kwillets

7 ms·

1.
by kwillets 3mo ago
This trend has been obvious since at least the Poland deal. Korea gets much more return on its defense dollar manufacturing exportable weapons systems than relying on imports or domestic-only programs.
2.
by kwillets 3mo ago
I'm curious to see what patterns it's grepping.
3.
by kwillets 5mo ago
This has a lot in common with a columnstore, but there are a few interesting differences. The main one is subrow versioning. Column stores (in OLAP at least) have always used row-level versioning, which gets in the way of small updates. A s
4.
by kwillets 6mo ago
One of the founders of Antithesis gave a talk about this problem last week; diversity in test cases is definitely an issue they're trying to tackle. The example he gave was Spanner tests not filling its cache due to jittering near zero
5.
by kwillets 6mo ago
This site is underweighted on OLAP. Columnstores were invented for precisely this use case; nobody in the field wants to normalize everything. Which brings me to the question, why a rowstore? Are Z-sets hard to manage otherwise? Another asp
6.
by kwillets 7mo ago
Can you be more specific about what type of data mining you're doing?
7.
by kwillets 7mo ago
He doesn't want to manage the database the way he manages the rest of his infrastructure. All of his bullet points apply to other components as well, but he's absorbed the cost of managing them and assigning responsibilities. - C
8.
by kwillets 9mo ago
The object storage stuff is new, but it's mostly confirmed that the older architecture works. MPP with shared (S3) storage and everything above that on local SSD and compute delivers the best performance. Even Snowflake finally came ou
9.
by kwillets 9mo ago
Over time I've realized that the best abstraction for managing a computer is a computer.
10.
by kwillets 9mo ago
This is a fairly simple idea of indexing characters for each column/offset and compressing the bitmaps. Simple is good, as the overhead of more sophisticated ideas (eg suffix sorting) is often prohibitive. One suggestion is to index th
11.
by kwillets 9mo ago
It's been around for quite while, but DB people hate to explain where they got an idea. For all I know Vertica got it from somewhere else; I think postgres got jsonb around the same time.
12.
by kwillets 10mo ago
My last dive into matrix computations was years ago, but the need was the same back then. We could sparsify matrices pretty easily, but the infrastructure was lacking. Some things never change.
13.
by kwillets 11mo ago
I wrote part of that -- it needed a tight summary that covers all the main components, so I packed as much as I could into a sentence or two. I believe the second paragraph is mostly from me, but it was some time ago, back when Hanok reviva
14.
by kwillets 11mo ago
This is fun, but I'm confused by the architecture. Duckdb is based on one-off queries that can scale momentarily and then disappear, but this seems to run on k8s and maintain a persistent distributed worker pool. This pool lacks many o
15.
by kwillets 11mo ago
Don't forget the 2 hour tableau cloud runtime limit.
16.
by kwillets 11mo ago
I'm just learning about agentic search so I'm a bit adrift. One of my side projects is a full text index for pattern search, and I'm trying to understand how it might fit with that. You mention tool call overhead, but is that
17.
by kwillets 11mo ago
Are you actually using grep here? How much data are you searching?
18.
by kwillets 11mo ago
This article seems somewhat fanciful. Medieval Koreans ate two meals a day, and famines were common. Only a small area of the country is suitable for rice cultivation. The photos seem to show only upper-class clothing and furniture. I'
19.
by kwillets 1y ago
Nam (Man Tea) and other brands have been in convenience stores for years; most have a full shelf of it. As I heard it the male part of the name is due to its use in manly herbal mixtures, but it's not considered a male-specific substan
20.
by kwillets 1y ago
I built the ads audience system. Most of the effects of that are already known here; Ads became a big trophy within the org; everybody had to have ads and post-sale revenue, even the fridge people. Sometime around when the CEO got out of pr
21.
by kwillets 1y ago
I worked at Samsung and saw plenty of enshittification (including losing my own job in some kind of sketchy power struggle), but oddly their audio stuff didn't seem like a bad deal. In TV's they support the higher quality home the
22.
by kwillets 1y ago
The SIMD string matching optimization unfortunately missed a trick -- it's more selective to match the first and last characters of a pattern than the first two, and it's the same cost. Credit to Muła for this one: http:/&#x
23.
by kwillets 1y ago
Sorting wins for unbounded strings because it only needs a prefix of each string.
24.
by kwillets 1y ago
The blog links on the infra listings are dead :(.
25.
by kwillets 1y ago
My company is doing the dbx thing, and the best I can tell my manager is that I'm neutral on it. My working theory is that the UI, a low-grade web-based SQL editor and catalog browser, is more integrated that the hodgepodge of tools th
26.
by kwillets 1y ago
I think you can just xor the whitespace mask with the shifted one. Also, when counting 0xFF bytes from a boolean etc., sub the mask; 0xFF == -1.
27.
by kwillets 1y ago
Vertica runs on commodity hardware, and there's no license cost for cpu, so it's very economical for large workloads. The quickest way to 10x your costs is to move a Vertica workload to Snowflake (last I heard my old job is now up
28.
by kwillets 1y ago
I interviewed for an adtech position there last year, and it went pretty badly. I only had about 5 YOE in this area, but it seemed like they had even less, and it was like we were speaking different languages.
29.
by kwillets 1y ago
This is data engineering, where people spend thousands of dollars of their company's money to avoid learning SQL. The place with no Java is across the street (old Soviet joke, originally for meat/fish stores).
30.
by kwillets 1y ago
Another chapter of the slowly-reimplementing-Vertica saga. It's becoming clear that merge trees and compaction need to be addressed next, after delete vectors brought them onstage. Vertica will actually look up the equality keys in a r

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