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A short explainer on how El Niño works [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_JF3etiAv8
59•nharada•1h ago•4 comments

The MacBook Pro's OLED PWM problem

https://macanorak.com/the-macbook-pros-oled-pwm-problem-when-a-better-display-becomes-worse-to-use/
312•MacAnorak•7h ago•172 comments

'Birdbrain' Is a Misnomer. Crows Make Decisions Faster Than We Can

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/15/science/birdbrain-crows-birds-research-decision.html
55•gumby•2h ago•30 comments

Emacs Is My Browser

https://joshblais.com/blog/emacs-as-my-browser/
122•nyc111•5h ago•64 comments

Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011)

https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html
148•ksec•6h ago•71 comments

Microsoft 365 outage leads to chlorine gas poisoning of 15 hotel guests

https://www1.wdr.de/nrw/rheinland/rhein-erft-kreis/technischer-defekt-chlor-phantasialand-100.html
109•DeepLogin•1h ago•42 comments

Claude Code and Codex reverse engineered my 1994 Jeep's ECU over a $3 Arduino [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPj3aQ-xxpI
196•envoked•3d ago•89 comments

SpaceX catches the Starship to end Flight 15

https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-15
1576•ls612•22h ago•1118 comments

Eclipse Mosquitto – An open source MQTT broker

https://github.com/eclipse-mosquitto/mosquitto
21•gregsadetsky•1h ago•8 comments

Understanding Positional Embeddings in Modern LLMs

https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/understanding-positional-embeddings
158•vismit2000•8h ago•10 comments

Notes on Mathematics for Engineers (1959) [pdf]

https://websites.umich.edu/~ners311/CourseLibrary/MathNotes.pdf
33•the-mitr•4d ago•10 comments

All AI-generated code should be Open Source

https://jakub.jankiewicz.org/blog/ai-code-open-source/
900•jcubic•5h ago•478 comments

Clice v1.0 Released: Welcome to Modern C++

https://ykiko.me/en/articles/2105384023094834022/
27•molenzwiebel•2h ago•7 comments

Eval Awareness vs. Eval Paranoia

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mepsi7JNKYejq9wry/eval-awareness-vs-eval-paranoia
21•ezrasu•3d ago•7 comments

Court denies motion to dismiss DRAM price fixing case

https://litnews.ai/articles/garciaguirre-samsung-sk-hynix-micron-dram-conspiracy-suit-survives-di...
448•ybathaee•19h ago•203 comments

Parents pay $75k for Alpha's AI school. Half of its students missed math target

https://fortune.com/2026/11/14/alpha-school-ai-students-tuition-learning-goals/
21•vrganj•41m ago•10 comments

A NES emulator written in Odin

https://lucypero.com/lucynes.html
82•frostbyte7•7h ago•28 comments

Bullet Dodged

https://idiotking.org/archives/2026/10/bullet-dodged-3/
8•surprisetalk•3d ago•1 comments

Why did some Apollo missions carry a grenade launcher?

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/37775
190•Skyfall106•11h ago•134 comments

20 Years of Pyrolog

https://pypy.org/posts/2026/11/20-years-of-pyrolog.html
54•lumpa•3d ago•4 comments

What thousands of conversations look like inside a language model

https://operator0x.com/field-notes/qwen-conversation-state-space/
88•josip208•2d ago•26 comments

Lutnick Pushed to Weaken Chip Rules That Overlap with His Family Business

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/15/us/politics/lutnick-pushed-to-weaken-chip-rules-that-overlap-w...
364•JumpCrisscross•8h ago•165 comments

The Telephone Changed the World

https://lithub.com/how-the-telephone-changed-the-world/
41•NaOH•21h ago•18 comments

Chasing an audio artifact on power loss

https://subalpinecircuits.com/chasing-an-audio-artifact-on-power-loss/
45•ireflect•2d ago•7 comments

Show HN: Carton Clock – A working pendulum clock made from empty drink cartons

https://www.niklasroy.com/carton-clock/
63•r0r0•2d ago•2 comments

How did Woz write the Apple 1 BASIC before building the computer?

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/17957
297•Skyfall106•21h ago•155 comments

How to read codes from (many) IR remote controls with as little code as possible

https://bitbanksoftware.blogspot.com/2026/11/how-to-read-codes-from-many-ir-remote.html
46•speckx•4d ago•8 comments

Handwritten 200-year-old dismissal notice found on roof tile

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6jdmdzv25r9o
68•nephihaha•2d ago•42 comments

A family tree of software job titles

https://zwischenzugs.com/2026/11/03/a-family-tree-of-software-job-titles/
422•umerf•1d ago•200 comments

Show HN: db-branch – database branches in seconds for AI agents and CI, via ZFS

https://github.com/db-branch/db-branch
25•nu_nu11•6h ago•6 comments
Open in hackernews

Anatomy of a SQL Engine

https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2025-04-25-sql-engine-anatomy/
168•ingve•1y ago

Comments

jimbokun•1y ago
Very nice write up enumerating all the stages of SQL query execution. Interesting even if you don’t care about the DoIt database specifically.
Austizzle•1y ago
Man, this title tripped me up for a minute because I pronounce it with the letters like Ess-Queue-Ell

So the "A" in "A ess-queue-ell" engine felt like it should have been an "An" until I realized it was meant to be pronounced like "sequel"

perching_aix•1y ago
Not necessarily, I see native speakers completely ignore this a lot.

Have you ever considered pronouncing it as squirrel by the way?

kreetx•1y ago
Many (most?) non-native English speakers do pronounce it as ess-queue-ell, especially in their own languages, so yes, the use of "a" instead of "an" does look off from that perspective.
SloopJon•1y ago
When I read SQL for Dummies almost thirty years ago, it made a point of distinguishing "sequel" as a historical predecessor to standard "SQL." As I recall, the author even asserted that SQL is not an acronym/initialism for structured query language. I felt funny saying sequel for the next decade or so, because I wasn't an old timer experienced with this pre-SQL technology.

Now I usually say sequel because everyone else does. That and it rolls off the tongue better than S-Q-L.

jtolmar•1y ago
I prefer "ess queue ell" these days, but the first DBA I ever worked with pronounced it "squirrel".
gopalv•1y ago
This is a great write up about a pull-style volcano SQL engine.

The IR I've used is the Calcite implementation, this looks very concept adjacent enough that it makes sense on the first read.

> tmp2/test-branch> explain plan select count() from xy join uv on x = u;

One of the helpful things we did was to build a graphviz dot export for the explains plans, which saved us days and years of work when trying to explain an optimization problem between the physical and logical layers.

My version would end up displayed as SVG like this

https://web.archive.org/web/20190724161156/http://people.apa...

But the calcite logical plans also have that dot export modes.

https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CALCITE-4197

th0ma5•1y ago
This is really great!!
gavinray•1y ago
Calcite also has a relatively-unknown web tool for plan visualization that lets you step through execution.

It's a method from "RuleMatchVisualizer":

https://github.com/apache/calcite/blob/36f6dddd894b8b79edeb5...

Here's a screenshot of what the webpage looks like, for anyone curious:

https://github.com/GavinRay97/GraphQLCalcite/blob/92b18a850d...

ignoreusernames•1y ago
I recommend anyone who works with databases to write a simple engine. It's a lot simpler than you may think and it's a great exercise. If using python, sqlglot (https://github.com/tobymao/sqlglot) let's you skip all the parsing and it even does some simple optimizations. From the parsed query tree it's pretty straightforward to build a logical plan and execute that. You can even use python's builtin ast module to convert sql expressions into python ones (so no need for a custom interpreter!)
Abde-Notte•1y ago
Second this - building even a simple engine gives real insight into query planning and execution. Once parsing is handled, the core ideas are a lot more approachable than they seem.
albert_e•1y ago
Sorry for slight digression.

In a larger system we are building we need a text-to-sql capability for some structured data retrieval.

Is there a way one could utilize this library (sqlglot) to build a multi-dialect sql generator -- that is not currently solved by directly relying on a LLM that is better at code generation in general?

LtdJorge•1y ago
This is a SQL to X library, though. I don’t think it’s what you need.
gavinray•1y ago
You can use an LLM to generate query-builder expressions from popular libraries in whatever language.

For example, on the JVM there is jOOQ, which allows you to write something like:

  select(field("foo"), avg("bar")).from(table("todos"))
And then it will render dialect-specific SQL. It has very advanced emulation functionality for things like JSON aggregations and working around quirks of dialects.

Alternatively, you can ask an LLM to generate a specific dialect of SQL, and then use jOOQ to parse it to an AST, and then render it as a different dialect, like:

    val parser= DSL.using(SQLDialect.POSTGRES).parser()
    val parsedQuery = parser.parseQuery(postgresQuery)
    val renderedMySQL = DSL.using(SQLDialect.MYSQL).renderInlined(parsedQuery)
    println(renderedMySQL)
Unsure if functionality like this exists in other Query Builder libraries for other languages.
KyleBrandt•1y ago
Using dolthub's go-mysql-server for Grafana's upcoming SQL expressions feature (private preview in Grafana 12, but in the OSS version with a feature toggle).

GMS lets you provide your own table and database implementations, so we use GMS to perform SQL queries against Grafana's dataframes - so users can join or manipulate different data source queires, but we don't have to insert the data into SQL to do this thanks to GMS.

genai-analyst•1y ago
another digression here... sorry... i see you're trying to diy text-to-sql—at some point you're gonna hit a bunch of hiccups. like, the model writes a query that “almost” works but joins the wrong tables, or it assumes column names that don’t exist, or it returns the wrong agg because it misread the intent. and retries won’t always save you—it’ll just confidently hallucinate again.

we’ve been through all of that at wobby.ai we ended up building a system where the data team defines guardrails and reusable query templates, so the agent doesn’t just make stuff up. it can still handle user prompts, but within a safe structure. if you want to save yourself from debugging this stuff endlessly, might be worth checking out wobby.ai.