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The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 1,888 posts.
I’ve had this sense that HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months. First most obvious giveaway is the frequency with which you see accounts posting brilliant insights like 13 60 well and t6ctctfuvuh7hguhuig8h88gd to f6gug7h8j8h6fzbuvubt GB I be cugttc fav uhz cb ibub8vgxgvzdrc to bubuvtxfh tf d…
The world tried to kill Andy off but he had to stay alive to to talk about what happened with databases in 2025.
"So, how much experience do you have with Big Data and Hadoop?" they asked me. I told them that I use Hadoop all the time, but rarely for jobs larger than a few TB. I'm basically a big data neophite - I know the concepts, I've written code, but never at scale.
Replace Redis, MongoDB, Kafka & more with PostgreSQL. Reduce complexity, boost development speed. Complete guide with real examples.
Apple just announced that they will use “perceptual hashing” to detect illegal photos on iPhones. I have some experience to share on this technology.
Features you already have but may not know about!
...or how to make Qwen learn query optimization via agentic reinforcement learning
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.
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…
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…
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.
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…
Self-hosting Postgres is simpler and cheaper than managed services suggest, with comparable reliability and better performance tunability.
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 …
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.
Today’s bug: I tried to store a UTF-8 string in a MariaDB “utf8”-encoded database, and Rails raised a bizarre error:
You can process data that doesn’t fit in memory by using four basic techniques: spending money, compression, chunking, and indexing.
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.
The views expressed in this newsletter are solely my own, and do not represent the views of my employer.
Andy rises from the ashes of his dead startup and discusses what happened in 2024 in the database game.
You don't need Neo4j for graph data. Walking through nodes, edges, and recursive traversals in plain Postgres, with working SQL.
Personal website for some random tidbits I work on
/dev/null is web scale
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.
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.
