New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,224 posts.
The Rise and Fall of the OLAP Cube (2020)
A definitive history of the rise of the OLAP cube, how it's affected our industry, and what comes after.
Write a time-series database engine from scratch
It covers how to make a time-series database engine from scratch
Make Patterns Pop Out of Heatmaps with Seriation (2018)
One of the easiest ways to start visualizing data is to turn a table into a heatmap: every cell gets a colour, the higher the number the brighter the colour. Unfortunately, this is often a fairly unrewarding exercise, yielding graphics that look like plaid or tartan fabric. Part of the problem is that the rows and…
The Untold Story of SQLite
On today's show, I'm talking to Richard Hipp about surviving becoming core infrastructure for the world. SQLite is everywhere. It's in your web browser, it's in your phone, it's probably in your car, and it's definitely in commercial planes. It's where your iMessages and WhatsApp messages are stored, and if you do a…
Protecting reserved roles with PostgreSQL Hooks
Using Postgres Hooks to protect functionality in your Postgres database.
Globally Distributed Postgres
Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.
A Docker footgun led to a vandal deleting NewsBlur's MongoDB database
tl;dr: A vandal deleted NewsBlur’s MongoDB database during a migration. No data was stolen or lost.
Querying Parquet with Precision Using DuckDB
DuckDB, a free and open source analytical data management system, can run SQL queries directly on Parquet files and automatically take advantage of the advanced features of the Parquet format.
Hierarchical Structures in PostgreSQL (2020)
Modelling hierarchical/team/categorical/tag data with arbitrary depths.
Rally, a novel privacy-first data sharing platform
Mozilla teams up with Princeton University researchers to enable crowdsourced science for public good; collaborates with research groups at Princeton, Stan
FastText is the best text classification library for a quick baseline
Text classification is a very frequent use case for machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). It’s used for things like spam detection in emails, sentiment analysis for social media posts, or intent detection in chat bots. In this series I am going to compare several libraries that can be used to…
AuthZ: Scalable permissions system
How we built an authorization system based on Google Zanzibar
Julia: Faster than Fortran, cleaner than Numpy
I'm super enthusiastic about Julia after running this comparison of Julia vs Numpy vs Fortran, for performance and code simplicity.
Joining CSV and JSON data with an in-memory SQLite database
The new sqlite-utils memory command can import CSV and JSON data directly into an in-memory SQLite database, combine and query it using SQL and output the results as CSV, JSON …
Zero-downtime schema migrations in Postgres using views
Schema migrations are tricky, especially when planned downtime is not an option. Changes need to be carefully designed to stay backwards compatible so that…
New Machine Learning Gems for Ruby
In August, I set out to improve the machine learning ecosystem for Ruby and wasn’t sure where it would go. Over the next 5 months, I ended up...
Scaling Relational SQL Databases (2020)
A list of things that we can do when we need to scale a SQL database.
Do you really need Redis? How to get away with just PostgreSQL
It's a common architecture to have PostgreSQL and Redis serve as the backbone of your app, but PostgreSQL may be capable of everything you use Redis for.
Rqlite 6.0: the evolution of a distributed database design
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. v6.0.0 is out now and makes clustering more robust. It also lays the foundation for more important features. What's new in 6.0? 6.0 multiplexes multiple logical connections between rqlite nodes…
No general method to detect fraud
The parts of a convincing deception
Text Classification by Data Compression
Edit – I posted this on Hackernews and got some valuable feedback. Many brought up the fact that you should be able to reuse the internal state of the compressor instead of recompressing the training …
The pedantic checklist for changing your data model in a web application
Let's say you have a web app with some database. In your database you have an Invoice model, where you store things you are charging your customers.
Web Applications from the Future: A Database in the Browser
If progress follows it's usual strategy, then whatever is difficult and valuable to do today will become easy and normal tomorrow. I imagine we'll discover new abstractions, which will make writing Google Docs as easy as the average web app is today.
How we achieved write speeds of 1.4M rows per second
The detailed story of how to build a vector-based storage model from scratch.