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The article explores the concept of timeframe, discussing how our perception of time shapes our experiences and decision-making. It examines the tension between the immediate and the long-term, highlighting the importance of finding a balanced approach to managing time and priorities.

The article discusses the challenges and implications of age verification on the internet, particularly for online content and services that are restricted to adults. It explores the various methods and technologies used for age verification, as well as the privacy and security concerns associated with these approaches.

The article explores the advantages of adopting the Rust programming language, highlighting its focus on safety, concurrency, and performance, making it a suitable choice for systems programming and building secure and reliable software.

The article discusses how some Americans are disabling or destroying surveillance cameras installed by a company called Flock, citing concerns over privacy and government overreach. It highlights the growing tensions between technological advancements in surveillance and public resistance to perceived invasions of personal freedoms.

The article discusses the differences between attention-driven media and social networks, highlighting the contrast in their focus on quality content versus attention-grabbing tactics, and the potential impact on society and individual well-being.

Loops is a new platform that aims to revolutionize social media by incentivizing users to create and engage with high-quality content through a unique economic model and decentralized network.

Pope Leo XIV urges priests to use their own brains, not artificial intelligence (AI), to write homilies, emphasizing the importance of personal reflection and original thought in preaching.

Elsevier, a major academic publisher, has decided to shut down its finance journal, Review of Financial Studies, after 35 years of operation. This decision reflects the changing landscape of academic publishing and the ongoing challenges facing specialized academic journals in the digital age.

A structured archive of CIA World Factbook data spanning 1990–2025. It currently includes: 36 editions 281 entities ~1.06M parsed fields full-text + boolean search country/year comparisons map/trend/ranking analysis views CSV/XLSX/PDF export The goal is to preserve long-horizon public-domain government data and make cross-year analysis practical. Live: https://cia-factbook-archive.fly.dev About/method details: https://cia-factbook-archive.fly.dev/about Data source is the CIA World Factbook (public domain). Not affiliated with the CIA or U.S. Government.

The article discusses Hetzner, a European hosting provider, announcing an increase in prices for their services due to rising energy and infrastructure costs. It provides details on the specific price changes and the company's rationale for the adjustments.

The article discusses the increasing use of robot vacuums and how they are becoming more advanced, with features like self-emptying and remote control. It also explores the potential for robot vacuums to be used in commercial and industrial settings, as well as the future of this technology.

The article discusses the process of getting the Broadcom brcmfmac wireless driver working with FreeBSD, including steps to install the necessary packages, configure the driver, and troubleshoot any issues that may arise.

ASML, a leading semiconductor equipment maker, has unveiled an EUV light source advance that could yield up to 50% more chips by 2030. This innovation is expected to boost the production capacity and efficiency of the semiconductor industry.

The article discusses six essential mathematical skills: mathematical maturity, problem-solving techniques, communication, collaboration, creativity, and persistence. It emphasizes the importance of developing these skills for success in mathematics-related fields.

The article discusses the launch of Firefox 148, which includes a new AI kill switch feature and other enhancements. The AI kill switch allows users to quickly disable AI-powered features in the browser, providing more control over their browsing experience.

The article discusses the discovery of a new species of giant rhino, Paraceratherium, which was one of the largest land mammals that ever existed. It provides insights into the evolution and geographic distribution of these prehistoric giants.

The article discusses a new blood test that can help diagnose Alzheimer's disease with greater accuracy. The test measures levels of specific proteins in the blood, providing a reliable and non-invasive way to identify the early stages of Alzheimer's.

Hey HN! Lev and Justin here, authors of PgDog (https://pgdog.dev/), a connection pooler, load balancer and database sharder for PostgreSQL. If you build apps with a lot of traffic, you know the first thing to break is the database. We are solving this with a network proxy that works without requiring application code changes or database migrations.

Our post from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099187

The most important update: we are in production. Sharding is used a lot, with direct-to-shard queries (one shard per query) working pretty much all the time. Cross-shard (or multi-database) queries are still a work in progress, but we are making headway.

Aggregate functions like count(), min(), max(), avg(), stddev() and variance() are working, without refactoring the app. PgDog calculates the aggregate in-transit, while transparently rewriting queries to fetch any missing info. For example, multi-database average calculation requires a total count of rows to calculate the original sum. PgDog will add count() to the query, if it’s not there already, and remove it from the rows sent to the app.

Sorting and grouping works, including DISTINCT, if the columns(s) are referenced in the result. Over 10 data types are supported, like, timestamp(tz), all integers, varchar, etc.

Cross-shard writes, including schema changes (CREATE/DROP/ALTER), are now atomic and synchronized between all shards with two-phase commit. PgDog keeps track of the transaction state internally and will rollback the transaction if the first phase fails. You don’t need to monkeypatch your ORM to use this: PgDog will intercept the COMMIT statement and execute PREPARE TRANSACTION and COMMIT PREPARED instead.

Omnisharded tables, a.k.a replicated or mirrored (identical on all shards), support atomic reads and writes. That’s important because most databases can’t be completely sharded and will have some common data on all databases that has to be kept in-sync.

Multi-tuple inserts, e.g., INSERT INTO table_x VALUES ($1, $2), ($3, $4), are split by our query rewriter and distributed to their respective shards automatically. They are used by ORMs like Prisma, Sequelize, and others, so those now work without code changes too.

Sharding keys can be mutated. PgDog will intercept and rewrite the update statement into 3 queries, SELECT, INSERT, and DELETE, moving the row between shards. If you’re using Citus (for everyone else, Citus is a Postgres extension for sharding databases), this might be worth a look.

If you’re like us and prefer integers to UUIDs for your primary keys, we built a cross-shard unique sequence, directly inside PgDog. It uses the system clock (and a couple other inputs), can be called like a Postgres function, and will automatically inject values into queries, so ORMs like ActiveRecord will continue to work out of the box. It’s monotonically increasing, just like a real Postgres sequence, and can generate up to 4 million numbers per second with a range of 69.73 years, so no need to migrate to UUIDv7 just yet.

    INSERT INTO my_table (id, created_at) VALUES (pgdog.unique_id(), now());

Sharding hardly works without a good load balancer. PgDog can monitor replicas and move write traffic to a promoted primary during a failover. This works with managed Postgres, like RDS (incl. Aurora), Azure Pg, GCP Cloud SQL, etc., because it just polls each instance with “SELECT pg_is_in_recovery()”. Primary election is not supported yet, so if you’re self-hosting with Patroni, you should keep it around for now, but you don’t need to run HAProxy in front of the DBs anymore.

The load balancer is getting pretty smart and can handle edge cases like SELECT FOR UPDATE and CTEs with INSERT/UPDATE statements, but if you still prefer to handle your read/write separation in code, you can do that too with manual routing. This works by giving PgDog a hint at runtime: a connection parameter (-c pgdog.role=primary), SET statement, or a query comment. If you have multiple connection pools in your app, you can replace them with just one connection to PgDog instead. For multi-threaded Python/Ruby/Go apps, this helps by reducing memory usage, I/O and context switching overhead.

Speaking of connection pooling, PgDog can automatically rollback unfinished transactions and drain and re-sync partially sent queries, all in an effort to preserve connections to the database. If you’ve seen Postgres go to 100% CPU because of a connection storm caused by an application crash, this might be for you. Draining connections works by receiving and discarding rows from abandoned queries and sending the Sync message via the Postgres wire protocol, which clears the query context and returns the connection to a normal state.

PgDog is open source and welcomes contributions and feedback in any form. As always, all features are configurable and can be turned off/on, so should you choose to give it a try, you can do so at your own pace. Our docs (https://docs.pgdog.dev) should help too.

Thanks for reading and happy hacking!

This article discusses the importance of properly maintaining and optimizing software tools to ensure they remain efficient and effective. It emphasizes the need to regularly review and optimize tool configurations, update dependencies, and address any issues that arise in order to maintain the productivity and reliability of one's software development workflow.

The article discusses the concept of a 'simple web we own', emphasizing the importance of individuals taking control of their online presence and creating their own personal websites rather than relying solely on social media platforms. It encourages readers to reclaim the internet and assert their digital independence.

According to a Goldman Sachs report, AI has contributed little to U.S. economic growth in 2022, with the technology having a negligible impact on productivity and overall economic performance.

The article discusses the extensive use of license plate readers by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, highlighting the lack of public input or oversight in the deployment of this technology despite its potential impact on privacy and civil liberties.

"I Want to Wash My Car. The Car Wash Is 50 Meters Away. Should I Walk or Drive?" This question has been making the rounds as a simple AI logic test so I wanted to see how it holds up across a broad set of models. Ran 53 models (leading open-source, open-weight, proprietary) with no system prompt, forced choice between drive and walk, with a reasoning field.

On a single run, only 11 out of 53 got it right (42 said walk). But a single run doesn't prove much, so I reran every model 10 times. Same prompt, no cache, clean slate.

The results got worse. Of the 11 that passed the single run, only 5 could do it consistently. GPT-5 managed 7/10. GPT-5.1, GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4.5, every Llama and Mistral model scored 0/10 across all 10 runs.

People kept saying humans would fail this too, so I got a human baseline through Rapidata (10k people, same forced choice): 71.5% said drive. Most models perform below that.

All reasoning traces (ran via Opper, my startup), full model breakdown, human baseline data, and raw JSON files are in the writeup for anyone who wants to dig in or run their own analysis.

The article provides an overview of database transactions, explaining how they work, their importance in ensuring data consistency, and the ACID properties that transactions should possess (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability).