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•8mo ago

Comments

castratikron•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
in CPU's - pipelining!
jchw•8mo 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...)

OpenClaw Is What Apple Intelligence Should Have Been

https://www.jakequist.com/thoughts/openclaw-is-what-apple-intelligence-should-have-been
62•jakequist•1h ago•54 comments

Voxtral Transcribe 2

https://mistral.ai/news/voxtral-transcribe-2
723•meetpateltech•10h ago•174 comments

As Rocks May Think

https://evjang.com/2026/02/04/rocks.html
53•modeless•2h ago•35 comments

Sqldef: Idempotent schema management tool for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite

https://sqldef.github.io/
51•Palmik•3d ago•11 comments

Claude Code: connect to a local model when your quota runs out

https://boxc.net/blog/2026/claude-code-connecting-to-local-models-when-your-quota-runs-out/
183•fugu2•3d ago•89 comments

AI is killing B2B SaaS

https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-killing-b2b-saas
218•namanyayg•8h ago•374 comments

Remarkable Pro Colors

https://www.thregr.org/wavexx/rnd/20260201-remarkable_pro_colors/
60•ffaser5gxlsll•3d ago•22 comments

Claude Code for Infrastructure

https://www.fluid.sh/
138•aspectrr•7h ago•124 comments

Building a 24-bit arcade CRT display adapter from scratch

https://www.scd31.com/posts/building-an-arcade-display-adapter
123•evakhoury•8h ago•33 comments

Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsofts-pivotal-ai-product-is-running-into-big-problems-ce235b28
120•fortran77•9h ago•148 comments

Tractor

https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/tractor.html
144•surprisetalk•1d ago•48 comments

A real-world benchmark for AI code review

https://www.qodo.ai/blog/how-we-built-a-real-world-benchmark-for-ai-code-review/
36•benocodes•4h ago•15 comments

Attention at Constant Cost per Token via Symmetry-Aware Taylor Approximation

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00294
151•fheinsen•11h ago•81 comments

A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

https://brandon.wang/2026/clawdbot
248•brdd•1d ago•391 comments

RS-SDK: Drive RuneScape with Claude Code

https://github.com/MaxBittker/rs-sdk
96•evakhoury•9h ago•39 comments

Spotlighting the World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell

https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/spotlighting-the-world-factbook-as-we-bid-a-fond-farewell/
87•mxfh•4h ago•75 comments

Sam Altman responds to Anthropic's "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude" ads

https://xcancel.com/sama/status/2019139174339928189
17•PieUser•59m ago•10 comments

Data Poems

https://dr.eamer.dev/datavis/poems/
20•putzdown•3d ago•4 comments

Claude is a space to think

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-is-a-space-to-think
365•meetpateltech•13h ago•195 comments

Show HN: Morph – Videos of AI testing your PR, embedded in GitHub

https://morphllm.com/products/glance
18•bhaktatejas922•4h ago•10 comments

Coding Agent VMs on NixOS with Microvm.nix

https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2026-02-01-coding-agent-microvm-nix/
82•secure•3d ago•39 comments

Converge (YC S23) Is Hiring Product Engineers (NYC, In-Person)

https://www.runconverge.com/careers/product-engineer
1•thomashlvt•8h ago

Lily Programming Language

https://lily-lang.org
5•FascinatedBox•3d ago•1 comments

Arcan-A12: Weaving a Different Web

https://www.divergent-desktop.org/blog/2026/01/26/a12web/
49•ingenieroariel•9h ago•14 comments

Debian's Challenge When Its Developers Drift Away

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-Developers-Quiet-Away
39•cuechan•3h ago•0 comments

The Codex app illustrates the shift left of IDEs and coding GUIs

https://www.benshoemaker.us/writing/codex-app-launch/
62•straydusk•5h ago•130 comments

Tell HN: Another round of Zendesk email spam

76•Philpax•6h ago•29 comments

Show HN: Bunqueue – Job queue for Bun using SQLite instead of Redis

https://github.com/egeominotti/bunqueue
7•kernelvoid•2d ago•2 comments

Guinea worm on track to be 2nd eradicated human disease; only 10 cases in 2025

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/02/guinea-worm-on-track-to-be-2nd-eradicated-human-disease-on...
261•bookofjoe•11h ago•114 comments

No More Hidden Changes: How MySQL 9.6 Transforms Foreign Key Management

https://blogs.oracle.com/mysql/no-more-hidden-changes-how-mysql-9-6-transforms-foreign-key-manage...
29•ksec•4d ago•15 comments