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Tell HN: Bob Cringely has died

454•paveworld•9h ago•93 comments

Why don't more developers “use the platform”?

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/10/03/why-dont-more-developers-use-the-platform/
135•vinhnx•5h ago•101 comments

VGHF Digital Archive passes 5000 magazines. Here's what's next

https://gamehistory.org/5k-magazines/
7•rdmuser•1h ago•1 comments

So you think you could be an electrician?

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/15/so-you-think-you-could-be-an-electrician
227•zdw•3d ago•156 comments

OpenBSD Developers Reject Uutils Coreutils

https://news.lavx.hu/article/openbsd-developers-reject-uutils-coreutils-port-over-licensing-and-c...
15•pjmlp•2h ago•4 comments

The work by Valve's Timur Kristóf on improving old AMD GPUs on Linux

https://www.phoronix.com/news/XDC-2026-Valve-Timur-AMDGPU
289•speckx•14h ago•44 comments

In Ukraine, distributed renewables foil Russia's assaults

https://energytransition.org/2026/09/in-ukraine-distributed-renewables-foil-russias-assaults/
68•JumpCrisscross•1h ago•31 comments

Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict

https://cosmowenman.substack.com/p/rodin-museum-3d-scan-verdict
201•CosmoWenman•16h ago•90 comments

Agents don't need memory, they need documentation

https://liao.gg/blog/agents-dont-need-memory
175•kmeh•17h ago•96 comments

Hole Punch: Sling your spaceship around gravitational fields

https://notoriousbfg.com/hole-punch/
295•trwhite•16h ago•66 comments

We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/3/default-hard-budget-caps/
437•elffjs•9h ago•216 comments

We're working on a new RuneScape MMO

https://play.runescape.com/4
66•droidjj•8h ago•25 comments

Celebrating the 100th birthday of the kidney donated to him as a teenager

https://www.whec.com/top-news/webster-man-celebrating-the-100th-birthday-of-the-kidney-his-mom-do...
195•gscott•2d ago•51 comments

Reasons I didn't become an EMT, ranked

https://ben.stolovitz.com/posts/reasons-not-emt-ranked/
153•citelao•13h ago•75 comments

LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents

https://fortune.com/2026/10/01/ai-godfather-yann-lecun-has-zero-concerns-about-human-extinction-s...
133•Anon84•16h ago•176 comments

Religious scholars met with Anthropic

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html
80•bookofjoe•7h ago•154 comments

Dirty Optimization Secrets (C for Playdate)

https://devforum.play.date/t/dirty-optimization-secrets-c-for-playdate/23011
15•ibobev•1d ago•1 comments

We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare

https://blog.cloudflare.com/next-git-platform-on-cloudflare/
132•geoffbp•14h ago•114 comments

gpuvis: GPU Trace Visualizer

https://github.com/mikesart/gpuvis
3•luu•1d ago•0 comments

Math's pedagogical curse – Grant Sanderson [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOuxo6SA8Uc
43•bobajeff•1d ago•18 comments

How to hack time, with C2PA

https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/hacking-time.html
38•Retr0id•15h ago•4 comments

I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/10/openai-safety-team-resignation/688881/?gift=v5U_Uz...
231•Brajeshwar•20h ago•492 comments

Your body of work thinks back at you

https://photoni.st/index.php/2026/09/25/your-body-of-work-thinks-back-at-you/
61•surprisetalk•3d ago•8 comments

UK Government Body Kept Files on People Criticizing Prevent Program

https://reclaimthenet.org/uk-prevent-unit-tracked-online-critics
43•latein•3h ago•10 comments

FTL: A new operating system for clouds

https://ftl-os.org/
173•romac•19h ago•67 comments

Three AI agents, two countries, and one uneven world wide web

https://royapakzad.substack.com/p/multilingual-ai-agents
31•effects•1d ago•1 comments

"Torturing" LLMs in a Robot Prison Has Triggered the Dumbest Debate in AI Yet

https://www.404media.co/someone-torturing-llms-in-a-robot-prison-has-triggered-the-dumbest-debate...
20•airhangerf15•2h ago•20 comments

Former SR-71 engineer talks NASA's Blackbird revival program

https://www.twz.com/air/former-sr-71-engineer-talks-nasas-blackbird-revival-program
61•rkagerer•1d ago•36 comments

What Meta got right with Muse

https://metedata.substack.com/p/what-meta-got-right-with-muse
49•young_mete•15h ago•62 comments

Surely you have ultra-wideband radios on your bins too?

https://sjg.io/writing/binrange-have-you-actually-put-the-bins-out/
76•simonjgreen•13h ago•37 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.