Best of 2015

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2015. 199 posts.

Databases & Data
156

Perceptual Image Compression at Flickr

At Flickr our users really care about image quality. They also care a lot about how responsive our apps are. Addressing both of these concerns simultaneously is challenging; higher quality images have larger file sizes and are slower to transfer. Slow transfers are especially noticeable on mobile devices. Flickr had…

159

Start Using Landsat on AWS

My colleague Jed Sundwall wrote the guest post below to show you how one of the newest AWS Public Data Sets is being put to use. — Jeff; You can now access over 85,000 Landsat 8 scenes through our newest Public Data Set: Landsat on AWS. The scenes are all available in the landsat-pds bucket […]

174

IBash Notebook

Did you know that there's a Bash kernel for IPython Notebook? It even displays inline images. Could it ever be a convenient environment for doing data science? Would it be worthwhile to publish my book Data Science at the Command Line as a collection of notebooks?

177

Call Me Maybe: Percona XtraDB Cluster

Percona’s CTO Vadim Tkachenko wrote a response to my Galera Snapshot Isolation post last week. I think Tkachenko may have misunderstood some of my results, and I’d like to clear those up now. I’ve ported the MariaDB tests to Percona XtraDB Cluster, and would like to confirm that using exclusive write locks on all…