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Astral to Join OpenAI

https://astral.sh/blog/openai
388•ibraheemdev•1h ago•176 comments

OpenBSD: PF queues break the 4 Gbps barrier

https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20260319125859
46•defrost•1h ago•15 comments

Juggalo Makeup Blocks Facial Recognition Technology (2019)

https://consequence.net/2019/07/juggalo-makeup-facial-recognition/
80•speckx•1h ago•24 comments

Consensus Board Game

https://matklad.github.io/2026/03/19/consensus-board-game.html
15•surprisetalk•53m ago•0 comments

Afroman found not liable in defamation case

https://nypost.com/2026/03/18/us-news/afroman-found-not-liable-in-bizarre-ohio-defamation-case/
605•antonymoose•5h ago•220 comments

Conway's Game of Life, in real life

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/conways-game-of-life-in-real-life
247•surprisetalk•11h ago•63 comments

'Your Frustration Is the Product'

https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/your_frustration_is_the_product
157•llm_nerd•3h ago•85 comments

Pretraining Language Models via Neural Cellular Automata

https://hanseungwook.github.io/blog/nca-pre-pre-training/
39•shmublu•3d ago•11 comments

Afroman Wins Civil Trial over Use of Police Raid Footage in His Music Videos

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/us/afroman-trial-lemon-cake-verdict.html
190•pseudolus•2h ago•21 comments

Nvidia greenboost: transparently extend GPU VRAM using system RAM/NVMe

https://gitlab.com/IsolatedOctopi/nvidia_greenboost
417•mmastrac•3d ago•115 comments

Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80

https://spectrum.ieee.org/eniac-80-ieee-milestone
66•baruchel•9h ago•27 comments

How many branches can your CPU predict?

https://lemire.me/blog/2026/03/18/how-many-branches-can-your-cpu-predict/
49•ibobev•2h ago•10 comments

OpenRocket

https://openrocket.info/
660•zeristor•4d ago•113 comments

Warranty Void If Regenerated

https://nearzero.software/p/warranty-void-if-regenerated
446•Stwerner•18h ago•270 comments

OpenAI to Acquire Astral

https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral/
135•meetpateltech•1h ago•68 comments

Stdwin: Standard window interface by Guido Van Rossum [pdf]

https://ir.cwi.nl/pub/5998/5998D.pdf
60•ivanbelenky•2d ago•33 comments

Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2026/03/18/austins-surge-of-new-housing-con...
658•matthest•14h ago•792 comments

LotusNotes

https://computer.rip/2026-03-14-lotusnotes.html
137•TMWNN•4d ago•71 comments

2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews

https://blog.icml.cc/2026/03/18/on-violations-of-llm-review-policies/
143•sergdigon•4h ago•130 comments

WFH is becoming a benefit again

27•sharemywin•2h ago•14 comments

A sufficiently detailed spec is code

https://haskellforall.com/2026/03/a-sufficiently-detailed-spec-is-code
492•signa11•12h ago•256 comments

Show HN: Duplicate 3 layers in a 24B LLM, logical deduction .22→.76. No training

https://github.com/alainnothere/llm-circuit-finder
186•xlayn•17h ago•70 comments

The next fight over the use of facial recognition could be in the supermarkets

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2026/03/16/the-facial-recognition-groce...
23•speckx•2h ago•7 comments

Gluon: Explicit Performance

https://www.lei.chat/posts/gluon-explicit-performance/
4•matt_d•2d ago•0 comments

Wander – A tiny, decentralised tool to explore the small web

https://susam.net/wander/
318•susam•1d ago•78 comments

Nvidia NemoClaw

https://github.com/NVIDIA/NemoClaw
348•hmokiguess•23h ago•229 comments

Autoresearch for SAT Solvers

https://github.com/iliazintchenko/agent-sat
149•chaisan•14h ago•29 comments

The math that explains why bell curves are everywhere

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-math-that-explains-why-bell-curves-are-everywhere-20260316/
174•ibobev•2d ago•103 comments

Iran war energy shock sparks global push to reduce fossil fuel dependence

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/iran-war-energy-shock-sparks-global-push-reduce-fossil-fu...
187•geox•3h ago•224 comments

Show HN: I built 48 lightweight SVG backgrounds you can copy/paste

https://www.svgbackgrounds.com/set/free-svg-backgrounds-and-patterns/
335•visiwig•23h ago•63 comments
Open in hackernews

Anatomy of a SQL Engine

https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2025-04-25-sql-engine-anatomy/
168•ingve•10mo ago

Comments

jimbokun•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo ago
Not necessarily, I see native speakers completely ignore this a lot.

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

kreetx•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo ago
I prefer "ess queue ell" these days, but the first DBA I ever worked with pronounced it "squirrel".
gopalv•10mo 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•10mo ago
This is really great!!
gavinray•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo ago
This is a SQL to X library, though. I don’t think it’s what you need.
gavinray•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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.