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It's not doing that. If you look at the repository, it's adding a new commit with tiny parquet files every 5 minutes. This recent one only was a 20.9 KB parquet

It's not doing that. If you look at the repository, it's adding a new commit with tiny parquet files every 5 minutes. This recent one only was a 20.9 KB parquet file: https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news/commit/96a6747a06e954a45c3e385736e762e03c9b1c0a https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news/commi... and the ones before it were a median of 5 KB: https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news/tree/main/today/2026/03/18/19 https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news/tree/... The bigger concern is how large the git history is going to get on the repository.

vovavili 6mo ago
This makes more sense. I still wonder if the author isn't just effectively recreating Apache Iceberg manually here.
- tomrod 6mo ago
  Are they paying for the repo space, I wonder?
  - cyanydeez 6mo ago
    someones paying to keep name dropping Iceberg(tm)
    - mulmen 6mo ago
      Weird accusation. Iceberg is an Apache project. I don’t think anyone gets paid when you use it so not sure what the benefit of shilling would be. It is just a table format that’s well suited for this purpose. I would expect any professional to make a similar recommendation.
- tamnd 6mo ago
  I intentionally kept it lightweight. Just Parquet files + simple partitioning + commits on Hugging Face. That already covers most of what I need, without introducing a heavier stack or extra dependencies. Also, I wanted something that is easy to consume anywhere. With this setup, you can point DuckDB or Polars directly at the data and start querying, no catalog or special tooling required.
btown 6mo ago
I recall that this became a big problem for the Homebrew project in terms of load on the repo, to the extent that Github asked them not to recommend/default-enable shallow clones for their users: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/15497#issuecomment-1568062267 https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/15497#issuecomment-1... This is likely to be lower traffic, and the history should (?) scale only linearly with new data, so likely not the worst thing. But it's something to be cognizant of when using SCM software in unexpected ways!
- roncesvalles 6mo ago
  How would shallow clone be more stressful for GitHub than a regular clone?
  - enchilada 6mo ago
    Shallow clones (and the resulting lack of shared history data) break many assumptions that packfile optimisations rely on. See also: https://github.com/orgs/Homebrew/discussions/225 https://github.com/orgs/Homebrew/discussions/225
sureglymop 6mo ago
So they are sharding by time/day? I have a similar project right now where I am scraping a dataset that is only ever offering the current state. I am trying to preserve the history of this dataset and was thinking of using the same strategy. If anyone has experience or pointers in how to best add time as a dimension to an existing generic dataset, I'd love to read about it.

vovavili 6mo ago

This makes more sense. I still wonder if the author isn't just effectively recreating Apache Iceberg manually here.

tomrod 6mo ago
Are they paying for the repo space, I wonder?
- cyanydeez 6mo ago
  someones paying to keep name dropping Iceberg(tm)
  - mulmen 6mo ago
    Weird accusation. Iceberg is an Apache project. I don’t think anyone gets paid when you use it so not sure what the benefit of shilling would be. It is just a table format that’s well suited for this purpose. I would expect any professional to make a similar recommendation.
tamnd 6mo ago
I intentionally kept it lightweight. Just Parquet files + simple partitioning + commits on Hugging Face. That already covers most of what I need, without introducing a heavier stack or extra dependencies. Also, I wanted something that is easy to consume anywhere. With this setup, you can point DuckDB or Polars directly at the data and start querying, no catalog or special tooling required.

btown 6mo ago

I recall that this became a big problem for the Homebrew project in terms of load on the repo, to the extent that Github asked them not to recommend/default-enable shallow clones for their users: https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/15497#issuecomment-1568062267 https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/15497#issuecomment-1... This is likely to be lower traffic, and the history should (?) scale only linearly with new data, so likely not the worst thing. But it's something to be cognizant of when using SCM software in unexpected ways!

roncesvalles 6mo ago
How would shallow clone be more stressful for GitHub than a regular clone?
- enchilada 6mo ago
  Shallow clones (and the resulting lack of shared history data) break many assumptions that packfile optimisations rely on. See also: https://github.com/orgs/Homebrew/discussions/225 https://github.com/orgs/Homebrew/discussions/225

sureglymop 6mo ago

So they are sharding by time/day? I have a similar project right now where I am scraping a dataset that is only ever offering the current state. I am trying to preserve the history of this dataset and was thinking of using the same strategy. If anyone has experience or pointers in how to best add time as a dimension to an existing generic dataset, I'd love to read about it.