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The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 95 posts.
When I got started using the Datomic database, I remember someone describing it to me as 'Event Sourcing without the hassle'. Having built Event Sourcing systems both with and without Datomic, I think this is very well put, although it might not be obvious, especially if you don't have much experience with Datomic.
With the problem of Image Classification is more or less solved by Deep learning, Text Classification is the next new developing theme in deep learning. For those who don’t know, Text classification is a common task in natural language processing, which transforms a sequence of text of indefinite length into a…
Datasette (previously) is my open source tool for exploring and publishing structured data. There are a lot of ideas embedded in Datasette. I realized that I haven’t put many of …
Concurrency Control is a mechanism that maintains atomicity and isolation, which are two properties of the ACID, when multiple transactions run concurrently in a database.
Discussions: Hacker News (195 points, 51 comments), Reddit r/Python (140 points, 18 comments) If you’re planning to learn data analysis, machine learning, or data science tools in python, you’re most likely going to be using the wonderful pandas library. Pandas is an open source library for data manipulation and…
Harvard and Students For Fair Admissions (SFFA), which is suing Harvard over discrimination against Asian-American applicants, have relea...
One of the effects of GDPR—the new EU General Data Protection Regulation—is that we’re all going to be learning a lot more about who collects our data and what they do with it. Consider PayPal, that just released a list of over 600 companies they share customer data with. Here’s a good visualization of that data. Is…
Proof of concept for compliance with GDPR on an Event Sourcing architecture built with Apache Kafka.
Since writing this post back in 2018, I have extended this to a 4-part series on causal inference: * ➡️️ Part 1: Intro to causal inference and do-calculus [https://www.inference.vc/untitled] * Part 2: Illustrating Interventions with a Toy Example…
Article based on my talk about Full-text search in Django with PostgreSQL.
Using K-means clustering on writing style to classify disputed Federalist Papers authorship.
Much of my professional work for the last 10+ years has revolved around handling, importing and exporting CSV files. CSV files are frustratingly misunderstood, abused, and most of all underspecified. While RFC4180 exists, it is far from definitive and goes largely ignored.
Funding open source software development is a complicated subject. I’m excited to announce that I’ve founded Ursa Labs ( https://ursalabs.org ), an independent development lab with the mission of innovation in data science tooling.
In a recent blog post , I talked about why every system that implements MVCC needs some scheme for removing old row versions, and how VACUUM...
"There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things."
Many software engineers use database indexes every day, but few of us really understand how they work. In this post I’ll explain: How indexing works in Postgres using B-Trees What B-Trees are Why they are a good fit for this problem Indexes in Postgres Postgres actually offers 4 different kinds of indexes for…
An in-depth exploration of a new class of expressive, performant, and intuitive CRDTs, together with macOS and iOS sample code.
I wanted to see how daily patterns emerge at the individual level and how a person’s entire day plays out. So I simulated 1,000 of them.
Ranking the lines by reliability, the anatomy of a delay, and a case for the $19 billion subway plan
Data scientists looking to learn Docker can get a brief intro and a look at how to improve your workflow
Update: I wrote a follow-up article about adding Loop Counters and Row Counts to SQL Plan FlameGraphs. I also show some old examples of “Bookshelf Graph” visualizations there. Check it out after reading this post first. Introduction Brendan Gregg invented and popularized a way to profile & visualize program response…
In my previous blog post, I explored some of the early ways of word embeddings and their shortcomings. The purpose of this post is to explo...
Pivot SQL tables with CASE or FILTER. Turn rows into columns for the entity-attribute-value model (EAV).
Facebook and Google and other advertising businesses are data factories, and regulation will be most effective if it lets users look inside
In this post, we model and explore the two-phase commit protocol using TLA+. The two-phase commit protocol is practical and is used in man...
Isolating cloud sync and persistent storage in an app architecture.
