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Earth is warming faster. Scientists are closing in on why

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/12/16/earth-is-warming-faster-scientists-ar...
87•andsoitis•1h ago•55 comments

ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

https://alexharri.com/blog/ascii-rendering
523•alexharri•7h ago•65 comments

We Put Claude Code in Rollercoaster Tycoon

https://labs.ramp.com/rct
182•iamwil•5d ago•95 comments

Why There's No Single Best Way to Store Information

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-theres-no-single-best-way-to-store-information-20260116/
30•7777777phil•2h ago•9 comments

Show HN: What if your menu bar was a keyboard-controlled command center?

https://extrabar.app/
27•pugdogdev•1h ago•13 comments

Counterfactual evaluation for recommendation systems

https://eugeneyan.com/writing/counterfactual-evaluation/
27•kurinikku•13h ago•0 comments

2025 was the third hottest year on record

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/01/14/2025-was-the-third-hottest-year-on-re...
108•andsoitis•1h ago•72 comments

M8SBC-486 (Homebrew 486 computer)

https://maniek86.xyz/projects/m8sbc_486.php
21•rasz•6d ago•3 comments

The 600-year-old origins of the word 'hello'

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260113-hello-hiya-aloha-what-our-greetings-reveal
75•1659447091•7h ago•43 comments

The Dilbert Afterlife

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife
324•rendall•1d ago•212 comments

East Germany balloon escape

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Germany_balloon_escape
631•robertvc•1d ago•267 comments

ClickHouse acquires Langfuse

https://langfuse.com/blog/joining-clickhouse
164•tin7in•9h ago•71 comments

Map To Poster – Create Art of your favourite city

https://github.com/originalankur/maptoposter
157•originalankur•8h ago•49 comments

Show HN: Streaming gigabyte medical images from S3 without downloading them

https://github.com/PABannier/WSIStreamer
108•el_pa_b•10h ago•40 comments

16 Best Practices for Reducing Dependabot Noise

https://nesbitt.io/2026/01/10/16-best-practices-for-reducing-dependabot-noise.html
16•zdw•5d ago•11 comments

Cloudflare acquires Astro

https://astro.build/blog/joining-cloudflare/
909•todotask2•1d ago•379 comments

The Resonant Computing Manifesto

https://resonantcomputing.org/
26•sinak•2h ago•6 comments

US electricity demand surged in 2025 – solar handled 61% of it

https://electrek.co/2026/01/16/us-electricity-demand-surged-in-2025-solar-handled-61-percent/
275•doener•8h ago•251 comments

The 'untouchable hacker god' behind Finland's biggest crime

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/17/vastaamo-hack-finland-therapy-notes
116•c420•11h ago•115 comments

The Olivetti Company – By Bradford Morgan White

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-olivetti-company
8•rbanffy•6d ago•3 comments

Cursor's latest “browser experiment” implied success without evidence

https://embedding-shapes.github.io/cursor-implied-success-without-evidence/
661•embedding-shape•1d ago•288 comments

High-Level Is the Goal

https://bvisness.me/high-level/
215•tobr•2d ago•104 comments

6-Day and IP Address Certificates Are Generally Available

https://letsencrypt.org/2026/01/15/6day-and-ip-general-availability
462•jaas•1d ago•256 comments

Italy investigates Activision Blizzard for pushing in-game purchases

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/16/italy-investigates-activision-blizzard-for-pushing-in-game-purc...
80•7777777phil•5h ago•31 comments

FLUX.2 [Klein]: Towards Interactive Visual Intelligence

https://bfl.ai/blog/flux2-klein-towards-interactive-visual-intelligence
199•GaggiX•19h ago•55 comments

PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/16/patch_tuesday_secure_launch_bug_no_shutdown/
176•smurda•8h ago•196 comments

Show HN: I built a tool to assist AI agents to know when a PR is good to go

https://dsifry.github.io/goodtogo/
11•dsifry•9h ago•9 comments

LLM Structured Outputs Handbook

https://nanonets.com/cookbooks/structured-llm-outputs
333•vitaelabitur•2d ago•58 comments

For me, Hacker News is probably the best community on the internet

16•DenisDolya•1h ago•10 comments

Drone Hacking Part 1: Dumping Firmware and Bruteforcing ECC

https://neodyme.io/en/blog/drone_hacking_part_1/
118•tripdout•16h ago•23 comments
Open in hackernews

Pglocks.org

https://pglocks.org/
80•hnasr•8mo ago

Comments

whilenot-dev•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
I agree, it is not so straightforward to find out.
braiamp•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
Very practical! Locking is one of the things that can really bite when doing migrations.