91
A Blackstone real estate company exposed SSN digits, DOBs, addresses and more
Update: This post received some attention on Hacker News — see the discussion thread.
92
One night in Uzbekistan: Why was this one data point so influential?
We have a comment coming out in Nature next week that is going to cause the retraction of a high-profile paper by Kotz et al. from last year (the second most cited climate paper in the news in 2024).
93
Things I want in a modern relational query language
This was a very old draft I’ve had sitting around for years. The recent discussions of new query languages like Acadia spurred me to revisit, revise, and publish this. I think one of the biggest causes of NoSQL is that… Continue reading →
94
Agentic AI systems violate the implicit assumptions of database design
There is an implicit contract at the foundation of every database architecture decision you have ever made. You probably never wrote it down. Nobody does. It just… existed.
95
LLM Classification Is Feature Engineering
LLMs make good classifiers but even better features
96
The mean means nothing: data visualization to debug a latency problem
I was recently trying to validate some performance improvements related to lld at $DAYJOB and it was a little frustrating to see the improvements in our benchmarks but not in the live-production dashboards.
97
Python sets and dictionaries can have quadratic-time performance
In Python, the dict data structure is the conventional key-value structure. E.g., you might store a list of names as keys and have their phone numbers as values. Valentin Ignatev wrote this amusing post on X: It is indeed widely believed that, in the strict sense, the dict data structure and its companion, the set ……
98
SpacetimeDB: a short technical review
This blog post has been archived! SpacetimeDB has improved a lot since I initially published this technical review, and most of the technical details in it no longer apply.
99
Average is all you need
LLMs will make more of your average stuff. And that's OK. Here's how average SQL beats fancy attribution models when your agent writes the queries.
100
Generate QR Codes with Pure SQL in PostgreSQL
As my cat woke me up way too early for a Saturday morning, I decided to put all this extra time (and my ChatGPT Pro subscription) into good use and generated a QR-code generator for PostgreSQL, written as a single pure SQL statement. No external libraries or Postgres extension installation needed! The pqr.sql example…
101
Hardwood: A New Parser for Apache Parquet
Today, it’s my great pleasure to announce the first public release of Hardwood, a new parser for the Apache Parquet file format, optimized for minimal dependencies and great performance. Hardwood is …
102
Explorative modeling: Train on the best of K guesses
What in the world is Explorative Modeling?
103
The real cost of random I/O
How good is the random_page_cost default, and should you lower it on modern flash storage?
104
Building SQLite with a small swarm
Yes, for a supported subset of SQL. To establish a baseline, I integrated the SQLLogicTest suite.
105
A polynomial autoencoder beats PCA on transformer embeddings
A closed-form autoencoder: PCA encoder + quadratic Ridge decoder. On FiQA it gives 4× compression of mxbai-embed-large-v1 at -0.88 p.p. NDCG@10, +1.34 p.p. over PCA. No SGD, no neural networks.
106
Graphing how the 10k* most common English words define each other
The words are a subset of the 10,000 most common words from Google's Trillion Word Corpus , with definitions sourced from Open English Wordnet .
107
Testing Postgres race conditions with synchronization barriers
Synchronization barriers let you test for race conditions with confidence.
108
21,864 Yugoslavian .yu domains
TLDR; get a list of 21,864 domains from the former Yugoslavia’s “.yu” top level domain: download the .CSV