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...)

Sovereignty in a System Prompt

https://pop.rdi.sh/sovereignty-in-a-system-prompt/
17•0x5FC3•18h ago•2 comments

I'm helping my dog vibe code games

https://www.calebleak.com/posts/dog-game/
872•cleak•15h ago•253 comments

Cl-kawa: Scheme on Java on Common Lisp

https://github.com/atgreen/cl-kawa
30•varjag•2d ago•5 comments

Show HN: Moonshine Open-Weights STT models – higher accuracy than WhisperLargev3

https://github.com/moonshine-ai/moonshine
226•petewarden•10h ago•48 comments

Mercury 2: Fast reasoning LLM powered by diffusion

https://www.inceptionlabs.ai/blog/introducing-mercury-2
199•fittingopposite•9h ago•87 comments

Pi – A minimal terminal coding harness

https://pi.dev
328•kristianpaul•10h ago•139 comments

Show HN: Quantifying opportunity cost with a deliberately "simple" web app

https://shouldhavebought.com/
4•b0bbi•16h ago•0 comments

Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/02/apple-accelerates-us-manufacturing-with-mac-mini-production/
489•haunter•11h ago•479 comments

Turing Completeness of GNU Find: From Mkdir-Assisted Loops to Standalone Comput

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20762
15•todsacerdoti•3h ago•2 comments

React just left meta. Here's what that means for developers

https://sulat.com/p/react-just-left-meta-heres-what-that
7•zenoware•1h ago•1 comments

Georgian wine culture dates back, uninterrupted, approximately 8k years

https://www.wsetglobal.com/knowledge-centre/blog/2023/july/05/exploring-georgian-wine-history-gra...
51•Anon84•4d ago•39 comments

Japanese Death Poems

https://www.secretorum.life/p/japanese-death-poems-part-3
13•NaOH•2d ago•0 comments

Hacking an old Kindle to display bus arrival times

https://www.mariannefeng.com/portfolio/kindle/
234•mengchengfeng•12h ago•53 comments

Show HN: Emdash – Open-source agentic development environment

https://github.com/generalaction/emdash
145•onecommit•14h ago•58 comments

I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978

https://wordglyph.xyz/one-piece-at-a-time
445•wordglyph•19h ago•162 comments

Amazon accused of widespread scheme to inflate prices across the economy

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/amazon-busted-for-widespread-price
377•toomuchtodo•7h ago•119 comments

Nearby Glasses

https://github.com/yjeanrenaud/yj_nearbyglasses
305•zingerlio•14h ago•114 comments

Steel Bank Common Lisp

https://www.sbcl.org/
199•tosh•13h ago•77 comments

Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid

https://www.cape.co/
83•0xWTF•9h ago•91 comments

Show HN: Context Mode – 315 KB of MCP output becomes 5.4 KB in Claude Code

https://github.com/mksglu/claude-context-mode
40•mksglu•1h ago•12 comments

Corgi Labs (YC W23) Is Hiring

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/corgi-labs/jobs/ZiEIf7a-founders-associate
1•leastsquares•7h ago

Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge

https://time.com/7380854/exclusive-anthropic-drops-flagship-safety-pledge/
255•cwwc•7h ago•103 comments

Hugging Face Skills

https://github.com/huggingface/skills
159•armcat•14h ago•44 comments

Looks like it is happening

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15500
169•jjgreen•11h ago•116 comments

Aesthetics of single threading

https://ta.fo/aesthetics-of-single-threading/
68•todsacerdoti•3d ago•16 comments

3D-Printed electric motor via multi-modal, multi-material extrusion

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17452759.2026.2613185
8•westurner•3d ago•7 comments

We installed a single turnstile to feel secure

https://idiallo.com/blog/installed-single-turnstile-for-security-theater
332•firefoxd•2d ago•154 comments

Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter

https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/stripe-2025-update
197•jez•17h ago•209 comments

IRS Tactics Against Meta Open a New Front in the Corporate Tax Fight

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/business/irs-meta-corporate-taxes.html
206•mitchbob•19h ago•206 comments

Optophone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optophone
68•Hooke•4d ago•12 comments