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Databases & Data

The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 106 posts.

2016
62

Mistakes Beginners Make When Working with Databases

When you start out as a developer there’s an overwhelming amount of things to grasp. First there’s the language itself, then all the quirks of the specific framework you’re using,and after that (or maybe before) we’ll throw front-end development into the mix, and somewhere along the line you have to decide to store…

63

England and Wales House Price Analysis

The last time I looked at house prices it went pretty well, and I ended up winning a data science competition. There I was only dealing with a million or so records, and a relatively small 120 MB dataset. Then I found out it was possible to download 3.7GB of property sale records for all of England and Wales since…

70

Analyzing Last.fm Listening History

Last.fm is a web site that tracks your music listening history across devices (computer, phone, iPod, etc) and services (Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, etc). I’ve been using Last.fm for nearly 10 years now, and my tracked listening history goes back even further when you consider all my pre-existing iTunes play counts…

76

XKCD Plots in Matplotlib: Going the Whole Way

One of the most consistently popular posts on this blog has been my XKCDify post, where I followed in the footsteps of others to write a little hack for xkcd-style plotting in matplotlib. In it, I mentioned the Sketch Path Filter pull request that would eventually supersede my ugly little hack.

79

Finding Similar Music Using Matrix Factorization

In a previous post I wrote about how to build a ‘People Who Like This Also Like …’ feature for displaying lists of similar musicians. My goal was to show how simple Information Retrieval techniques can do a good job calculating lists of related artists. For instance, using BM25 distance on The Beatles shows the most…

83

Jepsen: Crate 0.54.9 version divergence

In the last Jepsen analysis, we saw that RethinkDB 2.2.3 could encounter spectacular failure modes due to cluster reconfiguration during a partition. In this analysis, we’ll talk about Crate, and find out just how many versions a row’s version identifies.

89

MitM-ing Postgres

I recently had to set up a new postgres instance at work. While we’re already using Heroku Postgres for production loads, we had some requirements for this one that couldn’t be solved without being database admin, and thus had to go self-hosted. That...