frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

Apple vs the Law

https://formularsumo.co.uk/blog/2025/apple-vs-the-law/
104•tempodox•1h ago•56 comments

OpenFront: Realtime Risk-like multiplayer game in the browser

https://openfront.io/
35•thombles•2h ago•7 comments

Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries? (NBER)

https://www.nber.org/papers/w33989
13•jmsflknr•46m ago•7 comments

Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin
229•miloschwartz•10h ago•41 comments

Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale

https://www.recall.ai/blog/postgres-listen-notify-does-not-scale
425•davidgu•3d ago•174 comments

Batch Mode in the Gemini API: Process More for Less

https://developers.googleblog.com/en/scale-your-ai-workloads-batch-mode-gemini-api/
95•xnx•3d ago•28 comments

LLM Inference Handbook

https://bentoml.com/llm/
52•djhu9•6h ago•1 comments

The ChompSaw: A Benchtop Power Tool That's Safe for Kids to Use

https://www.core77.com/posts/137602/The-ChompSaw-A-Benchtop-Power-Tool-Thats-Safe-for-Kids-to-Use
161•surprisetalk•3d ago•98 comments

Btrfs Allocator Hints

https://lwn.net/ml/all/cover.1747070147.git.anand.jain@oracle.com/
10•forza_user•1d ago•2 comments

Show HN: Interactive pinout for the Raspberry Pi Pico 2

https://pico2.pinout.xyz
42•gadgetoid•3d ago•6 comments

What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

https://dynamicland.org/2024/FAQ/#What_is_Realtalks_relationship_to_AI
252•prathyvsh•17h ago•84 comments

Series of posts on HTTP status codes (2018)

https://evertpot.com/http/
37•antonalekseev•2d ago•7 comments

FOKS: Federated Open Key Service

https://foks.pub/
226•ubj•19h ago•48 comments

Flix – A powerful effect-oriented programming language

https://flix.dev/
267•freilanzer•18h ago•126 comments

Graphical Linear Algebra

https://graphicallinearalgebra.net/
239•hyperbrainer•16h ago•18 comments

Show HN: Cactus – Ollama for Smartphones

https://github.com/cactus-compute/cactus
143•HenryNdubuaku•13h ago•56 comments

Apple-1 Computer, handmade by Jobs and Woz [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdBKuBhdZwg
51•guiambros•2d ago•16 comments

Underwater turbine spinning for 6 years off Scotland's coast is a breakthrough

https://apnews.com/article/tidal-energy-turbine-marine-meygen-scotland-ffff3a7082205b33b612a1417e1ec6d6
171•djoldman•18h ago•155 comments

Show HN: I built a playground to showcase what Flux Kontext is good at

https://fluxkontextlab.com
51•Zephyrion•1d ago•14 comments

Red Hat Technical Writing Style Guide

https://stylepedia.net/style/
204•jumpocelot•17h ago•88 comments

Grok: Searching X for "From:Elonmusk (Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Gaza)"

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/
322•simonw•8h ago•169 comments

Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

https://www.browseros.com/
217•felarof•15h ago•77 comments

An almost catastrophic OpenZFS bug and the humans that made it

https://despairlabs.com/blog/posts/2025-07-10-an-openzfs-bug-and-the-humans-that-made-it/
6•r4um•2h ago•0 comments

Orwell Diaries 1938-1942

https://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/page/2/
107•bookofjoe•14h ago•60 comments

Foundations of Search: A Perspective from Computer Science (2012) [pdf]

https://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/J.Marshall/publications/SFR09_16%20Marshall%20&%20Neumann_PP.pdf
23•mooreds•3d ago•0 comments

Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
601•dheerajvs•16h ago•396 comments

AI coding tools can reduce productivity

https://secondthoughts.ai/p/ai-coding-slowdown
157•gk1•9h ago•151 comments

eBPF: Connecting with Container Runtimes

https://h0x0er.github.io/blog/2025/06/29/ebpf-connecting-with-container-runtimes/
53•forxtrot•13h ago•7 comments

Analyzing database trends through 1.8M Hacker News headlines

https://camelai.com/blog/hn-database-hype/
143•vercantez•3d ago•74 comments

Diffsitter – A Tree-sitter based AST difftool to get meaningful semantic diffs

https://github.com/afnanenayet/diffsitter
120•mihau•19h ago•30 comments
Open in hackernews

Linear Programming for Fun and Profit

https://modal.com/blog/resource-solver
62•hmac1282•2mo ago

Comments

ayhanfuat•2mo ago
> X = [x1, ..., Xn]: instances of each type to launch

Is this a continuous variable? Seems discrete to me. I am surprised it is solved by simplex.

Frummy•2mo ago
It's the answer, a vector of integers
ayhanfuat•2mo ago
Simplex cannot give a vector of integers though, unless the constraint matrix is unimodular. Maybe the integrality constraint was relaxed.
cweld510•2mo ago
You're right -- we do relax the integrality constraint, gaining performance at the expense of some precision, and we're generally able to paper over the difference at scheduling time. We've investigated integer linear programming for some use cases, but for solves to run quickly, we have to constrain the inputs significantly.
ayhanfuat•2mo ago
Thanks for the clarification. I guess it wouldn’t matter much if the numbers are large. Initially I thought they were mostly ones and zeros.
stncls•2mo ago
If this is business critical for you, you may want to switch to a faster solver. Glop is very nice, but it would be reasonable to expect a commercial solver (Gurobi, XPress, COpt) to be 60x faster [1]. By the same measure, the best open source solvers (CLP, HiGHS) are 2-3x faster than Glop.

Actually, the commercial solvers are so fast that I would not be surprised if they solved the IP problem as fast as Glop solves the LP. (Yes, the theory says it is impossible, but in practice it happens.) The cost of a commercial solver is 10k to 50k per license.

[1] ... this 60x number has very high variance depending on the type of problem, but it is not taken out of nowhere, it comes from the Mittelmann LP benchmarks https://plato.asu.edu/ftp/lpopt.html There are also benchmarks for other types of problems, including IP, see the whole list here: https://plato.asu.edu/bench.html

petters•2mo ago
If you are able to paper over the fractional numbers and get a usable solution, an integer solver should also be able to find a feasible solution easily. Perhaps not optimal, but better than just solving the LP and rounding
hustwindmaple1•2mo ago
You are basically doing a heurstic. Your solutions are not guaranteed to be optimal. Integer programming is the way to do.
cweld510•2mo ago
Great to see this post here -- really enjoyed writing it! I think it's really cool how an algorithm from an operational research context can play a critical role in a high-availability large-scale cloud service.
sumtechguy•2mo ago
LP is a shockingly good way to optimize a system. If you can put inputs/outputs into the correct form. Had an econ prof that loved these things for doing supply/demand maxima and minimum finding. He didnt outright say it but I think it was his current line of study when I was taking classes from him the 90s. I thought that, as he managed to bring it up in every class he taught.
Onavo•2mo ago
Well, kantorovich did win the Nobel for inventing that.
underanalyzer•2mo ago
Neat article. I do wish it mentioned that there are polynomial time algorithms to solve linear programming problems. According to the Google ortools docs it has the option to use those as well (but not with the GLOP solver). Might be good for when simplex is struggling (https://developers.google.com/optimization/lp/lp_advanced)
stncls•2mo ago
You're right, but it's very subtle and complicated.

In theory, the simplex method is not known to be polynomial-time, and it is likely that indeed it is not. Some variants of the simplex method have been proven to take exponential time in some worst cases (Klee-Minty cubes). What solvers implement could be said to be one such variant ("steepest-edge pricing"), but because solvers have tons of heuristics and engineering, and also because they work in floating-point arithmetic... it's difficult to tell for sure.

In practice, the main alternative is interior-point (aka. barrier) methods which, contrary to the simplex method, are polynomial-time in theory. They are usually (but not always) faster, and their advantage tends to increase for larger instances. The problem is that they are converging numerical algorithms, and with floating-point arithmetic they never quite 100% converge. By contrast, the simplex method is a combinatorial algorithm, and the numerical errors it faces should not accumulate. As a result, good solvers perform "crossover" after interior-point methods, to get a numerically clean optimal solution. Crossover is a combinatorial algorithm, like the simplex method. Unlike the simplex method though, crossover is polynomial-time in theory (strongly so, even). However, here, theory and practice diverge a bit, and crossover implementations are essentially simplified simplex methods. As a result, in my opinion, calling iterior-point + crossover polynomial-time would be a stretch.

Still, for large problems, we can expect iterior-point + crossover to be faster than the simplex method, by a factor 2x to 10x.

There is also first-order methods, which are getting much attention lately. However, in my experience, you should only use that if you are willing to tolerate huge constraint violations in the solution, and wildly suboptimal solutions. Their main use case is when other solvers need too much RAM to solve your instance.

underanalyzer•2mo ago
Very interesting! Thanks for the reply. I wonder if they tried these other solvers and decided they were either too slow b/c their problems were too small or the answers were too inaccurate
Onavo•2mo ago
The most interesting question is how you scrape the prices. The cloudprovider really need to provide an API.