Hacker News: refset

Lockbox: Constrain Your Bots to Set Them Free

refset — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:22:47 +0000

Article URL: https://www.chrismdp.com/lockbox-constrain-your-bots-to-set-them-free/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47245505

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by refset in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"

refset — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 20:46:21 +0000

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

New comment by refset in "Show HN: ShapedQL – A SQL engine for multi-stage ranking and RAG"

refset — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 14:58:25 +0000

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.

New comment by refset in "Show HN: ShapedQL – A SQL engine for multi-stage ranking and RAG"

refset — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 14:10:40 +0000

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

Databases Don't Know Why You're Asking

refset — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:44:58 +0000

Article URL: https://inferal.com/blog/databases-dont-know-why/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734632

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by refset in "The challenges of soft delete"

refset — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 07:38:31 +0000

> 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).

Benchmarking KDB-X vs. QuestDB, ClickHouse, TimescaleDB and InfluxDB with TSBS

refset — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:23:24 +0000

Article URL: https://kx.com/blog/benchmarking-kdb-x-vs-questdb-clickhouse-timescaledb-and-influxdb-with-tsbs/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46634910

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by refset in "SQL Studio"

refset — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 14:38:22 +0000

Could Metabase be a better fit?

New comment by refset in "Signals vs. Query-Based Compilers"

refset — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 21:15:19 +0000

> It would be interesting if someone purpose-built a relation and rules database for compilers

While not quite in rustc proper, along these lines: https://github.com/rust-lang/chalk + https://github.com/rust-lang/polonius

New comment by refset in "Databases in 2025: A Year in Review"

refset — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 20:39:09 +0000

> 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.

Not Minds, but Signs: Reframing LLMs Through Semiotics [pdf]

refset — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 14:13:43 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17080

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46205110

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Simplifying Quines

refset — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 23:30:56 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.phronemophobic.com/quineize.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46199160

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by refset in "Listen to Database Changes Through the Postgres WAL"

refset — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 08:52:41 +0000

Recently released Clojure implementation of the same pattern: https://github.com/eerohele/muutos

Columnar and the ADBC Driver Foundry

refset — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 10:13:31 +0000

Article URL: https://columnar.tech/blog/announcing-columnar/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45789198

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by refset in "SierraDB: A distributed event store built in Rust"

refset — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 20:37:49 +0000

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.

New comment by refset in "Event Sourcing, CQRS and Micro Services: Real FinTech Example"

refset — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 08:31:46 +0000

Aka 'bitemporal' - https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/eventual-business-consisten...

New comment by refset in "Ask HN: What's your experience with using graph databases for agentic use-cases?"

refset — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 14:41:39 +0000

> 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...

New comment by refset in "Designing agentic loops"

refset — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 20:35:58 +0000

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

New comment by refset in "Show HN: Vibe Linking"

refset — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 19:05:42 +0000

This is close: https://panr.github.io/hugo-theme-terminal-demo/

New comment by refset in "Everyone's trying vectors and graphs for AI memory. We went back to SQL"

refset — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 05:03:21 +0000

That's the joke (!)