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GPT in 500 Lines of SQL
A complete GPT2 implementation as a single SQL query in PostgreSQL.
Topics /
Databases & Data
The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 350 posts.
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Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election
Here’s a little “fake stats in the wild” gem that I think you and your followers will find at the least somewhat amusing.
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Why SQLite Uses Bytecode
Every SQL database engine works in roughly the same way: It first translates the input SQL text into a "prepared statement". Then it "executes" the prepared statement to generate a result.
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Slack AI Training with Customer Data
Slack's Terms and Policies, including privacy, Terms of Service, API terms, security, and more.
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You'll regret using natural keys
Beating another dead horse.
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Get me out of data hell
It is 9:59 AM in Melbourne, 9th October, 2024. Sunlight filters through my windows, illuminating swirling motes of dust across my living room. There is a cup of tea in my hand. I take a sip and savor it.
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PostgreSQL 17
The [PostgreSQL Global Development Group](https://www.postgresql.org) today announced the release of [PostgreSQL 17](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/17/release-17.html), the latest version of the world's most advanced …
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A search engine in 80 lines of Python
In this post I explain how I built a search engine from scratch using python. The resulting search engine is used to search in the posts of the blogs I follow.
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All the data can be yours: reverse engineering APIs
I’ve built a lot of unofficial software for my schools, Brown University and previously Macalester College. To name a few: an “everything app” called 75grand with dining hall menus, Moodle assignments, building hours, an event calendar, and more; two unfinished course catalogs; and a university shuttle tracker. None…
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S3 is files, but not a filesystem
"Deep" modules, mismatched interfaces - and why SAP is so painful
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How Figma's databases team lived to tell the scale
Our nine month journey to horizontally shard Figma’s Postgres stack, and the key to unlocking (nearly) infinite scalability.
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How Postgres stores data on disk – this one's a page turner
A high-level overview of how PostgreSQL stores data on disk, covering segments, pages and more.
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I’m writing a new vector search SQLite Extension
sqlite-vec is an new vector search SQLite extension, coming soon!
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Amazon S3 Adds Put-If-Match (Compare-and-Swap)
Discover more about what's new at AWS with Amazon S3 adds new functionality for conditional writes
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Vector indexing all of Wikipedia on a laptop
Indexing the entirety of English Wikipedia on a laptop has become a practical reality thanks to recent advances in the JVector library that will be part of the imminent 3.0 release.
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How bloom filters made SQLite 10x faster
This is the fascinating story of how researchers used Bloom filters cleverly to make SQLite 10x faster for analytical queries. These are my five-minute notes on the paper SQLite: Past, Present, and Future
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The design philosophy of Great Tables
We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about tables. Tables—like plots—are crucial as a last step toward presenting information. There is surprising…
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JPEG XL and the Pareto Front
Full details on libjxl v. 0.10 and how it affects jpeg xl lossless compression using Pareto Front for a closer analysis.
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OpenStreetMap's New Vector Tiles
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Vector databases are the wrong abstraction
Today’s vector databases disconnect embeddings from their source data. We should treat embeddings more like database indexes—here’s how.
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What I wish someone told me about Postgres
I’ve been working professionally for the better part of a decade on web apps and, in that time, I’ve had to learn how to use a lot of different systems and tools. During that education, I found that the official documentation typically proved to be the most helpful.
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The One Billion Row Challenge
Update Jan 4: Wow, this thing really took off! 1BRC is discussed at a couple of places on the internet, including Hacker News, lobste.rs, and Reddit. For folks to show-case non-Java solutions, there …
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Consistency LLM: converting LLMs to parallel decoders accelerates inference 3.5x
TL;DR: LLMs have been traditionally regarded as sequential decoders, decoding one token after another. In this blog, we show pretrained LLMs can be easily taught to operate as efficient parallel decoders. We introduce Consistency Large Language Models (CLLMs), a new family of parallel decoders capable of reducing…
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The semantic web is now widely adopted
Web 3.0 was not about the blockchain, thank god
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OpenZFS deduplication is good now and you shouldn't use it
OpenZFS 2.3.0 will be released any day now, and it includes the new “Fast Dedup” feature. My team at Klara spent many months in 2023 and 2024 working on it, and we reckon it’s pretty good, a huge step up from the old dedup as well as being a solid base for further improvements. I’ve been watching various forums and…
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SQLite: Wal2 Mode
"Wal2" mode is very similar to "wal" mode. To change a database to wal2 mode, use the command:
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How Discord stores trillions of messages (2023)
Engineer Bo Ingram shares insight into how Discord shoulders its traffic and provides a platform for our users to communicate.