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Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale

https://www.recall.ai/blog/postgres-listen-notify-does-not-scale
289•davidgu•3d ago•109 comments

Show HN: Pangolin – Open source alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin
26•miloschwartz•4h ago•3 comments

Show HN: Open source alternative to Perplexity Comet

https://www.browseros.com/
155•felarof•8h ago•52 comments

What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

https://dynamicland.org/2024/FAQ/#What_is_Realtalks_relationship_to_AI
231•prathyvsh•10h ago•78 comments

Batch Mode in the Gemini API: Process More for Less

https://developers.googleblog.com/en/scale-your-ai-workloads-batch-mode-gemini-api/
21•xnx•3d ago•4 comments

FOKS: Federated Open Key Service

https://foks.pub/
176•ubj•13h ago•42 comments

Graphical Linear Algebra

https://graphicallinearalgebra.net/
179•hyperbrainer•10h ago•12 comments

Flix – A powerful effect-oriented programming language

https://flix.dev/
216•freilanzer•12h ago•88 comments

Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
514•dheerajvs•9h ago•325 comments

Red Hat Technical Writing Style Guide

https://stylepedia.net/style/
159•jumpocelot•11h ago•71 comments

Yamlfmt: An extensible command line tool or library to format YAML files

https://github.com/google/yamlfmt
24•zdw•3d ago•12 comments

Belkin ending support for older Wemo products

https://www.belkin.com/support-article/?articleNum=335419
52•apparent•7h ago•46 comments

Turkey bans Grok over Erdoğan insults

https://www.politico.eu/article/turkey-ban-elon-musk-grok-recep-tayyip-erdogan-insult/
82•geox•2h ago•57 comments

Launch HN: Leaping (YC W25) – Self-Improving Voice AI

49•akyshnik•8h ago•25 comments

How to prove false statements: Practical attacks on Fiat-Shamir

https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientists-figure-out-how-to-prove-lies-20250709/
198•nsoonhui•16h ago•153 comments

Regarding Prollyferation: Followup to "People Keep Inventing Prolly Trees"

https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2025-07-03-regarding-prollyferation/
40•ingve•3d ago•1 comments

Show HN: Cactus – Ollama for Smartphones

107•HenryNdubuaku•7h ago•45 comments

eBPF: Connecting with Container Runtimes

https://h0x0er.github.io/blog/2025/06/29/ebpf-connecting-with-container-runtimes/
34•forxtrot•7h ago•0 comments

Grok 4

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/10/grok-4/
177•coloneltcb•6h ago•147 comments

Not So Fast: AI Coding Tools Can Reduce Productivity

https://secondthoughts.ai/p/ai-coding-slowdown
54•gk1•2h ago•30 comments

Analyzing database trends through 1.8M Hacker News headlines

https://camelai.com/blog/hn-database-hype/
116•vercantez•2d ago•61 comments

Diffsitter – A Tree-sitter based AST difftool to get meaningful semantic diffs

https://github.com/afnanenayet/diffsitter
89•mihau•13h ago•26 comments

Matt Trout has died

https://www.shadowcat.co.uk/2025/07/09/ripples-they-cause-in-the-world/
139•todsacerdoti•19h ago•41 comments

Is Gemini 2.5 good at bounding boxes?

https://simedw.com/2025/07/10/gemini-bounding-boxes/
259•simedw•13h ago•57 comments

The ChompSaw: A Benchtop Power Tool That's Safe for Kids to Use

https://www.core77.com/posts/137602/The-ChompSaw-A-Benchtop-Power-Tool-Thats-Safe-for-Kids-to-Use
80•surprisetalk•3d ago•64 comments

Foundations of Search: A Perspective from Computer Science (2012) [pdf]

https://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/J.Marshall/publications/SFR09_16%20Marshall%20&%20Neumann_PP.pdf
3•mooreds•3d ago•0 comments

Show HN: Typeform was too expensive so I built my own forms

https://www.ikiform.com/
166•preetsuthar17•17h ago•86 comments

Final report on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 in-flight exit door plug separation

https://www.ntsb.gov:443/investigations/Pages/DCA24MA063.aspx
130•starkparker•5h ago•141 comments

Radiocarbon dating reveals Rapa Nui not as isolated as previously thought

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-radiocarbon-dating-reveals-rapa-nui.html
16•pseudolus•3d ago•7 comments

Optimizing a Math Expression Parser in Rust

https://rpallas.xyz/math-parser/
127•serial_dev•16h ago•55 comments
Open in hackernews

Pglocks.org

https://pglocks.org/
80•hnasr•1mo ago

Comments

whilenot-dev•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo ago
I agree, it is not so straightforward to find out.
braiamp•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo 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•1mo ago
Very practical! Locking is one of the things that can really bite when doing migrations.