John Crowley was a rare breed among American writers in that he was an accomplished science fiction and fantasy writer who was also recognized by the mainstream establishment. Harold Bloom included Little, Big in his "The Western Canon", for example.

I've not read the later Crowley works, but The Deep, Engine Summer, and Little, Big are all among my favorite books.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49236814

Points: 8

# Comments: 2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49181818

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

We were able to show that the dead tuples caused Postgres to use the wrong query plan because it misjudged the amount of real rows. We reported this problem on the Postgres mailing list, and it seemed like this was a known problem and that there was interest in making the planner more dead-tuple-aware.

Alton Brown's technique [1] of using two skillets is also great if (like me) you don't have a panini press. You put the sandwich in one skillet, heated, then put the bottom of the second skillet on top.

[1] https://altonbrown.com/recipes/perfect-grilled-cheese/

This is a serious problem because it affects the planner's ability to make good choices. Dead tuples are still indexed and the need to skip them isn't accounted for by the query planner, so a table with lots of dead tuples may perform really badly. The autovacuum process will be constantly chasing dead tuples, and you'll want to set the autovacuum settings to be very aggressive to be able to keep up.

My team has been starting to use PgQue [1] for a new application, and it seems really well-designed. PgQue is explicitly designed to solve the bloat problem, by avoiding tuple deletion. Instead of deleting processed tuples, it will periodically TRUNCATE the entire table. It uses two tables that it "flips" between so TRUNCATE can run on the inactive table while the active on is used for queuing. PgQue also uses a snapshot approach to avoid row-level locks.

PgQue also stands out in that its queue model is position-based, so it can implement nice features like collaborative consumers, fan-out, atomic batches, and "recover from last good" behaviour. It makes some compromises (no priority support, slightly higher latency), but they're fine for most use cases.

Previously discussed on HN here [2].

[1] https://github.com/NikolayS/pgque

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47817349

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49112144

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48981230

Points: 9

# Comments: 3

Don't drink the Kool Aid. The studios love to make this sort of claim — recent examples include F1: The Movie, Top Gun: Maverick, and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, and you'll see interviews where the main actors say it was all real — but it's just marketing.

Project Hail Mary leans heavily on CG. For example, while they did hire a puppeteer (he ended up voicing the alien!) to control a neat physical puppet on set, almost all of it was replaced with CG in post production, and only used for reference. Corridor Crew has a great breakdown [1]. They frequently provide a good counterpoint against fraudulent "no CG" claims.

[1] https://youtu.be/l9zqIo8KtjI?is=e7-3Wz_mnMdl2Yp8

Cline does cover the evidence of destruction, which is also talked about in the other episodes. But the thing about drought is that we have written communications between different rules documenting that they were struggling with food supply.

An aside: For some reason I find Cline super annoying to listen to — his voice, drawl, and odd cadence triggers something visceral in me. But I admit he knows his stuff.

[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/empire-world-history/i...

The difference with a Rust codebase like this is that all of the unsafe code has been neatly isolated and clearly marked. The outside code is safe — at least according to the definition of what Rust considers safe, which is a high bar indeed and objectively superior to the unsafe mess that is C — and the unsafe code is naturally fenced in, which means that it can be seen by developers and tackled by incrementally.

In some cases unsafe is unavoidable, but it is possible for a human to verify that it is, in fact, acceptably safe even if inside an unsafe block.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48846161

Points: 18

# Comments: 7