frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Adafruit: Arduino’s Rules Are ‘Incompatible With Open Source’

https://thenewstack.io/adafruit-arduinos-rules-are-incompatible-with-open-source/
134•MilnerRoute•13h ago•53 comments

Why proteins fold and how GPUs help us fold

https://aval.bearblog.dev/nvidiaproteins/
49•diginova•2h ago•4 comments

Arborium: Tree-sitter code highlighting with Native and WASM targets

https://arborium.bearcove.eu/
67•zdw•4h ago•11 comments

Running on Empty: Copper

https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/running-on-empty-copper
55•the-needful•6d ago•41 comments

Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

243•david927•15h ago•788 comments

Unscii

http://viznut.fi/unscii/
41•Levitating•4h ago•2 comments

The Whole App is a Blob

https://drobinin.com/posts/the-whole-app-is-a-blob/
53•valzevul•3h ago•11 comments

How well do you know C++ auto type deduction?

https://www.volatileint.dev/posts/auto-type-deduction-gauntlet/
35•volatileint•5d ago•23 comments

John Varley has died

http://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2025/12/john-varley-1947-2025.html
51•decimalenough•5h ago•11 comments

CapROS: Capability-Based Reliable Operating System

https://www.capros.org/
74•gjvc•7h ago•29 comments

The Problem of Teaching Physics in Latin America (1963)

https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/46/2/LatinAmerica.htm
30•rramadass•11h ago•10 comments

Read Something Wonderful

https://readsomethingwonderful.com/
86•snorbleck•3h ago•14 comments

Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/bankruptcy-law/robot-vacuum-roomba-maker-files-for-bankruptcy-after...
83•nreece•7h ago•84 comments

Rio de Janeiro's talipot palm trees bloom for the first and only time

https://apnews.com/article/brazil-rio-talipot-palm-flamengo-park-dcfb1ce237af7a10ab72205fc9bbdc02
139•1659447091•1w ago•36 comments

If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-11-30/if-ai-replaces-workers-should-it-also-pay-taxes....
53•PaulHoule•7h ago•83 comments

Hashcards: A plain-text spaced repetition system

https://borretti.me/article/hashcards-plain-text-spaced-repetition
309•thomascountz•15h ago•143 comments

JSDoc is TypeScript

https://culi.bearblog.dev/jsdoc-is-typescript/
156•culi•12h ago•188 comments

AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

https://martinalderson.com/posts/ai-agents-are-starting-to-eat-saas/
95•jnord•8h ago•122 comments

Elevated errors across many models

https://status.claude.com/incidents/9g6qpr72ttbr
295•pablo24602•10h ago•141 comments

An attempt to articulate Forth's practical strengths and eternal usefulness

https://im-just-lee.ing/forth-why-cb234c03.txt
55•todsacerdoti•1w ago•24 comments

In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999)

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt
142•wseqyrku•6d ago•65 comments

The History of Xerox

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-xerox
8•rbanffy•3d ago•0 comments

Common Rust Lifetime Misconceptions

https://github.com/pretzelhammer/rust-blog/blob/master/posts/common-rust-lifetime-misconceptions.md
4•CafeRacer•2h ago•0 comments

History of Declarative Programming (2021)

https://shenlanguage.org/TBoS/tbos_15.html
51•measurablefunc•9h ago•14 comments

Microsoft Copilot AI Comes to LG TVs, and Can't Be Deleted

https://www.techpowerup.com/344075/microsoft-copilot-ai-comes-to-lg-tvs-and-cant-be-deleted
147•akyuu•7h ago•116 comments

SoundCloud just banned VPN access

https://old.reddit.com/r/SoundCloudMusic/comments/1pltd19/soundcloud_just_banned_vpn_access/
87•empressplay•5h ago•48 comments

Shai-Hulud compromised a dev machine and raided GitHub org access: a post-mortem

https://trigger.dev/blog/shai-hulud-postmortem
220•nkko•22h ago•135 comments

Price of a bot army revealed across online platforms

https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/price-bot-army-global-index
130•teleforce•15h ago•56 comments

Developing a food-safe finish for my wooden spoons

https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/developing-hardwax-oil/
192•alin23•4d ago•119 comments

Generative Optogenetics

https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/go
45•birriel•8h ago•12 comments
Open in hackernews

Anatomy of a SQL Engine

https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2025-04-25-sql-engine-anatomy/
168•ingve•7mo ago

Comments

jimbokun•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
Not necessarily, I see native speakers completely ignore this a lot.

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

kreetx•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
I prefer "ess queue ell" these days, but the first DBA I ever worked with pronounced it "squirrel".
gopalv•7mo 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•7mo ago
This is really great!!
gavinray•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo ago
This is a SQL to X library, though. I don’t think it’s what you need.
gavinray•7mo 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•7mo 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•7mo 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.