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Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia

https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/10/29/humans-will-never-again-create-a-project-quite-like-...
310•edward•3h ago•235 comments

Fold Epic Paper Airplanes

https://www.foldableflight.com
310•vismit2000•3h ago•62 comments

Zebkit – Chromium as an embeddable library

https://github.com/ikey4u/zebkit
35•Riiiiichard•59m ago•17 comments

What is malloc doing, anyway?

https://benmandrew.com/articles/what-is-malloc-doing-anyway
84•benmandrew•4h ago•17 comments

Fun things to do with your VM/370 CE machine – Fun with big computers

https://rbanffy.github.io/fun-with-big-computers/fun-with-vm370/
75•rbanffy•5h ago•9 comments

KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rust and WebGPU

https://ketchup3d.github.io/app/
640•dcoulmbe•16h ago•190 comments

Next-Concept Modeling: Fast, Parallel Coarse-to-Fine Text Generation

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14162
146•theanonymousone•8h ago•33 comments

Unlocking any car from X brand in most of the world

https://shubs.io/unlocking-any-car-from-x-brand-in-most-of-the-world/
507•infosecau•15h ago•271 comments

Burying the Evidence: nine out of every 10 time capsules go missing

https://longreads.com/2026/11/05/time-capsules-ashley-stimpson/
48•ohjeez•1d ago•33 comments

I'm not convinced the AI bubble exists

https://matteoraso.github.io/im-not-convinced-the-ai-bubble-exists.html#im-not-convinced-the-ai-b...
443•matteoraso•15h ago•767 comments

He Was a Suspect in the Yogurt Shop Murders for Thirty Years. He Can't Forget

https://www.texasmonthly.com/true-crime/the-yogurt-shop-killer-who-wasnt/
30•gmays•2d ago•9 comments

How Australia played the first music on a computer

https://www.pearcey.org.au/heritage/csirac/how-australia-played-the-worlds-first-music-on-a-compu...
15•Skyfall106•3d ago•5 comments

Declarative Dragging

https://declarative-dragging.github.io/
666•smusamashah•4d ago•83 comments

Active Benchmarking

https://www.brendangregg.com/activebenchmarking.html
4•dboon•3d ago•0 comments

Outlook.com is rejecting email from domains without DMARC

https://mailroute.net/blog/outlook-rejecting-email-without-dmarc
482•xmddmx•20h ago•332 comments

Chimera Vocal Synth

https://chimera-vocal-synth.vercel.app/
292•nmstoker•16h ago•50 comments

Psalm 7 release: PHP security&static analysis software

https://psalm.dev/articles/psalm-7
67•danogentili•1d ago•31 comments

Borrowing a Microsoft-signed shim to abuse Secure Boot on corporate hardware

https://leosmith.wtf/blog/not-so-secure-boot.html
25•p4p1•6h ago•6 comments

Show HN: Flide: Make Jev-like decision models up to 9.5x faster

https://github.com/OmniJev/Flide
83•unikcc•10h ago•19 comments

Quasi-Logarithmic Kitchen Timer

https://blog.coredump.cx/p/quasi-logarithmic-kitchen-timer
75•surprisetalk•4d ago•19 comments

ChatGPT Desktop forwards your SSH agent to remote machines

118•DenGorbachev•7h ago•38 comments

Dux: Free, open-source Wayland desktop shell with file manager and theming

https://duxlabs.dev/
320•indigodaddy•20h ago•121 comments

Children of Men: The Future Is a Mirror for the Present

https://reactormag.com/children-of-men-the-future-is-a-mirror-for-the-present/
67•speckx•2h ago•55 comments

Ask HN: What are you working on? (November 2026)

252•david927•18h ago•876 comments

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's letter to staff about affair

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/a-message-to-our-company
847•karimf•17h ago•1026 comments

The French Cake Cooked on a Spit (2018) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=havcACdx0Y0
23•NaOH•1d ago•15 comments

Ur-Nammu Founder of the Sumerian Renaissance

https://www.worldhistory.org/Ur-Nammu/
46•Bluestein•2d ago•8 comments

Writing as a thinking tool

http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2026/11/writing-as-thinking-tool.html
436•jruohonen•1d ago•106 comments

Llama-modchip: 284B DeepSeek on 64GB RAM, no GPU

https://github.com/synchopate/llama-modchip
461•joshcsimmons•1d ago•199 comments

Goldman Sachs is pulling Claude Code from its bankers and traders

https://www.thestateofai.com/news/goldman-sachs-claude-code-traders-bankers
838•TheWiggles•21h ago•456 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.