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•1y ago

Comments

castratikron•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y ago
in CPU's - pipelining!
jchw•1y 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...)

Anthropic's open-source framework for AI-powered vulnerability discovery

https://github.com/anthropics/defending-code-reference-harness
127•binyu•1h ago•42 comments

VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

https://blog.cloudflare.com/voidzero-joins-cloudflare/
528•coloneltcb•8h ago•237 comments

When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement

https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improvement
208•meetpateltech•5h ago•249 comments

Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot

https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm
438•mooreds•10h ago•165 comments

Castor: CERN Advanced STORage Manager

https://castor.web.cern.ch/content/home.html
34•naves•2h ago•11 comments

Retro-Tech Parenting

https://havenweb.org/2026/05/28/retro-tech.html
204•mawise•5h ago•138 comments

KVarN: Native vLLM backend for KV-cache quantization by Huawei

https://github.com/huawei-csl/KVarN
99•theanonymousone•6h ago•10 comments

Show HN: FFmpeg WebCLI – Full FFmpeg in Browser, Offline PWA, No Uploads(WASM)

https://github.com/tejaswigowda/ffmpeg-webCLI
37•tejaswigowda•1h ago•8 comments

JLink JTAG Access on the Pinecil

https://danielmangum.com/posts/jlink-jtag-pinecil/
23•hasheddan•2d ago•2 comments

Samurai City

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/samurai-city/
60•zdw•2d ago•5 comments

Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

https://www.buchodi.com/meta-glasses-facial-recognition/
153•buchodi•2h ago•137 comments

Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes

https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grades-soar-as-professors-see-greater-ai-u...
706•littlexsparkee•21h ago•666 comments

Making Debian or Fedora persistent live images

https://sigwait.org/~alex/blog/2026/05/28/smdBC8.html
44•henry_flower•3d ago•4 comments

Iran Shock Jolts Asia and Europe to Speed Up Energy Transition

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-energy-transition-iran-war/
48•toomuchtodo•1h ago•16 comments

Sum-product, unit distances, and number fields

https://www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread/blog:6
47•robinhouston•3d ago•6 comments

Zettascale (YC S24) Is Hiring Founding FPGA Engineers

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/zettascale/jobs/O9S1vqO-founding-engineer-fpga-rtl-asic-arc...
1•el_al•5h ago

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Army_Corps_of_Engineers_Bay_Model
197•tosh•2d ago•52 comments

Show HN: Uruky (EU-based Kagi alternative) now has Image Search and URL Rewrites

https://uruky.com/?il=en
194•BrunoBernardino•13h ago•183 comments

NSA using Anthropic's Mythos for cyber attacks

https://www.ft.com/content/d02d91b3-2636-454e-9442-dc7e69f51815
42•jawiggins•1h ago•13 comments

AI, Ashby Engineering, and the future

https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/engineering/ai-ashby-engineering-and-the-future
27•fredley•7h ago•16 comments

Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language

https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2026/06/03/elixir-v1-20-0-released/
953•cloud8421•1d ago•377 comments

Gaussian Point Splatting

https://momentsingraphics.de/Siggraph2026.html
168•ibobev•11h ago•64 comments

Ask HN: So what happened to Facebook "localhost" tracking?

66•juliusceasar•9h ago•72 comments

Branchless Quicksort faster than std:sort and pdqsort with C and C++ API

https://tiki.li/blog/blqsort
9•birdculture•2d ago•0 comments

Mornings and nights no longer exist at 47C: A day in the hottest place in India

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crmp0krp98ro
45•mellosouls•2d ago•14 comments

Show HN: Cost.dev (YC W21) – making agents cost-aware and cheaper to call

https://cost.dev/
19•akh•10h ago•6 comments

Ask HN: High school student – is learning programming still worthwhile?

3•Lucaslii•2h ago•1 comments

3D-printed book turns its own G-code into raised lettering

https://www.designboom.com/design/3d-printed-book-manual-darius-ou-benson-chong/
66•surprisetalk•2d ago•25 comments

The desperation of NYTimes

https://rozumem.xyz/posts/16
277•rozumem•4h ago•257 comments

Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/
721•lordleft•1d ago•1236 comments