iLabs Challenger+ RP2040 LoRa Mk II Adds Upgraded Power Architecture and BConnect Expansion
iLabs has released the Challenger+ RP2040 LoRa Mk II, an upgraded Feather-format microcontroller board that combines the Raspberry Pi RP2040 with an RFM95W LoRa radio module. The new revision refines the original design with improved noise isolation, enhanced power distribution, and added modular connectivity options. The board features a redesigned power supply … ⌘ Read more

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The Apple Compact Unwinding Format: Documented and Explained - Faultlore
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New OSM file format: 30% smaller than PBF, 5x faster to import
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VST3 audio plugin format is now MIT
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VST3 audio plugin format is now MIT
Article URL: https://forums.steinberg.net/t/vst-3-8-0-sdk-released/1011988

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45678549

Points: 502

# Comments: 118 ⌘ Read more

Beyond Indexes: How Open Table Formats Optimize Query Performance
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Linus Says Rust Formatting is “Bass-Ackwards Garbage”
“[Rustfmtcheck] is just ANNOYING. ⌘ Read more

@zvava@twtxt.net the second format (the one you think should be changed to), is it backwards compatible to what’s currently in place? I believe the first one would be.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hm, I couldn’t trick yt-dlp into downloading the correct format. Works in the browser, though. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net I know we won’t ever convince each other of the other’s favorite addressing scheme. :-D But I wanna address (haha) your concerns:

1. I don’t see any difference between the two schemes regarding link rot and migration. If the URL changes, both approaches are equally terrible as the feed URL is part of the hashed value and reference of some sort in the location-based scheme. It doesn’t matter.

2. The same is true for duplication and forks. Even today, the “cannonical URL” has to be chosen to build the hash. That’s exactly the same with location-based addressing. Why would a mirror only duplicate stuff with location- but not content-based addressing? I really fail to see that. Also, who is using mirrors or relays anyway? I don’t know of any such software to be honest.

3. If there is a spam feed, I just unfollow it. Done. Not a concern for me at all. Not the slightest bit. And the byte verification is THE source of all broken threads when the conversation start is edited. Yes, this can be viewed as a feature, but how many times was it actually a feature and not more behaving as an anti-feature in terms of user experience?

4. I don’t get your argument. If the feed in question is offline, one can simply look in local caches and see if there is a message at that particular time, just like looking up a hash. Where’s the difference? Except that the lookup key is longer or compound or whatever depending on the cache format.

5. Even a new hashing algorithm requires work on clients etc. It’s not that you get some backwards-compatibility for free. It just cannot be backwards-compatible in my opinion, no matter which approach we take. That’s why I believe some magic time for the switch causes the least amount of trouble. You leave the old world untouched and working.

If these are general concerns, I’m completely with you. But I don’t think that they only apply to location-based addressing. That’s how I interpreted your message. I could be wrong. Happy to read your explanations. :-)

@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Personally, I find the reversed order of URL first and then timestamp more natural to reference something. Granted, URL last would be kinda consistent with the mention format. However, the timestamp doesn’t act as a link text or display text like in a mention, so, it’s some different in my opinion. But yeah.

@zvava@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m not entirely sure about the spaces, but maybe they were omitted to simplify parsing of mentions in the form of @<nick url>. If the next token after the @<nick does not look like a URL, it’s not a mention but regular text. This is just wild guessing, though.

Looking at the regex and tests in the original twtxt reference implementation seems to confirm that theory in the sense as it relies on whitespace as the delimiter:

Another thing about nicks is that the original twtxt reference implementation converts nicks to all lowercase:

You probably know this already, the original twtxt file format specification can be found here: https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/twtxtfile.html

As for extensions, I don’t know of anything outside of twtxt.dev that has actually been (partially) implemented. However, there is also the issue tracker of the official reference implementation. You might wanna dig through that. For example, there is an alternative suggestions of multiline messages: https://github.com/buckket/twtxt/issues/157

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz all @prologic@twtxt.net has to do is to allow <details> and the subset under it. Granted, it could be implemented on the formatting toolbar too…

@zvava@twtxt.net may I recommend to change the mention format upon hitting reply to something similar to what it’s used in Yarn, and perhaps hiding the hash on the post too? Looking good!

Haha, fun! I browsed your gopher hole a little bit. I noticed some entries are fully justified (formatting), while others are not. I didn’t notice a pattern, though it makes sense not to use justification on entries with code. Yet, some prose entries are, and some are not. A mystery. :-)

Prosodical Thoughts: Debian repository key change
We have been working on some changes to our Debian/Ubuntu package repository.
If you use our repository to keep up to date with new Prosody packages, you
need to take action before 4th August 2025 to continue receiving updates
smoothly.

The ‘apt’ utility has been moving towards a new format for specifying package
repositories. If you are familiar with putting deb lines in a sources.list
file, [that method is changing](ht … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I spent so much time in the past figuring out if something is a dict or a list in YAML, for example.

What are the types in this example?

items:
- part_no:   A4786
  descrip:   Water Bucket (Filled)
  price:     1.47
  quantity:  4
- part_no:   E1628
  descrip:   High Heeled "Ruby" Slippers
  size:      8
  price:     133.7
  quantity:  1

items is a dict containing … a list of two other dicts? Right?

It is quite hard for me to grasp the structure of YAML docs. 😢

The big advantage of YAML (and JSON and TOML) is that it’s much easier to write code for those formats, than it is with XML. json.loads() and you’re done.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org yeah same YAML over XML forever bc at least one is more readable lmfao!! doesn’t forgive YAML’s crimes though… cursed formats

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Any text format beats a binary configuration format. However, YAML and XML are both terrible choices in my opinion. I’d prefer YAML over XML if I had to.

Xfce does one thing very right: It stores its settings in plain-text XML files. This allows me to easily read, track, and maybe even distribute these settings to other machines.

(Unlike GNOME’s dconf, which uses some binary file format. Fun fact: The older and now deprecated gconf also used XML files.)

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this really could use a proper definition or a “manifest”. 😅 Many of these ideas are not very wide spread. And I haven’t come across similar projects in all these years.

Let’s take the farbfeld image format as an example again. I think this captures the “spirit” quite well, because this isn’t even about code.

This is the entire farbfeld spec:

farbfeld is a lossless image format which is easy to parse, pipe and compress. It has the following format:

╔════════╤═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Bytes  │ Description                                             ║
╠════════╪═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ 8      │ "farbfeld" magic value                                  ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width)                      ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height)                     ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ [2222] │ 4x16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-major ║
╚════════╧═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

The RGB-data should be sRGB for best interoperability and not alpha-premultiplied.

(Now, I don’t know if your screen reader can work with this. Let me know if it doesn’t.)

I think these are some of the properties worth mentioning:

• The spec is extremely short. You can read this in under a minute and fully understand it. That alone is gold.
  
• There are no “knobs”: It’s just a single version, it’s not like there’s also an 8-bit color depth version and one for 16-bit and one for extra large images and one that supports layers and so on. This makes it much easier to implement a fully compliant program.
  
• Despite being so simple, it’s useful. I’ve used it in various programs, like my window manager, my status bars, some toy programs like “tuxeyes” (an Xeyes variant), or Advent of Code.
  
• The format does not include compression because it doesn’t need to. Just use something like bzip2 to get file sizes similar to PNG.
  
• It doesn’t cover every use case under the sun, but it does cover the most important ones (imho). They have discussed using something other than RGBA and decided it’s not worth the trouble.
  
• They refrained from adding extra baggage like metadata. It would have needlessly complicated things.

I did a “lecture”/“workshop” about this at work today. 16-bit DOS, real mode. 💾 Pretty cool and the audience (devs and sysadmins) seemed quite interested. 🥳

• People used the Intel docs to figure out the instruction encodings.
  
• Then they wrote a little DOS program that exits with a return code and they used uhex in DOSBox to do that. Yes, we wrote a COM file manually, no Assembler involved. (Many of them had never used DOS before.)
  
• DEBUG from FreeDOS was used to single-step through the program, showing what it does.
  
• This gets tedious rather quickly, so we switched to SVED from SvarDOS for writing the rest of the program in Assembly language. nasm worked great for us.
  
• At the end, we switched to BIOS calls instead of DOS syscalls to demonstrate that the same binary COM file works on another OS. Also a good opportunity to talk about bootloaders a little bit.
  
• (I think they even understood the basics of segmentation in the end.)
  

The 8086 / 16-bit real-mode DOS is a great platform to explain a lot of the fundamentals without having to deal with OS semantics or executable file formats.

Now that was a lot of fun. 🥳 It’s very rare that we do something like this, sadly. I love doing this kind of low-level stuff.

The DuckLake Manifesto: SQL as a Lakehouse Format
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Flatpak “not being actively developed anymore”
At the Linux Application Summit (LAS) in April, Sebastian Wick said that, by many metrics, Flatpak is doing great. The Flatpak application-packaging format is popular with upstream developers, and with many users. More and more applications are being published in the Flathub application store, and the format is even being adopted by Linux distributions like Fedora. However, he worried that work on the Flatpak project itself had stagnated, a … ⌘ Read more

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DWARF as a shared reverse engineering format
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LILYGO T-Embed SI4732 Combines ESP32 S3 with All Band Radio Tuning
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A brief history of the numeric keypad
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10 Invisible Standards That Make the Modern World Work
Modern life feels seamless. You buy a phone charger, and it fits. You send a letter, and it gets delivered. But behind that convenience is a complex web of invisible global standards—quiet, often century-old decisions that the entire planet just agreed to follow. Without them, your printer wouldn’t know how to format a page, your […]

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@sorenpeter@darch.dk No because as the spec statd originally, and we didn’t change that syntax at all:

Mentions are embedded within the text in either @ or @ format

So the lextwt parser we use will simply call this an invalid mention, which it does.

@sorenpeter@darch.dk Unfortunately it does break all clients, because the original spec stated:

Mentions are embedded within the text in either @ or @ format

Why are we testing, or playing with, an alternate non-fully-compatible feed format within the same feed that we use daily?

What is this ‘format:’ inside of printf? ⌘ Read more

Nobody writes emails by hand using RFC 5322 anymore, nor do we manually send them through telnet and SMTP commands. The days of crafting emails in raw format and dialing into servers are long gone. Modern email clients and services handle it all seamlessly in the background, making email easier than ever to send and receive—without needing to understand the protocols or formats behind it! #Email #SMTP #RFC #Automation

OSTIF Announces NATS Security Audit Results
OSTIF is proud to share the results of our security audit of NATS.  NATS is an open source project made by Synadia Communications for secure always-on messaging for a variety of digital formats and clients. With… ⌘ Read more

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Zulu said:

what is twtxt for you?

For me Twtxt is just the underlying format that Yarn.social builds upon 😅

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz (as I was trying to say…), Glad you think so👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

Holy hell?! When I post this:

@<kate https://yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz/user/kat/twtxt.txt> Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (_best that I can anyway!_) truly decentralised (_slow_) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

Something is swallowing it.

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway!) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway!) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway!) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Glad you think so! 👌 My goal with Yarn.social has always been to provide the best (best that I can anyway!) truly decentralised (slow) social experience that uses the Twtxt format under the hood 😅

I asked ChatGPT what it knows about Twtxt 😂 And surprisingly it’s rather accurate:

Twtxt is a minimalist, decentralized microblogging format introduced by John Downey in 2016. It uses plain text files served over HTTP—no accounts, databases, or APIs.
In 2020, James Mills (@prologic@twtxt.net) launched Yarn.social, an extended, federated implementation with user discovery, threads, mentions, and a full web UI.
Both share the same .twtxt.txt format but differ in complexity and social features.

@prologic@twtxt.net @bmallred@staystrong.run So is restic considered stable by now? “Stable” as in “stable data format”, like a future version will still be able to retrieve my current backups. I mean, it’s at version “0.18”, but they don’t specify which versioning scheme they use.

i feel so powerful i wrote a 3 line script that takes an inputted markdown filename from the current working directory and then spits out a nicely formatted html page. pandoc does all the work i did nothing

Managing multi-line logs with Fluent Bit and Python
In this blog you will learn about:  Introduction Logs are essential for monitoring and debugging applications, but not all logs are created equal. While most logs follow a simple line-by-line format, others span multiple lines to… ⌘ Read more