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An intro to DeepSeek's distributed file system
Personal website for some random tidbits I work on
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,888 posts.
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Data centers contain 90% crap data
We need to talk about the data. Crap data. We’re destroying our environment to create and store trillions of blurred images, half-baked videos, rip-off AI ‘songs’, rip-off AI animations, videos and images, emails with mega attachments, never-to-be-watched-again presentations, never-to-be-read-again reports, files and…
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Database Protocols Are Underwhelming
If you’ve been in this trade for a while, you have probably seen dozens of debates on the merits and problems of SQL as a relational database query language. As an ORM maintainer, I have a few gripes with SQL, but overall it is workable, and anyway, it has so much inertia that there’s no point fantasizing about a…
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MySQL transactions per second vs. fsyncs per second (2020)
Just wondering how many transactions or writes per second MySQL can handle? While it depends on many factors, fundamentally, about as many transactions as MySQL can commit to disk per second. A modern disk can do ~1000 fsyncs per second , but MySQL will group multiple writes with each fsync. An okay rule-of-thumb…
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Selective async commits in PostgreSQL – balancing durability and performance
Safely leverage PostgreSQL's asynchronous commit for significant performance gains
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Decrypting encrypted files from Akira ransomware using a bunch of GPUs
I recently helped a company recover their data from the Akira ransomware without paying the ransom. I'm sharing how I did it, along with the full source code. Update: since this article was written, a new version of Akira ransomware has appeared that can't be decrypted with this method The c
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In S3 simplicity is table stakes
From simple object storage to sophisticated table management, builders have always shaped S3's evolution. Andy Warfield discusses why making complex systems simple remains our north star at AWS.
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Wyvern's Open Satellite Feed
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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You might not need Redis
Redis is arguably the most well regarded tech of all. But many times you do not need Redis. Here are 3 examples from my last 3 jobs.
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The program is the database is the interface
That transfer to John Smith isn't covered by any of the tagging rules. So I select the date, switch to the editor window and paste the date into the date->tag definition:
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Satellogic's Open Satellite Feed
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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DeepSeek's smallpond: Bringing Distributed Computing to DuckDB
DeepSeek is pushing DuckDB beyond its single-node roots with smallpond, a new, simple approach to distributed compute. But does it solve the scalability challenge—or introduce new trade-offs?
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The power of interning: making a time series database smaller
This week-end project started by browsing the open-data repository of Paris’ public transport network, which contains various APIs to query real-time departures, current disruptions, etc.The data reuse section caught my eye, as it features external projects that use this open data.In particular, the RATP status…
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Losing a 5-year-long Illinois FOIA lawsuit for database schemas
Thomas Ptacek, a friend and expert witness in this lawsuit summed it up best in the court's hallway while walking within three feet of opposing counsel: "This is fucking stupid" .
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A data analysis of speeches at the Oscars
I analysed almost 2,000 Oscar speeches to discover if the claim that Harvey Weinstein was thanked more often than God is true. Plus, we'll find out which Hollywood icon is bigger than both of them.
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Hard problems that reduce to document ranking
There are two claims I’d like to make: LLMs can be used effectively1 for listwise document ranking. Some complex problems can (surprisingly) be solved by transforming them into document ranking problems. I’ve primarily explored both of these claims in the context of using patch diffing to locate N-day…
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The best way to use text embeddings portably is with Parquet and Polars
Never store embeddings in a CSV!
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Build your own SQLite in Rust, Part 5: Evaluating queries
In the previous posts, we've explored the SQLite file format and built a simple SQL parser. It's time to put these pieces together and implement a query…
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Kafka at the low end: how bad can it get?
There is oft-quoted advice that Kafka does poorly as a job queue. I’ve experienced this myself, and I wanted to formalize it a bit.
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Representing Graphs in PostgreSQL
Some tricks and techniques for working with graph or tree like data in Postgresql
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Searchcode.com’s SQLite database is probably 6 terabytes bigger than yours
searchcode.com’s SQLite database is probably one of the largest in the world, at least for a public facing website. It’s actual size is 6.4 TB. Which is probably 6 terabytes bigger than yours. …
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The secret ingredients of word2vec (2016)
Word2vec is a pervasive tool for learning word embeddings. Its success, however, is mostly due to particular architecture choices. Transferring these choices to traditional distributional methods makes them competitive with popular word embedding methods.
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Siren Call of SQLite on the Server
At Terrateam, we are big fans of Fly.io. The service is hosted there and it’s served us well. Just deploy your TOML file, get your infrastructure, do something else with the rest of your day. One of the interesting sides of Fly is that they invest heavily in server-side SQLite. They’ve written a number of blog posts…
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Visualizing data is an art
The case for less rigor and more nuance.
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League of Legends data scraping the hard and tedious way for fun
Personal website for some random tidbits I work on
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How about trailing commas in SQL?
Anecdotally, this might be the most requested feature in SQL: Allow some trailing commas.
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Transformer – Spreadsheet
Make your own AI by hand ✍️ exercises
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Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything
Sergey Filimonov's blog