frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Microsoft Will Preload Windows 11 File Explorer to Fix Bad Performance

https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2025/11/21/announcing-windows-11-insider-preview-build-...
24•ksec•58m ago•8 comments

Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

https://disassociated.com/personal-blogs-back-niche-blogs-next/
133•gnabgib•4h ago•81 comments

Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

https://www.igalia.com/2025/11/helpingvalve.html
468•TingPing•10h ago•146 comments

Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

https://www.buysellram.com/blog/samsungs-memory-price-surge-sends-shockwaves-through-the-global-d...
181•redohmy•1w ago•135 comments

Arduino Terms of Service and Privacy Policy update: setting the record straight

https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/11/21/the-arduino-terms-of-service-and-privacy-policy-update-setting...
17•manchoz•6h ago•3 comments

Show HN: Wealthfolio 2.0- Open source investment tracker. Now Mobile and Docker

https://wealthfolio.app/?v=2.0
451•a-fadil•11h ago•155 comments

Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most

https://nautil.us/childhood-friends-not-moms-shape-attachment-styles-most-1247316/
138•dnetesn•1w ago•48 comments

How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

https://edw.is/learning-vulkan/
40•jakogut•4h ago•15 comments

LAPD helicopter tracker with real-time operating costs

https://lapdhelicoptertracker.com/
106•polalavik•5h ago•121 comments

The death of tech idealism and rise of the homeless in Northern California

https://lithub.com/on-the-death-of-tech-idealism-and-rise-of-the-homeless-in-northern-california/
50•pseudolus•1h ago•10 comments

Self-hosting a NAT Gateway

https://www.awsistoohard.com/blog/self-hosting-nat-gateway
76•veryrealsid•4d ago•49 comments

Sharper MRI scans may be on horizon thanks to new physics-based model

https://news.rice.edu/news/2025/sharper-mri-scans-may-be-horizon-thanks-new-physics-based-model
18•hhs•3h ago•2 comments

Pixar: The Early Days A never-before-seen 1996 interview

https://stevejobsarchive.com/stories/pixar-early-days
90•sanj•6h ago•6 comments

We should all be using dependency cooldowns

https://blog.yossarian.net/2025/11/21/We-should-all-be-using-dependency-cooldowns
297•todsacerdoti•12h ago•194 comments

You can make PS2 games in JavaScript

https://jslegenddev.substack.com/p/you-can-now-make-ps2-games-in-javascript
243•tosh•10h ago•57 comments

Discontinuation of ARM Notebook with Snapdragon X Elite SoC

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Discontinuation-of-ARM-notebooks-with-Snapdragon-X-Elite-SoC.t...
92•Venn1•7h ago•26 comments

Is Matrix Multiplication Ugly?

https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/2025/11/21/is-matrix-multiplication-ugly/
48•jamespropp•5h ago•26 comments

When functions dissolve (2020)

https://rubber-duck-typing.com/posts/2020-12-12-when-functions-dissolve.html
5•vitalnodo•6d ago•0 comments

The Strange Afterlife of Hilma af Klint, Painting’s Posthumous Star

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/24/the-strange-afterlife-of-hilma-af-klint-paintings-p...
17•FinnLobsien•4d ago•1 comments

Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/nov/20/prozac-no-better-than-placebo-for-treating-childr...
219•pseudolus•1d ago•338 comments

3D printing with unconventional vase mode

https://vorpal.se/posts/2025/jun/23/3d-printing-with-unconventional-vase-mode/
23•dgroshev•4h ago•6 comments

Building a Durable Execution Engine with SQLite

https://www.morling.dev/blog/building-durable-execution-engine-with-sqlite/
116•ingve•1d ago•38 comments

Shop Sans is a typeface for curved text paths

https://www.futurefonts.com/hex/shop-sans
123•tobr•1w ago•34 comments

Make product worse, get money

https://dynomight.net/worse/
65•zdw•12h ago•61 comments

Solving Fizz Buzz with Cosines

https://susam.net/fizz-buzz-with-cosines.html
127•hprotagonist•10h ago•32 comments

RRules (yes handling RSCALE) using only PL/pgSQL

https://github.com/sirrodgepodge/rrule_plpgsql
15•sirrodgepodge•1w ago•1 comments

Pivot Robotics (YC W24) Is Hiring for an Industrial Automation Hardware Engineer

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/pivot-robotics/jobs/7xG9Dc6-mechanical-engineer-controls
1•vigneshrajmohan•10h ago

Olmo 3: Charting a path through the model flow to lead open-source AI

https://allenai.org/blog/olmo3
365•mseri•20h ago•120 comments

FAWK: LLMs can write a language interpreter

https://martin.janiczek.cz/2025/11/21/fawk-llms-can-write-a-language-interpreter.html
211•todsacerdoti•17h ago•185 comments

Homeschooling hits record numbers

https://reason.com/2025/11/19/homeschooling-hits-record-numbers/
209•bilsbie•1d ago•578 comments
Open in hackernews

Anatomy of a SQL Engine

https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2025-04-25-sql-engine-anatomy/
168•ingve•6mo ago

Comments

jimbokun•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo ago
Not necessarily, I see native speakers completely ignore this a lot.

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

kreetx•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo ago
I prefer "ess queue ell" these days, but the first DBA I ever worked with pronounced it "squirrel".
gopalv•6mo 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•6mo ago
This is really great!!
gavinray•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo ago
This is a SQL to X library, though. I don’t think it’s what you need.
gavinray•6mo 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.
genai-analyst•6mo 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.

KyleBrandt•6mo 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.