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Get me out of data hell
It is 9:59 AM in Melbourne, 9th October, 2024. Sunlight filters through my windows, illuminating swirling motes of dust across my living room. There is a cup of tea in my hand. I take a sip and savor it.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,223 posts.
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A graph that should be front-page news
Every so often the Earth produces a signal that is impossible to ignore. This graph is one of them. It shows sea-surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific, one of the most important parts of the Earth's climate system. Each blue line represents a different year since 1982. The red line is…
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How Discord Stores Billions of Messages (2017)
Discover the latest news and app updates, stories, company insights, and plenty more about Discord, all in one place.
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ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or TAB delimited text
ASCII delimited text solves the problems exporting and importing structured text files and is part of the design of the character set. Unfortunately a lot of people and systems use CSV and other pr…
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I logged my activities at 15-minute intervals for the whole year
What do I actually do with my time? How productive am I? I logged everything I did in 2020 and got some pretty cool data out of this.
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How percentile approximation works and why it's more useful than averages
What percentile approximations are, how percentiles work in PostgreSQL, and calculating them efficiently on time-series data.
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Faster CRDTs: An Adventure in Optimization
Some researchers in France put together a comparison showing lots of ways you could implement realtime collaborative editing (like Google Docs). They implemented lots of algorithms - CRDTs and OT algorithms and stuff. And they benchmarked them all to see how they perform. (Cool!!) Some algorithms worked reasonably…
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Go ahead, self-host Postgres
Self-hosting Postgres is simpler and cheaper than managed services suggest, with comparable reliability and better performance tunability.
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JSONB has landed
JSONB is a rewrite of the SQLite JSON functions that, depending on usage patterns, could be several times faster than the original JSON functions. This enhancement has now landed on trunk .
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Embeddings: What they are and why they matter
Embeddings are a really neat trick that often come wrapped in a pile of intimidating jargon. If you can make it through that jargon, they unlock powerful and exciting techniques …
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Cloudflare R2 storage: Rapid and reliable object storage, minus the egress fees
Introducing Cloudflare’s S3-compatible Object Storage service, with zero egress bandwidth charges and automatic migration from S3-compatible services.
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SQLite Internals: Pages and B-trees
Let's open a hex editor and see what this thing is made of
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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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PostgreSQL 17
The [PostgreSQL Global Development Group](https://www.postgresql.org) today announced the release of [PostgreSQL 17](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/17/release-17.html), the latest version of the world's most advanced …
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PostgreSQL 9.5: UPSERT, Row Level Security, and Big Data
**7 JANUARY 2016**: The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces the release of PostgreSQL 9.5. This release adds UPSERT capability, Row …
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Stop syncing everything
Discover Graft, an open-source transactional storage engine built to solve the challenges of syncing data at the edge. Inspired by lessons from SQLSync, Graft enables lazy, partial, and strongly consistent replication—allowing edge applications to sync only the data they need, exactly when they need it.
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PostgreSQL 15
**October 13, 2022** - The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today announced the release of [PostgreSQL 15](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/15/release-15.html), the latest version of …
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Soft deletion probably isn't worth it
The traditional soft deletion pattern using <code>deleted_at</code> columns leaks into code, curbs the usefulness of foreign keys, and makes data removal difficult. Luckily, there’s an alternative.
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LiteFS
We are building a distributed file system for your SQLite databases. Kinda weird, huh?
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Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
The 2024 Year End Drive Stats Report is here. See the the latest annualized failure rates and data insights for the Backblaze drive fleet.
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In MySQL, use “utf8mb4” instead of “utf8” (2016)
Today’s bug: I tried to store a UTF-8 string in a MariaDB “utf8”-encoded database, and Rails raised a bizarre error:
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Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs
With B2 Cloud Storage S3 Compatible APIs, we’re making the choice for something different a no-brainer.
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When your data doesn’t fit in memory: the basic techniques
You can process data that doesn’t fit in memory by using four basic techniques: spending money, compression, chunking, and indexing.
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A search engine in 80 lines of Python
In this post I explain how I built a search engine from scratch using python. The resulting search engine is used to search in the posts of the blogs I follow.