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Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours.html
71•satvikpendem•58m ago•30 comments

Show HN: A Project Oberon System version running on RISC-V instead of RISC-5

https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem/tree/op2-rv32
16•Rochus•1h ago•1 comments

There Are Magic Hexagons of Every Order

https://gukov.dev/math/2026/08/02/new-magic-hexagons.html
105•gukoff•6h ago•18 comments

The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)

https://halfhill.com/byte/1998-12_alpha.html
37•Lammy•4h ago•18 comments

My server is a phone now

https://seg6.space/posts/phone-server/
406•seg6•15h ago•177 comments

The Grid That Doubles the Strength of the Ground

https://practical.engineering/blog/2026/8/4/the-grid-that-doubles-the-strength-of-the-ground
68•michaefe•4d ago•11 comments

Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a, Native X64 Port

https://github.com/jmarshall23/msword
111•BruceEel•8h ago•50 comments

Uber SubmitQueue: a high-performance speculative merge queue

https://github.com/uber/submitqueue/
25•handfuloflight•1w ago•8 comments

Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386

https://os8088.com/
210•jggonz•14h ago•123 comments

Fastmail offers EU data region

https://www.fastmail.com/blog/fastmail-offers-eu-data-region/
461•groomlake•22h ago•256 comments

Reviving a four year old reMarkable 2

https://oskrim.github.io/hardware/2026/08/09/remarkable-over-ssh.html
57•tremguy•2h ago•46 comments

Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding

https://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/heuristics/differential.html
301•bobbiechen•1w ago•31 comments

Dithered QR Codes

https://www.andrewt.net/dithered-qr-codes/wtf/
277•jmusall•15h ago•27 comments

Shopify replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations–and it scaled

https://shopify.engineering/scaling-inventory-reservations
264•adletbalzhanov•15h ago•172 comments

Protopia

https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/protopia
35•surprisetalk•5d ago•29 comments

The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years (2011)

http://longbets.org/601/
175•doubletwoyou•9h ago•80 comments

Honey, I shrunk the embeddings: Matryoshka vs. PCA

https://dylancastillo.co/posts/matryoshka-vs-pca
3•dcastm•5d ago•0 comments

Why Wall Street Is Ignoring Big Tech's Debt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NufJ7g63KSY
30•johnbarron•2h ago•5 comments

TheoremDB – A public workspace for machine mathematics

https://theoremdb.org/
63•frozenseven•12h ago•7 comments

Everything You Do Is Being Recorded

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/05/ai-wearable-surveillance-countermeasures/687203/
86•ike_usawa•2h ago•70 comments

Stylized GGX Shading

https://alexandrelamure.github.io/graphics-posts/stylized-ggx-shading.html
41•ibobev•5d ago•0 comments

How to Survive in a Louisiana Swamp

https://unherd.com/2026/08/how-to-survive-on-a-louisiana-swamp/
27•bookofjoe•3d ago•5 comments

Unexpected events and prosocial behavior: the Batman effect (2025)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44184-025-00171-5
74•davidbarker•6d ago•23 comments

Show HN: Airy – Free, fast, and simple voice content creation

https://airy.so
13•login588•4h ago•7 comments

Making difficulty curves in games

http://www.davetech.co.uk/difficultycurves
140•hakkikonu•4d ago•54 comments

Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse

https://eclipsefan.org/?v=2&t=max&layers=eclipse%2Cbesselian%2Cumbra-live%2Cshadow-3d%2Ccloud-pro...
173•MarcoDewey•18h ago•54 comments

Should you stop cracking your knuckles?

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260807-should-i-stop-cracking-my-knuckles
82•tchalla•15h ago•86 comments

The Dynamics of the Egg

https://www.the-hinternet.com/p/the-dynamics-of-the-egg
5•Caiero•4d ago•0 comments

CSS: The bomb inside your inbox

https://portswigger.net/research/css-the-bomb-inside-your-inbox
49•ashurandi•4h ago•16 comments

Amazon circumvents Gilroy community vote for AI data center

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/amazon-secretly-circumvents-community-vot...
49•mikhael•1h ago•39 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.