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Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features

https://www.xda-developers.com/linux-gaming-is-getting-faster-because-windows-apis-are-becoming-l...
387•haunter•3d ago•248 comments

Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025)

https://fredchan.org/blog/locality-domains-guide/
444•speckx•8h ago•142 comments

A History of IDEs at Google

https://laurent.le-brun.eu/blog/a-history-of-ides-at-google
217•laurentlb•4d ago•172 comments

In-person examinations at Princeton will be proctored starting July 1

https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2026/05/princeton-news-adpol-proctoring-in-person-exami...
178•bookofjoe•2h ago•232 comments

Chess puzzle I found in my dad's old book

https://ardoedo.it/kempelen/
45•Eswo•2d ago•8 comments

Medicare's new payment model is built for AI. Most of the tech world has no idea

https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/12/medicares-new-payment-model-is-built-for-ai-and-most-of-the-tec...
21•brandonb•1h ago•13 comments

Tell HN: Dont use Claude Design, lost access to my projects after unsubscribing

55•pycassa•1h ago•11 comments

The Emacsification of Software

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/05/12/emacsification/
143•rdslw•15h ago•99 comments

MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble

https://www.jdhodges.com/blog/macbook-neo-benchmarks-analysis/
126•tosh•4h ago•90 comments

Xs of Y – roguelike that names itself every run. Written in 4kLoC

https://github.com/nooga/xsofy
136•andsoitis•3d ago•60 comments

S-100 Virtual Workbench

https://grantmestrength.github.io/S100/
90•rbanffy•7h ago•19 comments

How can Apple deal with the memory shortage?

https://asymco.com/2026/05/11/the-great-memory-panic-of-2026/
57•tambourine_man•2d ago•25 comments

Launch HN: Ardent (YC P26) – Postgres sandboxes in seconds with zero migration

https://www.tryardent.com/
55•vc289•6h ago•20 comments

The US is winning the AI race where it matters most: commercialization

https://avkcode.github.io/blog/us-winning-ai-race.html
142•akrylov•9h ago•387 comments

Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/drop-database-what-not-to-do-after-losing-an-it-job/
242•jnord•1d ago•165 comments

Reverting the incremental GC in Python 3.14 and 3.15

https://discuss.python.org/t/reverting-the-incremental-gc-in-python-3-14-and-3-15/107014
183•curiousgal•4d ago•71 comments

"Not Medically Necessary": Helping America's Health Insurers Deny Coverage

https://www.propublica.org/article/evicore-health-insurance-denials-cigna-unitedhealthcare-aetna-...
135•ceejayoz•4h ago•92 comments

New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260510030950.htm
279•HardwareLust•2d ago•135 comments

A sentimental tour of late 1990s and early 2000s hacking tools

https://andreafortuna.org/2026/05/13/amarcord/
31•speckx•4h ago•12 comments

Making the news available at no cost is a victory

https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2026/05/12/just-days-tribune-reporting/
90•danso•3h ago•100 comments

Marco Polo: Finding a friend with only distance and motion

https://www.jackhogan.me/blog/marco-polo
3•jackhogan11•2d ago•0 comments

Leaving GitHub for Forgejo

https://jorijn.com/en/blog/leaving-github-for-forgejo/
505•jorijn•10h ago•268 comments

An idiot's guide to lead optimisation for proteins

https://magnusross.github.io/posts/protein-lead-optimisation-1/
130•magni121•2d ago•10 comments

Comparing a 1980s memory map to the Raspi Pico

https://medium.com/@noborutakahashi/a-40-year-old-memory-map-comparable-to-todays-raspberry-pi-pi...
7•Schlagbohrer•3d ago•0 comments

Meta won't let you block its AI account on Threads

https://www.theverge.com/tech/929091/meta-ai-threads-account-block
55•logickkk1•2h ago•22 comments

Preserving Fisher-Price Pixter

https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=37.%20Pixter
199•dmitrygr•2d ago•39 comments

Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model

https://github.com/cactus-compute/needle
627•HenryNdubuaku•1d ago•180 comments

Exploring 8 Shaft Weaving

https://algorithmicpattern.org/2026/03/11/exploring-8-shaft-weaving/
16•surprisetalk•2d ago•0 comments

Substrate (YC S24) Is Hiring a Technical Success Manager

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/substrate/jobs/T2fMBhD-technical-success-manager
1•kunle•11h ago

I moved my digital stack to Europe

https://monokai.com/articles/how-i-moved-my-digital-stack-to-europe/
848•monokai_nl•11h ago•522 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.
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.

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.