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Decorative Cryptography

https://www.dlp.rip/decorative-cryptography
49•todsacerdoti•1h ago•12 comments

Databases in 2025: A Year in Review

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2026/01/2025-databases-retrospective.html
70•viveknathani_•2h ago•6 comments

A spider web unlike any seen before

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/science/biggest-spiderweb-sulfur-cave.html
62•juanplusjuan•2h ago•19 comments

Revisiting the original Roomba and its simple architecture

https://robotsinplainenglish.com/e/2025-12-27-roomba.html
12•ripe•2d ago•2 comments

Lessons from 14 years at Google

https://addyosmani.com/blog/21-lessons/
1241•cdrnsf•18h ago•534 comments

During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

https://sparkbox.com/foundry/helene_and_mobile_web_performance
200•CqtGLRGcukpy•7h ago•102 comments

Show HN: Terminal UI for AWS

https://github.com/huseyinbabal/taws
309•huseyinbabal•13h ago•154 comments

The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

https://candost.blog/the-unbearable-joy-of-sitting-alone-in-a-cafe/
618•mooreds•19h ago•370 comments

Logos Language Guide: Compile English to Rust

https://logicaffeine.com/guide
38•tristenharr•3d ago•19 comments

Why does a least squares fit appear to have a bias when applied to simple data?

https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/674129/why-does-a-linear-least-squares-fit-appear-to-ha...
242•azeemba•13h ago•63 comments

Why Microsoft Store Discontinued Support for Office Apps

https://www.bgr.com/2027774/why-microsoft-store-discontinued-office-support/
22•itronitron•3d ago•14 comments

Street Fighter II, the World Warrier (2021)

https://fabiensanglard.net/sf2_warrier/
380•birdculture•19h ago•67 comments

I charged $18k for a Static HTML Page (2019)

https://idiallo.com/blog/18000-dollars-static-web-page
284•caminanteblanco•2d ago•70 comments

Building a Rust-style static analyzer for C++ with AI

http://mpaxos.com/blog/rusty-cpp.html
55•shuaimu•4h ago•24 comments

Baffling purple honey found only in North Carolina

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20250417-the-baffling-purple-honey-found-only-in-north-carolina
77•rmason•4d ago•20 comments

Monads in C# (Part 2): Result

https://alexyorke.github.io/2025/09/13/monads-in-c-sharp-part-2-result/
21•polygot•3d ago•17 comments

Web development is fun again

https://ma.ttias.be/web-development-is-fun-again/
388•Mojah•19h ago•482 comments

How to translate a ROM: The mysteries of the game cartridge [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDg73E1n5-g
18•zdw•5d ago•0 comments

Show HN: An interactive guide to how browsers work

https://howbrowserswork.com/
231•krasun•18h ago•33 comments

Claude Code On-the-Go

https://granda.org/en/2026/01/02/claude-code-on-the-go/
318•todsacerdoti•14h ago•202 comments

Linear Address Spaces: Unsafe at any speed (2022)

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3534854
157•nithssh•5d ago•114 comments

Eurostar AI vulnerability: When a chatbot goes off the rails

https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/eurostar-ai-vulnerability-when-a-chatbot-goes-off-t...
144•speckx•13h ago•36 comments

Six Harmless Bugs Lead to Remote Code Execution

https://mehmetince.net/the-story-of-a-perfect-exploit-chain-six-bugs-that-looked-harmless-until-t...
62•ozirus•3d ago•14 comments

NeXTSTEP on Pa-RISC

https://www.openpa.net/nextstep_pa-risc.html
34•andsoitis•9h ago•5 comments

ICE is using facial-recognition technology to quickly arrest people

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/ice-facial-recognition-app-mobile-fortify-dfdd00bf
116•KnuthIsGod•4h ago•58 comments

Ripple, a puzzle game about 2nd and 3rd order effects

https://ripplegame.app/
123•mooreds•16h ago•32 comments

Agentic Patterns

https://github.com/nibzard/awesome-agentic-patterns
122•PretzelFisch•14h ago•22 comments

Moiré Explorer

https://play.ertdfgcvb.xyz/#/src/demos/moire_explorer
165•Luc•21h ago•19 comments

Anti-aging injection regrows knee cartilage and prevents arthritis

https://scitechdaily.com/anti-aging-injection-regrows-knee-cartilage-and-prevents-arthritis/
311•nis0s•18h ago•116 comments

Bison return to Illinois' Kane County after 200 years

https://phys.org/news/2025-12-bison-illinois-kane-county-years.html
151•bikenaga•5d ago•46 comments
Open in hackernews

Anatomy of a SQL Engine

https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2025-04-25-sql-engine-anatomy/
168•ingve•8mo ago

Comments

jimbokun•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
Not necessarily, I see native speakers completely ignore this a lot.

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

kreetx•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
I prefer "ess queue ell" these days, but the first DBA I ever worked with pronounced it "squirrel".
gopalv•8mo 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•8mo ago
This is really great!!
gavinray•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
This is a SQL to X library, though. I don’t think it’s what you need.
gavinray•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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.