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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 138 posts.
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Anonymized data is rarely anonymous
Justin Sherman for Wired points out the farce that is anonymized data: Data on hundreds of millions of Americans’ races, genders, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, political beliefs, int…
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Consider SQLite
If you were creating a web app from scratch today, what database would you use? Probably the most frequent answer I see to this is Postgres, although there are a wide range of common answers: MySQL, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, etc. Today I want you to consider: what if SQLite would do just fine?
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Advent of Code Surveys: Results
Results dashboard with the yearly (unofficial) Advent of Code participant survey
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Everything I've seen on optimizing Postgres on ZFS
Looking to run Postgres on ZFS? I've gathered some of the information and sage advice out there to give you a head start on figuring out how to do it safely and efficiently.
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Why start a new database conference?
Somehow I am organizing a conference called Have you tried rubbing a database on it?
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Postgres, Kafka, and a mysterious 100 GB
Lately I’ve been trying to learn more about Amazon Web Services (AWS) and some other popular technologies. Since I work at a large tech company, I spend a lot of my professional time using pr…
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Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people? English adults under 60 who have watched the 1984 Ghostbusters movie are dying at twice the rate of people who have watched the 2021 Ghostbusters move the same age.And have been for six months. The chart may seem unbelievable or impossible but it is correct…
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Things I learned from building a production database
In 2017, I went to Facebook on a sabbatical from my faculty position at Yale. I created a team to build a storage system called Delos at the bottom of the Facebook stack (think of it as Facebook’s version of Chubby). We hit production with a 3-person team in less than a year; and subsequently scaled the team to 30+…
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Back to basics: Writing an application using Go and PostgreSQL
Learn how to use PostgreSQL with the Go programming language using the pgx driver and toolkit in a very productive manner. Furthermore, with the provided source code, you'll be able to learn how to write efficient and sound unit and integration tests, ready to be run locally or on a Continuous Integration environment…
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One of these JPEGs is not like the other
“JPEG” or the image encoding specification by the “Joint Photographic Experts Group” (JPEG) is a truly universal format at this stage. You really cannot go very far on the internet without seeing a JPEG file. The amount of content encoded in JPEGs must be surely biblical by now. If there is one thing that is going to…
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Breakdown of data on homeless populations across the U.S.
Many people see a homelessness crisis, but what does the data say? We examine different locations, rates of change, types of homelessness, and mental health and substance abuse issues.
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Lesser-known Postgres features
Features you already have but may not know about!
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Zillow, Prophet, time series, and prices
So I made a mildly controversial tweet. Lots of people enjoyed it, but the LinkedIn-adjacent section of data science Twitter is not happy about it. I want to provide as much context for it as I can…
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Spending $5k to learn how database indexes work
At Superwall we’re building an SDK to help App Developers increase their revenue by showing the right offer to the right person at the right time. Follow me on twitter for little tips and articles like this one.
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Tao: Facebook’s distributed data store for the social graph
The papers over the next few weeks will be from (or related to) research from VLDB 2021 - on the horizon is one of my favorite systems conferences SOSP . As always, feel free to reach out on Twitter with feedback or suggestions about papers to read! These paper reviews can be delivered weekly to your inbox , or you…
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Comparing SQLite, DuckDB and Arrow with UN trade data
This is not a competition, is just to show how to use the hardware with relative efficiency, being the idea is to show something collaborative rather than competitive.
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Which jobs most often pair together among married couples
Find out which jobs most often pair together among married couples.
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EBCDIC is incompatible with GDPR
Welcome to acronym city! The Court of Appeal of Brussels has made an interesting ruling. A customer complained that their bank was spelling the customer's name incorrectly. The bank didn't have support for diacritical marks. Things like á, è, ô, ü, ç etc. Those accents are common in many languages. So it was a little…
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Deleting an S3 Bucket Costs Money
Deleting an S3 bucket is harder than you think, and may even cost you money.
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Roapi: An API Server for Static Datasets
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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FoundationDB: A distributed unbundled transactional key value store
FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store Zhou, et al., 2021
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Word-Aligned Bloom Filters
Programmers often need to 'filter out' data. Suppose that you are given a database of users where only a small percentage are 'paying customers' (say 5% or less). You can write an SQL query to check whether a given user is indeed a paying customer, but it might require a round trip to your database … Continue reading…
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R, OpenMP, MKL, Disaster
The answer should be something close to ALPHA , i.e. 0.01 . What R was printing out was weird numbers like 1e-10 .
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Dublin Core's dirty little secret (2010)
[This is part two in a series — you should read part 1 first for context and then you might go on to part 3.] The Dublin Core — metadata made dumb Just when librarians were in despair o…