New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,225 posts.
Most common words unique to 1-star and 5-star App Store reviews
I wrote a script to crawl U.S. App Store customer reviews for the top 100 apps from every category (minus duplicates) and compute the most common words in 1-star and 5-star reviews, excluding words that were also common in 3-star reviews.
NoSQL, Heroku, and You
Why NoSQL Matters “NoSQL” is a label which encompasses a wave of innovation now happening in the database space. The NoSQL movement has sparked a whirlwind
Edward Tufte: Sparklines: theory and practice
A forum moderated by author and artist Edward Tufte, including discussion and questions dealing with information design.
Scalable ACID
(This post is coauthored by Alexander Thomson and Daniel Abadi ) It is a poorly kept secret that NoSQL is not really about eliminating SQL ...
A Story of O(racle)
In recent days I’ve been thinking of JavaOne, as we kicked it around and decided we just couldn’t send speakers ; and of Oracle OpenWorld , to which JavaOne will now serve as an appendage. It reminded me of a conversation I had last year about Oracle.
Racket vs Clojure (it's all about the data structures)
I've been asked by several people to explain why I use Clojure for my professional work rather than Racket. ABOUT RACKET I have been using R...
A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Database Theory
William Kent, "A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Database Theory", Communications of the ACM 26(2), Feb. 1983, 120-125. Also IBM Technical Report TR03.159, Aug. 1981. Also presented at SHARE 62, March 1984, Anaheim, California. Also in A.R. Hurson, L.L. Miller and S.H. Pakzad, Parallel Architectures…
Dammit, MySQL
Update May 2018: This is more rant-ish than I would write now, but it’s my only post to hit the front page of HackerNews (it got to the number 2 spot back in 2010; I saved screenshots), so has a soft-place in my heart.
Google acquires Metaweb (Freebase)
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
What people want (according to Google Suggest)
Mergesort and Quicksort are two well-known sorting algorithms, familiar to both researchers and practitioners. Both are typically presented as examples of divide and conquer . Other than this fact, they are usually not seen to be very closely related. Let’s look at Mergesort and Quicksort in a somewhat unusual way…
In defence of SQL
SQL is ugly but powerful, ORM is genuinely dumb, and "NoSQL" should really be called OMADS: Obviously More Appropriate Data Stores. Start every project with an RDBMS, add specialized stores where they fit, and stop apologizing for using SQL. Forty years on, nothing beats it for ad-hoc questions about your data.
Data visualization - 9 Years of Sleep
For the last ten years or so, I used to turn on my PC when I came home from school or work and shut it down again right before I went to bed. So most of the time when my PC is running, I'm awake. I've also been idling in IRC for as long as I had Internet – when my PC is running, so is my IRC client.
Stop Words as Social Signals (a result that goes against IR common knowledge)
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