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We Mourn Our Craft

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/02/07/we-mourn-our-craft/
126•ColinWright•1h ago•93 comments

Speed up responses with fast mode

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/fast-mode
24•surprisetalk•1h ago•26 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
121•AlexeyBrin•7h ago•24 comments

U.S. Jobs Disappear at Fastest January Pace Since Great Recession

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikestunson/2026/02/05/us-jobs-disappear-at-fastest-january-pace-sin...
125•alephnerd•2h ago•81 comments

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

https://susam.net/twenty-five-years-of-computing.html
62•vinhnx•5h ago•7 comments

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
829•klaussilveira•21h ago•249 comments

Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
55•thelok•3h ago•8 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
110•1vuio0pswjnm7•8h ago•139 comments

Brookhaven Lab's RHIC Concludes 25-Year Run with Final Collisions

https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/brookhaven-labs-rhic-concludes-25-year-run-with-final-collis...
4•gnufx•41m ago•1 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
1060•xnx•1d ago•611 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://rlhfbook.com/
76•onurkanbkrc•6h ago•5 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
484•theblazehen•2d ago•175 comments

I Write Games in C (yes, C)

https://jonathanwhiting.com/writing/blog/games_in_c/
10•valyala•2h ago•1 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
210•jesperordrup•12h ago•70 comments

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html
9•valyala•2h ago•0 comments

France's homegrown open source online office suite

https://github.com/suitenumerique
559•nar001•6h ago•257 comments

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
223•alainrk•6h ago•343 comments

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/a-fresh-look-at-ibm-3270-information-display-system
37•rbanffy•4d ago•7 comments

Selection Rather Than Prediction

https://voratiq.com/blog/selection-rather-than-prediction/
8•languid-photic•3d ago•1 comments

History and Timeline of the Proco Rat Pedal (2021)

https://web.archive.org/web/20211030011207/https://thejhsshow.com/articles/history-and-timeline-o...
19•brudgers•5d ago•4 comments

72M Points of Interest

https://tech.marksblogg.com/overture-places-pois.html
29•marklit•5d ago•2 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
114•videotopia•4d ago•31 comments

Where did all the starships go?

https://www.datawrapper.de/blog/science-fiction-decline
76•speckx•4d ago•75 comments

Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version

https://github.com/Momciloo/fun-with-clip-path
6•momciloo•2h ago•0 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
273•isitcontent•22h ago•38 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
201•limoce•4d ago•111 comments

Show HN: Kappal – CLI to Run Docker Compose YML on Kubernetes for Local Dev

https://github.com/sandys/kappal
22•sandGorgon•2d ago•11 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
286•dmpetrov•22h ago•154 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
155•matheusalmeida•2d ago•48 comments

Software factories and the agentic moment

https://factory.strongdm.ai/
71•mellosouls•4h ago•75 comments
Open in hackernews

Building agents using streaming SQL queries

https://www.morling.dev/blog/this-ai-agent-should-have-been-sql-query/
103•rmoff•7mo ago

Comments

simonw•7mo ago
This combines a bunch of different things, but the key idea appears to be having a Flink (stream processing server) SQL query set up that effectively means that new documents added to the data store trigger a query that then uses an LLM (via a custom SQL function) to e.g. calculate a summary of a paper, then feeds that on to something that sends an alert to Slack or similar.

So this is about running LLM prompts as part of an existing streaming data processing setup.

I guess you could call a trigger-based SQL query an "agent", since that term is wide open to being defined however you want to use it!

gunnarmorling•7mo ago
Author here, thanks for reading and commenting! Indeed my conclusion is that "agent" means different things to different people. The idea for this post was to explore what's there already and what may be missing for using SQL in this context. When following Anthropic's taxonomy, as of today, SQL let's you get quite far for building workflows. For agents in their terminology, some more work is needed to integrate things like MCP, but I don't see any fundamental reasons for why this couldn't be done.
nilirl•7mo ago
This felt forced.

If you read through the whole thing, they don't manage to build an AI Agent, they make LLM API calls using Flink's SQL.

They admit making it agentic, with choice over tool selection and with agent-like memory, requires workarounds.

Annoying workarounds, imo.

The post mentions work is in progress to build agents that use Flink without using Flink SQL.

Thereby invalidating it's own title.

esafak•7mo ago
Perhaps a charitable take is that this is a musing on how to use immutability for building agents? Maybe a functional approach would be less constrictive than SQL.
tra3•7mo ago
Indeed. I'm very curious about the original source of inspiration for the post, "That microservice should have been a SQL query". It's not as catchy without AI though.
nilirl•7mo ago
How did it make an argument for immutability?
esafak•7mo ago
Not very strongly, but SELECTs are immutable unless you are evil and create a mutating function, which I've seen happen.
philipodonnell•7mo ago
I’ve built lots of pre-LLM data processing pipelines like this and the more I read people putting “agents” into this kind of context the less they resemble agents like the Anthropics of the world defines and the more they just resemble functions. I wonder if eventually there won’t be a distinction and it’ll just be a way to make processing and branching nodes in a pipeline less deterministic when you need more flexibility than pure code-rules can give you.
btown•7mo ago
An interesting thought experiment is that a service that can both be triggered by, and write to, the same persistent queue can call an LLM in each iteration and create a self-evolving agentic workflow. Much like a Scrapy spider can recursively find new things to crawl, an agent can recursively find new things to do.

SQL is a great language to express “choose something from a priority queue and do something with it” but if you try to think about predefining your entire computation DAG as a single query rather than many queries over time, you lose the loose asynchronous iteration that gives an agent the same grace you’d give to a real-life task assignment. And that grace is what makes agentic workflows powerful.

soco•7mo ago
Original title: "This AI Agent Should Have Been a SQL Query"