Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 6,299 posts.

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3639

DuckDB 0.9

The DuckDB team is happy to announce the latest DuckDB release (0.9.0). This release is named Undulata after the Yellow-billed duck native to Africa. To install the new version, please visit the installation guide. The full release notes can be found on GitHub. There have been too many changes to discuss them each in…

3643

PostgreSQL 14 Internals

I’m excited to announce that the translation of the “ PostgreSQL 14 Internals ” book is finally complete thanks to the amazing work of Liudmila Mantrova. The final part of the book considers each of the index types in great detail. It explains and demonstrates how access methods, operator classes, and data types work…

3649

Passive Solar Water Desalination

I know we are supposed to be worried about the world supply of fresh water. I have been hearing that at least for the last 40 years, and the statistics are alarming. According to the Global Commission on the Economics of Water: "We are seeing the consequences not of freak events, nor of population growth

3656

Real-time messaging

Did you know that ground stations transmit signals to satellites 22,236 miles above the equator in geostationary orbits, and that those signals are then beamed down to the entire North American subcontinent? Satellite radios today serve hundreds of channels across 9,540,000 square miles. Unless you’re working at a…

3658

Against LLM Maximalism

LLMs are not a direct solution to most of the NLP use-cases companies have been working on. They are extremely useful, but if you want to deliver reliable software you can improve over time, you can't just write a prompt and call it a day. Once you're past prototyping and want to deliver the best system you can…

3659

Going Rogue

When a beleaguered Netscape announced in January of 1998 that it would release the source code to its browser for everyone to tinker with and improve upon, the news shook the worlds of technology and business to their foundations. This open-source “revolution,” as even many in the mainstream press took to calling it…