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ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data
ICE is using a Palantir tool that uses Medicaid and other government data to stalk people for arrest. This is exactly the kind of data privacy abuse that EFF has been warning about.
Topics /
Databases & Data
The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 239 posts.
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Tracking down the 16-year-old WAL-reset SQLite bug
Tailscale and SQLite developers traced maddening corruption incidents to find the WAL-Reset data race, then uncovered a second stale expression index bug.
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PGSimCity - How PostgreSQL Works
An independent, non-commercial educational visualization of PostgreSQL internals. Not affiliated with Electronic Arts.
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GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis
Benchmarks and Analysis of GLM-5.2
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Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
Sadly, taking away valuable disclosure avoidance tools doesn't make fundamental trade-offs go away.
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Postgres 19 is late because so many more bugs are being found now
Over the past decade, the timing of PostgreSQL major releases has become very predictable: no earlier than the middle of September, and no l...
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SQLite is all you need for durable workflows
DBOS recently argued that Postgres is all you need for durable execution: if you already trust your database, you do not need a separate orchestration tier. I a…
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A Preview of DuckDB v2.0
DuckDB 2.0 is coming this fall. In this post, we preview its headline features: DuckDB as a server, triggers, the VARIANT type, asynchronous I/O, a new SQL parser, a new storage format, and much more.
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New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
I’ve had this sense that HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months. First most obvious giveaway is the frequency with which you see accounts posting brilliant insights like 13 60 well and t6ctctfuvuh7hguhuig8h88gd to f6gug7h8j8h6fzbuvubt GB I be cugttc fav uhz cb ibub8vgxgvzdrc to bubuvtxfh tf d…
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Databases in 2025: A Year in Review
The world tried to kill Andy off but he had to stay alive to to talk about what happened with databases in 2025.
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Training a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres
...or how to make Qwen learn query optimization via agentic reinforcement learning
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A graph that should be front-page news
Every so often the Earth produces a signal that is impossible to ignore. This graph is one of them. It shows sea-surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific, one of the most important parts of the Earth's climate system. Each blue line represents a different year since 1982. The red line is…
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SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format
SQLite is a Recommended Storage Format for datasets according to the US Library of Congress . Further information:
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Timestral: Mistral's time-series foundation models
State-of-the-art probabilistic forecasting in four sizes (5M–209M params), CPU-efficient, zero-shot ready.
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Executable Is a SQLite Database
I have been probably obsessed with two things in the last few years: Nix as a tool to explore innovative ideas that require the capability to rebuild the world and replacing ELF with SQLite as an executable format. You might have noticed that these two ideas are well suited to each other.
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AI didn't delete your database, you did
Last week, a tweet went viral showing a guy claiming that a Cursor/Claude agent deleted his company's production database. We watched from the sidelines as he tried to get a confession from the agent:
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It's 2026, Just Use Postgres
Stop managing multiple databases. Postgres extensions replace Elasticsearch, Pinecone, Redis, MongoDB, and InfluxDB with BM25, vectors, JSONB.
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The startup's Postgres survival guide
A guide to preventing Postgres from toppling over.
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RAG Is Simpler Than You Think
Six approaches to retrieval-based AI, from minimal to elaborate
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65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform
Sentiment analysis of 32,000 Hacker News posts shows 65% skew negative and earn 27% more points. Six transformer and LLM models tested, full data included.
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DuckDB Internals Part 1
Walk through DuckDB's internals: how it skips serialization overhead, parses and optimizes SQL, and stores data in columnar row groups with zone maps.
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Polars 2.0
The release Python Polars 2.0, bringing the streaming engine, out-of-core and first class blazingly fast SQL support
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Cosmologically Unique IDs
We are an exploratory species, just past the solar system now, but perhaps one day we will look back and call our galaxy merely the first. There are many problems to solve along the way, and today we will look at one very small one. How do we assign IDs to devices (or any object) so the IDs are guaranteed to always be…
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DuckDB 2.0.0 LTS “Cinnamon Teal”
The DuckDB team is happy to announce that today we're releasing DuckDB version 2.0.0 LTS, codenamed “Cinnamon Teal” (Spatula cyanoptera). This is our biggest feature release so far, and it ships a polished version of the Quack protocol, asynchronous I/O, a first-class VARIANT type, agent mode, triggers, an extensible…
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ggsql: A Grammar of Graphics for SQL
Introducing ggsql, a grammar of graphics for SQL that lets you describe visualizations directly inside SQL queries.
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PostgreSQL for Everything
You need simplicity if you want to move fast. PostgreSQL can very well replace Kafka, Redis, Clickhouse and Elastic. And many successful companies are doing exactly that. Let's check out how.
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Beating GPT-5.6 Sol on retrieval with 100x cheaper open models
A 4B open-source model post-trained with Castform retrieved search results as accurately as GPT-5.6 Sol, while costing 100x less.
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PingCap TiDB Leaks
PingCAP Inc. / TiDB Cloud • Distributed databases • 10.6 TB total exfiltration • 200 GB stage one release
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Unconventional PostgreSQL Optimizations
Creative ideas for speeding up queries in PostgreSQL