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My server is a phone now

https://seg6.space/posts/phone-server/
194•seg6•6h ago•79 comments

Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386

https://os8088.com/
97•jggonz•5h ago•38 comments

"The original URL for this prediction will no longer be available in 11 years." (2011)

https://longbets.org/601/
8•doubletwoyou•29m ago•2 comments

Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding

https://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/heuristics/differential.html
136•bobbiechen•1w ago•15 comments

Fastmail offers EU data region

https://www.fastmail.com/blog/fastmail-offers-eu-data-region/
353•groomlake•12h ago•178 comments

Shopify replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations–and it scaled

https://shopify.engineering/scaling-inventory-reservations
110•adletbalzhanov•6h ago•66 comments

Dithered QR Codes

https://www.andrewt.net/dithered-qr-codes/wtf/
94•jmusall•5h ago•13 comments

Unexpected events and prosocial behavior: the Batman effect

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44184-025-00171-5
31•davidbarker•6d ago•1 comments

_for-sale DNS records

https://specification.website/spec/foundations/for-sale-dns/
371•shaunpud•15h ago•136 comments

Incentives Are for Losers

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/incentives-are-for-losers
17•bkudria•3h ago•3 comments

Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse

https://eclipsefan.org/?v=2&t=max&layers=eclipse%2Cbesselian%2Cumbra-live%2Cshadow-3d%2Ccloud-pro...
111•MarcoDewey•9h ago•25 comments

Making difficulty curves in games

http://www.davetech.co.uk/difficultycurves
83•hakkikonu•3d ago•32 comments

Melatonin impairs morning cognition in healthy young adults

https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/46/Supplement_1/A34/7181621
19•bohaska•4h ago•2 comments

Retraction: The App Store Rejection of the Week That Was a Correct Rejection

https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_rejection_of_the_week
57•minimaxir•1h ago•4 comments

The Sound and Music of 'Hyper Light Drifter' [video]

https://gdcvault.com/play/1024135/The-Sound-and-Music-of
35•hyperific•3d ago•7 comments

Fixing my tooltip accessibility mistake

https://jakearchibald.com/2026/my-tooltip-a11y-mistake/
13•robin_reala•1w ago•1 comments

Triton: DirectX 11 Driver for QEMU

https://blog.getutm.app/2026/introducing-triton-directx-11-driver-for-qemu/
154•electricant•15h ago•29 comments

Building a local positioning system to track runners using Ultra-Wideband

https://zeus.ugent.be/blog/25-26/12urenloop-uwb/
53•robinpdev•1w ago•3 comments

TheoremDB · A public workspace for machine mathematics

https://theoremdb.org/
12•frozenseven•3h ago•0 comments

The phone book that led us to Assad's spy chief in hiding

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gyrzn8p94o
35•cwwc•3h ago•18 comments

DDisasm: Reversible (bi-directional) Disassembler

https://github.com/GrammaTech/ddisasm
29•aboardRat4•6d ago•5 comments

Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength

https://twitter.com/un1c0rnioz/status/2084686552299634805
247•ilamont•1d ago•181 comments

When Feature Flags Do and Don't Make Sense

https://software.rajivprab.com/2019/12/19/when-feature-flags-do-and-dont-make-sense/
15•whack•5d ago•8 comments

Preventing Misfolding by Preventing Folding

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/preventing-misfolding-preventing-folding
52•surprisetalk•4d ago•3 comments

Message your other Claude Code sessions

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/cross-session-messaging
90•mfiguiere•13h ago•38 comments

Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?

https://hackaday.com/2026/08/08/want-energy-efficiency-dude-youre-getting-a-dell/
180•gumby•12h ago•141 comments

ChatGPT starts blocking direct requests to copy an author's style

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/chatgpt-stops-cloning-famous-writers-voices-but-may-capture-a-...
28•Eloissssss•2h ago•15 comments

Should you stop cracking your knuckles?

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260807-should-i-stop-cracking-my-knuckles
30•tchalla•6h ago•32 comments

“Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers

https://blog.senko.net/code-was-never-the-hard-part-is-an-insult-to-all-programmers
636•senko•14h ago•399 comments

Illinois Just Told Every Operating System to Start Reporting Your Kid's Age

https://itsfoss.com/news/illinois-age-verification-bill/
8•WaitWaitWha•56m ago•1 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.