11 with all the latest desktop and terminal bling. Fleek also offers the largest set of programs and packages in the world, allowing users to add what they need and Fleek will handle the rest for them. Additionally, Fleek is a user-friendly wrapper around Nix and Nix Home Manager, but the friendly fleek command hides all the complexity from users. Fleek takes users from an empty slate to a fully productive working environment in less than five minutes, and it allows users to take the exact same environment, tools, and configuration wherever they go.

Displaying my washing machine's remaining time with curl, jq, and pizauth

https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2023/displaying_my_washing_machines_remaining_time_with_curl_jq_pizauth.html

Summary: Summary not available due to connection issues.

Joblib: Running Python functions as pipeline jobs

https://joblib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

Summary: The Joblib library is a set of tools for lightweight pipelining in Python that includes transparent disk-caching of functions, lazy re-evaluation, and easy simple parallel computing. It is optimized for large data, particularly numpy arrays, and is BSD-licensed. The vision of Joblib is to provide tools to achieve better performance and reproducibility when working with long-running jobs. It addresses the problems of computing the same thing twice and persisting arbitrary objects containing large data. Joblib's main features include transparent and fast disk-caching of output value, embarrassingly parallel helper, and fast compressed persistence. The library provides a user manual that covers project goals, benefits of pipelines, design choices, installation, on-demand recomputing, shelving, and more.

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