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Edward Tufte: Sparklines: theory and practice
A forum moderated by author and artist Edward Tufte, including discussion and questions dealing with information design.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 561 posts.
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Amazon S3 Update – Strong Read-After-Write Consistency
When we launched S3 back in 2006, I discussed its virtually unlimited capacity (“…easily store any number of blocks…”), the fact that it was designed to provide 99.99% availability, and that it offered durable storage, with data transparently stored in multiple locations. Since that launch, our customers have used S3…
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The top programming languages
Explore the top programming languages on GitHub—and what languages are growing the fastest.
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Backblaze Releases the Reed-Solomon Java Library for Free
Today we are releasing our latest open-source project: Backblaze Reed-Solomon Java library for erasure coding. Click for details on how to use and download.
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Amazon's Dynamo
In two weeks we’ll present a paper on the Dynamo technology at SOSP, the prestigious biannual Operating Systems conference. Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system. The technology is designed to give its users the…
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Farming Hard Drives: How Backblaze Weathered the Thailand Drive Crisis
The rain started in August and by mid-October 2011, violent floods in Thailand had damaged the factories that helped produce nearly half of the world’s
97
Waiting for PostgreSQL 12 – Allow user control of CTE materialization, and change the default behavior.
This is pretty important change, as it has the chance to cause performance issues in some cases.
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Jepsen: Redis
Previously on Jepsen , we explored two-phase commit in Postgres . In this post, we demonstrate Redis losing 56% of writes during a partition.
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CRDTs are the future
I saw Martin Kleppmann’s talk a few weeks ago about his approach to realtime editing with CRDTs, and I felt a deep sense of despair. Maybe all the work I’ve been doing for the past decade won’t be part of the future after all, because Martin’s
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Let’s Build a Simple Database (2017)
Writing a sqlite clone from scratch in C
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The database servers powering Let's Encrypt
Let’s Encrypt helps to protect a huge portion of the Web by providing TLS certificates to more than 235 million websites. A database is at the heart of how Let’s Encrypt manages certificate issuance. If this database isn’t performing well enough, it can cause API errors and timeouts for our subscribers. Database…
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SQLite: Wal2 Mode
"Wal2" mode is very similar to "wal" mode. To change a database to wal2 mode, use the command:
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Limbo: A complete rewrite of SQLite in Rust
we forked SQLite with the libSQL project. What would it be like if we just rewrote it?
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Call me maybe: etcd and Consul
In the previous post, we discovered the potential for data loss in RabbitMQ clusters . In this oft-requested installation of the Jepsen series, we’ll look at etcd : a new contender in the CP coordination service arena. We’ll also discuss Consul ’s findings with Jepsen.
106
How JPEG XL compares to other image codecs
The JPEG XL is a powerful codec – find out how it compares to other codecs, including JPEG XL vs HEIC and JPEG XL vs JPEG.
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Surprises in the Bitcoin blockchain and how they are stored (2014)
Every Bitcoin transaction is stored in the distributed database known as the Bitcoin blockchain. However, people have found ways to hack ...
108
Scaling Datastores at Slack with Vitess
From the very beginning of Slack, MySQL was used as the storage engine for all our data. Slack operated MySQL servers in an active-active configuration. This is the story of how we changed our data storage architecture from the active-active clusters over to Vitess — a horizontal scaling system for MySQL. Vitess is…
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Savings are now more liquid and part of “M1 money”
Money is marvelously nuanced. Because different assets can be used as money, we need several categories and definitions to keep track of it. M1 describes the most liquid and widely...
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Demonstrations and Political Violence in America: New Data for Summer 2020
The report covers 2020 trends in political violence and demonstrations in the US, focusing on the BLM movement.
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Latest Data on COVID-19 Vaccinations by Race/Ethnicity
KFF is collecting and analyzing data on COVID-19 vaccinations by race/ethnicity to gain increased insight who is receiving the vaccine and whether some groups are facing disparities in vaccination.
113
Jepsen: MongoDB
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 .
114
Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database
Over my 17 years at Amazon, I have seen that my colleagues on the engineering team are never content to leave good-enough alone. They routinely re-evaluate every internal system to make sure that it is as scalable, efficient, performant, and secure as possible. When they find an avenue for improvement, they will use…
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Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees
Introducing Cloudflare’s S3-compatible Object Storage service, with zero egress bandwidth charges and automatic migration from S3-compatible services.
116
We Can Do Better Than SQL
The questions we often hear are "Why create a new query language?" and "What's wrong with SQL?". This blog post contains answers to both.
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Call Me Maybe: MongoDB Stale Reads
Please note: our followup analysis of 3.4.0-rc3 revealed additional faults in MongoDB’s replication algorithms which could lead to the loss of acknowledged documents–even with Majority Write Concern, journaling, and fsynced writes.
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Jepsen: RethinkDB 2.1.5
In this Jepsen report, we’ll verify RethinkDB’s support for linearizable operations using majority reads and writes, and explore assorted read and write anomalies when consistency levels are relaxed. This work was funded by RethinkDB, and conducted in accordance with the Jepsen ethics policy .
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37signals: A/B testing part 3: Finalé
I was an A/B test skeptic. Maybe we don’t want to be second-guessed. Maybe we don’t want to cater to the lowest common denominator. Designers are taught—explicitly and implicitly—to follow certain visual rules and the final design will work great. The whole A/B testing concept probably …
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Postgres full-text search is Good Enough (2015)
When you have to build a web application, you are often asked to add search. The magnifying glass is something that we now add to wireframes without even knowing what we are going to search.