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Topics /
Databases & Data
The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 1,888 posts.
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Modes, Medians and Means: A Unifying Perspective
Introduction / Warning Link to heading Any traditional introductory statistics course will teach students the definitions of modes, medians and means. But, because introductory courses can’t assume that students have much mathematical maturity, the close relationship between these three summary statistics can’t be…
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Common statistical tests are linear models
By Jonas Kristoffer Lindeløv ( blog , profile ). Last updated: 28 June, 2019 (See changelog ). Check out the Python version and the Twitter summary .
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Write a time-series database engine from scratch
It covers how to make a time-series database engine from scratch
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I don't need your query language
Seriously, I don't. I'd prefer SQL.
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Every GPU That Mattered
49 graphics cards. 30 years. From Quake to Cyberpunk.
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50 years later, is two-phase locking the best we can do?
Two phase locking (2PL) was the first of the general-purpose Concurrency Controls to be invented which provided Serializability. In fact, 2P...
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Google's new pipe syntax in SQL
A new paper from Google Research describing custom syntax for analytical SQL queries that has been rolling out inside Google since February, reaching 1,600 "seven-day-active users" by August 2024. A …
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Psql command line tutorial and cheat sheet
The least you need to know about Postgres
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The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015)
Andy attempts to revive his blog by predicting what databases will look like in the year 2065.
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Time for a WTF MySQL Moment
Documenting the reasons why I tend to prefer Postgres - even when it's my friends getting bitten.
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The end of a myth: Distributed transactions can scale
This paper appeared in VLDB'17. The paper presents NAM-DB, a scalable distributed database system that uses RDMA (mostly 1-way RDMA) and a ...
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Some SQL Tricks of an Application DBA
Non-trivial tips for database development
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Subtly Bad Things Linux May Be Doing To PostgreSQL
In addition to talking about PostgreSQL at LSF/MM and Collab , I also learned a few things about the Linux kernel that I had not known befor...
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Xkcd-Style Plots in Matplotlib (2012)
Update: the matplotlib pull request has been merged! See This post for a description of the XKCD functionality now built-in to matplotlib!
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I could've accessed 17T Microsoft records
How one unchecked login token put 17 trillion rows in a Microsoft internal analytics service within reach.
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New information extracted from Snowden PDFs through metadata version analysis
We discovered that entire sections describing domestic U.S. intelligence facilities were deliberately removed from two published documents, while equivalent foreign facilities remained visible. The evidence exists in an unexpected place - the PDF metadata of documents published by The Intercept in 2016, and by The…
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Architecture Notes: Datasette
Simon is the creator of Datasette and co-creator of Django web framework. Formerly he was a JSK journalism fellow at Stanford, and prior to that an Engineering Director at Eventbrite.
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Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years
The Only Programming Language Built on Mathematics, Not Fashion
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The Marketing Behind MongoDB
Countless NoSQL databases competed to be the database of choice. MongoDB's marketing strategy helped it become the winner.
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21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X
Sep 0.10.0 was released April 22nd, 2025 with optimizations for AVX-512 capable CPUs like the AMD 9950X (Zen 5) and updated benchmarks including the 9950X. Sep now achieves a staggering 21 GB/s on the 9950X for the low-level CSV parsing. 🚀 Before 0.10.0, Sep achieved ~18 GB/s on 9950X.
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Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy
State partisanship and COVID vaccination rates are strongly predictive of COVID death rates even once you account for age.
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3.4M Solar Panels
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic
9 months of daily A/B-testing of Google AdSense banner ads on Gwern.net indicates banner ads decrease total traffic substantially, possibly due to spillover effects in reader engagement and resharing.
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SQL patterns I use to catch transaction fraud
The actual queries I run when I'm hunting fraud in transaction data. Velocity, impossible distances, suspicious amounts, merchant clusters, off-hours buys, and window functions.
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