Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 304 posts.

Databases & Data
157

Amazon S3 Transfer Acceleration

Several AWS teams are focused on simplifying and accelerating the process of moving on-premises data to the cloud. We started out with the very basic PUT operation and multipart upload in the early days. Along the way we gave you the ability to send us a disk, and made that process even easier by launching […]

173

England and Wales House Price Analysis

The last time I looked at house prices it went pretty well, and I ended up winning a data science competition. There I was only dealing with a million or so records, and a relatively small 120 MB dataset. Then I found out it was possible to download 3.7GB of property sale records for all of England and Wales since…

174

IPv6 Support for Amazon S3

Update October 1, 2021 – This post has been edited to remove outdated S3 buckets. As you probably know, every server and device that is connected to the Internet must have a unique IP address. Way back in 1981, RFC 791 (“Internet Protocol”) defined an IP address as a 32-bit entity, with three distinct network […]

175

Postgres Count Performance

Everybody counts, but not always quickly. This post looks into how the PostgreSQL database optimizes counting. In Postgres, there are ways to count orders of magnitude faster. We’ll look at exact counts (distinct counts) as well as estimated counts, using approximation algorithms such as HyperLogLog (HLL) in Postgres.