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The West Forgot How to Make Things. Now It's Forgetting How to Code

https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-west-forgot-how-to-make-things
148•milkglass•1h ago•62 comments

Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/amateur-armed-with-chatgpt-vibe-maths-a-60-year-old-pr...
330•pr337h4m•14h ago•195 comments

Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-has-there-been-so-little-progress-on-alzheimers-disease/
207•chiefalchemist•7h ago•109 comments

Exposing Floating Point – Bartosz Ciechanowski (2019)

https://ciechanow.ski/exposing-floating-point/
11•subset•52m ago•2 comments

Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day

226•_-x-_•7h ago•100 comments

USB Cheat Sheet (2022)

https://fabiensanglard.net/usbcheat/index.html
275•gwerbret•10h ago•55 comments

GnuPG – post-quantum crypto landing in mainline

https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-announce/2026q2/000504.html
46•zdkaster•4h ago•14 comments

Terra API (YC W21) Hiring: Applied AI Strategist(Health Intelligence)

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/terra-api/jobs/DY7BCZU-applied-ai-strategist-market-intelli...
1•kyriakosel•1h ago

The route from Prussian military headquarters to Gary Gygax’s basement

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/14/shall-we-play-a-game
27•jger15•2d ago•2 comments

Mahjong: A Visual Guide

https://themahjong.guide/
76•iamwil•2d ago•20 comments

Quirks of Human Anatomy

https://www.sdbonline.org/sites/fly/lewheldquirk/figlegq6.htm
17•gurjeet•1d ago•1 comments

EU Age Control: The trojan horse for digital IDs

https://juraj.bednar.io/en/blog-en/2026/04/17/eu-age-control-the-trojan-horse-for-digital-ids/
141•gasull•4h ago•53 comments

Flickr: The first and last great photo platform

https://petapixel.com/2026/04/22/flickr-the-first-and-last-great-photo-platform/
151•Nrbelex•3d ago•77 comments

OpenAI Privacy Filter

https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai-privacy-filter/
197•tanelpoder•3d ago•37 comments

1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)

https://www.hypertalking.com/2023/05/08/1-bit-pixel-art-of-hokusais-the-great-wave-off-kanagawa/
575•stephen-hill•3d ago•90 comments

The Free Universal Construction Kit

https://fffff.at/free-universal-construction-kit/
311•robinhouston•4d ago•65 comments

Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish

https://blog.matthewbrunelle.com/its-ok-to-use-coding-assistance-tools-to-revive-the-projects-you...
264•speckx•15h ago•151 comments

The Joy of Folding Bikes

https://blog.korny.info/2026/04/19/the-joy-of-folding-bikes
161•pavel_lishin•3d ago•102 comments

Rediscovering the Handcart

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2026/04/rediscovering-the-handcart/
16•jgrodziski•3d ago•1 comments

America's Geothermal Breakthrough

https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Geothermal-Energy/Americas-Geothermal-Breakthrough-Could-...
107•sleepyguy•12h ago•123 comments

Reviving BrowserID in 2026

https://wakamoleguy.com/p/reviving-browserid-in-2026
22•wakamoleguy•5h ago•4 comments

Martin Galway's music source files from 1980's Commodore 64 games

https://github.com/MartinGalway/C64_music
173•ingve•21h ago•25 comments

Math Is Hard – OpenBSD Stories

http://miod.online.fr/software/openbsd/stories/vaxfp.html
96•signa11•2d ago•3 comments

The Super Nintendo Cartridges (2024)

https://fabiensanglard.net/snes_carts/
46•offbyone42•7h ago•5 comments

AGPLv3§74 Empowers Users to Thwart Badgeware Like OnlyOffice

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2026/apr/16/badgeware-onlyoffice-nextcloud-affero-gpl/
54•pabs3•3h ago•9 comments

Hokusai and Tesselations

https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1899550/1/11/
104•srean•14h ago•14 comments

Optimizing Datalog for the GPU

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3669940.3707274
47•tosh•2d ago•3 comments

Simulacrum of Knowledge Work

https://blog.happyfellow.dev/simulacrum-of-knowledge-work/
143•thehappyfellow•14h ago•56 comments

DeepSeek-V4 on Day 0: From Fast Inference to Verified RL with SGLang and Miles

https://www.lmsys.org/blog/2026-04-25-deepseek-v4/
48•mji•8h ago•5 comments

Per-image PCA characterization of the Kodak image suite (PDF and JSON)

https://github.com/PearsonZero/kodak-pcd0992-statistical-characterization/tree/main/baseline
7•PearsonZero•4d ago•2 comments
Open in hackernews

Pglocks.org

https://pglocks.org/
80•hnasr•11mo ago

Comments

whilenot-dev•11mo ago
I'm a bit lost here.

Locking is a challenging problem in complex systems. Is this list to be interpreted as a "TODO: get rid of locking conflicts in future releases" or more a "NOTE: be aware there are known conflicts that will not change - find ways to work around them"?

EDIT: Also, is the creation of this list an automated or a manual effort?

tux3•11mo ago
I think this is intended as educational material, not a list of things to fix.

The locks are here by necessity, it is not so easy at all to get rid of them. And even in special cases where it is possible, the complexity you have to introduce is not to be taken lightly...

If even a tenth of these disapppeared, it would be incredible, in a very surprising way.

atombender•11mo ago
The creator looks like a developer and teacher, not a Postgres core team member. So I assume this is for documentation purposes.

I actually like this a lot, as there isn't a single place in the Postgres documentation that lists all the possible locks; it's spread out all over. Having a quick reference for what kinds of commands you'd be blocking with your transaction is valuable.

It's pretty evident that the pages have been programmatically generated, but I'd love know what it's generated from. I think you can derive this information from the documentation, but not sure if you can do it in an automated way without an LLM.

braiamp•11mo ago
> there isn't a single place in the Postgres documentation that lists all the possible locks

Did you read this page? https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/explicit-locking.htm...

atombender•11mo ago
That's a great page, but it has several issues.

First, it isn't complete; as I said, the locking behaviour is spread out all over the Postgres documentation. For example, that page doesn't list what locks DROP INDEX takes. To find that out, you have to go to the documentation page for that command and read it carefully. In fact, really carefully — the locking behaviour is only documented under the section about CONCURRENTLY.

The page also doesn't list what possible commands are then blocked. Locks interact in subtle (and incorrectly named!) ways that are explained in the tables on that page ("Conflicting lock modes"), so to understand if something will block something else you have to look at the two commands you are curious about and then look at how their locks interact.

gulcin_xata•11mo ago
I agree, it is not so straightforward to find out.
braiamp•11mo ago
These are database locks, which means that depending which arrives first, the later transaction has to wait till the first one finishes to complete. These locks are about SQL commands and which commands can run concurrently with the others. There's a graph here of how that looks like https://pankrat.github.io/2015/django-migrations-without-dow...

Usually for maximum performance (minimum latency, maximum throughput) you want to have operations not lock each other, unless absolutely necessary, in which case you want them to be short.

whilenot-dev•11mo ago
You make it sound like the conflict is just affecting performance and won't result in a deadlock. So it's for performance aware postgres clients/users, and not for postgres developers?
andyferris•11mo ago
It is a guide for developers using postgres as a client, who need to write systems that don't deadlock, are performant and are correct. These are the (rather sharp) tools that postgres provides for doing so (or else you can use e.g. serializable isolation and optimistic concurrency, but in my experience that has too many false positives and bail out rather eagerly, whereas these tools let you be very precise and granular).
mebcitto•11mo ago
Other relevant talks/blogs that I found really useful for understanding Postgres locks are:

* Unlocking the Postgres Lock Manager by Bruce Momjian: https://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/locking.pdf

* Anatomy of table-level locks by Gulcin Yildirim Jelinek: https://xata.io/blog/anatomy-of-locks

pasxizeis•11mo ago
Shameless plug: I wrote a tool[1] that executes a given migration against a test database (e.g. in your CI) and reports back what locks it acquired.

The rationale being to have a "lock diagnostics report" commented in your PR's migration file.

It's a prototype and has a few rough edges and missing functionality, but feedback is more than welcome.

[1] https://github.com/agis/pglockanalyze

jononor•11mo ago
Very practical! Locking is one of the things that can really bite when doing migrations.