frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Munder Difflin – Agent harness to run an office of your clones

https://munderdiffl.in/
86•simonpure•3h ago•30 comments

Z80–The 1970s Microprocessor Still Alive

https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/mi/2021/06/09623402/1yJTvlRLmhi
49•asdefghyk•3h ago•21 comments

A Kantian Critique of "Sorry" by Justin Bieber

https://decodingvibes.com/blog/a-kantian-critique-of-sorry-by-justin-bieber/
5•altmanaltman•18m ago•0 comments

Canada suspends trade negotiations with USA and match tariffs dollar for dollar

https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/statements/2026/08/21/statement-prime-minister-carney-canada-us-trad...
454•backlit4034•3h ago•354 comments

Hook, hold, harvest and hide: Meta's alleged strategy laid out in first week

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/22/meta-trial-children-privacy
62•sbulaev•1h ago•4 comments

Rust Glancer: Rust LSP using 100x less RAM

https://rust-glancer.github.io/blog/hello-world/
311•matklad•17h ago•62 comments

Felony Bench

https://www.felonybench.com/
765•colinprince•22h ago•298 comments

Kobo can run apps now

https://bandarlabs.github.io/Cobalt/
593•thepoet•21h ago•193 comments

Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/us/politics/samuel-tunick-deleted-phone-felony.html
879•floathub•1d ago•1004 comments

I accidentally logged hundreds of thousands of phone calls to military bases

https://lina.sh/blog/hijacking-e164-arpa
591•gavide•1d ago•75 comments

There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

https://danluu.com/perf-opt/
511•Jach•12h ago•367 comments

Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results

https://kagi.com/changelog#11296
1176•speckx•23h ago•370 comments

Zig’s io.threaded is neat

https://matklad.github.io/2026/08/06/neat-io-threaded.html
101•chilipepperhott•23h ago•56 comments

Stop Making TUIs

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/08/20/stop-making-tuis/
217•underdeserver•1d ago•306 comments

Three important steps in my maturation process

https://thomasdullien.github.io/posts/2026-08-21-three-important-steps-in-my-maturation-process/
174•tdullien•15h ago•79 comments

OTel isn’t going well

https://matduggan.com/otel-isnt-going-well-and-i-made-a-spreadsheet-about-it/
156•hn_acker•19h ago•61 comments

Scientists release biggest 2D map of the universe

https://newscenter.lbl.gov/2026/08/10/scientists-release-biggest-2d-map-of-the-universe/
221•NKosmatos•19h ago•60 comments

How Thailand Resisted Colonization

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-thailand-resisted-colonization/
56•karakoram•19h ago•13 comments

AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2026/08/18/does-ai-stop-children-from-learning
332•dash2•3d ago•338 comments

Galactic Compass 2: now with new augmented reality mode

https://interconnected.org/home/2026/08/21/galactic
21•bobbiechen•20h ago•2 comments

Optimizing meshoptimizer to process billions of triangles in minutes (2025)

https://zeux.io/2025/09/30/billions-of-triangles-in-minutes/
52•corysama•19h ago•0 comments

Claudette: Make Claude stop talking like a BuzzFeed article

https://github.com/adnanakil/nobuzz/blob/main/README.md
309•aakil•23h ago•197 comments

I'm becoming AI-blind

https://cymerys.com/w/im-becoming-ai-blind
417•rcymerys•1d ago•420 comments

People of ACM – Russ Cox

https://www.acm.org/articles/people-of-acm/2026/russ-cox
146•signa11•5d ago•14 comments

Everyone says assembly is untyped—everyone is wrong

https://www.gingerbill.org/article/2026/08/20/designing-odins-inline-asm/
105•adamrezich•1d ago•49 comments

Early-life stress leaves a 'scar' inside brain cells in mice

https://medicine.washu.edu/news/how-early-life-stress-leaves-a-scar-inside-brain-cells/
103•gmays•1d ago•50 comments

New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson

https://precastreinforced.co.uk/2026/08/16/new-worlds/
259•speckx•1d ago•167 comments

A revisit of remote Spectre attacks on Cloudflare Workers

https://blog.cloudflare.com/revisiting-spectre-attacks-on-workers/
67•albertpedersen•2d ago•3 comments

The coolest anti-surveillance tools at Defcon [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2uAsJ5EPAw
221•neom•3d ago•37 comments

SalesPatriot (YC W25) Is Hiring Forward Deployed Engineers

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/salespatriot/jobs/M46X6YX-forward-deployed-engineer
1•maciejSz•16h ago
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.