511
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,888 posts.
512
Track HN: Survival Rate of Show HN Stories
Spoiler alert: many of the good projects didn’t survive
513
Text Editor Data Structures
Text editors can be an interesting challenge to program. The types of problems that text editors need to solve can range from trivial to mind-bogglingly difficult. Recently, I have been on something of a spiritual journey to rework some internal data structures in an editor I have been building, specifically the most…
514
Merklizing the key/value store for fun and profit
Joel Gustafson
515
PostgreSQL and SQL:2023
In a previous article, I introduced what is new in SQL:2023. Now I want to show the status of SQL:2023 support in PostgreSQL. See the previous article for details on these features.
516
How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap
Use R to get geocoded location and routing data from OpenStreetMap and explore our family’s impending 5,000 mile road trip around the USA
517
Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person
TLDR We have analyzed all Ordinal Inscriptions created since Bitcoin block 779832, which marks the introduction of the BRC-20 standard.
518
519
Cases where full scans are better than indexes
Sometimes you have a lot of data, and one approach to support quick searches is pre-processing it to build an index so a search can involve only looking at a small fraction of the total data. The threshold at which it's worth switching to indexing, though, might be higher than you'd guess. Here are some cases I've…
520
Implementing a distributed key-value store on top of implementing Raft in Go
Implementing the Raft distributed consensus protocol in Go
521
522
The many faces of DISTINCT in Postgres (2017)
3 interesting uses of DISTINCT in PostgreSQL
523
524
Kafka vs. Redpanda performance – do the claims add up?
Apache Kafka has been the most popular open source event streaming system for many years and it continues to grow in popularity. Within the wider ecosystem there are other open source and source available competitors to Kafka such as Apache Pulsar, NATS Streaming, Redis Streams, RabbitMQ and more re
525
Abusing vector search for texts, maps, and chess
Vector search isn't just for AI embeddings. Use HNSW for geo-spatial queries, stock covariance, chess positions, text tokens, and multi-modal recommendations with custom metrics.
526
Prolog for data science
I demonstrate a widely applicable pattern which integrates Prolog as a critical component in a data science analysis. Analytic methods are used to generate properties about the data under study and Prolog is used to reason about the data via the generated properties. The post includes some examples of piece-wise…
527
I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky
I downloaded all the posts on Bluesky as of 2023-05-01. Then I did some data analysis on the 1680399 posts from 45457 accounts.
528
Ways to shoot yourself in the foot with Postgres
Personal website of Phil Booth
529
530
Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads
When the JPEG folks were working on image compression, they didn't create a better or faster LZ. Instead they developed new approaches. I se...
531
How RocksDB Works
Over the past years, the adoption of RocksDB increased dramatically. It became a standard for embeddable key-value stores.
532
33TB of text data for a 1T-parameter model
Important: This page summarizes data scaling only, using tokens to parameters as a ratio, and as derived from large language models like GPT-3, Chinchilla, and beyond, linked to the Compute-Optimal scaling laws like Kaplan and Hoffmann/Chinchilla. Please note that compute scaling laws are outside the scope of my…
533
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.
534
Do you need a vector database?
Spoiler alert: the answer is maybe! Although, my inclusion of the word “actually” betrays my bias. Vector databases are having their day right now. Three different vector DB companies have raised money on valuations up to $700 million (paywall link). Surprisingly, their rise in popularity is not for their “original”…
535
SQLite performance tuning: concurrent reads, multiple GBs and 100k SELECTs/s
SQLite is an embedded SQL database. It’s extremely easy to setup, buildable as a single C file with libraries existing for basically all common programming languages. It doesn’t need any server setup or configuration since the SQL logic is run in the host process, and the database consists of only
536
The end of a myth: Distributed transactions can scale
This paper appeared in VLDB'17. The paper presents NAM-DB, a scalable distributed database system that uses RDMA (mostly 1-way RDMA) and a ...
537
Building a Database in the 2020s (2022)
Building a database in the 2020s
538
539
Mapping hospital accessibility with OpenStreetMap
Using OpenStreetMap data to craft a self-hosted interactive map of hospital accessibility in Virginia.
540
Near-lossless image formats using ultra-fast LZ codecs
I think simple ultra-high speed lossy (or near-lossless) image codecs, built from the new generation of fast LZ codecs, are going to become ...