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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,888 posts.
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PostgreSQL Scalability: Towards Millions TPS
PostgreSQL scalability on multicore and multisocket machines became a subject of optimization long time ago once such machines became widely used. This blog post shows brief history of vertical scalability improvements between versions 8.0 and 8.4. PostgreSQL 9.2 had very noticeable scalability improvement. Thanks to…
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Accounting for Computer Scientists
Every educated person really ought to have a basic understanding of accounting. Just like maths, science, programming, music, literature, history, etc., it’s one of those things which helps you make sense of the world. Although dealing with money is not much fun, it’s an unavoidable part of life, so you might as well…
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New Features Coming in PostgreSQL 10
The list of new features coming in PostgreSQL 10 is extremely impressive. I've been involved in the PostgreSQL project since the 8.4 releas...
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The City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32M Emails for $40
In my last post, I wrote about my adventure of requesting metadata for both phone calls and emails from the City of Chicago Office of the Mayor. The work there - and its associated frustration - sent me down a path of sending requests throughout the US to both learn whether these sorts of problems are systemic…
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RAG Is Simpler Than You Think
Six approaches to retrieval-based AI, from minimal to elaborate
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I put my whole life into a single database
Back in 2019, I started collecting all kinds of metrics about my life. Every single day for the last 2.5 years I tracked over 100 different data types - ranging from fitness & nutrition to social life, computer usage and weather.
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Simple Anomaly Detection Using Plain SQL
Identify Problems Before They Become Disasters
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NewSQL databases fail to guarantee consistency and I blame Spanner
(Spanner vs. Calvin, Part 2) [TL;DR I wrote a post in 2017 that discussed Spanner vs. Calvin that focused on performance differences. Th...
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A faster way to copy SQLite databases between computers
Dumping a SQLite database to a text file can make it much smaller, which means you can download it faster.
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How bloom filters made SQLite 10x faster
This is the fascinating story of how researchers used Bloom filters cleverly to make SQLite 10x faster for analytical queries. These are my five-minute notes on the paper SQLite: Past, Present, and Future
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65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform
Sentiment analysis of 32,000 Hacker News posts shows 65% skew negative and earn 27% more points. Six transformer and LLM models tested, full data included.
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Against SQL
But SQL is the only widely-used implementation of the relational model, and it is:
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OpenStreetMap's New Vector Tiles
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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What's New in SQLite 3.35
Math functions, column removal and RETURNING clause.
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DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
DuckDB’s spatial extension cut geo setup to two lines of SQL, and interest in geospatial data turned upward the moment it shipped.
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Inappropriate Uses of Google Trends
Alternatively titled ‘Be aware of context, and maybe start using Google AdWords’ Instead
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What I wish someone told me about Postgres
I’ve been working professionally for the better part of a decade on web apps and, in that time, I’ve had to learn how to use a lot of different systems and tools. During that education, I found that the official documentation typically proved to be the most helpful.
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How not to structure database-backed web apps: performance bugs in the wild
How not to structure your database-backed web applications: a study of performance bugs in the wild Yang et al., ICSE’18 This is a fascinating study of the problems people get into when using…
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Visualizing all books of the world in ISBN-Space
Libraries have been trying to collect humanity’s knowledge almost since the invention of writing. In the digital age, it might actually be possible to create a comprehensive collection of all human writing that meets certain criteria. That’s what shadow libraries do - collect and share as many
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Event Sourcing is Hard
Despite it being sold as the one true path, event sourcing comes with some pain points when you try to put its ideas into production.
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The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
I was pleasantly surprised when somebody shared my traveling salesman animation to reddit and the post made it all the way to reddit’s default front page (i.e. the top 25). The gif racked up over 1.3 …