Top all-time · #20466
Into the Light
Personal blog · nchammas.com/writingdataprogramming
Into the Light is a personal blog at nchammas.com about data and programming. Since 2017, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times, most often “Solving the Water Jug Problem from Die Hard 3 with TLA+ and Hypothesis”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-08, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
One comment cites a post arguing that a data pipeline is just a materialized view, as a related post to a Materialize thread. The comment does not judge the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Solving the Water Jug Problem from Die Hard 3 with TLA+ and Hypothesis2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-04-05
- A Data Pipeline Is a Materialized View2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-02-21
What Hacker News says?
> If you process data one row at a time, that is clearly a streaming pipeline, but most systems that call themselves streaming actually process data in small batches. From a user perspective, it’s an implementational detail, the only thing you care about is the latency target. Author here. 100% agreed. As an aside, I just came across your post about how Databricks is an RDBMS [0]. I recently wrote a similar article…
Comment linking /writing/modern-data-lake-database
on “A Data Pipeline Is a Materialized View”Submitted A Data Pipeline Is a Materialized View as a story · 144 points
HN discussionRelevant related post: A data pipeline is just a materialized view: https://nchammas.com/writing/data-pipeline-materialized-view
Comment linking /writing/data-pipeline-materialized-view
on “Introducing dbt + Materialize”Submitted A Query Language Is Also a Data Constraint Language as a story · 24 points
HN discussion> providing analytics and a database type experience over a data lake. It's interesting how the modern data lake is developing in this way, recreating many patterns from the traditional database for distributed systems and massive scale: SQL and query optimization, transactions and time travel, schema evolution and data constraints... Having started out as a database developer / DBA many years ago, working with data…
Comment linking /writing/modern-data-lake-database
on “Why Databricks Is Winning”Submitted Solving the Water Jug Problem from Die Hard 3 with TLA+ and Hypothesis as a story · 6 points
HN discussionHypothesis is really a neat library. You can use it to implement stateful testing, which allows you to cover some of the more complex problems that might normally require something like TLA+. I saw a solution to the water jug problem from the movie Die Hard 3 written in TLA+ and ported it to Hypothesis [0]. It was surprisingly straightforward and easy to read. [0]: https://nchammas.com/writing/how-not-to-die-hard-wi…
Comment linking /writing/how-not-to-die-hard-with-hypothesis
on “Solving puzzles with hypothesis”Submitted The Modern Data Lake Is a Database as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI recently shared a similar rationale for why a custom query language can help users even in the age of LLMs. https://nchammas.com/writing/custom-query-language-design#wh... Users can't "own" queries they don't understand. An LLM helping a user avoid annoying syntax errors is very useful; but helping a user write a query they ultimately cannot understand is fraught with the problems you describe.
Comment linking /writing/custom-query-language-design
on “Any text-to-SQL benchmark should address difficulties of real-world data stores”Submitted Designing a Custom Query Language for Non-Technical Analysts as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis is pretty neat, and it reminds me of my experiment solving the water jug problem from Die Hard 3 using Hypothesis [1] (a Python library for property-based testing). Though I doubt Hypothesis's stateful testing capabilities can replicate all the capabilities of Datalog (or its elegance for this kind of logic problem), I think you could port the author's expression of the game rules to Hypothesis pretty straightf…
Comment linking /writing/how-not-to-die-hard-with-hypothesis
on “Find Legal Moves in Brass Birmingham with Datalog”Submitted Solving the Water Jug Problem from Die Hard 3 with TLA+ and Hypothesis as a story · 2 points
HN discussion