Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,888 posts.

Databases & Data
Any year
216

Ways Data Projects Fail

Introduction Data science continues to generate excitement and yet real-world results can often disappoint business stakeholders. How can we mitigate risk and ensure results match expectations? Working as a technical data scientist at the interface between R&D and commercial operations has given me an insight into the…

217

Text Editor Data Structures

Text editors can be an interesting challenge to program. The types of problems that text editors need to solve can range from trivial to mind-bogglingly difficult. Recently, I have been on something of a spiritual journey to rework some internal data structures in an editor I have been building, specifically the most…

223

DuckDB as the New jq

Recently, I’ve been interested in the DuckDB project (like a SQLite geared towards data applications). And one of the amazing features is that it has many data importers included without requiring extra dependencies. This means it can natively read and parse JSON as a database table, among many other formats.

224

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?

237

Redis is fast – I'll cache in Postgres

There are books & many articles online, like this one arguing for using Postgres for everything. I thought I’d take a look at one use case - using Postgres instead of Redis for caching. I work with APIs quite a bit, so I’d build a super simple HTTP server that responds with data from that cache. I’d start from Redis…