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Are You Sure You Want to Use MMAP in Your Database Management System? (2022)
MMAP Databases = 💩
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 47 posts.
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[109] Data Falsificada (Part 1): “Clusterfake”
This is the introduction to a four-part series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino. In 2021, we and a team o…
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SQLite Begin Concurrent
Usually, SQLite allows at most one writer to proceed concurrently. The BEGIN CONCURRENT enhancement allows multiple writers to process write transactions simultanously if the database is in "wal" or "wal2" mode, although the system still serializes COMMIT commands.
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You cannot have exactly-once delivery (2015)
I’m often surprised that people continually have fundamental misconceptions about how distributed systems behave. I myself shared many of these misconceptions, so I try not to demean or dismiss but rather educate and enlighten, hopefully while sounding less preachy than that just did. I continue to learn only by…
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The technology behind GitHub’s new code search
A look at what went into building the world's largest public code search index.
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Pipeworld: Spreadsheet Dataflow Computing (2021)
Now for something completely different. In the spiritual vein of One Night in Rio: Vacation photos from Plan9 and AWK for multimedia, here is a tool that is the link that ties almost all the projec…
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Scaling SQLite to 4M QPS on a Single Server (EC2 vs Bare Metal)
Discover how Expensify achieved remarkable scaling: 4M QPS on one server! Dive into optimizing SQLite for impressive performance gains.
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Big data is dead
Big data is dead. Long live easy data. | Reading time: 18 min read
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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 …
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What if OpenDocument used SQLite? (2014)
Suppose the OpenDocument file format, and specifically the "ODP" OpenDocument Presentation format, were built around SQLite. Benefits would include:
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What is a Vector Database? (2021)
Discover Vector Databases: How They Work, Examples, Use Cases, Pros & Cons, Selection and Implementation. They have combined capabilities of traditional databases and standalone vector indexes while specializing for vector embeddings.
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LLaMA2 Chat 70B outperformed ChatGPT
AlpacaEval an LLM-based automatic evaluation that is fast, cheap, and reliable. It is based on the AlpacaFarm evaluation set, which tests the ability of models to follow general user instructions. These responses are then compared to reference responses (Davinci003 for AlpacaEval, GPT-4 Preview for AlpacaEval 2.0) by…
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Datomic is Free
Nubank is making all editions of Datomic free of licensing fees, released under Apache 2.0 and available directly from Maven Central, no signup required.
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JPEG XL: How it started, how it’s going
Significance of Apple's support for JPEG XL and what this means for the widespread adoption of this next-generation image compression format.
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SQL:2023 is finished: Here is what's new
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.
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Storing OpenAI embeddings in Postgres with pgvector
An example of how to build an AI-powered search engine using OpenAI's embeddings and PostgreSQL.
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Excel will allow certain auto data conversions to be turned off
Based on your feedback, we've improved the Automatic Data Conversion settings, and made them also available in Excel for Mac.
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Debunking the Myth of "Anonymous" Data
Today, almost everything about our lives is digitally recorded and stored somewhere. Each credit card purchase, personal medical diagnosis, and preference about music and books is recorded and then used to predict what we like and dislike, and—ultimately—who we are. This often happens without our...
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Accidental database programming
Join me as we take a look at common application data patterns, and how they relate to the inner-workings of databases. In this post, we discuss data caching, indexing, optimistic mutations, and recursive cache invalidation. We will see how life might be easier if we could just use a frontend optimized database like…
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From deep to long learning?
For the last two years , a line of work in our lab has been to increase sequence length. We thought longer sequences would enable a new era of machine learning foundation models: they could learn from longer contexts, multiple media sources, complex demonstrations, and more. All data ready and waiting to be learned…
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Bad numbers in the “gzip beats BERT” paper?
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.
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Jepsen: MySQL 8.0.34
MySQL needs little introduction. Over the last 28 years it has become one of the most widely deployed SQL databases. MySQL is primarily used for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads, but is also deployed as a part of OLAP and queuing systems.
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Backblaze Drive Stats for Q3 2023
Explore Backblaze's Q3 2023 hard drive stats, revealing insights on 259,533 HDDs, failure rates, and data center performance for enhanced reliability.
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The part of Postgres we hate the most: Multi-version concurrency control
Andy Pavlo - Carnegie Mellon University,
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We put a distributed database in the browser and made a game of it
TigerBeetle is a distributed financial transactions database, designed for mission critical safety. How do you test something so critical? Well, we could tell you (and we will), but why not show you?
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Backblaze Drive Stats for 2022
Check out the 2022 year-end Drive Stats data, and let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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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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D1: Improvements to performance and scalability
We've been heads down iterating on D1, and we've just shipped a major new version that's substantially faster, more reliable, and introduces Time Travel: the ability to restore a D1 database to any point in time.
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SciPy builds for Python 3.12 on Windows are a minor miracle
Moving SciPy to Meson meant finding a different Fortran compiler on Windows, which was particularly tricky to pull off for conda-forge. This blog tells the story about how things looked pretty grim for the Python 3.12 release, and how things ended up working out just in the nick of time.