Hacker News: scottcodie

New comment by scottcodie in "Show HN: LLM Attention Visualization"

scottcodie — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 01:21:22 +0000

You can also mine attention from image models, it's a lot of fun and very interesting.

New comment by scottcodie in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"

scottcodie — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 18:20:47 +0000

A new transformers architecture based on relational data instead of text. Been exploring search reranking based on graph data and customer prediction.

https://github.com/relativedb/relational-transformers

https://relationaltransformers.com/

You can read more about the architecture here: https://relativedb.com/blog/relational-transformer

New comment by scottcodie in "Why we write our own C and C++ inference engines"

scottcodie — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 04:58:43 +0000

I did took a native c++ approach when writing a relational transformers engine (RelativeDB). My journey was pytorch -> c++ -> Triton (lang). While C++ was more performant than Triton, I couldn't afford to optimize on every gpu. I just accepted the ~15% throughput loss for my cloud service, which honestly wasn't bad for the amount of flexibility I got out of it.

But the cpp port of vllm looks great, that'd be great if you'll maintain that. I hit the same limitations with vllm.

New comment by scottcodie in "Show HN: RelativeDB – OSS query engine for relational foundation models"

scottcodie — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 22:35:59 +0000

The whole graph is walked at inference time to create the context. There is an attention feature, called 'neighbor attention', that propagate signals along primary-foreign key relationships. The task table includes the foreign keys themselves.

Show HN: RelativeDB – OSS query engine for relational foundation models

scottcodie — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:32:52 +0000

Structured data could be the next big frontier for foundation models.

RelativeDB is an open source query engine built around the Relational Transformer architecture, developed by Stanford’s Tabular and Relational (STAR) Project. These models can adapt to new databases and prediction tasks using relatively little labeled context.

With some of my experiments, the results have been remarkable. On some tasks, RelativeDB can outperform XGBoost with only a small amount of relational context and no manual feature engineering.

So RelativeDB turns relational foundation models into something you can query (like this customer churn query):

``` PREDICT NOT EXISTS(orders.*) OVER (90 DAYS FOLLOWING) FROM customers ```

The engine finds the relevant context across the related tables and returns a prediction. The goal is to make questions like churn, demand forecasting, fraud detection, and recommendations feel more like database queries than bespoke ML projects.

Longer term, I think the optimizer should be able to choose between relational foundation models, fine-tuned models, and conventional approaches such as XGBoost depending on the query (how much graph-like context is needed vs just tabular features). Bridging ML to LLMs in a sane way.

I think there are markets for quantitive finance and utilizing emerging context graphs.

The project is early, and I would especially appreciate feedback on the query language and execution model.

RelativeDB: https://github.com/RelativeDB/RelQL Stanford RT-J: https://star-project.stanford.edu/rt-j/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49063842

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by scottcodie in "How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing"

scottcodie — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 21:16:15 +0000

I created a prose tool as a claude code plugin to catch these and other AI-isms. It's not really intended for release quite yet, but it has been very useful. https://github.com/MariHQ/mari-cc

New comment by scottcodie in "Show HN: CLI that helps AI agents avoid vulnerable dependencies"

scottcodie — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:03:58 +0000

If this was a claude plugin with a hook on my dep files, I'd be in.

New comment by scottcodie in "What game engines know about data that databases forgot"

scottcodie — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:10:50 +0000

I'm not sure a game needs transactions. It seems to me that entity streaming concepts are a better fit: reading from an event queue and consistently reconciling the state over time. Like the sorted top-n in the example, if it was a game and the query is generally known, it would be better to just materialize it as a fast rank, which goes beyond the IVM-style materialization they suggested.

New comment by scottcodie in "Wedeo – a Rust Rewrite of FFmpeg"

scottcodie — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:32:53 +0000

Have you taken a look at the various test harnesses for video encoding/decoding, or consider publishing a standalone one yourself? I get a bit-for-bit rewrite can have some advantage but it's hard to know if the AI implementation actually covers all of the edges cases.

New comment by scottcodie in "Testing a cheaper laminar flow hood"

scottcodie — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 05:05:26 +0000

I have a legit laminar flow hood (airclean 600, 32 inch) in my home for plant tissue culture. I gotta say, I thought it was going to be easy street to sterile culture- it was not. Sterile protocol matters so much that I think it would have been just as easy to do what I needed to do in a glove box with all the extra precautions I had to take. It's honestly hard to beat an enclosed container with zero airflow.

New comment by scottcodie in ""You Don't Need Kafka, Just Use Postgres" Considered Harmful"

scottcodie — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 22:23:47 +0000

One thing the other blog post missed and this post misses too is that you don't need Kafka to use Debezium with Postgres. This gives you a pretty seamless onramp to event streaming tools as you scale.

New comment by scottcodie in "Is Postgres read heavy or write heavy?"

scottcodie — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 03:25:27 +0000

I've spent my entire career developing databases (oracle, cassandra, my own database startup). Knowing if your workload is read or write heavy is one of the first questions when evaluating database choice, and is critical for tuning options. I would give this article hate just because it feels partially written by AI and the title needs a possessive 'your' in it, but its core ideas are sound and frame the issue correctly.

New comment by scottcodie in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (March 2025)"

scottcodie — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 01:53:00 +0000

Stream processing/materialization engine written in rust that can be compiled to wasm.

Graffiti art.

New comment by scottcodie in "Ask HN: I’m an FCC Commissioner proposing regulation of IoT security updates"

scottcodie — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 20:09:27 +0000

Is there a definition of a "security update"? Software has an infinite number of bugs and it is cost infeasible to fix them all. If it's years down the road, the engineers that wrote the code may be long gone.

New comment by scottcodie in "The best approach I've seen for hiring junior engineers"

scottcodie — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 05:31:14 +0000

Paying poorly would bias you to candidates who will accept poor wages. Good candidates, even if they are young and inexperienced, can have a high market rate.

New comment by scottcodie in "Payment systems while working at a pizza place"

scottcodie — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 17:39:30 +0000

You could also use a temporal table.

New comment by scottcodie in "I don't need your query language"

scottcodie — Sat, 17 Jun 2023 21:20:50 +0000

SQL in the context of a single query struggles with a composable features. But looking slightly outside the scope of queries with assignment statements and view/materialization dags then you start getting some of that composition back. I think SQRL is an good example of SQL with a bunch of composable feature bolt-ons.

https://www.datasqrl.com/blog/sqrl-high-level-data-language-...

New comment by scottcodie in "Ask HN: How do you think LLMs will affect society medium/long term?"

scottcodie — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 23:14:07 +0000

Most technology advances are not labor replacing but rather labor augmenting. For example, LLMs could make teachers much more productive in the classroom but it would be unlikely to replace teachers entirely.

New comment by scottcodie in "Record-Breaking Egg Profits Prompt Accusation of Price Gouging"

scottcodie — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 18:30:49 +0000

Price gouging is often seen as immoral because it involves high prices without a justifiable reason. It is often considered in absence of welfare analysis, even if the middle class can afford the price increase, it can still be considered price gouging. In a competitive market, prices are based on what the market can bear, not on moral considerations. In such markets, prices must remain low to remain in business. However, high prices without justifiable reasons could be indication of monopolistic behavior from too much consolidation, and should be called out and investigated.

New comment by scottcodie in "Mexico cracks down on solar geoengineering"

scottcodie — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 10:57:59 +0000

Usually you don't consider health insurance to be a moral hazard in this way. However, in healthcare, a moral hazard can occur when people use more healthcare services because the cost for them is low.