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Start all of your commands with a comma

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
100•theblazehen•2d ago•22 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
654•klaussilveira•13h ago•189 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
944•xnx•19h ago•549 comments

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
119•matheusalmeida•2d ago•29 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
38•helloplanets•4d ago•38 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
47•videotopia•4d ago•1 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
227•isitcontent•14h ago•25 comments

Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room"

https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/02/01/welcome-to-the-room/
13•kaonwarb•3d ago•17 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
219•dmpetrov•14h ago•113 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
327•vecti•16h ago•143 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
378•ostacke•19h ago•94 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
487•todsacerdoti•21h ago•240 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
359•aktau•20h ago•181 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
286•eljojo•16h ago•167 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
409•lstoll•20h ago•275 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
21•jesperordrup•4h ago•12 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
87•quibono•4d ago•21 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
59•kmm•5d ago•4 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
3•speckx•3d ago•2 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
31•romes•4d ago•3 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
250•i5heu•16h ago•194 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
15•bikenaga•3d ago•3 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
56•gfortaine•11h ago•23 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
1062•cdrnsf•23h ago•444 comments

Why I Joined OpenAI

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2026-02-07/why-i-joined-openai.html
144•SerCe•9h ago•133 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
180•limoce•3d ago•97 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
287•surprisetalk•3d ago•41 comments

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
147•vmatsiiako•18h ago•67 comments

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
72•phreda4•13h ago•14 comments

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/female-asian-elephant-calf-born-smithsonians-national-zoo-an...
29•gmays•9h ago•12 comments
Open in hackernews

A job queue in two lines of JavaScript

https://jameshfisher.com/2025/07/07/a-job-queue-in-two-lines-of-js/
57•chmaynard•7mo ago

Comments

lerp-io•6mo ago
The chain variable continuously grows because each call to enqueue() creates a new promise that references the previous one. This creates an ever-growing chain of promises that never gets garbage collected.
ath92•6mo ago
Couldn’t the browser garbage collect the promises (and their callbacks) that have been rejected or resolved? I.e. effectively “shift” the promises at the start of the queue that have been dealt with and will never be relevant again?

At least this stackoverflow answer suggests the handlers are GC’ed: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79448475/are-promise-han...

jameshart•6mo ago
Why does the promise returned by a promise’s then() method need to reference that promise?

The original promise needs to reference the chained promise, not the other way round.

As jobs complete I would expect the top of the chain to be eligible to be garbage collected.

paulddraper•6mo ago
Though it seems like that, no.

  a = b.then(c);
When `b` is resolved, it is garbage collected, even if a reference to `a` is retained.

(If the runtime maintains async stack traces, that could be an issue...but that is a common issue, and the stack depth is limited.)

bapak•6mo ago
That's not how promises work, there's no chain. It's no different from

    await job1()
    await job2()
    await job3()
    await job4()
Except dynamic
ameliaquining•6mo ago
At least in V8, this is not the case. To prove it, start a Chromium-based browser with the command-line flag --js-flags=--expose-gc, then go to https://runjs.app/play/#aWYgKCF3aW5kb3cuZ2MpIHsKICB0aHJvdyBu...
bigiain•6mo ago
> This creates an ever-growing chain of promises that never gets garbage collected.

Modern frontend development performance best practise is to allow for garbage collection only when the browser crashes.

moralestapia•6mo ago
Nope.
Inviz•6mo ago
I wonder if people who are claiming its not the case ever tried to use promises in hardcore ways like this, chaining 10s of thousands of calls. You often hit some bullshit, i.e. Promise.race is a big cause of issues.

Even if you are doing `then().then()`, something _else_ in the code base could retain the promise somehow and then your whole chain isn't GCable!

For example https://github.com/rxaviers/async-pool library that implements concurrency for async iterators (and uses promise.race) subtly creates GC pressure which you dont see until you make a whole lot of calls and suddenly its slow

gabrielsroka•6mo ago
That's TS, not JS.
90s_dev•6mo ago
For now.

https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations

jameshart•6mo ago
One line of TS, then two lines of JS (with a type annotation in one of them)
goloroden•6mo ago
It’s not even 2 lines:

1. Type definition 2. Chain definition 3. Enqueue definition

jakelazaroff•6mo ago
Line 1 is fully erased when transpiling, leaving two lines of JavaScript.
Brian_K_White•6mo ago
But you still had to write it and it's required to get the result, so I don't see any rational for not counting it.

Transpilation does not change the fact that the input is these 3 lines of code in 2 different languages.

jakelazaroff•6mo ago
Right, and only two of those lines are JavaScript. The type definition is not required to get the result.
metadat•6mo ago
I noticed the same thing when I saw the code. Is it honest for TFA to title it as "2-lines of Javascript" in this case?
dcre•6mo ago
Oh, come on.
egorfine•6mo ago
I came here to make the same comment.

I wonder why are you downvoted for being as factual and neutral as it is technically possible.

ameliaquining•6mo ago
I think because a reader who doesn't want to use TypeScript can trivially remove the type annotations, so they're not actually a barrier to using this code in JavaScript. Some people might also be suspicious that the reason to bring this up is to imply hostility to JavaScript tooling that requires a build step, since it's become popular to hate on this.
egorfine•6mo ago
So as a community of developers we're totally okay calling TypeScript "JavaScript" because ... mentioning that hard cold fact is a sign of hostility towards TS? Ok. Got it.
90s_dev•6mo ago
I came across this trick a few months ago when I was dealing with what seemed to be a race condition from a chrome-only API, and I just felt so clever! I don't remember though whether the race condition actually was one or not though, and I eventually had to rip that entire class out of my codebase. But it's such a good feeling to know I came up with a solution that clever all by myself.
Inviz•6mo ago
Chaining promises like this is not a good idea for high throughput cases (creates gc pressure), but perfectly valid for regular cases.
paulddraper•6mo ago
Huh?

It creates 1 object allocation per enqueue.

Inviz•6mo ago
yeah but it creates closure as well, which typically references some objects that isn't easy to GC. So if you have long-living promise with some data captured in closure, it will not be cleared. So doing then().then().then() may not release objects referenced in callbacks that resolved time ago.
paulddraper•6mo ago
There are zero closures here.
vivzkestrel•6mo ago
A production grade application would need a much more robust mechanism like BullMQ
ameliaquining•6mo ago
There are use cases for a non-persistent task queue, like doing things one at a time on the frontend. (JavaScript is single-threaded but will interleave multiple separate async call chains that each span multiple event-loop iterations, and there could be situations where you might not want that.)
theThree•6mo ago
Something like this?

async function runTasks(tasks: Job[]) { for (let task of tasks) { try { await task() } catch (e) { } } }

foxygen•6mo ago
This only works if you have the full list of tasks beforehand.
neals•6mo ago
Anybody willing to walk me through this code? I don't get it.
foxygen•6mo ago
chain is a global variable. It starts with an empty promise. First call to enqueue changes the (global)value of chain to emptyPromise.then(firstJob), second call to enqueue changes it to emptyPromise.then(firstJob).then(secondJob) and so on.
fwlr•6mo ago
JavaScript promises are objects with a resolver function and an internal asynchronous computation. At some point in the future, the asynchronous computation will complete, and at that point the promise will call its resolver function with the return value of the computation.

`prom.then(fn)` creates a new promise. The new promise’s resolver function is the `fn` inside `then(fn)`, and the new promise’s asynchronous computation is the original promise’s resolver function.

cluckindan•6mo ago
If you wanted to e.g. log something on failures, you’d need to do something like this:

    chain
      .then(job)
      .catch((err) => {
        console.error(err);
        return job();
      });
Otherwise failures would need to be logged by the job itself before rejecting the promise.
egorfine•6mo ago
> If you need a job queue in JS

  type Job = () => Promise<unknown>;
This is not JS.
ameliaquining•6mo ago
It's trivial to remove the type annotations.
ameliaquining•6mo ago
To make it slightly more idiomatic, you can use chain.finally(job) instead of chain.then(job, job). (All browsers have supported this API for over seven years.)