Best of 2013

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2013. 141 posts.

Databases & Data
5

Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere

London, 1772. I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the new-fangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects. This is in connection with the…

9

Command-line tools for data science

Blog article by Jeroen Janssens. Sep 19, 2013. 21 min read. Data science is OSEMN (pronounced as awesome). That is, it involves Obtaining, Scrubbing, Exploring, Modelling, and iNterpreting data. As a data scientist, I spend quite a bit of time on the command-line, especially when there’s data to be obtained, scrubbed…

20

Call me maybe: Cassandra

Cassandra is a Dynamo system; like Riak, it divides a hash ring into a several chunks, and keeps N replicas of each chunk on different nodes. It uses tunable quorums, hinted handoff, and active anti-entropy to keep replicas up to date. Unlike the Dynamo paper and some of its peers, Cassandra eschews vector clocks in…