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Top stories from https://news.ycombinator.com (with 100+ score) Contribute to the development here: https://github.com/phil-r/hackernewsbot Also check https://t.me/designer_news Contacts: @philr
The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans (🔥 Score: 159+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6sdyu
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6sdyu
Kerosene did not save the sperm whale (2024) (Score: 150+ in 9 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6sc59
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6sc59
An interactive-speed Linux computer made of only 3 8-pin chips (Score: 150+ in 5 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6scP8
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6scP8
Understanding Machine Learning: From Theory to Algorithms (Score: 153+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6scCK
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6scCK
Microsoft employees recall their early years (❄️ Score: 150+ in 4 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rVNM
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rVNM
Hacking the call records of millions of Americans (❄️ Score: 150+ in 2 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s3Rg
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s3Rg
Show HN: The C3 programming language (C alternative language) (Score: 150+ in 1 day)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s7qN
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s7qN
Get it from here: https://github.com/c3lang/c3c
In 2019, while contributing to the C2 language, I started up "C3" as a pet project while waiting for pull requests to be approved...
Now it's 6 years later and C3 well on its way to 1.0, having released 0.7.0 last week.
Unlike other C alternatives, C3 tries to evolve C – but without concern to backwards compatibility to the latter.
What it adds to C is among other things:
- Module system
- Semantic macros and compile time introspection
- Lightweight generic modules
- Zero overhead errors
- Build-in slices and SIMD types
- Gradual contracts
- Built-in checks in debug mode
You can find more details on the site: https://c3-lang.org
It might be interesting to look at the examples: https://c3-lang.org/language-overview/examples/ so see how the language looks for some simple examples.
Some other links that might be interesting follows:
I've posted about C3 on HN before, notably
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24108980
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27876570
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32005678
Here are some interviews on C3:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC8VDRJqXfc
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rS8MVZH-vA
Here is a series doing various tasks in C3:
- https://ebn.codeberg.page/programming/c3/c3-file-io/
Some projects:
- Gameboy emulator https://github.com/OdnetninI/Gameboy-Emulator/
- RISCV Bare metal Hello World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iAJxx6Ok4E
- "Depths of Daemonheim" roguelike https://github.com/TechnicalFowl/7DRL-2025
Nvidia adds native Python support to CUDA (🔥 Score: 153+ in 3 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6sbcA
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6sbcA
Why does Britain feel so poor? (🔥 Score: 152+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6sbea
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6sbea
Supervisors often prefer rule breakers, up to a point (❄️ Score: 150+ in 2 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s2MN
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s2MN
New antibiotic that kills drug-resistant bacteria found in technician's garden (❄️ Score: 150+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rVzx
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rVzx
Bored of It (🔥 Score: 156+ in 1 hour)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6saQj
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6saQj
Build an 8-bit computer from scratch (❄️ Score: 150+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rTVM
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rTVM
Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age (Score: 159+ in 7 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s8GM
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s8GM
A university president makes a case against cowardice (Score: 150+ in 10 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s75H
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s75H
Trump's Tariffs Wipe Out over $6T on Wall Street in Epic Two-Day Rout (🔥 Score: 189+ in 48 minutes)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6sdD9
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6sdD9
The blissful Zen of a good side project (Score: 152+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6sd46
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6sd46
The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition (Score: 151+ in 5 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6scEf
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6scEf
Dow plunges 2,200 points, Nasdaq enters bear market (🔥 Score: 164+ in 1 hour)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6sd5R
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6sd5R
Growing trade deficit is selling the nation out from under us (2003) [pdf] (Score: 150+ in 12 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6saEE
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6saEE
Trump's Trade War Escalates as China Retaliates with 34% Tariffs (Score: 151+ in 5 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6saYu
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6saYu
Study finds solo music listening boosts social well-being (❄️ Score: 150+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rW9c
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rW9c
Show HN: GitMCP is an automatic MCP server for every GitHub repo (Score: 151+ in 21 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s8CV
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s8CV
US labour watchdog halts Apple cases after US picks group's lawyer for top job (❄️ Score: 162+ in 2 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s2Wi
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s2Wi
Show HN: Hatchet v1 – A task orchestration platform built on Postgres (Score: 150+ in 19 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s8nx
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s8nx
Hey HN - this is Alexander from Hatchet. We’re building an open-source platform for managing background tasks, using Postgres as the underlying database.
Just over a year ago, we launched Hatchet as a distributed task queue built on top of Postgres with a 100% MIT license (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39643136). The feedback and response we got from the HN community was overwhelming. In the first month after launching, we processed about 20k tasks on the platform — today, we’re processing over 20k tasks per minute (>1 billion per month).
Scaling up this quickly was difficult — every task in Hatchet corresponds to at minimum 5 Postgres transactions and we would see bursts on Hatchet Cloud instances to over 5k tasks/second, which corresponds to roughly 25k transactions/second. As it turns out, a simple Postgres queue utilizing FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED doesn’t cut it at this scale. After provisioning the largest instance type that CloudSQL offers, we even discussed potentially moving some load off of Postgres in favor of something trendy like Clickhouse + Kafka.
But we doubled down on Postgres, and spent about 6 months learning how to operate Postgres databases at scale and reading the Postgres manual and several other resources [0] during commutes and at night. We stuck with Postgres for two reasons:
1. We wanted to make Hatchet as portable and easy to administer as possible, and felt that implementing our own storage engine specifically on Hatchet Cloud would be disingenuous at best, and in the worst case, would take our focus away from the open source community.
2. More importantly, Postgres is general-purpose, which is what makes it both great but hard to scale for some types of workloads. This is also what allows us to offer a general-purpose orchestration platform — we heavily utilize Postgres features like transactions, SKIP LOCKED, recursive queries, triggers, COPY FROM, and much more.
Which brings us to today. We’re announcing a full rewrite of the Hatchet engine — still built on Postgres — together with our task orchestration layer which is built on top of our underlying queue. To be more specific, we’re launching:
1. DAG-based workflows that support a much wider array of conditions, including sleep conditions, event-based triggering, and conditional execution based on parent output data [1].
2. Durable execution — durable execution refers to a function’s ability to recover from failure by caching intermediate results and automatically replaying them on a retry. We call a function with this ability a durable task. We also support durable sleep and durable events, which you can read more about here [2]
3. Queue features such as key-based concurrency queues (for implementing fair queueing), rate limiting, sticky assignment, and worker affinity.
4. Improved performance across every dimension we’ve tested, which we attribute to six improvements to the Hatchet architecture: range-based partitioning of time series tables, hash-based partitioning of task events (for updating task statuses), separating our monitoring tables from our queue, buffered reads and writes, switching all high-volume tables to use identity columns, and aggressive use of Postgres triggers.
We've also removed RabbitMQ as a required dependency for self-hosting.
We'd greatly appreciate any feedback you have and hope you get the chance to try out Hatchet.
[0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/
[1] https://docs.hatchet.run/home/conditional-workflows
[2] https://docs.hatchet.run/home/durable-execution
Gumroad is now open source (🔥 Score: 150+ in 2 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6saJ9
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6saJ9
InitWare, a portable systemd fork running on BSDs and Linux (Score: 150+ in 18 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s72Z
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s72Z
The Slow Collapse of Critical Thinking in OSINT Due to AI (Score: 151+ in 8 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s8BB
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s8BB
Celebrate 50 years of Microsoft with the company's original source code (Score: 156+ in 4 hours)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6s9nN
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6s9nN
John Cage recital set to last 639 years recently witnessed a chord change (❄️ Score: 153+ in 3 days)
Link: https://readhacker.news/s/6rUDt
Comments: https://readhacker.news/c/6rUDt