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Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)

https://lax-skyline.parcelscope.net/
172•rustywasm•4h ago•74 comments

Trusting-Trust Attack against an Entire Linux Distribution

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24888
109•signa11•2d ago•26 comments

WeatherNext 3

https://deepmind.google/science/weathernext/
184•matthieu_bl•4d ago•34 comments

Scientists observe Einstein's gravity in the quantum world

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-08-28-scientists-observe-einsteins-gravity-in-the-quantum-world
95•mudil•3d ago•25 comments

Finding a bug in Dummit and Foote's Abstract Algebra

https://kallus.org/blog/dummit_and_foote.html
54•evakhoury•3d ago•31 comments

Show HN: Interactive Tree of Life

https://ptree.org/
38•Lucent•3d ago•14 comments

Leaving VMware just got harder after Broadcom pulled VDDK downloads

https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2026/09/leaving-vmware-just-got-harder-after-broadcom-pulled-...
24•josephcsible•2h ago•9 comments

Macbeth and His Problems

https://porticoquarterly.com/essay/macbeth-and-his-problems/
28•apophatic•2h ago•7 comments

Working on Economics with Fable 5

https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/08/03/working-on-economics-with-fable-5/
18•Wilsoniumite•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Stuxnet – A reconstructed source code of the infamous cyber-weapon

https://github.com/Sadpainy/Stuxnet
7•CMDDestory•59m ago•2 comments

216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA
418•treve•22h ago•683 comments

Decapitating a MacBook (2025)

https://mm-dev.rocks/series/decapitating-macbook-an-odyssey/
51•luu•1d ago•33 comments

Methods for Random Gradients (2024)

https://justinjay.wang/methods-for-random-gradients/
42•nickswalker•4d ago•4 comments

Decoding the NEC V20 Microcode

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2026/09/decoding-nec-v20-microcode.html
103•mariuz•3d ago•7 comments

Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics

https://mathathonchallenge.com/index.html
212•astroanax•13h ago•74 comments

Icy Moons Are Ocean Worlds

https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/icy-moons-are-ocean-worlds
113•worldvoyageur•1d ago•10 comments

Simple Is Not Small

https://jyn.dev/simple-is-not-the-same-as-small/
171•zdw•3d ago•56 comments

This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

https://ladybird.org/newsletter/2026-08-31/
130•exploraz•3d ago•22 comments

The Education of a Doomer

https://borretti.me/article/the-education-of-a-doomer
34•f311a•1h ago•26 comments

My practical approach to surfing the web safely

https://molily.de/safe-websurfing/
57•ethanhawksley•5d ago•24 comments

bzip3

https://github.com/iczelia/bzip3
359•tosh•9h ago•103 comments

The Dataflow Model Revisited

https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/volumes/19/paper/The%20Dataflow%20Model%20Revisited
78•scott_s•1d ago•14 comments

Keep Our Servers Running

https://blog.archive.org/2026/09/01/keep-our-servers-running-your-recurring-donation-goes-3x-this...
928•sonicrocketman•19h ago•241 comments

Show HN: I built an aesthetically pleasing puzzle

https://jigsawhaiku.com/
15•windowshopping•3d ago•5 comments

Catching Crumbs from the Table (2000)

https://www.nature.com/articles/35014679
11•stefanpie•1d ago•3 comments

Replaceable but Employed: Automation and the Meaning of Work

https://www.nber.org/papers/w35559
47•mooreds•4h ago•25 comments

She Also Found It at the Movies

https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/she-also-found-it-at-the-movies
19•prismatic•3d ago•0 comments

Whistle Synth Mac App

https://www.jefftk.com/p/whistle-synth-mac-app
58•luu•3d ago•13 comments

How to bring up the Linux Kernel on a new platform

https://werwolv.net/posts/linux_bringup/
63•WerWolv•4d ago•4 comments

Live map of public transport in Belgium

https://openbaarvervoerbelgie.be/
178•coinfused•14h ago•73 comments
Open in hackernews

Pglocks.org

https://pglocks.org/
80•hnasr•1y ago

Comments

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