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Command-line tools can be faster than a Hadoop cluster (2014)
Adam Drake is an advisor to scale-up tech companies. He writes about ML/AI/data, leadership, and building tech teams.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 253 posts.
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Event Sourcing (2005)
Capture all changes to an application state as a sequence of events.
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The Untold Story of SQLite
On today's show, I'm talking to Richard Hipp about surviving becoming core infrastructure for the world. SQLite is everywhere. It's in your web browser, it's in your phone, it's probably in your car, and it's definitely in commercial planes. It's where your iMessages and WhatsApp messages are stored, and if you do a…
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Visualizing Algorithms
Algorithms are a fascinating use case for visualization. To visualize an algorithm, we don’t merely fit data to a chart; there is no primary dataset. Instead there are logical rules that describe behavior. This may be why algorithm visualizations are so unusual, as designers experiment with novel forms to better…
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Summary of the 1.1 Billion Taxi Rides Benchmarks
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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How Google Code Search Worked: Regex Matching with a Trigram Index (2012)
In the summer of 2006, I was lucky enough to be an intern at Google. At the time, Google had an internal tool called gsearch that acted as if it ran grep over all the files in the Google source tree and printed the results. Of course, that implementation would be fairly slow, so what gsearch actually did was talk to a…
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CQRS: Command Query Responsibility Segregation (2011)
CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) is the notion that you can use a different model to update information than the model you use to read information
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Hosting SQLite databases on GitHub Pages or any static file hoster
I was writing a tiny website to display statistics of how much sponsored content a Youtube creator has over time when I noticed that I often write a small tool as a website that queries some data from a database and then displays it in a graph, a table, or similar. But if you want to use a
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Scalability, but at what cost? (2015)
Michael Isard, Derek Murray, and I recently sent in a HotOS submission (it’s not blind, so no harm talking about it, we think). The subject is hinted at from...
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How is efficacy vs. severe disease strong if 60% of hospitalized are vaccinated?
A surge involving the rapidly-transmitting Delta variant in heavily vaccinated countries has led to much hand-wringing that the vaccines are not effective against Delta, or vaccine effectivenss wanes after 4-6 months. This has fueled anti-vaccine sentiment suggesting the vaccines are not working, and causing much…
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Call me maybe: MongoDB (2013)
Previously in Jepsen , we discussed Redis . In this post, we’ll see MongoDB drop a phenomenal amount of data. See also: followup analyses of 2.6.7 and 3.4.0-rc3 .
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Accounting for Computer Scientists
Every educated person really ought to have a basic understanding of accounting. Just like maths, science, programming, music, literature, history, etc., it’s one of those things which helps you make sense of the world. Although dealing with money is not much fun, it’s an unavoidable part of life, so you might as well…
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Command-line tools can be faster than your Hadoop cluster
Adam Drake is an advisor to scale-up tech companies. He writes about ML/AI/data, leadership, and building tech teams.
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Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere
London, 1772. I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the new-fangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects. This is in connection with the…
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Learning from 20 years of personal analytics
Utilizing data analysis capabilities in Wolfram|Alpha Pro, Stephen Wolfram looks at his quantified self based on his large collection of lifelogging data.
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Fabrice Bellard's TS Zip (2024)
Results and speed for other programs on enwik8 and enwik9 are available at the Large Text Compression Benchmark .
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Will ZFS and non-ECC RAM kill your data?
This comes up far too often, so rather than continuing to explain it over and over again, I’m going to try to do a really good job of it once and link to it here.
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A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning (2015)
What is machine learning? See how it works with our animated data visualization.
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Asynchronous Python and Databases
To quote the last part of this blog post, "I think it's [asyncio] really well done, it's fun to use, and I still am interested in having more of a SQLAlchemy story for it, because I'm sure folks will still want this no matter what anyone says.". To that end, SQLAlchemy 1.4 now includes complete support for asyncio …
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Against SQL
But SQL is the only widely-used implementation of the relational model, and it is:
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Call me maybe: Elasticsearch
This post covers Elasticsearch 1.1.0. In the months since its publication, Elasticsearch has added a comprehensive overview of correctness issues and their progress towards fixing some of these bugs.
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Storing UTC is not a silver bullet
Note: this is a pretty long post. If you’re not interested in the details, the conclusion at the bottom is intended to be read in a standalone fashion. There’s also a related blog post …
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Data is a Toxic Asset
Thefts of personal information aren’t unusual. Every week, thieves break into networks and steal data about people, often tens of millions at a time. Most of the time it’s information that’s needed to commit fraud, as happened in 2015 to Experian and the IRS. Sometimes it’s stolen for purposes of embarrassment or…
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We need tool support for keyset pagination
Pagination without OFFSET has many benefits but one problem: there is no tool support. Please help changing this.
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Data Compression Explained (2012)
Copyright (C) 2010-2012, Dell, Inc . You are permitted to copy and distribute material from this book provided (1) any material you distribute includes this license, (2) the material is not modified, and (3) you do not charge a fee or require any other considerations for copies or for any works that incorporate…