frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

The Scalar Select Anti-Pattern

https://matklad.github.io/2025/05/14/scalar-select-aniti-pattern.html
47•goranmoomin•9mo ago

Comments

castratikron•9mo ago
As long as processing one event does not affect any of the other events in the batch. E.g. events are file IO, and processing one event causes another event's descriptor to get closed before that event can be processed.
wahern•9mo ago
If the close routine on an event source, or the low-level (e.g. epoll) registration, deregistration, and dequeueing logic doesn't know how to keep polling and liveness state consistent between userspace and the kernel, they've got much bigger problems. This looks like Rust code so I would hope the event stream libraries are, e.g., keeping Rc'd file objects and properly managing reference integrity viz-a-viz kernel state before the application caller ever sees the first dequeued event in a cycle. This is a perennial issue with event loop libraries and buggy application code (in every language). One can't just deal with raw file descriptors, call the close syscall directly, etc, hoping to keep state consistent implicitly. There's an unavoidable tie-in needed between application's wrappers around low-level resources and the event loop in use.
taeric•9mo ago
I'm not entirely clear on what the proposal is at the end? Seems that the long term answer as to "which of these implications to pursue" is "all of them?" Simply taking in a batch of instructions doesn't immediately change much? You still have to be able to do each of the other things. And you will still expect some dependencies between batches that could possibly interact in the same ways.

In a sense, this is no different than how your processor is dealing with instructions coming in. You will have some instructions that can be run without waiting on previous ones. You will have some that can complete quickly. You will have some that are stalled on other parts of the system. (I'm sure I could keep wording an instruction to match each of the implications.)

To that end, part of your program has to deal with taking off "whats next" and finding how to prepare that to pass to the execution portion of your program. You can make that only take in batches, but you are almost certainly responsible for how you chunk them moreso than whatever process is sending the instructions to you? Even if you are handed clear batches, it is incumbent on you to batch them as they go off to the rest of the system.

lmz•9mo ago
I guess the proposal is "instead of fetching and acting on one event at a time, consider fetching all available events and look for opportunities to optimize which ones you process (e.g. by prioritization or by skipping certain events if superseded by newer ones)".
taeric•9mo ago
I mean, I got that. But you could as easily say "instead of fetching and acting on one event at a time, fetch and triage/route instructions into applicable queues."

In particular, there is no guarantee that moving to batches changes any of the problems you may have from acting on a single one at a time. To that end, you will have to look into all of the other strategies sooner or later.

Following from that, the problem is not "processMessage" or whatever. The problem is that you haven't broken "processMessage" up into the constituent "receive/triage/process/resolve" loop that you almost certainly will have to end up with.

malkia•9mo ago
in CPU's - pipelining!
jchw•9mo ago
I believe something similar is going on internally in Windows with event queues. It coalesces and prioritizes input events when multiple of them pile up before you're able to pop new events off of the queue. (For some events, e.g. pointer events, you can even go and query frames that were coalesced during input handling.) On the application/API end, it just looks like a "scalar select" loop, but actually it is doing batching behavior for input events!

(On the flip side, if you have a Wayland client that falls behind on processing its event queue, it can crash. On the whole this isn't really that bad but if you have something sending a shit load of events it can cause very bad behavior. This has made me wonder if it's possible, with UNIX domain sockets, to implement some kind of event coalescing on the server-side, to avoid flooding the client with high-precision pointer movement events while it's falling behind. Maybe start coalescing when FIONREAD gets to some high watermark? No idea...)

Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War

https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
2059•qwertox•13h ago•1096 comments

F-Droid Board of Directors nominations 2026

https://f-droid.org/2026/02/26/board-of-directors-nominations.html
30•edent•1h ago•8 comments

Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

https://blog.janestreet.com/can-you-reverse-engineer-our-neural-network/
39•jsomers•2d ago•1 comments

Dyson settles forced labour suit in landmark UK case

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cddnry8dnl7o
41•cmsefton•1h ago•31 comments

The normalization of corruption in organizations (2003) [pdf]

https://gwern.net/doc/sociology/2003-ashforth.pdf
95•rendx•5h ago•36 comments

The Hunt for Dark Breakfast

https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/02/22/the-hunt-for-dark-breakfast/
271•moultano•8h ago•106 comments

An interactive intro to quadtrees

https://growingswe.com/blog/quadtrees
33•evakhoury•2d ago•3 comments

MitID, Denmarks sole digital ID, has been down for over an hour and counting

https://www.digitaliser.dk/mitid/nyt-fra-mitid/2026/feb/driftsforstyrrelser-mitid
52•mousepad12•1h ago•64 comments

Compact disc story (1998)

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/294484774_Compact_disc_story
8•pipeline_peak•8h ago•1 comments

Quantitativity on the number of rational points in the Mordell conjecture

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mathematicians-make-a-breakthrough-on-2-000-year-old-p...
5•wglb•22h ago•0 comments

Ubicloud (YC W24): Software Engineer – $95-$250K in Turkey, Netherlands, CA

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ubicloud/jobs/j4bntEJ-software-engineer
1•ozgune•3h ago

What Claude Code chooses

https://amplifying.ai/research/claude-code-picks
455•tin7in•17h ago•179 comments

Breaking Free

https://www.forbrukerradet.no/breakingfree/
12•Aissen•2h ago•1 comments

80386 Protection

https://nand2mario.github.io/posts/2026/80386_protection/
85•nand2mario•2d ago•16 comments

AirSnitch: Demystifying and breaking client isolation in Wi-Fi networks [pdf]

https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2026-f1282-paper.pdf
367•DamnInteresting•20h ago•169 comments

Layoffs at Block

https://twitter.com/jack/status/2027129697092731343
755•mlex•14h ago•825 comments

The Origins of Agar

https://www.asimov.press/p/agar
37•surprisetalk•3d ago•5 comments

Implementing a clear room Z80 / ZX Spectrum emulator with Claude Code

https://antirez.com/news/160
31•antirez•2d ago•33 comments

Reading English from 1000 Ad

https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/260224.html
6•LAC-Tech•3d ago•1 comments

Parakeet.cpp – Parakeet ASR inference in pure C++ with Metal GPU acceleration

https://github.com/Frikallo/parakeet.cpp
73•noahkay13•8h ago•19 comments

What does " 2>&1 " mean?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/818255/what-does-21-mean
313•alexmolas•16h ago•175 comments

Working on Pharo Smalltalk: BPatterns: Rewrite Engine with Smalltalk Style

http://dionisiydk.blogspot.com/2026/02/bpatterns-rewrite-engine-with-smalltalk.html
13•mpweiher•3h ago•1 comments

The complete Manic Miner disassembly

https://skoolkit.ca/disassemblies/manic_miner/
10•sandebert•4h ago•2 comments

I rendered 1,418 confusables over 230 fonts. Most aren't confusable to the eye

https://paultendo.github.io/posts/confusable-vision-visual-similarity/
74•paultendo•1d ago•29 comments

Launch HN: Cardboard (YC W26) – Agentic video editor

https://www.usecardboard.com/
122•sxmawl•17h ago•64 comments

OsmAnd’s Faster Offline Navigation (2025)

https://osmand.net/blog/fast-routing/
186•todsacerdoti•17h ago•67 comments

An Introduction to the Codex Seraphinianus, the Strangest Book Ever Published

https://www.openculture.com/2026/02/an-introduction-to-the-codex-seraphinianus.html
82•vinhnx•3d ago•18 comments

Lawmakers say US Military used laser to take down Border Protection drone in TX

https://apnews.com/article/military-laser-border-drone-texas-airport-55aaab7093f7d6dd174f909f3875...
5•thinkcontext•30m ago•1 comments

Museum of Plugs and Sockets

https://plugsocketmuseum.nl/index.html
135•ohjeez•3d ago•66 comments

I baked a pie every day for a year

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/feb/22/a-new-start-after-60-i-baked-a-pie-every-day...
284•NaOH•3d ago•184 comments