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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,888 posts.
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PostgreSQL needs a new load balancer
We do a lot of high-availablity PostgreSQL deployments for clients. As of 9.1, streaming replication (SR) is excellent for this, and can sc...
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Announcing pqR: A faster version of R
pqR — a “pretty quick” version of R — is now available to be downloaded, built, and installed on Linux/Unix systems. This version of R is based on R-2.15.0, but with many performance im…
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Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere
London, 1772. I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the new-fangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects. This is in connection with the…
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Non-blocking transactional atomicity
tl;dr: You can perform non-blocking multi-object atomic reads and writes across arbitrary data partitions via some simple multi-versioning and by storing metadata regarding related items.
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Call me maybe: final thoughts
Previously in Jepsen , we discussed Riak . Now we’ll review and integrate our findings.
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Jepsen: Postgres
Previously on Jepsen , we introduced the problem of network partitions . Here, we demonstrate that a few transactions which “fail” during the start of a partition may have actually succeeded.
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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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Data Science of the Facebook World
Stephen Wolfram shares interesting Facebook data analysis finds from the Data Donor program of Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook.
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Top Reasons I like Postgres Over SQL Server
While at Waza this year, I had a chance to talk to my friend Guillaume Roques. In addition to talking about SalesForce, we took advantage of our mutual .NET backgrounds to discuss Microsoft. We did the typically uncompromising praise of The Gu and how far Azure has come along in the last 18 months… and of course we…
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No, ZFS really doesn't need an fsck tool
(This blog entry has been recovered for the sole purpose of repairing a link in Hackernews. This blog entry is otherwise hidden on the website. 2026-04-13)
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Web Scraping 101 with Python
A beginner's guide to getting started with web scraping using Python and BeautifulSoup.
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Deep Inside: A Study of 10,000 Pornstars and Their Careers
An analysis and infographic of 10,000 porn stars and adult films, revealing what the average adult performer looks like and does on film.
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How I work with Postgres – psql, My PostgreSQL Admin
On at least a weekly basis and not uncommonly multiple times in a single week I get this question: @neilmiddleton I’ve been hunting for a nice PG interface that works within other things. PGAdmin kinda works, except the SQL editor is a piece of shit Sometimes it leans more to, what is the Sequel Pro equivilant for…
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Julia, I love you (2012)
Julia is a new language for scientific computing that is winning praise from a slew of very smart people, including Harlan Harris, Chris Fonnesbeck, Douglas Bates, Vince Buffalo and Shane Conway. As a language, it has lofty design goals, which, if attained, will make it noticeably superior to Matlab, R and Python for…
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More on Postgres Performance
If you missed my previous post on Understanding Postgres Performance its a great starting point. On this particular post I’m going to dig in to some real life examples of optimizing queries and indexes. It all starts with stats I wrote about some of the great new features in Postgres 9.2 in the recent announcement on…