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Astronomers may have found the first exomoon

https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2610/
85•MarcoDewey•1h ago•36 comments

Private healthcare makes industries less innovative. It's time for change

https://werd.io/private-healthcare-makes-industries-less-innovative-its-time-for-change/
101•benwerd•1h ago•62 comments

Software rendering in 500 lines of bare C++

https://haqr.eu/tinyrenderer/
35•mpweiher•1h ago•6 comments

AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-hide-debt-off-balance-sheet
189•technewssss•2h ago•92 comments

Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain

https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/writing-by-hand-is-good-for-your
53•dwwoelfel•54m ago•2 comments

Scanning for Pangram Errors

https://veryfineprint.substack.com/p/scanning-for-pangram-errors
41•jsnell•6d ago•24 comments

Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a5fdc7a-d6f8-83e8-bbea-8deb42cfed56
1024•gmays•21h ago•587 comments

Cruller: Bun's Zig Runtime, Continued on Zig 0.16

https://ziggit.dev/t/cruller-buns-zig-runtime-continued-on-zig-0-16/16734
126•Erenay09•9h ago•86 comments

The Telegarden (1995-2004)

https://goldberg.berkeley.edu/garden/
15•zetamax•2d ago•2 comments

The Unity CLI: manage Unity from your terminal

https://unity.com/blog/meet-the-unity-cli
53•nateb2022•1d ago•15 comments

Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop

https://resobscura.substack.com/p/quality-non-fiction-books-are-the
456•benbreen•1d ago•220 comments

OpenStreetMap: Admin_level for All Countries

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dadministrative#Table_:_Admin_level_for_all_cou...
6•ivanjermakov•4d ago•0 comments

Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/alphabets-cash-burn-raises-alarm-big-tech-ai-spe...
194•1vuio0pswjnm7•2h ago•184 comments

Everyone should know SIMD

https://mitchellh.com/writing/everyone-should-know-simd
555•WadeGrimridge•21h ago•204 comments

Show HN: Bento - An entire PowerPoint in one HTML file (edit+view+data+collab)

https://bento.page/slides/
945•starfallg•1d ago•217 comments

Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot

https://jointhefreeworld.org/blog/articles/emacs/emacs-eglot-scala-kotlin/index.html
119•jjba23•2d ago•96 comments

GigaToken: ~1000x faster Language model tokenization

https://github.com/marcelroed/gigatoken/
584•syrusakbary•21h ago•116 comments

Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?

https://dylancastillo.co/posts/pelicanmaxxing.html
635•dcastm•22h ago•237 comments

I Regret Migrating to Codeberg

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/i-regret-migrating-to-codeberg/
53•boramalper•1h ago•28 comments

Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html
156•acmnrs•14h ago•98 comments

ANSI escape injection in MCP servers: Hidden from humans, visible to AI

https://brightsec.com/research/detecting-ansi-escape-sequence-injection-in-mcp-servers-with-dast/
42•xgpyc2qp•2d ago•23 comments

Making

https://beej.us/blog/data/ai-making/
417•erikschoster•23h ago•169 comments

Test-time training 3D reconstruction

https://github.com/Inception3D/TTT3R
22•soupspaces•1w ago•2 comments

The startup's Postgres survival guide

https://hatchet.run/blog/postgres-survival-guide
478•abelanger•1d ago•206 comments

Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

https://dfarq.homeip.net/amiga-1000-ten-years-ahead-of-its-time/
139•giuliomagnifico•9h ago•125 comments

Frequently Asked Questions on Expertise

https://jtpeterson.substack.com/p/faq-on-expertise
30•surprisetalk•3d ago•3 comments

Show HN: Cactus Hybrid: We taught Gemma 4 to know when it's wrong

https://github.com/cactus-compute/cactus-hybrid
170•HenryNdubuaku•21h ago•37 comments

John C. Dvorak has died

https://twitter.com/na_announce/status/2079952538040672302
868•coleca•19h ago•287 comments

Making ASCII Art in Vim

https://alexyang.dev/vim-ascii-art/
105•evakhoury•2d ago•14 comments

Malleable Computing, Emacs, and You

http://yummymelon.com/devnull/malleable-computing-emacs-and-you.html
137•kickingvegas•18h ago•41 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.