Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Aug 26

Where is the Cursor for SQL?

CoQuery is a minimal vibe-coded SQL playground powered by SQLite WASM and Google Gemini language models. There is no backend, everything is in the webpage frontend.

github.com/arnabdotorg/...

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Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Apr 4

I decided to vibe code a quick "CSE 3241 Game Show" using Claude Artifacts and Gemini to help students study for their finals. I was very pleasantly surprised by how easy the process is. Figured I'd share the process, and some design principles I used! www.linkedin.com/pulse/vibe-c...

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Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Mar 4

Vidformer hits v1.0! 🎉 Try the Google Colab notebook for a walkthrough!

Dominik Winecki @winecki.bsky.social · Mar 4

After 13 months and 450+ commits, Vidformer v1.0 is here! It makes computer vision video annotation instant with optimized execution and on-demand rendering for fast iteration in existing workflows, just swap "import cv2" with "import vidformer.cv2 as cv2". github.com/ixlab/vidfor...

GitHub - ixlab/vidformer

Contribute to ixlab/vidformer development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Reposted by Arnab Nandi

Year Progress Bot @yearprogress.bsky.social · Mar 3

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Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Mar 2

ok this is pretty cool. #TBDBITL on ice (via @espn.com, who doesnt seem to post videos here?) @bsky.app please make it easier for publishers to post!

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Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Feb 21

Noticed that students call ChatGPT just "Chat".
Also noticed that OpenAI does own chat.com !

Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Feb 19

This came up during a class discussion. Apple **has** launched a dedicated social network before. In 2010, iTunes Ping was launched to build out a music-focused social network: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_...

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Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Feb 11

But really, what is the convergence state for all of this? Github automates prompt-to-repo, followed by PR-bots managing feature prioritization? PyPI predicts and curates packages from the future?

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Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Feb 7

One of Apple's biggest missed opportunities is not moving fast enough with AppleScript / Automator / Shortcuts into the LLM universe. Imagine an App Store that says "we can't find you an app that does that, but <press here> to stitch one together".

Shortcuts (Apple) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Feb 6

Murat, it's not much warmer, but please come visit sometime!

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Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Feb 5

Love it. I'm just thinking, the obvious product name would be Excel Multiverse

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Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Feb 5

Oh man, would love to see ideas from prob. dbs make it in here as well! @[email protected]@bsky.brid.gy has a strong portfolio... odin.cse.buffalo.edu/research/ind... maybms.sourceforge.net

MayBMS: A Probabilistic Database System

maybms.sourceforge.net

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Reposted by Arnab Nandi

Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · Feb 4

What if a spreadsheet cell could hold multiple values at the same time?

That's the idea behind Ambsheets, a project I've been working on w/ @geoffreylitt.com at @inkandswitch.com. It's a new spreadsheet that makes it easier for you to explore many possibilities simultaneously.

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Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Feb 4

The current excitement about research agents (@emollick.bsky.social has great notes) reminded me of the portfolio of tools from Corpernic in the early 2000s, including a summarizer, a search aggregator, and a shopper.

Obviously the capabilities are wildly different, but the need has been around.

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Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Feb 3

If I understand this correctly, Valve is a super outlier for the "revenue per employee" metric?

Apple: $2.4M
Microsoft: $1M
Netflix: $3M
Google: $1.6M
Valve: ***$14M*** ($5B / 336 employees)

Valve Corporation - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Reposted by Arnab Nandi

Hank Green @hankgreen.bsky.social · Feb 1

In children per year, the US birth rate is at an all-time low, but in Miles’ per hour it’s at an all time high.

A graph showing the number of people named Miles born per hour. It has grown exponentially since 1980.

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Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Feb 2

Nice post! Also -- when combined with survivorship bias-type data, there is a lot that is missed...

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Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Jan 30

Headspace is running a promo, $10 for the whole year for students: checkout.headspace.com/checkout?vou...

Checkout - Headspace

Checkout and view your order summary.

checkout.headspace.com

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Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Jan 30

SIGMOD 2025 List of Accepted Workshops is out! We have a compelling lineup spanning established workshops and some new ones. Thank you all for the excellent submissions!

2025.sigmod.org/sigmod_works...

2025.sigmod.org

Reposted by Arnab Nandi

Edutopia @edutopia.org · Jan 28

— @steelethoughts.bsky.social

“The best education does not prepare students for a test, or for a college, or for a job. It prepares them to keep learning.” —Danny Steele, Principal

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Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Jan 21

Call for Papers: It's been 10 years since the HILDA Workshop started, centering around humans in #Data pipelines! We've joined forces w/ Information Systems Journal to offer a Special Issue on HILDA topics, co-edited by Roee Shraga + me: Please submit a paper!

www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

Information Systems | ScienceDirect.com by Elsevier - Information Systems | ScienceDirect.com by ElsevierScienceDirect

Read the latest articles of Information Systems at ScienceDirect.com, Elsevier’s leading platform of peer-reviewed scholarly literature

www.sciencedirect.com

Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Jan 21

🔁@csail.mit.edu: Early Video of Jeff Bezos walking through the first office of Amazon.com Inc., featuring the "Programming Perl" camel book on a desk (Amazon was one of the biggest users of Perl / Mason for content generation.)

Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Jan 10

(via @cooley.org)

Every kid in the US learns of the Great Chicago Fire (2,112 acres) in school and how modern building codes & fire depts have made this impossible, yet both the 2023 Lahaina & the current Palisades Fire crossed 17,000 acres - 8x the size!

I marked up a map of Chicago to compare.

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Arnab Nandi @arnab.org · Jan 9

OpenAI Sora notes.
- Performance: getting 5-10second videos within the minute of submitting, impressive.
- Quality: hard to iterate edits. They have remix and recut using existing video as seed, but it's at prompt level
- Composing: They have a composer mode, but there is a lot more that can be done

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