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Agent design is still hard

https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/11/21/agents-are-hard/
139•the_mitsuhiko•4h ago•52 comments

Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

https://disassociated.com/personal-blogs-back-niche-blogs-next/
462•gnabgib•17h ago•296 comments

Kodak ran a nuclear device in its basement for decades

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a69147321/kodak-film-nuclear-reactor/
150•cainxinth•1w ago•67 comments

Helping Valve to power up Steam devices

https://www.igalia.com/2025/11/helpingvalve.html
697•TingPing•22h ago•246 comments

The twin probes just launched toward Mars have an Easter egg on board

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/11/the-twin-probes-just-launched-toward-mars-have-an-easter-eg...
26•pseudolus•1w ago•11 comments

Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening

https://www.buysellram.com/blog/samsungs-memory-price-surge-sends-shockwaves-through-the-global-d...
347•redohmy•1w ago•293 comments

The Connectivity Standards Alliance Announces Zigbee 4.0 and Suzi

https://csa-iot.org/newsroom/the-connectivity-standards-alliance-announces-zigbee-4-0-and-suzi-em...
83•paulatreides•3d ago•52 comments

The Pentagon Can't Trust GPS Anymore

https://www.wsj.com/tech/the-pentagon-cant-trust-gps-anymore-is-quantum-physics-the-answer-d7b2d4e6
9•jonbaer•42m ago•4 comments

Original Superman comic becomes the highest-priced comic book ever sold

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8e9rp0knj6o
284•1659447091•10h ago•167 comments

Weight-sparse transformers have interpretable circuits [pdf]

https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/41df8f28-d4ef-43e9-aed2-823f9393e470/circuit-sparsity-paper.pdf
41•0x79de•1w ago•8 comments

Show HN: Wealthfolio 2.0- Open source investment tracker. Now Mobile and Docker

https://wealthfolio.app/?v=2.0
580•a-fadil•23h ago•189 comments

Moss Survives 9 Months in Space Vacuum

https://scienceclock.com/moss-survives-9-months-in-space-vacuum/
121•ashishgupta2209•12h ago•47 comments

TiDAR: Think in Diffusion, Talk in Autoregression

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08923
33•internetguy•6d ago•3 comments

How to See the Dead

https://www.asimov.press/p/see-the-dead
5•mailyk•4d ago•0 comments

ADHD and monotropism (2023)

https://monotropism.org/adhd/
74•wonger_•4h ago•47 comments

A looming 'insect apocalypse' could endanger global food supplies

https://www.livescience.com/animals/insects/a-looming-insect-apocalypse-could-endanger-global-foo...
24•Brajeshwar•1h ago•8 comments

How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

https://edw.is/learning-vulkan/
134•jakogut•16h ago•74 comments

Sharper MRI scans may be on horizon thanks to new physics-based model

https://news.rice.edu/news/2025/sharper-mri-scans-may-be-horizon-thanks-new-physics-based-model
105•hhs•15h ago•27 comments

We should all be using dependency cooldowns

https://blog.yossarian.net/2025/11/21/We-should-all-be-using-dependency-cooldowns
407•todsacerdoti•1d ago•238 comments

Concrete Shipbuilding – Argentina

https://thecretefleet.com/blog/f/concrete-shipbuilding-–-argentina
35•surprisetalk•5d ago•9 comments

Arduino Terms of Service and Privacy Policy update: setting the record straight

https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/11/21/the-arduino-terms-of-service-and-privacy-policy-update-setting...
71•manchoz•18h ago•62 comments

Discontinuation of ARM Notebook with Snapdragon X Elite SoC

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Discontinuation-of-ARM-notebooks-with-Snapdragon-X-Elite-SoC.t...
172•Venn1•20h ago•102 comments

LAPD helicopter tracker with real-time operating costs

https://lapdhelicoptertracker.com/
188•polalavik•17h ago•214 comments

Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most

https://nautil.us/childhood-friends-not-moms-shape-attachment-styles-most-1247316/
245•dnetesn•1w ago•82 comments

You can make PS2 games in JavaScript

https://jslegenddev.substack.com/p/you-can-now-make-ps2-games-in-javascript
288•tosh•23h ago•71 comments

Pixar: The Early Days A never-before-seen 1996 interview

https://stevejobsarchive.com/stories/pixar-early-days
138•sanj•19h ago•9 comments

An Interview with Unity CEO Matthew Bromberg About Turnarounds

https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-unity-ceo-matthew-bromberg-about-turnarounds/
30•feross•1w ago•22 comments

Is Matrix Multiplication Ugly?

https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/2025/11/21/is-matrix-multiplication-ugly/
114•jamespropp•17h ago•74 comments

Self-hosting a NAT Gateway

https://www.awsistoohard.com/blog/self-hosting-nat-gateway
150•veryrealsid•4d ago•105 comments

Make product worse, get money

https://dynomight.net/worse/
134•zdw•1d ago•147 comments
Open in hackernews

Anatomy of a SQL Engine

https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2025-04-25-sql-engine-anatomy/
168•ingve•6mo ago

Comments

jimbokun•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo ago
Not necessarily, I see native speakers completely ignore this a lot.

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

kreetx•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo ago
I prefer "ess queue ell" these days, but the first DBA I ever worked with pronounced it "squirrel".
gopalv•6mo 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•6mo ago
This is really great!!
gavinray•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo ago
This is a SQL to X library, though. I don’t think it’s what you need.
gavinray•6mo 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•6mo 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•6mo 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.