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Databases & Data

The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 1,888 posts.

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788

What category theory teaches us about dataframes

Every dataframe library ships with hundreds of operations. pandas alone has over 200 methods on a DataFrame. Is pivot different from melt? Is apply different from map? What about transform, agg, applymap, pipe? Some of these seem like the same operation wearing different hats. Others seem genuinely distinct. Without a…

789

Prolog for data science

I demonstrate a widely applicable pattern which integrates Prolog as a critical component in a data science analysis. Analytic methods are used to generate properties about the data under study and Prolog is used to reason about the data via the generated properties. The post includes some examples of piece-wise…

791

You cannot have exactly-once delivery (2015)

I’m often surprised that people continually have fundamental misconceptions about how distributed systems behave. I myself shared many of these misconceptions, so I try not to demean or dismiss but rather educate and enlighten, hopefully while sounding less preachy than that just did. I continue to learn only by…

793

The Universal Data Structure

Whether you write compilers, web services or Django admin panels, you probably use hash maps more than all other data structures combined. In fact, you may not remember the last time you used anything else. This is not a coincidence: any conceivable data structure can be implemented with a hash map; therefore, there…

799

Reasons to love SQLAlchemy

I've seen some bashing of ORMs of late, which I think is totally undeserved. I'm a big fan of SQLAlchemy ; I use it in most of my projects, and have contributed code to the library. I'm going to explain 10 good reasons you should love SQLAlchemy too! In fairness, there are a number of good ORMs around, and most of…

801

The 600+ Companies PayPal Shares Your Data With

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…

805

PostgreSQL Encryption: The Available Options

On an episode of Postgres FM , the hosts had a (very brief) discussion of data encryption in PostgreSQL. While Postgres FM is a podcast well worth a subscribe, the hosts aren’t data security experts, and so as someone who builds a queryable database encryption system , I found the coverage to be somewhat… lacking. I…