Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 253 posts.
Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups is a technical post about database scalability. What caught my eye was the term . What an odd term — “sharding.” Why would a database be described that way?
SQL:2023 has been wrapped. The final text has been submitted by the working group to ISO Central Secretariat, and it’s now up to the ISO gods when it will be published. Based on past experience, it could be between a few weeks and a few months.
Remember when I blogged about linear read scalability out to 32 cores ? Well, the awesome Nate Boley provided me with access to his brand n...
RabbitMQ is a distributed message queue, and is probably the most popular open-source implementation of the AMQP messaging protocol. It supports a wealth of durability, routing, and fanout strategies, and combines excellent documentation with well-designed protocol extensions. I’d like to set all these wonderful…
The command line tools that ship with any Unix-like system are extremely handy for many data tasks. Here are some of the ones that I've found most useful.
After downloading all 1,265,114 Hacker News submissions from the official Hacker News API, I gathered a few interesting statistics which show the true impact of Hacker News.
A Data Lake is a store that hold raw data as a source for data scientists to explore ways to gain information. It should not be accessed by end-users or used for system integration.
Making decision despite missing SQL data (NULL): How to avoid OR…IS NULL in the WHERE clause.
One of the most consistently popular posts on this blog has been my XKCDify post, where I followed in the footsteps of others to write a little hack for xkcd-style plotting in matplotlib. In it, I mentioned the Sketch Path Filter pull request that would eventually supersede my ugly little hack.
What this function does is to give you a lumninance-correct grayscale version of any matplotlib colormap. I've found this useful for quickly checking how my plots might appear if printed in black and white, but I think it's probably even more useful for stoking the flame of the internet's general rant against jet .
Building a robust background worker system that leverages transactional isolation to never work a job too early, and transactional durability to never let one drop.
I’ve been at OpenAI for almost a year now. In that time, I’ve trained a lot of generative models. More than anyone really has any right to train. As I’ve spent these hours observing the effects of tweaking various model configurations and h
How does SQLite work? Part 1: pages!
I'm in the process of rebuilding my homelab from the ground up, moving from a 24U full-size 4-post rack to a mini rack. One of the most difficult devices to downsize (especially economically) is a NAS. But as my needs have changed, I'm bucking the trend of all datahoarders and I need less storage than the 120 TB (80…
Writing a SQL database from scratch in Go: 1. SELECT, INSERT, CREATE and a REPL
The Spreadsheet That Launched A Million Companies
As much as Andy loves PostgreSQL, there is one part that is terrible and causes many headaches for people. Learn what it is and why it sucks.
The recent paper, “Low-Resource” Text Classification: A Parameter-Free Classification Method with Compressors by Jiang et al. [ link ] recently received a lot of attention on twitter.
9 months of daily A/B-testing of Google AdSense banner ads on Gwern.net indicates banner ads decrease total traffic substantially, possibly due to spillover effects in reader engagement and resharing.
This is my personal site, where I write about Ruby, programming, and any of my varied fascinations.
Modern AI rewards being very weird.
Statistical analysis and mining of huge multi-terabyte data sets is a common task nowadays, especially in the areas like web analytics and Internet advertising. Analysis of such large data sets oft…
Personal Blog of Will Drevo
Stephen Wolfram shares interesting Facebook data analysis finds from the Data Donor program of Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook.
