News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

refset

Re:Inkscape 1.4.4 on Wednesday May 06, 2026 @04:27PM (#48041308)
> Fixed a crash when starting Inkscape with a graphics tablet plugged in

Great news! Having to reconnect the USB cable each time is no fun.

Re:ggsql: A Grammar of Graphics for SQL on Monday April 20, 2026 @04:57PM (#47840565)
Also in this vein is Shaper, a SQL-first approach for handling entire dashboards (and powered by DuckDB): https://taleshape.com/shaper/docs/getting-started/
In case anyone else was curious about the screensaver mentioned, I couldn't find any screenshots so just got Claude to cook up an HTML port: https://refset.github.io/xgrav-canvas-js/xgrav.html
Re: on Thursday January 29, 2026 @09:58AM (#46811051)
I work on https://github.com/xtdb/xtdb which is broadly Postgres-compatible with a few key SQL extensions (SQL:2011 bitemporal tables + immutability, first-class nested data, pipeline syntax, etc). Built on Arrow and the JVM but is otherwise mostly from scratch.

XTDB is perhaps not directly relevant to the topic at hand, but I am a firm believer that ML workflows can benefit from robust temporal modelling.

Re: on Thursday January 29, 2026 @09:10AM (#46810424)
Neat examples, and I agree that extending SQL like this has real potential. Another project along very similar lines is https://github.com/ryrobes/larsql
Re:The challenges of soft delete on Wednesday January 21, 2026 @02:38AM (#46702339)
> other requirements

In my experience, usually along the lines of "what was the state of the world?" (valid-time as-of query) instead of "what was the state of the database?" (system-time as-of query).

Re:SQL Studio on Friday January 09, 2026 @09:38AM (#46554302)
Could Metabase be a better fit?
Re:Signals vs. Query-Based Compilers on Thursday January 08, 2026 @04:15PM (#46546582)
> It would be interesting if someone purpose-built a relation and rules database for compilers

There's already Datalog inside the Rust compiler: https://github.com/rust-lang/chalk + https://github.com/rust-lang/polonius

Re:Databases in 2025: A Year in Review on Monday January 05, 2026 @03:39PM (#46504599)
> it's kind of frustrating that XTDB has to be its own top-level database instead of a storage engine or plugin for another. XTDB's core competence is its approach to temporal row tagging and querying. What part of this core competence requires a new SQL parser?

Many implementation options were considered before we embarked on v2, including building on Calcite. We opted to maximise flexibility over the long term (we have bigger ambitions beyond the bitemporal angle) and to keep non-Clojure/Kotlin dependencies to a minimum.

Re:Listen to Database Changes Through the Postgres WAL on Monday November 17, 2025 @03:52AM (#45951925)
Recently released Clojure implementation of the same pattern: https://github.com/eerohele/muutos
SierraDB looks closer to Rama than XTDB https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2024/01/09/everything-wrong-w...

XTDB doesn't currently solve the problems of user-defined projections (via stored procedures, triggers, Incremental View Maintenance etc.) or multi-partition scaling.

> which is more efficient than "hacking it" with recursive queries in a relational db

It seems to me that the way recursive CTEs were originally defined is the biggest reason that relational databases haven't been more successful with users who need to run serious graph workloads - in Frank McSherry's words:

> As it turns out, WTIH RECURSIVE has a bevy of limitations and mysterious semantics (four pages of limitations in the version of the standard I have, and I still haven't found the semantics yet). I certainly cannot enumerate, or even understand the full list [...] There are so many things I don't understand here.

https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2022...

Re:Designing Agentic Loops on Tuesday September 30, 2025 @04:35PM (#45430899)
For anyone else curious about what a practical loop implementation might look like, Steve Yegge YOLO-bootstrapped his 'Efrit' project using a few lines of Elisp: https://github.com/steveyegge/efrit/blob/4feb67574a330cc789f...

And for more context on Efrit this is a fun watch: "When Steve Gives Claude Full Access To 50 Years of Emacs Capabilities" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJUyVVFOXOc

Re:Show HN: Vibe Linking on Saturday September 27, 2025 @03:05PM (#45398536)
That's the joke (!)
Re:Show HN: Vibe Linking on Thursday September 25, 2025 @11:44AM (#45374216)
Unfortunately not, I've just had this one opened in my browser for ages as a reminder (after seeing it on HN IIRC) and recognised it instantly :)
Re:Show HN: Vibe Linking on Wednesday September 24, 2025 @04:49PM (#45365777)
Great seeing another example here of The Monospace Web design theme https://owickstrom.github.io/the-monospace-web/
> pg_memories revolutionized our AI's ability to remember things. Before, we were using... well, also a database, but this one has better marketing.

https://pg-memories.netlify.app/

Re:Markov Chains Are the Original Language Models on Wednesday September 24, 2025 @04:37AM (#45357777)
Specifically 1.4 "Compression is an Artificial Intelligence Problem" https://www.mattmahoney.net/dc/dce.html#Section_14
Re:Notion 3.0 on Tuesday September 23, 2025 @06:24AM (#45345103)
"Notes and Domino is a cross-platform, distributed document-oriented NoSQL database and messaging framework and rapid application development environment that includes pre-built applications like email, calendar, etc." [0]

Lotus Notes was the original offline-first everything app, including cutting edge PKI and encryption. It worked over dial-up and needed only a handful of MBs of memory (before the Java rewrite at least). Has anything else really come close since?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes

Looks like DriftDB is focused on the 'system time' AS OF dimension, a.k.a. rollback querying. AsOf joins are more about doing analysis over user-defined domain timestamps (/ 'valid time'). Combining both concepts gets you a bitemporal database.
The SQL:2011 syntax puts the temporal filters directly after base table reference (and before the table alias) [0]

i.e. it would be `SELECT * FROM orders FOR SYSTEM_TIME AS OF "@seq:1000" WHERE customer_id="cust1"` rather than `SELECT * FROM orders WHERE customer_id="cust1" AS OF "@seq:1000"` (the latter being an example from the DriftDB readme)

[0] https://docs.xtdb.com/reference/main/sql/queries.html#_tempo...

Older »