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Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating
The views expressed in this newsletter are solely my own, and do not represent the views of my employer.
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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SQL Maxis: Why We Ditched RabbitMQ and Replaced It with a Postgres Queue
Embracing our SQL Maxi nature: how we ripped out RabbitMQ from our infrastructure and replaced it with a Postgres queue.
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Timestral: Mistral's time-series foundation models
State-of-the-art probabilistic forecasting in four sizes (5M–209M params), CPU-efficient, zero-shot ready.
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Databases in 2024: A Year in Review
Andy rises from the ashes of his dead startup and discusses what happened in 2024 in the database game.
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We Can Do Better Than SQL
The questions we often hear are "Why create a new query language?" and "What's wrong with SQL?". This blog post contains answers to both.
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A database for 2022
we moved from etcd to SQLite for a simpler, more scalable database solution. Learn about Litestream, live replication, and lessons learned.
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Postgres as a graph database
You don't need Neo4j for graph data. Walking through nodes, edges, and recursive traversals in plain Postgres, with working SQL.
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An intro to DeepSeek's distributed file system
Personal website for some random tidbits I work on
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/dev/null is an ACID compliant database
/dev/null is web scale
131
PostgreSQL 11 Released
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today announced the release of PostgreSQL 11, the latest version of the world’s most advanced …
132
SQLite small blob storage: 35% Faster Than the Filesystem
SQLite reads and writes small blobs (for example, thumbnail images) 35% faster¹ than the same blobs can be read from or written to individual files on disk using fread() or fwrite().
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Pev: Postgres ‘Explain’ Visualizer (2016)
Postgres Explain Visualizer (Pev) is a tool I wrote to make EXPLAIN output easier to grok. It creates a graphical representation of the query plan.
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Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4
AWS’s Sergey Melnik, along with HN commenters matashii and Ants Aasma, have identified the cause of Long Fork in PostgreSQL clusters. As described a 2013 mailing list post , the order in which a PostgreSQL primary makes transactions visible is determined by an in-memory lock. Secondaries, however, make transactions…
135
Building a data team at a mid-stage startup
You are brought into a startup to run their three-person data team. This is a story about teams and organization, and how you spend a year getting the team to a good place.
136
Most data work seems fundamentally worthless
After going viral, there is one comment I'd like to address. One guy pointed out how comfortable this work seemed, how high the pay was, and said I am out-of-touch and privileged. To that I say, yes, obviously . I moved to the first-world to have first-world problems. Mission accomplished.
137
Call Me Maybe: MongoDB Stale Reads
Please note: our followup analysis of 3.4.0-rc3 revealed additional faults in MongoDB’s replication algorithms which could lead to the loss of acknowledged documents–even with Majority Write Concern, journaling, and fsynced writes.
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Jepsen: MongoDB 4.2.6
2020-05-26: MongoDB identified a bug in the transaction retry mechanism which they believe was responsible for the anomalies observed in this report; a patch is scheduled for 4.2.8.
139
Practical SQL for Data Analysis
What you can do without Pandas
140
Postgres Full-Text Search: A search engine in a database
With Postgres, you don't need to immediately look farther than your own database management system for a full-text search solution. If you haven't yet given Postgres' built-in full-text search a try, read on for a simple intro.
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What every software engineer should know about Apache Kafka
To help fellow engineers wrap their head around Apache Kafka and event streaming, I wrote a 4-part series on the Confluent blog on Kafka’s core fundamentals....
144
All the data can be yours: reverse engineering APIs
I’ve built a lot of unofficial software for my schools, Brown University and previously Macalester College. To name a few: an “everything app” called 75grand with dining hall menus, Moodle assignments, building hours, an event calendar, and more; two unfinished course catalogs; and a university shuttle tracker. None…
145
Be Careful with UUID or GUID as Primary Keys
You can use of UUIDs as the primary key to avoid database scale problems. But should you? I propose an alternative.
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How we decreased GitLab repo backup times from 48 hours to 41 minutes
Learn how we tracked a performance bottleneck to a 15-year-old Git function and fixed it, leading to enhanced efficiency that supports more robust backup strategies and can reduce risk.
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I analyzed hospital price lists so you didn't have to
Blog for DoltHub, a website hosting databases made with Dolt, an open-source version-controlled SQL database with Git-like semantics.
148
Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis
Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis is the largest and most detailed measurement of online tracking to date. We measure stateful (cookie-based) and stateless (fingerprinting-based) tracking, the effect of browser privacy tools, and "cookie syncing". This measurement is made possible by our web…
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D1: Our SQL database
Today, we’re excited to announce D1, Cloudflare’s first SQL database, designed for Cloudflare Workers
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Weld: Accelerating numpy, scikit and pandas as much as 100x with Rust and LLVM
Lambdaclass's blog about distributed systems, machine learning, compilers, operating systems, security and cryptography.