JoelJacobson

no profile record

Submissions

Ask HN: GLM-5.2 FP8 vs. BF16

1 pointsby JoelJacobson14 dagen geleden0 comments

Claude Code vs. Codex: FRA challenge 75746d-2025

gist.github.com

4 pointsby JoelJacobsonvorige maand0 comments

comments

24 dagen geledendiscuss

I was curious what the claim

"10-100x uplift in terms of speed compared to Postgres on things like regexp_matches()"

was about, so I checked, and DuckDB's regexp_matches() is not the same as PostgreSQL's regexp_matches(). DuckDB's version "Returns true if string contains the regexp pattern, false otherwise." [1] while PostgreSQL's "returns a set of text arrays of matching substring(s)" [2].

I think the closest think in PostgreSQL to DuckDB's regexp_matches() is `string ~ pattern` or `regexp_like(string, pattern)`.

[1] https://duckdb.org/docs/lts/sql/functions/regular_expression... [2] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/functions-matching.h...

29 dagen geledendiscuss

Sorry, should have emphasized that it was the "much easier" part I didn't agree with in that interview.

29 dagen geledendiscuss

[flagged]

29 dagen geledendiscuss

[flagged]

29 dagen geledendiscuss

This article made me think of a strange claim by Elon Musk at 07:08 in this [1] interview:

"Cooling is actually much easier in space than it is on earth. You can just radiate to the vacuum."

I don't think that follows. The radiator is only the final heat sink. You still need to move heat from very dense chips into a deployable, space-rated radiator, and handle pumps, loops, leaks, redundancy, radiation damage, replacement, eclipses, Earth IR/albedo, and launch mass.

[1] https://youtu.be/D_1j5dVWNYI?si=R77VeVKlRXRhaBk5&t=428

29 dagen geledendiscuss

I think we can't rule out the explanation that all the ideas of space data centers could be connected to a desire by some of finding additional applications for rockets that can transport stuff to space.

vorige maanddiscuss

Here is a tl;dr as well: https://keyjoin.org/tldr.html

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Shame on The Netherlands: ~89% of homes still use natural gas in some way for heating [1], and their government are now "scrapping the obligation to purchase a heat pump in 2026" [2].

[1] https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2025/50/ever-more-gas-free-hom... [2] https://www.abnamro.nl/en/personal/specially-for/preferred-b...

3 maanden geledendiscuss

Shameless plug: In the upcoming release of PostgreSQL 19, LISTEN/NOTIFY has been optimized to scale much better with selective signaling, i.e. when lots of backends are listening on different channels, patch: https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit...

3 maanden geledendiscuss

I agree! It should be very stable, IMO. If not, then please send a bug report and we'll look into it. Also, now it scales well with the number of listening connections (given clients listen on unique channel names): https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit...

6 maanden geledendiscuss

Rust without async maybe?

7 maanden geledendiscuss

What a really like about concurrent(), is that it improves readability and expressiveness, making it clear when writing and reading that "this code MUST run in parallel".

8 maanden geledendiscuss

It's a common misconception that the single queue is a poor design choice. The user reports, of seeing notifications/second severely degrade with lots of backends, cannot be explained by the single-queue design. An efficient implementation of a single-queue, should flatten out as parallellism increases, not degrade and go towards zero.

8 maanden geledendiscuss

In the linked "Optimize LISTEN/NOTIFY" pgsql-hackers, I've shared a lot of benchmark results for different workloads, which also include results on how PostgreSQL currently works (this is "master" in the benchmark results), that can help you better understand the expectations for different workloads.

The work-around solution we used at Trustly (a company I co-founded), is a component named `allas` that a colleague of mine at that time, Marko Tikkaja, created to solve our problems, that massively reduced the load on our servers. Marko has open sourced and published this work here: https://github.com/johto/allas

Basically, `allas` opens up a single connection to PostgreSQL, on which it LISTEN on all the channels it needs to listen on. Then clients connect to `allas` over the PostgreSQL protocol, so it's basically faking a PostgreSQL server, and when clients do LISTEN on a channel with allas, allas will then LISTEN on that channel on the real PostgreSQL server on the single connection it needs. Thanks to `allas` being implemented in Go, using Go's efficient goroutines for concurrency, it efficiently scales with lots and lots of connections. I'm not a Go-expert myself, but I've understood Go is quite well suited for this type of application.

This component is still being used at Trustly, and is battle-tested and production grade.

That said, it would of course be much better to avoid the need for a separate component, and fix the scalability issues in core PostgreSQL, so that's what I'm currently working on.

8 maanden geledendiscuss

Thanks for the report. For that use-case (if you have a single application using a single connection with a LISTEN) then it's expected that is should perform well, since then there is only a single backend which will be context-switched to when each NOTIFY signals it.

8 maanden geledendiscuss

Here is the Commitfest entry if you want to help with reviewing/development/testing of the patch: https://commitfest.postgresql.org/patch/6078/

8 maanden geledendiscuss

> It works, but suddenly your query times explode! Instead of doing 1 million transactions per second* you can now do only 3 (*These numbers were exaggerated for dramatic effect)

In general, a single-queue design doesn’t make throughput collapse when you add more parallelism; it just gives you a fixed ceiling. With a well-designed queue, throughput goes up with concurrency, then flattens when the serialized section (the queue) saturates, maybe sagging a bit from context switching.

If instead you see performance severely degrade as you add workers, that typically means there’s an additional problem beyond “we have one queue” — things like broadcast wakeups (“every event wakes every listener”), global scans on each event, or other O(N) work per operation. That’s a very different, and more serious, scalability bug than simply relying on a single queue.

8 maanden geledendiscuss

> The problem with Postgres' NOTIFY is that all notifications go through a single queue!

> Even if you have 20 database connections making 20 transactions in parallel, all of them need to wait for their turn to lock the notification queue, add their notification, and unlock the queue again. This creates a bottleneck especially in high-throughput databases.

We're currently working hard on optimizing LISTEN/NOTIFY: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/6899c044-4a82-49b...

If you have any experiences of actual workload where you are currently experiencing performance/scalability problems, I would be interested in hearing from you, to better understand the actual workload. In some workloads, you might only listen to a single channel. For such single-channel workloads, the current implementation seems hard to tweak further, given the semantics and in-commit-order guarantees. However, for multi-channel workloads, we could do a lot better, which is what the linked patch is about. The main problem with the current implementation for multi-channel workloads, is that we currently signal and wake all listening backends (a backend is the PostgreSQL processes your client is connected to), even if they are not interested in the specific channels being notified in the current commit. This means that if you have 100 connections open in which each connect client has made a LISTEN on a different channel, then when someone does a NOTIFY on one of those channels, instead of just signaling the backend that listen on that channel, all 100 backends will be signaled. For multi-channel workloads, this could mean an enormous extra cost coming from the context-switching due to the signaling.

I would greatly appreciate if you could please reply to this comment and share your different workloads when you've had problems with LISTEN/NOTIFY, to better understand approximately how many listening backends you had, and how many channels you had, and the mix of volume on such channels. Anything that could help us do better realistic simulations of such workloads, to improve the benchmark tests we're working on. Thank you.

8 maanden geledendiscuss

> If you call pg_notify or NOTIFY inside a trigger, it will get called 100,000 times and send out 100,000 notifications if you change 100,000 rows in a single transaction which from a performance perspective is ... not ideal.

This is only true if those notifications are different; if they are identical, such as in the same the notification is to alert listeners some table has new data (for cache invalidation), they are sent out as one notification only. See source code comment in async.c:

     *   Duplicate notifications from the same transaction are sent out as one
     *   notification only. This is done to save work when for example a trigger
     *   on a 2 million row table fires a notification for each row that has been
     *   changed. If the application needs to receive every single notification
     *   that has been sent, it can easily add some unique string into the extra
     *   payload parameter.

8 maanden geledendiscuss

I think the sweet spot is to use exceptions for bugs. If the error is expected, make it data.

JoelJacobson · HackerTrans