Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43706811

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

It looks like LLMs can do a pretty good job at generating ideas, particularly if you prompt them right.

After that, you have to: 1/ make sure that the SQL produces the same results, 2/ see what the query planner will actually do with it, 3/ see whether it improves performance.

As you point out, the data makes a difference, so you need production data statistics, at a minimum, to do this well.

There's a lot of value in just getting a database connection. But the LLMs hit limits pretty quickly when it comes to index tuning, etc.

Classical algorithms still have their place.

Postgres Pro is an open source Model Context Protocol (MCP) server built to support every stage of the development process.

It does a lot more than help generate and run SQL—it helps you make sure your application and database actually run well.

Features:

- Industrial-strength tuning algorithms similar to those in MS SQL Server

- “What if?” tool to evaluate LLM-generated index suggestions

- Works with Cursor, etc., to make changes in ORM code

- Ensures safe SQL execution with restricted mode

- Includes health checks to stay ahead of production problems

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43632299

Points: 11

# Comments: 4

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43596401

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

An analysis of Spectre and software isolation is here:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05178

  - The first time it occurred to me that "master" in this context could offend anyone was when GitHub changed the name (and broke my workflow).
  - My immediate reaction was, "this change is by white people for white people," where "white" means anyone who isn't black.
  - My next reaction was, "they may be changing the name for the wrong reasons, but the change is brilliant."

What's powerful about this name change is that it pushes us to alter a habit, in my case one embedded deeply in my fingers, something that I do every day without realizing that I'm doing it. Thus it is a useful reminder of the implicit bias that contributes to the lack of diversity in tech. Never mind that the old name was harmless, the change brings repeated awareness to an important topic, and it reaches a the developer community in a targeted way.

So, next time you are annoyed that you have to fix a script or you accidentally type master when you needed to type main, please just take a deep breath, change the name, and remember to reflect upon whether you have are subconscious habits or biases that work against diversity in tech.

We've been building an experimental shared file system that specifically targets the FaaS setting. It supports SQLite and gets big performance gains over NFS/EFS, especially on read-mostly workloads, due to improved local caching and lock elision. See: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.09845

(https://data.humdata.org/dataset/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov...).

This raises a few questions for me: - Is an entirely decentralized solution to this problem possible? - Aside from placing trust in the government, are the privacy protections adequate?

I’ve found the following rubric helpful for building distributed systems: 1/ correctness, 2/ reliability, 3/ performance. Credit: CochroachDB team.

I couldn’t agree more with this statement, and even moreso in a business setting than in research. It’s just so easy to get caught up in statistical significance and lose perspective on practical significance. I’ve found confidence intervals most informative and easy to understand.