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Top Books on Amazon Based on Links in Hacker News Comments
This visualization shows the top 30 books ranked by total number of links to Amazon in Hacker News comments from Oct 2006 to Oct 2015.
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Deep-Fried Data
This is the text version of a talk I gave on September 27, 2016, at the Collections as Data event at the Library of Congress. [ video ] (21 mins)
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PostgreSQL Scalability: Towards Millions TPS
PostgreSQL scalability on multicore and multisocket machines became a subject of optimization long time ago once such machines became widely used. This blog post shows brief history of vertical scalability improvements between versions 8.0 and 8.4. PostgreSQL 9.2 had very noticeable scalability improvement. Thanks to…
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Inappropriate Uses of Google Trends
Alternatively titled ‘Be aware of context, and maybe start using Google AdWords’ Instead
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Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart
This data sculpture depicts a map of housing prices in San Francisco. It's a map of the city, torn at the seams. The height of each area represents the average price per square foot for recent home sales. Where neighboring areas are close in value they are connected, but if neighboring areas are too far
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What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)
I’ve come to the conclusion that, for me, ORMs are more detriment than benefit. In short, they can be used to nicely augment working with SQL in a program, but they should not replace it.
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Jepsen: RethinkDB 2.1.5
In this Jepsen report, we’ll verify RethinkDB’s support for linearizable operations using majority reads and writes, and explore assorted read and write anomalies when consistency levels are relaxed. This work was funded by RethinkDB, and conducted in accordance with the Jepsen ethics policy .
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Ways Data Projects Fail
Introduction Data science continues to generate excitement and yet real-world results can often disappoint business stakeholders. How can we mitigate risk and ensure results match expectations? Working as a technical data scientist at the interface between R&D and commercial operations has given me an insight into the…
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What is Differential Privacy?
Yesterday at the WWDC keynote, Apple announced a series of new security and privacy features, including one feature that’s drawn a bit of attention — and confusion. Specifically, Apple …
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78% of Reddit Threads with 1,000+ Comments Mention Nazis
Let me start this post by noting that I will not attempt to test Godwin’s Law , which states that:
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Following a Select Statement Through Postgres Internals (2014)
This is the third of a series of four posts based on a presentation I did at the Barcelona Ruby Conference called “20,000 Leagues Under ActiveRecord.” (posts: one two four and video ).
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Jepsen: VoltDB 6.3
In the last Jepsen post, we found that RethinkDB could lose data when a network partition occurred during cluster reconfiguration. In this analysis, we’ll show that although VoltDB 6.3 claims strict serializability, internal optimizations and bugs lead to stale reads, dirty reads, and even lost updates; fixes are now…
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Top Books on Amazon Based on Number of HN Users Linking Them in Comments
This visualization shows the top 29 books ranked by the number of unique users linking to corresponding Amazon pages in Hacker News comments from Oct 2006 to Oct 2015.
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A beginners guide to thinking in SQL
In this tutorial we will learn about the concepts behind the SQL syntax. We will go through the basics of how to use the FROM and WHERE clauses, and move on to more advanced topics like joins, aggregations and subqueries.
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Statistical Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
You can get CS papers published with shoddy statistics, but that doesn’t mean you should. Here are three easy ways to bungle the data analysis in your evaluation section: don’t even try to use statistics when you really ought to; misinterpret an inconclusive statistical test as concluding a negative; or run too many…
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No More Full Table Vacuums in PostgreSQL
I just committed a very important patch to PostgreSQL. The short summary for the patch is " Don't vacuum all-frozen pages. " and it follows...
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Unix’s file durability problem
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Log Structured Merge Trees
A detailed look at the interesting LSM file organisation seen in BigTable, Cassandra and most recently MongoDB.
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Parsing 10TB of Metadata, 26M Domain Names and 1.4M SSL Certs for $10 on AWS
Last May I was working on hobby project similar to this: https://github.com/zakjan/cert-chain-resolver/. As I found the cert-chain-resolver project a couple of days later I did nothing with the results, but I got some…
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Introduction to PostgreSQL physical storage
I initially wrote this post for myself, I wanted to understand enough about the underlying physical storage to be able to grasp other concepts which can affect your database. This post is probably more aimed to people with similar interests, I will try to keep it accurate but the aim is to make it simpler to…
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