HackerNews Summary (2023-06-14 01PM)

Source: Repairing Electronics: A Circular Economy Solution for Reducing E-Waste and Building Resilience in Rural Africa

Summary
Africa is facing a significant problem of electronic waste due to the large amount of e-waste imported from other countries. Improper discarding methods, such as burning and dumping, can result in serious environmental degradation and negative health impacts. One solution to reduce e-waste and build climate resilience is to view e-waste as a resource and develop circular economy approaches to generate economic opportunities for local communities.

Fact

🌍 Only 17.4% of electronics are properly collected and recycled globally, dropping to just 0.9% in Africa.

📉 Currently, 60% of e-waste in Africa comes from imports, with the actual number predicted to be even higher due to illegal importation.

🌱 Circular economy approaches can financially strengthen African communities and generate new income streams to boost the local economy.

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Source: Phoenix LiveView: Async Assign Pattern

Summary
An AsyncAssigns module provides a consistent pattern for asynchronously loading assigns. It allows default data to be set on initial render, spawns linked or unlinked processes to fetch data and assigns it back to the parent LiveView.

Facts

🧑‍💻 The tools in Elixir are powerful and there are many ways to manage the flow of setting default values on initial render and updating assigns.

📝 The AsyncAssigns module helps to encapsulate the flow and provides a consistent pattern for asynchronous data loading.

🔧 It allows for spawning linked or unlinked processes to fetch data and assigns it back to the parent LiveView.

👍 The module keeps related assigns loaded together and allows parallel loading of assigns that are not dependent.

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Source: First People Sickened By COVID-19 Were Chinese Scientists At Wuhan Institute Of Virology, Say US Government Sources

Summary
Three members of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), including researcher Ben Hu, who led “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses, were among the first people infected with COVID-19, according to sources within the US government. The evidence strengthens the case for the virus accidentally escaping from the WIV and increases the possibility of uncovering its origin.

Fact

🦠 Three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were WIV researchers, including Ben Hu, who led “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses.

🧬 Hu and Yu researched the novel lineage of SARS-like viruses from which SARS-CoV-2 hails and co-authored a paper with Shi Zhengli.

🔍 The evidence strengthens the case for the virus accidentally escaping from the WIV and increases the possibility of uncovering its origin.

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Source: openSIL/openSIL

Summary
AMD openSIL is a collection of C libraries for x86 host firmware that includes three optimized libraries, xSIM, xPRF, and xUSL. The project is open-source and enables the integration of AMD openSIL with previous UEFI-AGESA installations.

Facts

💻 AMD openSIL is a collection of C libraries for x86 host firmware.

📚 AMD openSIL includes three optimized libraries: xSIM, xPRF, and xUSL.

🔧 AMD openSIL can be integrated with previous UEFI-AGESA installations.

🌐 The project is open-source.

📝 Formal documentation will soon be published for this repository.

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Source: Enforced bounds checking for frozen function interfaces

Summary
This post discusses how to improve interfaces for existing functions that do not permit current bounds checking syntax for array parameters. By using a two-level wrapper that interchanges call arguments and a macro definition, compilers are able to provide static analysis that diagnoses calls that receive buffers that are too small compared to specified size.

Fact
💡 The interface of `memcpy` can be improved to express the requirement that both buffers must be at least `n` bytes wide by reordering the parameters and transforming them into arrays. This alternative interface cannot be used directly instead of the C library call, but it can be used to identify bounds errors in existing code.

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