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Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything
Sergey Filimonov's blog
Topics /
Databases & Data
The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 148 posts.
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Go ahead, self-host Postgres
Self-hosting Postgres is simpler and cheaper than managed services suggest, with comparable reliability and better performance tunability.
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Databases in 2024: A Year in Review
Andy rises from the ashes of his dead startup and discusses what happened in 2024 in the database game.
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An intro to DeepSeek's distributed file system
Personal website for some random tidbits I work on
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/dev/null is an ACID compliant database
/dev/null is web scale
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Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents
Lessons learned from building RAG systems for Usul AI and enterprise clients, processing over 13 million pages.
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Build your own database
A step-by-step guide to building a key-value database from scratch.
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A faster way to copy SQLite databases between computers
Dumping a SQLite database to a text file can make it much smaller, which means you can download it faster.
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DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
DuckDB’s spatial extension cut geo setup to two lines of SQL, and interest in geospatial data turned upward the moment it shipped.
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Visualizing all books of the world in ISBN-Space
Libraries have been trying to collect humanity’s knowledge almost since the invention of writing. In the digital age, it might actually be possible to create a comprehensive collection of all human writing that meets certain criteria. That’s what shadow libraries do - collect and share as many
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Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip
I'm in the process of rebuilding my homelab from the ground up, moving from a 24U full-size 4-post rack to a mini rack. One of the most difficult devices to downsize (especially economically) is a NAS. But as my needs have changed, I'm bucking the trend of all datahoarders and I need less storage than the 120 TB (80…
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Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18
Learn how to clone PostgreSQL databases instantly using reflinks. Turn slow template copies into milliseconds with PostgreSQL 18's new file copy options.
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100k TPS over a billion rows: the unreasonable effectiveness of SQLite
A blog mostly about Clojure programming
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Your data model is your destiny
Your product's core abstractions determine whether new features compound into a moat or just add to a feature list. Here's how to get it right.
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How Google Maps allocates survival across London's restaurants
I wanted a dinner recommendation and got a research agenda instead. Using 13000+ restaurants, I rebuild its ratings with machine learning and map how algorithmic visibility actually distributes power.
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Are LLMs able to notice the “gorilla in the data”?
One paper that caught my attention a bit ago was Selective attention in hypothesis-driven data analysis by Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher. In their study, students who were given specific hypotheses to test were much less likely to notice an obvious “gorilla in the data” compared to students who explored the data…
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The Case Against PGVector
The real limitations of pgvector in production: index choice between IVFFlat and HNSW, why real-time search is hard, pre- vs post-filtering pain, how performance degrades at scale, and when a dedicated vector database is the better call.
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Avoid UUID Version 4 Primary Keys in Postgres
Introduction Over the last decade, when working on databases with UUID Version 41 as the primary key data type, these databases have usually had bad performance and excessive IO. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4122#section-4.4 ↩
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How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs
Learn how Amazon built the backbone of the modern web that scales to 1 PB/s and 150M QPS on commodity hard drives
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Redis is fast – I'll cache in Postgres
There are books & many articles online, like this one arguing for using Postgres for everything. I thought I’d take a look at one use case - using Postgres instead of Redis for caching. I work with APIs quite a bit, so I’d build a super simple HTTP server that responds with data from that cache. I’d start from Redis…
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Making Postgres slower
As an respectable unemployed person must do, I tried to make Postgres as slow as possible
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What GPT-OSS leaks about OpenAI's training data
OpenAI recently released their open-weights model. Here we'll discuss how that inevitably leaks some information about their model training stack, and, on the way, show that GPT-5 was trained on phrases from adult websites....
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Python is not a great language for data science
It may be a good language for data science, but it’s not a great one.
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21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X
Sep 0.10.0 was released April 22nd, 2025 with optimizations for AVX-512 capable CPUs like the AMD 9950X (Zen 5) and updated benchmarks including the 9950X. Sep now achieves a staggering 21 GB/s on the 9950X for the low-level CSV parsing. 🚀 Before 0.10.0, Sep achieved ~18 GB/s on 9950X.
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B-Trees: More Than I Thought I'd Want to Know (2021)
B-Trees are not boring, after all
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Hard problems that reduce to document ranking
There are two claims I’d like to make: LLMs can be used effectively1 for listwise document ranking. Some complex problems can (surprisingly) be solved by transforming them into document ranking problems. I’ve primarily explored both of these claims in the context of using patch diffing to locate N-day…
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I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs
And the results surprised me