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I paid people to try and follow my README

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/10/i-paid-people-to-try-and-follow-my-readme/
234•edent•5h ago•123 comments

The tilde in your PATH may not be your HOME

https://disconnect3d.pl//2026/10/02/dont-put-tilde-in-your-path/
124•arusekk•4h ago•71 comments

Bot traffic from Yandex

https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as13238?dateRange=7d
494•walrus01•6h ago•190 comments

LineageOS 24.0

https://lineageos.org/Changelog-32/
293•timschumi•10h ago•105 comments

The Corporate Happiness Treadmill and the Case for Doing Less

https://0xff.nu/corp-burnout/
7•hxii•52m ago•0 comments

Valen's Memory Safety: A New Kind of Borrow Checking

https://verdagon.dev/blog/valen-group-borrowing
73•verdagon•4h ago•31 comments

Show HN: BetterWispr – Free, open-source dictation for Mac

https://betterwispr.com/
58•kartik017•4h ago•30 comments

Why Texas Is Making Data Centers Wait

https://a16z.com/why-texas-is-making-data-centers-wait/
26•gmays•2h ago•38 comments

How I reverse engineered a commercial spatial audio effect

http://epestr.com/blog/reverse-engineering-a-commercial-spatial-audio-effect/
20•epestr•1h ago•5 comments

Nitter: Update Oct 10th seeking funding and legal help

https://nitter.net
316•ForHackernews•6h ago•154 comments

The RAM shortage is bringing back DDR4

https://www.theverge.com/games/1009140/ram-shortage-intel-amd-ddr4-comeback
177•1potato•1d ago•162 comments

2D Vehicles

https://patkerr.co.uk/2d-vehicles/
574•Michelangelo11•4d ago•110 comments

Weave (YC W25) is hiring ML, AI, product, & design engineers

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/weave-os
1•adchurch•4h ago

Build your own decision model

https://nishtahir.com/build-your-own-decision-model/
421•softwaredoug•18h ago•95 comments

A city-building game in which the city would prefer you didn't

https://housing.over.pizza/
468•JumpCrisscross•20h ago•155 comments

IRCv3

https://ircv3.net/
227•basilikum•6h ago•206 comments

3rd Yandex Cloud Data Center Was Hit

https://status.yandex.cloud/en/incidents/2136
391•defly•9h ago•479 comments

Documents Add to Evidence in Climate Deception Case Against ExxonMobil

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07102026/exxonmobil-climate-deception-new-evidence/
308•gumby•2h ago•154 comments

The Lightbulb Computer

https://lightbulbcomputer.com/
533•oskarth•1d ago•86 comments

A Cray-1 supercomputer replica from 30 "obsolete" Mac Minis

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/a-cray-1-supercomputer-replica-from-30-obsolete-mac-minis/
12•pseudolus•1d ago•1 comments

The Wild West of polyglot docs sites

https://technicalwriting.dev/blog/2026/10/polyglot/index.html
5•zdw•2d ago•1 comments

Plumbers, chains, and famous painters: The history of the pipe operator in R

http://adolfoalvarez.cl/blog/2021-09-16-plumbers-chains-and-famous-painters-the-history-of-the-pi...
31•sinnsro•2d ago•2 comments

Rat's Register Allocator

https://hexrat.cc/pages/blog/2026_10_07
43•mpweiher•1d ago•2 comments

How big is a Git commit?

https://ratfactor.com/cards/git-commit-size
69•theanonymousone•2d ago•28 comments

PSPi 6 – Raspberry Pi in a PSP

https://github.com/othermod/PSPi-Version-6
122•therepanic•16h ago•12 comments

Retrofitting language models to operate over bytes

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-11111-4
96•theanonymousone•3d ago•19 comments

Nix wrote half of my debugger

https://fzakaria.com/2026/10/07/nix-wrote-half-of-my-debugger
226•ingve•2d ago•53 comments

Show HN: Happy Hangul Day! An RNN for Generating Korean Handwriting Strokes

https://hangul.ink/blog/hangul-day
83•jbaudanza•2d ago•16 comments

Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]

https://teorth.github.io/tao-web/slides/math-2-0-caltech-2026.pdf
127•Anon84•3h ago•158 comments

Five months treating bugs like patients and coding agents like a medical team

https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/experiment-running-hospital-code/
191•rafiss•2d ago•85 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.