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The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 1,888 posts.
We’ve been writing a bit about some odd tail behavior in the Fivethirtyeight election forecast, for example that it was giving Joe Biden a 3% chance of winning Alabama (which seemed high), it was displaying Trump winning California as in “the range of scenarios our model thinks is possible” (which didn’t seem right)…
When timestamps aren’t time-ordered and other oddities
Important: This page summarizes data scaling only, using tokens to parameters as a ratio, and as derived from large language models like GPT-3, Chinchilla, and beyond, linked to the Compute-Optimal scaling laws like Kaplan and Hoffmann/Chinchilla. Please note that compute scaling laws are outside the scope of my…
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Vacuum is one of the sub-systems in PostgreSQL which gets improved with each release. I have checked past five releases and each has qu...
Maximizing Postgres connection economy by using a single connection per program to receive and distribute all listen/notify notifications.
Here are a list of features which I think are generally underrated in PostgreSQL and why. Many though not all of these are being used in t...
The BIG feature. The feature that made PostgreSQL leap from 8.4 to 9.0. Patch was written by Fujii Masao, and committed by Heikki Linnakangas on 15th of January 2010:
Warning: what follows is a somewhat technical discussion of my love-hate relationship with the R statistical language, in which I somehow manage to waste 2,400 words talking about a single line of …
Proof of concept for compliance with GDPR on an Event Sourcing architecture built with Apache Kafka.
A blog mostly about Clojure programming
If progress follows it's usual strategy, then whatever is difficult and valuable to do today will become easy and normal tomorrow. I imagine we'll discover new abstractions, which will make writing Google Docs as easy as the average web app is today.
How disappointing it is to learn that the best ideas rarely come from data after 15 years of working in the field.
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…
Languages that suffer success often have to do so by selling out and adding features that go against some of the original purposes of their design. SQL is a...
The CAP theorem states a database cannot guarantee consistency, availability, and partition-tolera...
In 2005, I decided to design my first geospatial database engine. PostGIS was unable to keep up with the modest volumes of sensor data I was working with and while I was new to geospatial data, I had skill designing database engines. It seemed simple enough to get the scale and performance I required. Nothing could…
Using Haskell, R, Python, SQLite, and Elasticsearch, we data mine Hacker News front page stories and their back page counterparts for patterns.
My name is Taras Kloba, Chief Partner Architect at Microsoft. This blog captures my journey through data engineering, certifications, and technology insights.
The oldest recorded transaction was in 3100 BC
The case for less rigor and more nuance.
Why TOAST is the best thing since sliced bread
Building resilient services by identifying foreign state mutations and grouping local changes into restartable atomic phases so that every request can be driven to completion.
