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I canceled my book deal

https://austinhenley.com/blog/canceledbookdeal.html
207•azhenley•3h ago•117 comments

Privacy and control. My tech setup

https://toidiu.com/blog/2025-12-25-privacy-and-control/
77•todsacerdoti•2h ago•36 comments

All-optical synthesis chip for large-scale intelligent semantic vision

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv7434
15•QueensGambit•1h ago•0 comments

The compiler is your best friend

https://blog.daniel-beskin.com/2025-12-22-the-compiler-is-your-best-friend-stop-lying-to-it
113•based2•5h ago•65 comments

Demystifying DVDs

https://hiddenpalace.org/News/One_Bad_Ass_Hedgehog_-_Shadow_the_Hedgehog#Demystifying_DVDs
42•boltzmann-brain•2d ago•4 comments

Scaffolding to Superhuman: How Curriculum Learning Solved 2048 and Tetris

https://kywch.github.io/blog/2025/12/curriculum-learning-2048-tetris/
95•a1k0n•5h ago•19 comments

Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design [pdf] (2011)

https://www.ece.uvic.ca/~elec399/201409/Akin%27s%20Laws%20of%20Spacecraft%20Design.pdf
237•tosh•11h ago•61 comments

Microtonal Spiral Piano

https://shih1.github.io/spiral/
43•phoenix_ashes•5d ago•8 comments

When square pixels aren't square

https://alexwlchan.net/2025/square-pixels/
81•PaulHoule•7h ago•38 comments

The most famous transcendental numbers

https://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/trans.html
115•vismit2000•8h ago•61 comments

Show HN: Use Claude Code to Query 600 GB Indexes over Hacker News, ArXiv, etc.

https://exopriors.com/scry
265•Xyra•13h ago•96 comments

Stewart Cheifet, creator of The Computer Chronicles, has died

https://obits.goldsteinsfuneral.com/stewart-cheifet
106•spankibalt•3h ago•38 comments

SigNoz (YC W21, open source observability platform) Is Hiring across roles

https://signoz.io/careers
1•pranay01•4h ago

Efficient method to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/innovations/efficient-method-capture-carbon-dioxide-atmosphere-de...
225•lrasinen•7h ago•236 comments

The rise of industrial software

https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/12/30/the-rise-of-industrial-software
188•chrisloy•12h ago•143 comments

39C3 Grafana Dashboard

https://dashboard.congress.ccc.de/public-dashboards/e6cf86b287304662b4d1b8eb31b5ab50
12•immibis•4d ago•4 comments

Kitchen optimizations

https://www.natemeyvis.com/kitchen-optimizations/
41•Theaetetus•1w ago•79 comments

Back to the future: the story of Squeak, a practical Smalltalk written in itself [pdf] (1997)

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr1997001_backto.pdf
81•fanf2•6d ago•21 comments

Doom in Django: testing the limits of LiveView at 600.000 divs/segundo

https://en.andros.dev/blog/7b1b607b/doom-in-django-testing-the-limits-of-liveview-at-600000-divss...
151•andros•3d ago•47 comments

Who invented the transistor?

https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/who-invented-the-transistor.html
49•todsacerdoti•9h ago•44 comments

How AI labs are solving the power problem

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/how-ai-labs-are-solving-the-power
77•Symmetry•7h ago•149 comments

Nvidia GB10's Memory Subsystem, from the CPU Side

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/inside-nvidia-gb10s-memory-subsystem
52•ingve•8h ago•4 comments

Meta created 'playbook' to fend off pressure to crack down on scammers

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-created-playbook-fend-off-pressure-crack-down-scammer...
144•lossolo•2h ago•62 comments

Show HN: Frockly – A visual editor for understanding complex Excel formulas

3•jack_ruru•6d ago•0 comments

France targets Australia-style social media ban for children next year

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/31/france-plans-social-media-ban-for-under-15s-from-se...
137•belter•6h ago•163 comments

Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame

https://monogame.net/blog/2025-12-30-385-new-sponsor-announcement/
469•haunter•5h ago•194 comments

Tixl: Open-source realtime motion graphics

https://github.com/tixl3d/tixl
160•nateb2022•5d ago•25 comments

Suddenly Everyone Is Scared to Dance at Concerts and Clubs

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/music/new-years-eve-dancing-clubs-concerts-7e3f5f19
11•OGEnthusiast•1h ago•4 comments

Animated AI

https://animatedai.github.io/
288•frozenseven•5d ago•25 comments

Court report detailing ChatGPT's involvement with a recent murder suicide [pdf]

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.461878/gov.uscourts.cand.461878.1.0.pdf
91•Mgtyalx•3h ago•76 comments
Open in hackernews

Pglocks.org

https://pglocks.org/
80•hnasr•7mo ago

Comments

whilenot-dev•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
I agree, it is not so straightforward to find out.
braiamp•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
Very practical! Locking is one of the things that can really bite when doing migrations.