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2025: The Year in LLMs

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/31/the-year-in-llms/
129•simonw•2h ago•62 comments

I canceled my book deal

https://austinhenley.com/blog/canceledbookdeal.html
340•azhenley•8h ago•224 comments

Scientists unlock brain's natural clean-up system for new treatments for stroke

https://www.monash.edu/pharm/about/news/news-listing/latest/scientists-unlock-brains-natural-clea...
73•PaulHoule•4h ago•12 comments

Show HN: BusterMQ, Thread-per-core NATS server in Zig with io_uring

https://bustermq.sh/
27•jbaptiste•2h ago•2 comments

Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-12-31/warren-buffett-steps-down-as-berkshire-hathaway...
389•ValentineC•4h ago•241 comments

Resistance training load does not determine hypertrophy

https://physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/JP289684
56•Luc•4h ago•56 comments

Observed Agent Sandbox Bypasses

https://voratiq.com/blog/yolo-in-the-sandbox/
28•m-hodges•3d ago•14 comments

All-optical synthesis chip for large-scale intelligent semantic vision

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv7434
56•QueensGambit•6h ago•9 comments

GoGoGrandparent (YC S16) Is Hiring Tech Leads

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gogograndparent/jobs/w2jGKM7-gogograndparent-yc-s16-is-hiri...
1•davidchl•1h ago

Demystifying DVDs

https://hiddenpalace.org/News/One_Bad_Ass_Hedgehog_-_Shadow_the_Hedgehog#Demystifying_DVDs
110•boltzmann-brain•2d ago•8 comments

On privacy and control

https://toidiu.com/blog/2025-12-25-privacy-and-control/
146•todsacerdoti•7h ago•79 comments

My role as a founder-CTO: year 8

https://miguelcarranza.es/cto-year-8
99•ridruejo•5d ago•89 comments

Ÿnsect, a French insect farming startup, has been been placed into liquidation

https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/26/how-reality-crushed-ynsect-the-french-startup-that-had-raised-o...
67•fcpguru•5d ago•73 comments

The compiler is your best friend

https://blog.daniel-beskin.com/2025-12-22-the-compiler-is-your-best-friend-stop-lying-to-it
140•based2•10h ago•89 comments

Nerd: A language for LLMs, not humans

https://www.nerd-lang.org/about
32•gnanagurusrgs•1h ago•60 comments

PyPI in 2025: A Year in Review

https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2025-12-31-pypi-2025-in-review/
46•miketheman•7h ago•11 comments

The Delete Act

https://privacy.ca.gov/drop/about-drop-and-the-delete-act/
105•weaksauce•2h ago•55 comments

Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design (2011) [pdf]

https://www.ece.uvic.ca/~elec399/201409/Akin%27s%20Laws%20of%20Spacecraft%20Design.pdf
267•tosh•16h ago•81 comments

Scaffolding to Superhuman: How Curriculum Learning Solved 2048 and Tetris

https://kywch.github.io/blog/2025/12/curriculum-learning-2048-tetris/
120•a1k0n•10h ago•28 comments

Web Browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups

https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/12/31/web-browsers-have-stopped-blocking-pop-ups/
64•coldpie•8h ago•54 comments

Show HN: Use Claude Code to Query 600 GB Indexes over Hacker News, ArXiv, etc.

https://exopriors.com/scry
306•Xyra•18h ago•112 comments

When square pixels aren't square

https://alexwlchan.net/2025/square-pixels/
112•PaulHoule•12h ago•53 comments

The most famous transcendental numbers

https://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/trans.html
141•vismit2000•14h ago•84 comments

Microtonal Spiral Piano

https://shih1.github.io/spiral/
75•phoenix_ashes•5d ago•13 comments

Show HN: Frockly – A visual editor for understanding complex Excel formulas

40•jack_ruru•6d ago•9 comments

How AI labs are solving the power problem

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/how-ai-labs-are-solving-the-power
125•Symmetry•12h ago•202 comments

Stewart Cheifet, creator of The Computer Chronicles, has died

https://obits.goldsteinsfuneral.com/stewart-cheifet
201•spankibalt•8h ago•60 comments

The rise of industrial software

https://chrisloy.dev/post/2025/12/30/the-rise-of-industrial-software
217•chrisloy•17h ago•158 comments

Nvidia GB10's Memory Subsystem, from the CPU Side

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/inside-nvidia-gb10s-memory-subsystem
70•ingve•13h ago•6 comments

Iron Beam: Israel's first operational anti drone laser system

https://mod.gov.il/en/press-releases/press-room/israel-mod-and-rafael-deliver-first-operational-h...
83•fork-bomber•12h ago•109 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•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•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.