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Category Theory Illustrated – Orders

https://abuseofnotation.github.io/category-theory-illustrated/04_order/
43•boris_m•2h ago•9 comments

Amiga Graphics

https://amiga.lychesis.net/
34•sph•2h ago•1 comments

Show HN: I made a calculator that works over disjoint sets of intervals

https://victorpoughon.github.io/interval-calculator/
139•fouronnes3•7h ago•22 comments

Claude Design

https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-design-anthropic-labs
1025•meetpateltech•17h ago•670 comments

The simple geometry behind any road

https://sandboxspirit.com/blog/simple-geometry-of-roads/
19•azhenley•2d ago•3 comments

Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs

https://www.claudecodecamp.com/p/i-measured-claude-4-7-s-new-tokenizer-here-s-what-it-costs-you
601•aray07•17h ago•428 comments

Towards trust in Emacs

https://eshelyaron.com/posts/2026-04-15-towards-trust-in-emacs.html
97•eshelyaron•2d ago•11 comments

All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/The_toxic_side_of_the_Moon
324•cybermango•14h ago•190 comments

Spending 3 months coding by hand

https://miguelconner.substack.com/p/im-coding-by-hand
201•evakhoury•16h ago•199 comments

Rewriting Every Syscall in a Linux Binary at Load Time

https://amitlimaye1.substack.com/p/rewriting-every-syscall-in-a-linux
38•riteshnoronha16•4d ago•13 comments

A simplified model of Fil-C

https://www.corsix.org/content/simplified-model-of-fil-c
171•aw1621107•11h ago•90 comments

Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)

https://www.tobyord.com/writing/hourly-costs-for-ai-agents
195•louiereederson•2d ago•48 comments

It is incorrect to "normalize" // in HTTP URL paths

https://runxiyu.org/comp/doubleslash/
22•pabs3•3h ago•10 comments

Brunost: The Nynorsk Programming Language

https://lindbakk.com/blog/introducing-brunost
56•atomfinger•4d ago•22 comments

Show HN: Smol machines – subsecond coldstart, portable virtual machines

https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm
326•binsquare•15h ago•99 comments

Slop Cop

https://awnist.com/slop-cop
172•ericHosick•17h ago•102 comments

Show HN: PanicLock – Close your MacBook lid disable TouchID –> password unlock

https://github.com/paniclock/paniclock/
186•seanieb•16h ago•78 comments

"cat readme.txt" is not safe if you use iTerm2

https://blog.calif.io/p/mad-bugs-even-cat-readmetxt-is-not
174•arkadiyt•14h ago•93 comments

Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

https://twitter.com/finmoorhouse/status/2044933442236776794
188•nowflux•16h ago•149 comments

Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin

https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/75848
229•speckx•18h ago•102 comments

NASA Force

https://nasaforce.gov/
268•LorenDB•17h ago•266 comments

Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01204-5
76•unsuspecting•10h ago•61 comments

Making Wax Sealed Letters at Scale

https://waxletter.com/
16•hjconstas•2d ago•12 comments

NIST gives up enriching most CVEs

https://risky.biz/risky-bulletin-nist-gives-up-enriching-most-cves/
198•mooreds•17h ago•51 comments

Casus Belli Engineering

https://marcosmagueta.com/blog/casus-belli-engineering/
34•b-man•7h ago•7 comments

The Unix executable as a Smalltalk method (2025) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZjPQ7vtLNA
52•surprisetalk•1d ago•3 comments

Introducing: ShaderPad

https://rileyjshaw.com/blog/introducing-shaderpad/
91•evakhoury•2d ago•18 comments

Arc Prize Foundation (YC W26) Is Hiring a Platform Engineer for ARC-AGI-4

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/arc-prize-foundation/jobs/AKZRZDN-platform-engineer-benchma...
1•gkamradt_•11h ago

The GNU libc atanh is correctly rounded

https://inria.hal.science/hal-05591661
90•matt_d•3d ago•20 comments

Ban the sale of precise geolocation

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/it-is-time-to-ban-the-sale-of-precise-geolocation
693•hn_acker•18h ago•176 comments
Open in hackernews

Anatomy of a SQL Engine

https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2025-04-25-sql-engine-anatomy/
168•ingve•11mo ago

Comments

jimbokun•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo ago
Not necessarily, I see native speakers completely ignore this a lot.

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

kreetx•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo ago
I prefer "ess queue ell" these days, but the first DBA I ever worked with pronounced it "squirrel".
gopalv•11mo 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•11mo ago
This is really great!!
gavinray•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo ago
This is a SQL to X library, though. I don’t think it’s what you need.
gavinray•11mo 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•11mo 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•11mo 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.