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Deep dive into Turso, the “SQLite rewrite in Rust”
I love Rust and I love SQLite, so you can guess. Iwas pretty excited when I lerned that "SQLite was rewritten in Rust" What is SQLite, actually? 2 things: a
Topics /
Databases & Data
The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 242 posts.
122
Does Postgres Scale?
Benchmarking the workflow execution and workflow queueing scalability of a single Postgres server.
123
Planet Labs' open satellite feed
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
124
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…
125
An all-sky map of half a million supermassive black holes
The Black Hole Mapper reaches a milestone with its first southern hemisphere optical observations, coordinated eROSITA X-ray identification, and multi-epoch tracking of accreting black holes across the universe.
126
Moving our warehouse off DuckDB
We moved our warehouse product off DuckDB and DuckLake onto our own flavor of Trino and a new open table format, HogLake. Here's what broke at scale and why.
127
Chess in SQL
What if I told you SQL could play chess? No JavaScript, no frameworks - just pure SQL rendering a full chess board in your browser.
128
Your File System Is Already A Graph Database
Karpathy recently posted about using LLMs to build personal knowledge bases — collecting raw sources into a directory, having an LLM “compile” them into a wiki of interlinked markdown …
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Can you use autoregressive diffusion to generate market data?
The following is part of a series of posts about 2026 summer intern projects – for more, see “What the interns have wrought, special jumbo 2026 edition”
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UUIDv7: Timestamps aren’t time-ordered and other oddities
When timestamps aren’t time-ordered and other oddities
131
NanoGPT Slowrun: Language Modeling with Limited Data, Infinite Compute
NanoGPT Slowrun is an open effort to implement data-efficient learning algorithms; 5.5x data efficiency in the first week and improving.
132
The perils of UUID primary keys in SQLite
A blog mostly about Clojure programming
133
Two Bits Are Better Than One: making bloom filters 2x more accurate
Optimisation of bloom filters in Floe using double bit setting with lightweight hashing.
134
Zombie stats: Where the numbers AI quotes come from
We asked five AI assistants 200 questions that call for a number and followed 1,285 of the statistics they cited back to the source.
135
Postgres data stored in Parquet on S3: LTAP architecture explained
Almost every traditional database keeps its write-ahead log and data files on one machine's disk, which is the root cause of data loss risk, expensive read replicas and high-availability clones, and analytics queries that drag down transactions.
136
Postgres isn't slow, your storage is
A recap of Sai Srirampur's POSETTE 2026 talk on storage performance in Postgres, with a local NVMe vs. EBS benchmark and the production setup behind it.
137
It's Not Just X. It's Y
Against the Quantification of Integrity When the measure of language becomes its target, it ceases to be good language. 💡Nerd Rating: 1/5. I discuss the origins of certain linguistic tics in LLMs and what it means for writing, student assessment, and thinking. "It's not x, it's y.
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Bayesian statistics for confused data scientists
A gentle introduction to Bayesian statistics for data scientists who, like me, are confused by it.
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The revenge of the data scientist
AI eval mistakes and the data science practices that fix them.
141
Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes
Using H3 indexes to greatly speed up geospatial SQL Queries. Orders of magnitude improvements can be gained with the right data structures
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Fast drilldown dashboards from a single Parquet file
Range Requests Are All You Need
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Matrix Multiplications on GPUs Run Faster When Given “Predictable” Data (2024)
Great minds discuss flops per watt.
144
How TimescaleDB compresses time-series data
TimescaleDB compression with hypercore - columnar storage with up to 98% ratio in PostgreSQL. segmentby/orderby configuration and a benchmark for IoT and time-series.
145
Three Six Mafia – Data about "6/6/6 dating" (2024)
Most guys my age have "the chat". The one with your college buddies that only exists to share memes, argue, bully, and occasionally announce that you got a promotion or had a kid. I am like most guys.
146
A distributed queue in a single JSON file on object storage
How to build a single global queue for distributed systems on object storage: Start with a single file on object storage, then add write batching, a stateless broker, and high-availability.
147
Footguns with Postgres “at time zone 'UTC'”
And why you may need to repeat AT TIME ZONE 'UTC' twice. SUMMARY * AT TIME ZONE 'UTC' converts the data type from timestamptz to timestamp (example). * Now you are inadvertently using the timestamp without time zone (aka timestamp) data type, which is markedly discouraged. * There are tons of footguns with timestamp…
148
NanoGPT Slowrun: 10x Data Efficiency with Infinite Compute
We've achieved 10x data efficiency with NanoGPT Slowrun within a few weeks. An ensemble of 1.8B parameter models (18B total params) trained on 100M tokens matches what would normally require 1B tokens with a standard LM baseline. Data efficiency matters because compute grows much faster than data . Since our current…
149
How Is Data Stored?
Invariably, it involves trying to trap electrons in increasingly complicated ways.
150
We are building data breach machines and nobody cares
A few weeks ago, my longstanding friend and colleague Curt Cunning mentioned to me that he was slogging through Nietzsche, which bespeaks his incredible will to power through things that are unpleasant (one of the many things that makes him an exceptional engineer). In any case, it lead me to revisit some of his work…