31
32
A simple search engine from scratch
*if you include word2vec.
33
The RAG Obituary: Killed by agents, buried by context windows
I’ve been working in AI and search for a decade. First, I built Doctrine, the largest European legal search engine, and now I am building Fintool , an AI-powered financial research platform that helps institutional investors analyze companies, screen stocks, and make investment decisions.
34
35
PSA: SQLite WAL checksums fail silently and may lose data
SQLite WAL has checksums, but on corruption it drops all the data and does not raise error
36
Removing newlines in FASTA file increases ZSTD compression ratio by 10x
First released with Zstandard 1.3.2 in 2017, the --long range match finder increases the compressor’s search window to at least 128MiB, improving deduplication inside large files. This optional feature had substantial performance overheads at launch, but various optimisations have since brought its performance within…
37
Building a Simple Search Engine That Works
You don't need Elasticsearch for most projects. I built a simple search engine from scratch that tokenizes everything, stores it in your existing database, and scores results by relevance. Dead simple to understand and maintain.
38
Reverse geocoding is hard
My wife and I run OpenBenches - a crowd-sourced database of nearly 40,000 memorial benches. Every bench is geo-tagged with a latitude and longitude. But how do you go from a string of digits to something human readable? How do I turn -33.755780,150.603769 into "42 Wallaby Way, Sydney, Australia"? Luckily, that's a…
39
Data on AI-related Show HN posts
The idea for this article didn't exist in my brain before this morning. But there I was, scrolling the New page and even more tired of all the AI-related Show HN posts than usual. I was confident that their numbers were multiplying and wanted proof. Exactly how much more AI crap is on my lawn compared to last year?
40
The power of interning: making a time series database smaller
This week-end project started by browsing the open-data repository of Paris’ public transport network, which contains various APIs to query real-time departures, current disruptions, etc.The data reuse section caught my eye, as it features external projects that use this open data.In particular, the RATP status…
41
Composable SQL
Better SQL through typed, composable query fragments.
42
43
MongoBleed Explained Simply
CVE-2025-14847 allows attackers to read any arbitrary data from the database's heap memory. It affects all MongoDB versions since 2017, here's a simple explanation:
44
Decrypting encrypted files from Akira ransomware using a bunch of GPUs
I recently helped a company recover their data from the Akira ransomware without paying the ransom. I'm sharing how I did it, along with the full source code. Update: since this article was written, a new version of Akira ransomware has appeared that can't be decrypted with this method The c
45
Satellogic's Open Satellite Feed
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
46
Shardines: SQLite3 Database-per-Tenant with ActiveRecord
There is a pattern I am very fond of - “one database per tenant” in web applications with multiple, isolated users. Recently, I needed to fix an application I had for a long time where this database-per-tenant multitenancy utterly broke down, because I was doing connection management wrong. Which begat the question…
47
How rqlite is tested
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, and built on SQLite and Raft. With its origins dating back to 2014, its design has always prioritized reliability, and quality. The robustness of rqlite is also a testament to its disciplined testing strategy: after more than 10 years…
48
Transformer – Spreadsheet
Make your own AI by hand ✍️ exercises
49
Parsing Protobuf like never before
Historically I have worked on many projects related to high-performance Protobuf, be that on the C++ runtime, on the Rust runtime, or on integrating UPB , the fastest Protobuf runtime, written by my colleague Josh Haberman . I generally don’t post directly about my current job, but my most recent toy-turned-product is…
50
The best way to use text embeddings portably is with Parquet and Polars
Never store embeddings in a CSV!
51
Searchcode.com’s SQLite database is probably 6 terabytes bigger than yours
searchcode.com’s SQLite database is probably one of the largest in the world, at least for a public facing website. It’s actual size is 6.4 TB. Which is probably 6 terabytes bigger than yours. …
52
You might not need Redis
Redis is arguably the most well regarded tech of all. But many times you do not need Redis. Here are 3 examples from my last 3 jobs.
53
Bloom Filters
The original motivation for the creation of Bloom filters is efficient set membership, using a probabilistic approach to significantly reduce the time and space required to reject items that are not members in a certain set.
54
55
Postgres UUIDv7 and per-back end monotonicity
How Postgres’ v7 UUIDs are made monotonic, and why that’s a great feature.
56
57
How about trailing commas in SQL?
Anecdotally, this might be the most requested feature in SQL: Allow some trailing commas.
58
Data centers contain 90% crap data
We need to talk about the data. Crap data. We’re destroying our environment to create and store trillions of blurred images, half-baked videos, rip-off AI ‘songs’, rip-off AI animations, videos and images, emails with mega attachments, never-to-be-watched-again presentations, never-to-be-read-again reports, files and…
59
60
American solar farms
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...