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Vector databases are the wrong abstraction
Today’s vector databases disconnect embeddings from their source data. We should treat embeddings more like database indexes—here’s how.
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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Delivering Billions of Messages Exactly Once
The single requirement of all data pipelines is that they cannot lose data. Data can usually be delayed or re-ordered–but never dropped.
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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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View Counting at Reddit
Get the latest product news, company announcements, and user insights from the official Reddit blog.
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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.
249
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…
250
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.
252
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 …
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Advent of Code 2024 in pure SQL
A blog by and for database architects.
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The One Billion Row Challenge
Update Jan 4: Wow, this thing really took off! 1BRC is discussed at a couple of places on the internet, including Hacker News, lobste.rs, and Reddit. For folks to show-case non-Java solutions, there …
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Multi-node TimescaleDB is now free
Fully managed PostgreSQL from the creators of TimescaleDB. 99.9% uptime SLA, 10,000+ IOPS, columnar compression up to 95%, and built-in search. Try it free.
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DuckDB Internals Part 1
Walk through DuckDB's internals: how it skips serialization overhead, parses and optimizes SQL, and stores data in columnar row groups with zone maps.
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A Jev that can ask Opus for help gives Opus accuracy at 4x lower cost
We tested Jev and GPT-6 Luna as judges for identity resolution. A hybrid of Jev and Claude Opus matched frontier accuracy at over 4x lower cost.
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How Does Sqlite Work? (2014)
How does SQLite work? Part 1: pages!
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The internals of PostgreSQL
After a temporary stay in Japan to focus on my health and personal responsibilities, I am fully recovered, ready, and excited to work abroad again.
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SciPy builds for Python 3.12 on Windows are a minor miracle
Moving SciPy to Meson meant finding a different Fortran compiler on Windows, which was particularly tricky to pull off for conda-forge. This blog tells the story about how things looked pretty grim for the Python 3.12 release, and how things ended up working out just in the nick of time.
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Recently minted database technologies that I find intriguing
I’m a huge fan of databases, so much so that I’ve written a book on so-called “NoSQL” databases, I spent some of my most fruitful years in tech working on the highly influential distributed database Riak , and I even built a database called Purple last year just for fun.
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A Minimalist Guide to SQLite
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Polars 2.0
The release Python Polars 2.0, bringing the streaming engine, out-of-core and first class blazingly fast SQL support
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Which jobs most often pair together among married couples
Find out which jobs most often pair together among married couples.
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Elasticsearch 1.0.0 released
Powered by Elasticsearch. Ready to deploy your data? Start free.
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Lessons learned from sharding Postgres at Notion
With an effort to make Notion faster and more reliable for years to come — we migrated Notion’s PostgreSQL monolith into a horizontally-partitioned database fleet.
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Postgres is a great pub/sub and job server (2019)
If you need a publish/subscribe or job server at any point in your project, try using Postgres. It'll give you lots of data integrity and performance guarantees, and it doesn't require you or your team learning any new technology.
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Cosmologically Unique IDs
We are an exploratory species, just past the solar system now, but perhaps one day we will look back and call our galaxy merely the first. There are many problems to solve along the way, and today we will look at one very small one. How do we assign IDs to devices (or any object) so the IDs are guaranteed to always be…