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The only scalable delete in Postgres is DROP TABLE
Large DELETEs add work instead of reclaiming it. Structure your database so deletion becomes DROP TABLE or TRUNCATE.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,224 posts.
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Spanish traders set the standard for GnuCash database design
TLDR: Spanish traders in the 1600s did not want to count their thumbs, which influenced GnuCash's database design choices in 1997. Much like a horse's arse set the standard for railways . How seemingly odd design turns out to be a genius solution that serves people pretty well.
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The perils of UUID primary keys in SQLite
A blog mostly about Clojure programming
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Looking Forward to Postgres 19: Query Hints
Postgres 19 brings plan advice: the query hints the Postgres community held off on for 15 years. Shaun Thomas covers the 15-year debate, pg_plan_advice, pg_stash_advice, and how to use them.
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Speculative KV coding: losslessly compressing KV cache by up to ~4×
Lossless compression of a target model's KV cache by up to 4×, using a cheaper predictor model to drive an arithmetic coder.
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Redis 8.8: New array data structure, rate limiter, performance improvements
Redis 8.8 is now available in Open Source. Explore the new array data type, window counter rate limiter, streams NACK, and more performance-focused updates.
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databow: a Rust CLI to query any database with an ADBC driver
One command-line tool to query them all, built with Rust and ADBC
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How we index images for RAG
Reading the screenshots, diagrams and tables in technical documentation for LLMs
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It's Not Just X. It's Y
Against the Quantification of Integrity When the measure of language becomes its target, it ceases to be good language. 💡Nerd Rating: 1/5. I discuss the origins of certain linguistic tics in LLMs and what it means for writing, student assessment, and thinking. "It's not x, it's y.
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Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years
The Only Programming Language Built on Mathematics, Not Fashion
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SQLite is all you need for durable workflows
DBOS recently argued that Postgres is all you need for durable execution: if you already trust your database, you do not need a separate orchestration tier. I a…
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Building durable workflows on Postgres
Explaining the concept of a Postgres-backed durable execution system like DBOS and comparing it to external workflow orchestration systems like Temporal.
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I analysed 20 years of my chats
Importing 1.2 million messages from Telegram, VK, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter into a structured Obsidian vault with local LLM inference - to measure how my friendships work with decay curves, vocabulary shifts, directional sentiment, and conflict rates.
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Matrix Multiplications on GPUs Run Faster When Given “Predictable” Data (2024)
Great minds discuss flops per watt.
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SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud
The actual queries I run when I'm hunting fraud in transaction data. Velocity, impossible distances, suspicious amounts, merchant clusters, off-hours buys, and window functions.
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Quack: The DuckDB Client-Server Protocol
DuckDB instances can now talk to each other using the Quack remote protocol. This lets you run DuckDB in a client-server setup with multiple concurrent writers. In DuckDB's spirit, Quack is simple to set up and builds on proven technologies such as HTTP. It's also fast, which allows it to support workloads ranging…
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Replacing a 3 GB SQLite db with a 10 MB FST (finite state transducer) binary
Note for numberphiles: all numbers have been rounded to their first significant digit, because I’m a fan of Rob Eastaway’s “zequals” method of getting to the point when it comes to estimation. It’s much more valuable to walk away with the heuristic “some dude got a 300x memory reduction by swapping out a database he…
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Gemini API File Search is now multimodal
Updates to the Gemini API File Search tool makes building efficient, multimodal file retrieval systems easier for developers.
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Lakebase architecture delivers faster Postgres writes
How Lakebase's storage architecture pushes down full page write generation to cut WAL traffic by 94% and boost Postgres write throughput by up to 5x.
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dBase: 1979-2026
Litigation, neglect killed dBase. The dBase newsgroup servers went off-line since November 2025. Court-smart dBase vendors and AI accelerated the fall.
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SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format
SQLite is a Recommended Storage Format for datasets according to the US Library of Congress . Further information:
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AI didn't delete your database, you did
Last week, a tweet went viral showing a guy claiming that a Cursor/Claude agent deleted his company's production database. We watched from the sidelines as he tried to get a confession from the agent:
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A polynomial autoencoder beats PCA on transformer embeddings
A closed-form autoencoder: PCA encoder + quadratic Ridge decoder. On FiQA it gives 4× compression of mxbai-embed-large-v1 at -0.88 p.p. NDCG@10, +1.34 p.p. over PCA. No SGD, no neural networks.
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Does Postgres Scale?
Benchmarking the workflow execution and workflow queueing scalability of a single Postgres server.
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Full-Text Search with DuckDB
Pete Doherty is a NYC based software developer
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Linux 7.0 Broke PostgreSQL: The Preemption Regression Explained
Linux 7.0 delivered roughly half the throughput of Linux 6.x on the same hardware and workload.