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“Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115855840223258103
286•cod1r•5h ago•185 comments

Flock Hardcoded the Password for America's Surveillance Infrastructure 53 Times

https://nexanet.ai/blog/53-times-flocksafety-hardcoded-the-password-for-americas-surveillance-inf...
311•fuck_flock•10h ago•96 comments

JavaScript Demos in 140 Characters

https://beta.dwitter.net
198•themanmaran•8h ago•45 comments

RTX 5090 and Raspberry Pi: Can it game?

https://scottjg.com/posts/2026-01-08-crappy-computer-showdown/
174•scottjg•8h ago•65 comments

Robotopia: A 3D, first-person, talking simulator

https://elbowgreasegames.substack.com/p/introducing-robotopia-a-3d-first
24•psawaya•1d ago•3 comments

Show HN: Rocket Launch and Orbit Simulator

https://www.donutthejedi.com/
106•donutthejedi•8h ago•31 comments

How Markdown took over the world

https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/09/how-markdown-took-over-the-world/
173•zdw•9h ago•131 comments

How will the miracle happen today?

https://kk.org/thetechnium/how-will-the-miracle-happen-today/
381•zdw•5d ago•207 comments

Show HN: Scroll Wikipedia like TikTok

https://quack.sdan.io
182•sdan•9h ago•48 comments

Scientists discover oldest poison, on 60k-year-old arrows

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/science/poison-arrows-south-africa.html
96•noleary•1d ago•33 comments

Cloudflare CEO on the Italy fines

https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/2009654937303896492
443•sidcool•11h ago•613 comments

Greenland sharks maintain vision for centuries through DNA repair mechanism

https://phys.org/news/2026-01-eye-greenland-sharks-vision-centuries.html
12•pseudolus•3d ago•0 comments

My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it

https://matthewrocklin.com/ai-zealotry/
78•akshayka•9h ago•128 comments

Show HN: Miditui – a terminal app/UI for MIDI composing, mixing, and playback

https://github.com/minimaxir/miditui
10•minimaxir•1d ago•1 comments

Deno has made its PyPI distribution official

https://github.com/denoland/deno/issues/31254
30•zahlman•6h ago•24 comments

Show HN: I made a memory game to teach you to play piano by ear

https://lend-me-your-ears.specr.net
428•vunderba•10h ago•154 comments

Turn a single image into a navigable 3D Gaussian Splat with depth

https://lab.revelium.studio/ml-sharp
62•ytpete•9h ago•38 comments

Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux

https://help.kagi.com/orion/misc/linux-status.html
356•HelloUsername•14h ago•251 comments

Favorite Tech Museums

https://aresluna.org/fav-tech-museums/
16•justincormack•4d ago•6 comments

Show HN: Yellopages – New tab Chrome extension

https://yellopages.kawaicheung.io/
9•kiwigod17•1d ago•1 comments

Show HN: A website that auctions itself daily

https://www.thedailyauction.com/
25•nsomani•1d ago•8 comments

QtNat – Open you port with Qt UPnP

http://renaudguezennec.eu/index.php/2026/01/09/qtnat-open-you-port-with-qt/
39•jandeboevrie•7h ago•31 comments

Show HN: Similarity = cosine(your_GitHub_stars, Karpathy) Client-side

https://puzer.github.io/github_recommender/
124•puzer•3d ago•35 comments

How to store a chess position in 26 bytes (2022)

https://ezzeriesa.notion.site/How-to-store-a-chess-position-in-26-bytes-using-bit-level-magic-df1...
78•kurinikku•12h ago•69 comments

Amiga Pointer Archive

https://heckmeck.de/pointers/
42•erickhill•12h ago•16 comments

Replit (YC W18) Is Hiring

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/replit
1•amasad•9h ago

The (likely?) cheapest home-made Michelson interferometer

https://guille.site/posts/3d-printed-michelson/
87•LolWolf•5d ago•56 comments

The Vietnam government has banned rooted phones from using any banking app

https://xdaforums.com/t/discussion-the-root-and-mod-hiding-fingerprint-spoofing-keybox-stealing-c...
445•Magnusmaster•10h ago•535 comments

See it with your lying ears

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/see-it-with-your-lying-ears
38•fratellobigio•3h ago•5 comments

How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code

https://www.mihaileric.com/The-Emperor-Has-No-Clothes/
726•nutellalover•1d ago•222 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.