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Array languages vs. the curse of the spreadsheet
It has been said that the most popular programming language in the world is the spreadsheet (and in particular these days, Excel). There...
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,888 posts.
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The "missing" graph datatype already exists. It was invented in the '70s
This post is a response to/inspired by The Hunt for the Missing Data Type ( HN ) by Hillel Wayne. I suggest reading his article first.
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All you need is Wide Events, not "Metrics, Logs and Traces"
This quote from Charity Majors is probably the best summary of the current state of observability in the tech industry - a total, mass confusion.
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Mamba Explained: The State Space Model Taking On Transformers
The State Space Model taking on Transformers
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Does offering ChatGPT a tip cause it to generate better text?
Modern AI rewards being very weird.
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GPT in 500 Lines of SQL
A complete GPT2 implementation as a single SQL query in PostgreSQL.
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Data will not tell you what to do
How disappointing it is to learn that the best ideas rarely come from data after 15 years of working in the field.
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Wddbfs – Mount a SQLite database as a filesystem
Often when I’m prototyping a project, I hesitate to use a sqlite database despite their many adavantages . It seems much easier to just dump a bunch of files in a directory and to rely on the universal support for the filesystem API to read/delete/update records. Part of this is avoiding the overhead of figuring out a…
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Python datetime pitfalls, and what libraries are (not) doing about it
It’s no secret that the Python datetime library has its quirks. Not only are there probably more than you think; third-party libraries don’t address most of them! I created a new library to explore what a better datetime library could look like.
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Analyzing Spotify Stream History
I recently learned Spotify provides downloads for users’ streaming history. For me, this is over 10 years worth of data, so at the very least it seemed like a good nostalgia trip. This post covers some of my analysis of my personal export, and hopefully is a good starting place if you’re interested in exploring your…
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Thinking about high-quality human data
[Special thank you to Ian Kivlichan for many useful pointers (E.g. the 100+ year old Nature paper “Vox populi”) and nice feedback. 🙏 ] High-quality data is the fuel for modern data deep learning model training. Most of the task-specific labeled data comes from human annotation, such as classification task or RLHF…
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Postgres as queue
The team I've been working in for the last year or so have had great success using Postgres-as-queue. We've managed to avoid the following:
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A search engine in 80 lines of Python
In this post I explain how I built a search engine from scratch using python. The resulting search engine is used to search in the posts of the blogs I follow.
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Implementing system-versioned tables in Postgres
There's no official support for system-versioned tables in Postgres yet, and the temporal extensions aren't supported on Azure/AWS/GCP. Let's implement it ourselves with 3 triggers and an index.
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UUID Benchmark War
This month’s PGSQL Phriday #015 topic is about UUIDs, hosted by Lætitia Avrot. Lætitia has called for a debate. No, no, no. I say let’s have an all-out war. A benchmark war. I have deci…
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Why Postgres RDS didn't work for us
Background
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What I talk about when I talk about query optimizer (part 1): IR design
Achieving Data Freedom Through Open Source and Rust
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CRDTs Turned Inside Out
🔰If CRDTs are new to you, here are some introductory links. - An interactive intro to CRDTs [https://jakelazaroff.com/words/an-interactive-intro-to-crdts/] - An introduction to state-based CRDTs [https://www.bartoszsypytkowski.com/the-state-of-a-state-based-crdts/] - CRDTs for non-academics…
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Are we at peak vector database?
Seriously - why do we need all these vector databases? Do we need dozens of them?
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Indexing iCloud Photos with AI Using LLaVA and Pgvector
A straightforward idea, gluing stuff together until it works, but it’s a glimpse of what’s possible with help of local AIs in near future
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Let's talk about joins
An review of horizontal and vertical joins with examples from education research.
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Type information for faster Python C extensions
Update: The paper version of this post is accepted at PLDI SOAP 2024. Take a look at the preprint (PDF).
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Trade-offs between Different CRDTs
🔰If CRDTs are new to you, here are some introductory links. - An interactive intro to CRDTs - An introduction to state-based CRDTs - CRDTs for non-academics - CRDT: The Hard Parts - Readings in CRDTs - crdt.tech What are the trade-offs between different kinds of CRDTs (Conflict-free Replicated
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Visualizing Ext4
What does ext4 look like?
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The One Billion Row Challenge
Update Jan 4: Wow, this thing really took off! 1BRC is discussed at a couple of places on the internet, including Hacker News, lobste.rs, and Reddit. For folks to show-case non-Java solutions, there …
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Thoughts on PostgreSQL in 2024
A look ahead at some ongoing projects in PostgreSQL in 2024 and beyond
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Self-hosting a high-availability Postgres cluster on Kubernetes
Ryan Schachte — infrastructure, networking, and distributed systems
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A Canadian payroll dependency chart
Unfortunately, like most aspects of the tax system, this steadily increases in complexity, and this year with the Canada Pension Plan including not just "base" premiums and "additional" premiums but also "second additional premiums", I needed to rewrite my spreadsheet from scratch; and also very unfortunately, the…