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An Introduction to Hierarchical Modeling
A visual explanation of multi-level modeling
Topics /
Databases & Data
The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 138 posts.
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SQL vs. NoSQL Is the Wrong Distinction
A misconception that I held for a really long time was that systems that use SQL (Structured Query Language) are by definition relational databases, and systems that don’t (e.g., MongoDB, Cassandra) are non-relational. It’s easy to understand whether a database uses SQL or not, but what does it mean when we say a…
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Potemkin Data Science (2020)
Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe…
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Event Sourcing (2005)
Capture all changes to an application state as a sequence of events.
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Text Classification by Data Compression
Edit – I posted this on Hackernews and got some valuable feedback. Many brought up the fact that you should be able to reuse the internal state of the compressor instead of recompressing the training …
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Postgres, Kafka, and a mysterious 100 GB
Lately I’ve been trying to learn more about Amazon Web Services (AWS) and some other popular technologies. Since I work at a large tech company, I spend a lot of my professional time using pr…
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Advent of Code Surveys: Results
Results dashboard with the yearly (unofficial) Advent of Code participant survey
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The 74,000 numbers of Barclays Bank
The UK faces an epidemic of telephone scams. Fraudsters are constantly calling people up pretending to be their bank. But how can you be sure the number displayed on your screen in genuine? You can't. The telecom system is hopelessly insecure and shouldn't be trusted for anything more complicated than dialling the…
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How is efficacy vs. severe disease strong if 60% of hospitalized are vaccinated?
A surge involving the rapidly-transmitting Delta variant in heavily vaccinated countries has led to much hand-wringing that the vaccines are not effective against Delta, or vaccine effectivenss wanes after 4-6 months. This has fueled anti-vaccine sentiment suggesting the vaccines are not working, and causing much…
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Reed-Solomon error recovery in RAID-6
A post describing a simple example how you can create your own manual error recovery solution based on what is used in RAID-6, in Python.
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Everything I've seen on optimizing Postgres on ZFS
Looking to run Postgres on ZFS? I've gathered some of the information and sage advice out there to give you a head start on figuring out how to do it safely and efficiently.
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Evolution of tree data structures for indexing
I have to admit, my research blog posts are getting longer and longer. From one side I find it genuinely encouraging, because if one gets so much information just by scratching the topic, imagine what’s hidden beneath the surface! One university professor once said “what could be interesting in databases?”, and it…
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Dublin Core's dirty little secret (2010)
[This is part two in a series — you should read part 1 first for context and then you might go on to part 3.] The Dublin Core — metadata made dumb Just when librarians were in despair o…
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Roapi: An API Server for Static Datasets
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...