Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 314 posts.

Databases & Data
216

Apache Arrow 4.0

The Apache Arrow team is pleased to announce the 4.0.0 release. This covers 3 months of development work and includes 711 resolved issues from 114 distinct contributors. See the Install Page to learn how to get the libraries for your platform. The release notes below are not exhaustive and only expose selected…

233

One of these JPEGs is not like the other

“JPEG” or the image encoding specification by the “Joint Photographic Experts Group” (JPEG) is a truly universal format at this stage. You really cannot go very far on the internet without seeing a JPEG file. The amount of content encoded in JPEGs must be surely biblical by now. If there is one thing that is going to…

236

SQLite Is Dynamically Typed (2020)

A small, cool fact about SQLite is that its columns are flexibly typed. You can store any value in any column! Try it out: sqlite> create table t1 (v1 int, v2 varchar(10)); sqlite> insert into t1 values ("abc", "this string is longer than 10 characters!"); sqlite> select * from t1; abc|this string is longer than 10…