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Columnar Storage is Normalization • Buttondown

Columnar Storage is Normalization • Buttondown

✨ Check out this insightful post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: ✅ **What You’ll Learn**: Something I didn't understand for a while is that the process of turning row-oriented data into column-oriented data isn't a totally bespoke, foreign concept in the realm of databases. It's still of the relational abstraction. Or can be. As an example, say we have this data: data = [ ⚡, 💬, 💬 ] This represents a table in a relational database. Let's assume this was a table in a relational database and we had to do all sorts of disk-access, whatever, to access any…
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3.4M Solar Panels

3.4M Solar Panels

🚀 Read this insightful post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: In October, I reviewed the Ground-Mounted Solar Energy in the United States (GM-SEUS) dataset. This dataset attempted to outline the majority of solar farm arrays and panels across the US. Version 1 of this dataset contained 2.9M panels.On Monday, version 2 of this dataset was released and now contains more than 3.4M panels. In addition to the panels and arrays being refreshed, there is a new rooftop array dataset.In this post, I'll review v2 of the GM-SEUS dataset. My Workstation I'm using a 5.7 GHz…
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CATL’s new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes

CATL’s new LFP battery can charge from 10 to 98% in less than 7 minutes

✨ Check out this trending post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: ✅ **What You’ll Learn**: LFP batteries have more linear charging curves than NCM batteries, and unlike the latter, they don’t mind being fully recharged by a DC fast charger. Charging from 10 to 98 percent took just six minutes and 27 seconds. The more standard 10–80 percent time takes just three minutes, 44 seconds. Only have a minute to plug in? Still sufficient to get from 10 to 35 percent state of charge. Another issue is cold-weather performance, and even electromobility evangelists must concede that EVs suffer more…
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How The Heck Does GPS Work? (An Interactive Exploration)

How The Heck Does GPS Work? (An Interactive Exploration)

✨ Check out this awesome post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: How geometry, stopwatches, and Einstein's theories work together to make GPS possible.Shri KhalpadaApril 11, 2026 Part of How The Heck?, a series of interactive explanations of everyday technology. If you like these, you can follow the author or buy him a coffee! If you're like me, you might be entirely dependent on GPS to navigate the world. At some point, you may have caught yourself wondering during those panicked moments when an exit is coming up and your phone is recalibrating: how does my…
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What Async Promised and What it Delivered — Causality

What Async Promised and What it Delivered — Causality

🔥 Discover this awesome post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: OS threads are expensive: an operating system thread typically reserves a megabyte of stack space and takes roughly a millisecond to create. Context switches happen in kernel space and burn CPU cycles. A server handling thousands of concurrent connections and dedicating one thread per connection means thousands of threads each consuming memory and competing for scheduling. The system spends time managing threads that could be better spent doing useful work. This is the C10K problem, named by Dan Kegel in 1999. If you were building…
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Preserved for billions of years, organic compounds found on Mars

Preserved for billions of years, organic compounds found on Mars

🔥 Read this awesome post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: 📌 **What You’ll Learn**: The findings suggest Mars can preserve the kind of molecules that could point to proof that life once existed on the planet.(CN) — NASA’s Curiosity rover has found a new set of organic molecules on Mars, including compounds scientists say are linked to the building blocks of life.The discovery comes from a chemical experiment carried out for the first time on another planet and suggests Mars can preserve complex organic material for billions of years.Scientists say the rover identified more than 20 organic compounds in…
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Sure, xor’ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out, but why not sub?

Sure, xor’ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out, but why not sub?

🔥 Explore this awesome post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: 💡 **What You’ll Learn**: Matt Godbolt, probably best known for being the proprietor of Compiler Explorer, wrote a brief article on why x86 compilers love the xor eax, eax instruction. The answer is that it is the most compact way to set a register to zero on x86. In particular, it is several bytes shorter than the more obvious mov eax, 0 since it avoids having to encode the four-byte constant. The x86 architecture does not have a dedicated zero register, so if you need to zero out a…
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justrach/kuri: Browser automation and web crawling for AI agents. Zig-native, token-efficient CDP snapshots, HAR recording, and a standalone fetcher. · GitHub

justrach/kuri: Browser automation and web crawling for AI agents. Zig-native, token-efficient CDP snapshots, HAR recording, and a standalone fetcher. · GitHub

💥 Explore this insightful post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: 📌 **What You’ll Learn**: Browser automation & web crawling for AI agents. Written in Zig. Zero Node.js. CDP automation · A11y snapshots · HAR recording · Standalone fetcher · Interactive terminal browser · Agentic CLI · Security testing Quick Start · Benchmarks · kuri-agent · Security Testing · API · Changelog Why teams switch to Kuri: 464 KB binary, ~3 ms cold start. On Google Flights, a full agent loop (go→snap→click→snap→eval) costs 4,110 tokens vs 4,880 for agent-browser — 16% less per cycle, compounding across multi-step tasks. Most browser…
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Things I’ve Learned as a Senior Engineer

Things I’ve Learned as a Senior Engineer

🔥 Read this insightful post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: ✅ **What You’ll Learn**: A few years ago, a data engineer on r/ExperiencedDevs got drunk and wrote down everything he learned in 10 years of engineering. The original account is deleted, but the post captures something real — the kind of honesty you only get after a few glasses of wine. Preserving it here, typos and all.Contains the language you’d expect from someone who opened with ‘I’m drunk’.I’m drunk and I’ll probably regret this, but here’s a drunken rank of things I’ve learned as an engineer for the past…
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Global growth in solar “the largest ever observed for any source”

Global growth in solar “the largest ever observed for any source”

🔥 Explore this trending post from Hacker News 📖 📂 **Category**: ✅ **What You’ll Learn**: Moving to a solar-dominated grid When it comes to supplying electrons for those alternatives, the central story is solar power. “The absolute increase of solar PV generation in 2025 is the largest ever observed for any source,” the IEA says, “excluding years marked by rebounds from global economic shocks such as COVID-19.” In other words, with nothing in particular driving the energy markets in 2025, Solar’s growth was unprecedented. On its own, its growth covered a quarter of the rising demand for all forms of…
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