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The real cost of random I/O
How good is the random_page_cost default, and should you lower it on modern flash storage?
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,888 posts.
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New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
I’ve had this sense that HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months. First most obvious giveaway is the frequency with which you see accounts posting brilliant insights like 13 60 well and t6ctctfuvuh7hguhuig8h88gd to f6gug7h8j8h6fzbuvubt GB I be cugttc fav uhz cb ibub8vgxgvzdrc to bubuvtxfh tf d…
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Why the KeePass format should be based on SQLite
Mohammed Ketab
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Cosmologically Unique IDs
We are an exploratory species, just past the solar system now, but perhaps one day we will look back and call our galaxy merely the first. There are many problems to solve along the way, and today we will look at one very small one. How do we assign IDs to devices (or any object) so the IDs are guaranteed to always be…
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Testing Postgres race conditions with synchronization barriers
Synchronization barriers let you test for race conditions with confidence.
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Building SQLite with a small swarm
Yes, for a supported subset of SQL. To establish a baseline, I integrated the SQLLogicTest suite.
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How Is Data Stored?
Invariably, it involves trying to trap electrons in increasingly complicated ways.
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Text classification with Python 3.14's ZSTD module
Python 3.14 added Zstandard to stdlib; its incremental API finally makes classify-by-compression practical.
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Deep dive into Turso, the “SQLite rewrite in Rust”
I love Rust and I love SQLite, so you can guess. Iwas pretty excited when I lerned that "SQLite was rewritten in Rust" What is SQLite, actually? 2 things: a
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My ridiculously robust photo management system (Immich edition)
How I added Immich to my already robust photo management system to make it ridiculously robust.
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Using PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue for Event-Driven Systems
Learn how to use PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue (DLQ) for event-driven systems. Case study from Wayfair showing how to handle failures in Kafka consumers with PostgreSQL.
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Unconventional PostgreSQL Optimizations
Creative ideas for speeding up queries in PostgreSQL
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Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing
Why DuckDB has become my go-to tool for data processing, offering simplicity, speed, and powerful features.
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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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Generate QR Codes with Pure SQL in PostgreSQL
As my cat woke me up way too early for a Saturday morning, I decided to put all this extra time (and my ChatGPT Pro subscription) into good use and generated a QR-code generator for PostgreSQL, written as a single pure SQL statement. No external libraries or Postgres extension installation needed! The pqr.sql example…
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New information extracted from Snowden PDFs through metadata version analysis
We discovered that entire sections describing domestic U.S. intelligence facilities were deliberately removed from two published documents, while equivalent foreign facilities remained visible. The evidence exists in an unexpected place - the PDF metadata of documents published by The Intercept in 2016, and by The…
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65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform
Sentiment analysis of 32,000 Hacker News posts shows 65% skew negative and earn 27% more points. Six transformer and LLM models tested, full data included.
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Databases in 2025: A Year in Review
The world tried to kill Andy off but he had to stay alive to to talk about what happened with databases in 2025.
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MongoBleed Explained Simply
CVE-2025-14847 allows attackers to read any arbitrary data from the database's heap memory. It affects all MongoDB versions since 2017, here's a simple explanation:
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Pokémon Team Optimization
This article will show you how forming your Pokémon team can be turned into a mathematical optimization problem.
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Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18
Learn how to clone PostgreSQL databases instantly using reflinks. Turn slow template copies into milliseconds with PostgreSQL 18's new file copy options.
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Your Supabase is public if you turn off RLS
I was chatting with a close friend of mine and he sent me a link to his new SaaS that he's developing.
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Go ahead, self-host Postgres
Self-hosting Postgres is simpler and cheaper than managed services suggest, with comparable reliability and better performance tunability.
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What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like?
What does a relational database designed specifically for local SSDs look like? Postgres, MySQL, SQLite and many others were invented in the 90s and 00s, the era of spinning disks. A local NVMe SSD has ~1000x improvement in both throughput and latency. Design decisions like write-ahead logs, large page sizes, and…
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Avoid UUID Version 4 Primary Keys in Postgres
Introduction Over the last decade, when working on databases with UUID Version 41 as the primary key data type, these databases have usually had bad performance and excessive IO. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4122#section-4.4 ↩
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Zmij: Faster floating point double-to-string conversion
There comes a time in every software engineer’s life when they come up with a new binary-to-decimal floating-point conversion method. I guess my time has come. I just wrote one, mostly over a weekend: https://github.com/vitaut/zmij .
118
How Google Maps allocates survival across London's restaurants
I wanted a dinner recommendation and got a research agenda instead. Using 13000+ restaurants, I rebuild its ratings with machine learning and map how algorithmic visibility actually distributes power.
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How exchanges turn order books into distributed logs
Every modern exchange is a distributed database in disguise. This article reveals how trading engines transform chaotic streams of buy and sell orders into a perfectly ordered, replayable log, ensuring fairness, determinism, and market data reliability.
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100k TPS over a billion rows: the unreasonable effectiveness of SQLite
A blog mostly about Clojure programming