andrea_s's comments

andrea_s | 5 years ago | on: Sensors detect rise in nuclear particles on Baltic Sea

> Back to topic. In Russia it is believed that after taking Berlin soldiers should have fought Allies. That's liberation war for you.

And they were not the only ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Unthinkable

andrea_s | 6 years ago | on: SIMD instructions

Yandex ClickHouse also should be on the list!

andrea_s | 6 years ago | on: Launch HN: Paragon (YC W20) – Visually Build API Workflows

No pricing and no self-hosting option (either/or would be fine of course). A pretty neat tool for hobbies, maybe...

andrea_s | 6 years ago | on: Announcing Timescale Cloud

MongoDB is not well suited for OLAP-style workloads - have you considered Yandex ClickHouse?

andrea_s | 8 years ago | on: Postmortem of Service Outage at 3.4M Concurrent Users

404 not found at the moment - does anyone has a snapshot?

edit: nevermind, it is available again - weird

andrea_s | 8 years ago | on: SQL in CockroachDB: Mapping Table Data to Key-Value Storage (2015)

To be fair, Spark is way too slow to be used as a back-end database system (there's a big bap between "lightning speed computation", as they put them, and a common workload for a database serving data to a user-facing application).

Now of course Spark makes up for it with its great flexibility and scalability, but I do not really see the two technologies as competing ones.

This even without getting into the other parts of the data model (insert, update, delete) that do not exist in Spark (or "kind of" exist), by design.

andrea_s | 8 years ago | on: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

Honestly I don't know, I do not work for Thoughtspot.

My assumption is that it works on metadata coming from a relational schema with a rule parser on top.

Honestly I don't see how it would work well enough if it was based on NLP of unstructured data.

andrea_s | 8 years ago | on: Visualize data instantly with machine learning in Google Sheets

Kind of goes in the direction of what Thoughtspot (https://www.thoughtspot.com/) is doing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-y_EjFsDuk)

andrea_s | 9 years ago | on: Google Data Studio

I have tried it ~1 month ago and was quite a bit underwhelmed - direct connectivity with Google products is nice, but the data manipulation capabilities themselves lag behind Tableau a big deal (especially when it comes to clicking around in charts and tables to slice your dataset, which is admittedly something in which Tableau excels).

I do believe it is a valuable addition to the GA enterprise tier (especially for customers savvy enough to use BigQuery too), but at the moment I don't quite see it as a serious competitor to other off-the-shelf BI tools - would be very happy to be proved wrong in a few months, though.

andrea_s | 9 years ago | on: PurpleJS – An alternative to Node.js for Java projects

Perhaps that's closer to ClearScript (https://clearscript.codeplex.com/) in the .NET environment - although ClearScript has a broader area of application and supports multiple engines.

andrea_s | 9 years ago | on: Postgres Count Performance

It's a bit odd there's no mention of the PG columnar store in this article (https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2014/04/03/columnar-store-for...) - especially since it's from the same company.

It would be interesting to see how much the performances improve once you use cstore_fdw (especially since 1M records is quite small when talking about OLAP workloads).

disclaimer: I've never used cstore_fdw, but I have evaluated a number of columnar databases in the past.

andrea_s | 9 years ago | on: Headless Chrome is coming soon

What about Selenium? Is it already covered in point 2?

andrea_s | 10 years ago | on: The Sad State of Web Development

"I'll tell you now, kid, it was all so much better when I was your age!"

There, I've saved you from reading the article.

andrea_s | 10 years ago | on: Microsoft Is Acquiring London’s AI-Driven Swiftkey for $250M

I've recently switched from a Windows Phone back to an Android one, and from my experience WP keyboard suggestions are usually more on point compared to the Android ones. Only thing I miss about the old phone, really :-) I will be trying SwiftKey now.

andrea_s | 10 years ago | on: Python hasattr() Considered Harmful

Wrecking any hope of retrocompatibility considered harmful (who could have known?)

andrea_s | 10 years ago | on: Zero taxes for startups in Albania

Stay classy!

andrea_s | 10 years ago | on: List of Y Combinator companies I have worked with (hacked)

Ambiguity clickbait is the best clickbait :-)

andrea_s | 10 years ago | on: Scientists discover the world contains dramatically more trees than was thought

That would be like estimating the world population to be 1B instead of 7B, though...

andrea_s | 10 years ago | on: The day I ordered pizza that 'doesn't exist'

Nothing, really (if it works for you!). It's just extremely far removed from the usual way pizza is consumed in Italy. I'm usually annoyed by the many culinary debates we like to have (e.g. when should you put cheese on your pasta), but this one I can relate to :-)

andrea_s | 10 years ago | on: The day I ordered pizza that 'doesn't exist'

I think I might have met a few, as I am Italian myself :-)

To be honest the story would be much more believable if the writer weren't a foreigner - that kind of reaction from the shop owner is usually reserved for much stronger violations of the "pizza code" (pineapple pizza being the go-to example!)