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Embeddings: What they are and why they matter
Embeddings are a really neat trick that often come wrapped in a pile of intimidating jargon. If you can make it through that jargon, they unlock powerful and exciting techniques …
Simon Willison
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Visit simonwillison.net → RSS feedOn Hacker News May 2009 – Nov 2026
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Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data
I gave a talk yesterday about personal data warehouses for GitHub’s OCTO Speaker Series, focusing on my Datasette and Dogsheep projects. The video of the talk is now available, and …
3
Google's new pipe syntax in SQL
A new paper from Google Research describing custom syntax for analytical SQL queries that has been rolling out inside Google since February, reaching 1,600 "seven-day-active users" by August 2024. A …
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Zero-latency SQLite storage in every Durable Object
Kenton Varda introduces the next iteration of Cloudflare's Durable Object platform, which recently upgraded from a key/value store to a full relational system based on SQLite. For useful background on …
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Datasette’s new JSON write API: The first alpha of Datasette 1.0
This week I published the first alpha release of Datasette 1.0, with a significant new feature: Datasette core now includes a JSON API for creating and dropping tables and inserting, …
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Datasette Lite: a server-side Python web application running in a browser
Datasette Lite is a new way to run Datasette: entirely in a browser, taking advantage of the incredible Pyodide project which provides Python compiled to WebAssembly plus a whole suite …
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Using SQL to find my best photo of a pelican according to Apple Photos
According to the Apple Photos internal SQLite database, this is the most aesthetically pleasing photograph I have ever taken of a pelican: Here’s the SQL query that found me my …
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SQL as an API language
Datasette (previously) is my open source tool for exploring and publishing structured data. There are a lot of ideas embedded in Datasette. I realized that I haven’t put many of …
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Cross-Database Queries in SQLite
I released Datasette 0.55 and sqlite-utils 3.6 this week with a common theme across both releases: supporting cross-database joins. Cross-database queries in Datasette SQLite databases are single files on disk. …
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Notes on the SQLite DuckDB Paper
SQLite: Past, Present, and Future is a newly published paper authored by Kevin P. Gaffney, Martin Prammer and Jignesh M. Patel from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and D. Richard Hipp, …
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AI for Data Journalism: demonstrating what we can do with this stuff
I gave a talk last month at the Story Discovery at Scale data journalism conference hosted at Stanford by Big Local News. My brief was to go deep into the …
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How to implement Q&A against your docs with GPT3 embeddings and Datasette
If you’ve spent any time with GPT-3 or ChatGPT, you’ve likely thought about how useful it would be if you could point them at a specific, current collection of text …
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Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset
I did not expect this! [...] we are announcing today the general availability of a foundational open data set, Foursquare Open Source Places ("FSQ OS Places"). This base layer of …
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Joining CSV and JSON data with an in-memory SQLite database
The new sqlite-utils memory command can import CSV and JSON data directly into an in-memory SQLite database, combine and query it using SQL and output the results as CSV, JSON …
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Implementing faceted search with Django and PostgreSQL
I’ve added a faceted search engine to this blog, powered by PostgreSQL. It supports regular text search (proper search, not just SQL“like” queries), filter by tag, filter by date, filter …
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Ask questions of SQLite databases and CSV/JSON files in your terminal
I built a new plugin for my sqlite-utils CLI tool that lets you ask human-language questions directly of SQLite databases and CSV/JSON files on your computer. It’s called sqlite-utils-ask. Here’s …
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Datasette Facets: Faceted Browse and a JSON API for any CSV File or SQLite DB
Datasette 0.22 is out with the most significant new feature I’ve added since the initial release: faceted browse. Datasette lets you deploy an instant web UI and JSON API for …
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Why I like Redis
I’ve been getting a lot of useful work done with Redis recently. Redis is typically categorised as yet another of those new-fangled NoSQL key/value stores, but if you look closer …