Top all-time · #10442
Illuminated Computing
Company blog · illuminatedcomputing.com/posts · on HN as pjungwirprogrammingweb
Illuminated Computing is the company blog at illuminatedcomputing.com, writing about programming and web. Since 2012, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 114 times, most often “Too Many Outer Joins”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Illuminated Computing for posts on database temporal tables, SQL:2011 temporal feature support across databases, and Postgres time-travel and versioning. Commenters cite these posts as background on those topics.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /posts/2019/08/sql2011-survey/2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-06-26
- Too Many Outer Joins2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-10-03
- TQuel Paper: Implementing Temporal Operators in Postgres2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-07-22
What Hacker News says?
Optimizer nuances aside, I agree with this and think it's helpful for anyone writing SQL. I've trained a lot of non-developers (and new-developers) to use SQL, and one of my favorite tips is, "Start with FROM." Even sooner than "start with FROM" is "What does each row of the result mean?" Is it a sale? A month of sales? A customer? If you can answer what you want , then it's usually easy to start there. Especially i…
Comment linking /posts/2015/02/too_many_outer_joins/
on “SQL queries don't start with SELECT”Submitted When the Inner JSON Effect Works as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIt looks like Paul A. Jungwirth and others are trying to get Temporal Tables into Postgres 18. https://illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2024/07/temporal-reve...
Comment linking /posts/2024/07/temporal-reverted/
on “PostgreSQL 17”Submitted Postgres CTE for Threaded Comments as a story · 5 points
HN discussionhttps://illuminatedcomputing.com/
Comment linking /
on “Building a Kickass Portfolio”Submitted Histograms in Postgres with Window Functions as a story · 4 points
HN discussionBack in 2010 I wanted to try out Scala. I fired up the REPL and did this: scala> 1+2 res0: Int = 12 Here is a blog post I wrote about it at the time: https://illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2010/11/no-luck-tryin... I was running under Cygwin and the issue was something about the Java-based readline library. I filed a ticket (linked in my blog post but the link is broken now), but the maintainers' response was somethi…
Comment linking /posts/2010/11/no-luck-trying-out-scala/
on ““It is never a compiler error””Submitted TQuel Paper: Implementing Temporal Operators in Postgres as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI thought re-analyzing Morris's data would be a fun "homework" assignment to give myself as I try to learn statistics. It looks like the simplest approach is nothing like what I proposed above, but a "two-sample t-test." I performed that analysis and wrote it up here, if anyone is interested: http://illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2012/08/font-credibili...
Comment linking /posts/2012/08/font-credibility/
on “The effect of typefaces on credibility”Submitted Debugging the Sprinkler System as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMany security protocols use credentials that are only valid for a brief time. Here is a simple example of a problem caused by my server's time being more than 10 minutes off from the time on S3: http://illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2015/04/paperclip_expi...
Comment linking /posts/2015/04/paperclip_expiring_url_and_request_has_expired/
on “What does it take to make Google work at scale?”Submitted Simple Chef-Solo Tutorial as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf you are dealing with timestamps from the past (e.g. birthdays via a datepicker that constructs Date objects), then you should watch out for different browsers' inconsistent handling of Daylight Savings Time. Moment is really indispensable here, since it includes a database of past years' DST transition dates. I wrote a blog post about it here: https://illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2017/11/javascript-ti...
Comment linking /posts/2017/11/javascript-timezones/
on “You Don't Need Moment.js”Submitted Too Many Outer Joins as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYes, it can make a huge difference. I did this once when I had arrays of ~1 million floats and had to compute statistics on them. I wound up implementing a bunch of stats functions as C stored procedures that operate on arrays, and brought query times down from ~12 seconds to ~20 milliseconds: https://github.com/pjungwir/aggs_for_arrays/ Another time arrays are handy is when you don't know how many "columns" you nee…
Comment linking /posts/2013/03/fun-postgres-puzzle/
on “PostgreSQL Magic”Submitted JavaScript Daylight Savings Time: One Weird Trick Your Application Hates as a story · 2 points
HN discussionJust why isn't key distribution an SMTP extention? I'd expect there to be an RFC for it, but I couldn't find anything. (I'm not talking about DomainKeys. I'm asking why an SMTP client can't ask for a recipient's public key, and if it exists do the encryption.) Here is a blog post about it: http://www.illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2013/07/public-key...
Comment linking /posts/2013/07/public-keys-via-smtp/
on “Set up an email server in two hours”Submitted Postgres custom range types for geoip as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe Lua scripting is also great if you need two commands to run atomically. I wrote a blog post about this just the other day: http://illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2012/10/redis-eval/
Comment linking /posts/2012/10/redis-eval/
on “Redis 2.6.0 Released”Submitted Ledger with Autosync as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI agree. Rails database migrations get so many of these things right: every change is a script, the database is versioned (via schema_migrations). I really like that the database is the sum of a list of deltas. I've worked with people who argued it'd be better if you could just write a declarative schema description by hand (like schema.rb), and have Rails automatically adjust your database to meet that description.…
Comment linking /posts/2013/03/rules-for-rails-migrations/
on “Database versioning best practices”Submitted Postgres LATERAL join as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIf you have trouble remembering things, one fun trick is to write your own man pages. Here is one way to do it: http://www.illuminatedcomputing.com/manpj/ After a couple years you'll have quite a collection!
Comment linking /manpj/
on “Storage Space Doubled For All Linode VPS plans”Submitted Postgres Puzzle as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere is a blog post I wrote about using a recursive query to pull out this kind of tree: http://illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2014/09/postgres-cte-f... The problem I was tackling was making the tree sorted like you see in threaded, scored comments.
Comment linking /posts/2014/09/postgres-cte-for-threaded-comments/
on “Representing Trees in PostgreSQL”Submitted Statistical analysis of the NYT blog about font credibility as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSEEKING WORK - Portland, OR or Remote I'm a polygot, full-stack developer with 16 years experience. My specialties are Rails, Postgres, Chef, and Angular/Ember, although I'm comfortable on a variety of platforms. I am reliable, easy to work with, quick to turn things around, and a good communicator. I can work solo or on a team, either as lead or a team member. I value client satisfaction as highly as technical exce…
Comment linking /portfolio
on “Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (October 2016)”Submitted TQuel Paper: Implementing Temporal Operators in Postgres as a story · 1 points
HN discussionTo toot my own horn, I wrote a blog post that takes their approach and extends it to sort sibling comments by upvotes, like on HN or Reddit: http://illuminatedcomputing.com/posts/2014/09/postgres-cte-f... It's trickier than you might expect!
Comment linking /posts/2014/09/postgres-cte-for-threaded-comments/
on “Tree structure query with PostgreSQL”Submitted My Claude Code Setup as a story · 1 points
HN discussion