frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Start all of your commands with a comma

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
142•theblazehen•2d ago•42 comments

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

https://openciv3.org/
668•klaussilveira•14h ago•202 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
949•xnx•19h ago•551 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
122•matheusalmeida•2d ago•33 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
53•videotopia•4d ago•2 comments

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

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

Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room"

https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/02/01/welcome-to-the-room/
16•kaonwarb•3d ago•19 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
28•jesperordrup•4h ago•16 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
223•dmpetrov•14h ago•117 comments

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

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

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
494•todsacerdoti•22h ago•243 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
381•ostacke•20h ago•95 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/
288•eljojo•17h ago•169 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
412•lstoll•20h ago•278 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
19•bikenaga•3d ago•4 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
63•kmm•5d ago•6 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

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

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
256•i5heu•17h ago•196 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

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

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
44•helloplanets•4d ago•42 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
12•speckx•3d ago•5 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
59•gfortaine•12h ago•25 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...
33•gmays•9h ago•12 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/
1066•cdrnsf•23h ago•446 comments

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

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
150•vmatsiiako•19h ago•67 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
288•surprisetalk•3d ago•43 comments

Why I Joined OpenAI

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2026-02-07/why-i-joined-openai.html
149•SerCe•10h ago•138 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
183•limoce•3d ago•98 comments

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

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
73•phreda4•13h ago•14 comments
Open in hackernews

Waitgroups: What they are, how to use them and what changed with Go 1.25

https://mfbmina.dev/en/posts/waitgroups/
62•mfbmina•5mo ago

Comments

nikolayasdf123•5mo ago
> wg := sync.WaitGroup{}

just `var wg sync.WaitGroup`, it is cleaner this way

mr90210•5mo ago
Oh you are one of those. The nit picker. This is not at a PR review mate.
nikolayasdf123•5mo ago
"one of those", name calling, telling me what to say,

cool it down a little. touch some grass. and hopefully you will see beauty in Go zero-values :P

dwb•5mo ago
Why?
nikolayasdf123•5mo ago
zero value. container-agnostic initialization. say your type is not struct anymore, you would not have to change the way you intialize it. what you care here is zero value, and let the type figure out that it is zero and use methods appropriately. and it is just more clean this way

here is google guideline: https://google.github.io/styleguide/go/best-practices#declar...

dwb•5mo ago
That is a much better argument than saying it is "more clean", which doesn't mean anything. I don't necessarily agree, because I don't think zero values are a good feature of the language, and even if they were this is a completely trivial case. But at least I don't have to work out what "cleanliness" is.
fozdenn•5mo ago
doesn't this point to a bigger problem that there are two ways of doing the same thing?
nikolayasdf123•5mo ago
no. it is different thing. container-agnostic zero value vs struct init.
unsnap_biceps•5mo ago
multiple ways of doing something isn't inherently bad.

For example, if you want to set a variable to the number of seconds in seven hours, you could just set the variable to 25200, or you could set it to 60 * 60 * 7. The expanded version might be clearer in the code context, but in the end they do exactly the same thing.

pests•5mo ago
Your math equation turned the asterisks into italics.
unsnap_biceps•5mo ago
Whoops, fixed. Thanks for the note
nikolayasdf123•5mo ago
hold on, why would you have 7 hours?

dont you mean a week? 60 x 60 x 24 x 7 ?

or at lest 8 hours?

7 hours is just odd

unsnap_biceps•5mo ago
The goal was to pick an arbitrary number that wasn't well known. There was no intention behind the specific value chosen.
stefanos82•5mo ago
Personally I wished they had it backported to previous versions too, because it's rather convenient!

What is quite sad is that we cannot add it ourselves as it's so simple of what they have done:

    func (wg *WaitGroup) Go(f func()) {
        wg.Add(1)
        go func() {
            defer wg.Done()
           f()
        }()
    }
cedws•5mo ago
You can wrap WaitGroup if you really want to.
stefanos82•5mo ago
Can you provide an example please?
listeria•5mo ago
something like this would do it:

  package main
  
  import (
    "sync"
    "time"
  )
  
  type WaitGroup struct {
    sync.WaitGroup
  }
  
  func (wg *WaitGroup) Go(fn func()) {
    wg.Add(1)
    go func() {
      defer wg.Done()
      fn()
    }()
  }
  
  func main() {
    var wg WaitGroup
    wg.Go(func() { time.Sleep(1 * time.Second) })
    wg.Wait()
  }
stefanos82•5mo ago
This is really amazing, thank you so much!
listeria•5mo ago
It's called struct embedding, there an article about it in Go by Example if you're interested: https://gobyexample.com/struct-embedding
stefanos82•5mo ago
Thank you @listeria, today I learned about struct embedding lol!
genghisjahn•5mo ago
I rediscover this about once a year and am always so happy when I do.
evanelias•5mo ago
You can just use golang.org/x/sync/errgroup instead, which has always provided this style of use.

errgroup also has other niceties like error propagation, context cancellation, and concurrency limiting.

porridgeraisin•5mo ago
errgroup cancels the whole task if even one subtask fails however. That is not desirable always.
Groxx•5mo ago
It does not, which is easy to verify from the source. Every func passed in is always run (with the exception of TryGo which is explicitly "maybe").

At best, using the optional, higher-effort errgroup.WithContext will cancel the context but still run all of your funcs. If you don't want that for one of the funcs, or some component of them, just don't use the context.

evanelias•5mo ago
If the context cancellation is undesirable, you just choose not to use WithContext, as the sibling comment mentions.

You could also just make your subtask function return nil always, if you just want to get the automatic bookkeeping call pattern (like WaitGroup.Go from Golang 1.25), plus optional concurrency limiting.

Also note, even if a subtask function returns an error, the errgroup Wait blocking semantics are identical to those of a WaitGroup. Wait will return the first error when it returns, but it doesn't unblock early on first error.

Cyph0n•5mo ago
Context cancellation is not always desirable. I personally have been bitten multiple times by the default behavior of errgroup.
CamouflagedKiwi•5mo ago
You have to explicitly propagate the group's context if you want it to cancel. You can just not do that if you don't want - there certainly are cases for that.
Cyph0n•5mo ago
But if you’re looking at the package API, there is no alternative constructor for Group, which makes it seem as if the most common default is to construct a Group using WithContext. Also, 2/3 of the examples use WithContext.

My recommendation would be to have a NewGroup function or equivalent that returns an empty group to surface it as an alternative to WithContext.

evanelias•5mo ago
> My recommendation would be to have a NewGroup function or equivalent that returns an empty group

That goes against common practices in Golang, articulated in the second paragraph of https://go.dev/doc/effective_go#allocation_new among many other places.

Also the errgroup documentation specifically says "A zero Group is valid, has no limit on the number of active goroutines, and does not cancel on error." And, as you noted, one of the examples doesn't use WithContext.

Cyph0n•5mo ago
That’s one of my Go pet peeves - zero/default structs are sometimes valid and sometimes not, and the only way to know is to dig into the docs. I prefer the API to speak for itself, ideally enforced by the language/compiler.
CamouflagedKiwi•5mo ago
They basically don't backport anything for Go, but the quid pro quo for that is that the backwards compatibility is pretty strong so upgrades should be safe. I have seen one serious issue from it, but still it's the language I'm the most confident to do an upgrade and expect things to Just Work afterwards.
porridgeraisin•5mo ago
Love this. Majority of concurrency in a usual web service is implemented using waitgroups IME (see below) This will greatly simplify it.

  var wg sync.WaitGroup
  wg.Add(1)
  go func(){
    callService1(inputs, outParameter)
    wg.Done()
  }
  // Repeat for services 2 through N
  wg.Wait()
  // Combine all outputs

BTW, this can already be done with a wrapper type

  type WaitGroup struct { sync.WaitGroup }

  func (wg *WaitGroup) Go(fn func()) {
    wg.Add(1)
    go func() {
      fn()
      wg.Done()
    }()
  }
Since you're doing struct embedding you can call methods of sync.WaitGroup on the new WaitGroup type as well.
a-poor•5mo ago
This means you can't pass variables in as function arguments. Even the example in the official go docs doesn't handle the scope correctly:

  func main() {
   var wg sync.WaitGroup
   var urls = []string{
    "http://www.golang.org/",
    "http://www.google.com/",
    "http://www.example.com/",
   }
   for _, url := range urls {
    // Launch a goroutine to fetch the URL.
    wg.Go(func() {
     // Fetch the URL.
     http.Get(url)
    })
   }
   // Wait for all HTTP fetches to complete.
   wg.Wait()
  }
https://pkg.go.dev/sync#example-WaitGroup

You need to use this pattern instead:

   for _, url := range urls {
    url := url
    // ...
jeremyloy_wt•5mo ago
This isn’t necessary anymore as of Go 1.22

https://go.dev/blog/loopvar-preview

9rx•5mo ago
> This means you can't pass variables in as function arguments.

Well, you could...

    for _, url := range urls {
        wg.Go(func(u string) func() {
            return func() {
                http.Get(u)
            }
        }(url))
    }
> You need to use this pattern instead

Why? Seems rather redundant. It is not like WaitGroup.Go exists in earlier versions.

danenania•5mo ago
I like WaitGroup as a concept, but I often end up using a channel instead for clearer error handling. Something like:

  errCh := make(chan error)
  for _, url := range urls {
    go func(url string){
      errCh <- http.Get(url)
    }(url)
  }

  for range urls {
    err := <-errCh
    if err != nil {
      // handle error
    }
  }
Should I be using WaitGroup instead? If I do, don't I still need an error channel anyway—in which case it feels redundant? Or am I thinking about this wrong? I rarely encounter concurrency situations that the above pattern doesn't seem sufficient for.
javier2•5mo ago
How you handle err here? If you return, the go routines will leak
danenania•5mo ago
Ah, good point—should be using a buffered channel to avoid that:

  errCh := make(chan error, len(urls))
unsnap_biceps•5mo ago
buffered channels won't help here. That's just how many results can be buffered before the remaining results can be added to the channel. It doesn't wait until all of them are done before returning a result to the consumer.
danenania•5mo ago
> It doesn't wait until all of them are done before returning a result to the consumer.

Right, but it prevents goroutine leaks. In these situations I'm usually fine with bailing on the first error, but I grant that's not always desirable. If it's not, I would collect and join errors and return those along with partial results (if those are useful).

c0balt•5mo ago
You would probably benefit from errgroup, https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/sync/errgroup

But channels already do the waiting part for you.

danenania•5mo ago
Thanks! looking into errgroup
tombert•5mo ago
Forgive a bit of ignorance, it's been a bit since I've touched Go, but this looks awfully similar to a Java CountdownLatch [1]. Is this just a glorified Go port of that or am I missing something vital here?

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/concurre...

xh-dude•5mo ago
Pretty much. It’s a counting semaphore underneath.
arccy•5mo ago
CountDownLatch looks like it can only count down? the go one you can add/remove at will
layer8•5mo ago
Phaser [0] would be the more flexible equivalent in Java.

[0] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/concurre...

tombert•5mo ago
You are right; it looks like a Phaser is a bit more analogous: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/concurre...