drob

13 ms·

91.
by drob 13y ago
It totally is. Learning!
92.
by drob 13y ago
Everything is denormalized into an array so we can evaluate funnel queries quickly, with no joins.
93.
by drob 13y ago
Correct -- they handle the idiom more gracefully in the context of an array-backed list, not an array. I elided the two as postgres arrays don't quite fit cleanly into either. (For example, evaluating arr[i] is O(i) for postgres arrays
94.
Creating PostgreSQL Arrays Without A Quadratic Blowup(blog.heapanalytics.com)
26 points by drob 13y ago|15 comments
95.
Great American Interchange(en.wikipedia.org)
1 points by drob 13y ago|0 comments
96.
by drob 13y ago
Such an interesting direction. Replication at the level of individual tables would be killer!
97.
by drob 13y ago
No, this isn't an issue for fixed length types, although you're still better off using unnest instead of explicitly indexing into them.
98.
by drob 13y ago
Query performance is critical. Insert perf is a comparatively minor concern. Even so, there are a few factors to consider: - Half second dedupes are for users with 100k+ events, which is <<1% of them. - We batch events for ~5s before
99.
by drob 13y ago
I guess we could do it with hstore. I wonder what sort of performance I'll get on it for a hashmap workload. Hmm...
100.
by drob 13y ago
Yes. Our schema is fully denormalized, which is particularly important for performance on funnels. (See heapanalytics.com/features/funnels) In particular, to compute where a user drops off in a funnel, I need to scan one array fro
101.
by drob 13y ago
For now, the following works for us: - For plpgsql functions that are required by app queries, we just roll them out when we write them / when they change (via ansible). - For plpgsql functions used in jobs, the job just reloads the re
102.
by drob 13y ago
Augh, I needed a hashmap in plpgsql last week! It's the worst. Best I could come up with was an awful hack in which I left stuff in a table with columns (key, val, invocation_code), where the third is a UUID specific to the invocation
103.
Using PostgreSQL Arrays The Right Way(blog.heapanalytics.com)
80 points by drob 13y ago|38 comments
104.
by drob 13y ago
Along these lines, I recommend installing New Relic server monitoring on all your EC2 instances. The server-level monitoring is free, and it's super simple to install. (The code we use to roll it out via ansible: https://gis
105.
by drob 13y ago
Agreed. One can learn a lot of practical postgres from camping out in there. It's also where I found out about a handy tool for demystifying EXPLAIN output: http://explain.depesz.com/
106.
by drob 13y ago
Yup! This is the basis for Fourier analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_analysis
107.
by drob 13y ago
In general, I agree that building up can harm the character of a neighborhood, but this is often presented in the context of SF and Oakland as a false choice. The difference between skyrocketing prices and stable ones is on the order of 3,0
108.
by drob 13y ago
Yup! Customers with <25k monthly visits won't be charged anymore.
109.
by drob 13y ago
The hope is that we can make this work for content sites case-by-case with the enterprise tier. Agreed that this is still not ideal for medium-sized content sites, though a lot better than the old pricing model, which charged by the user (a
110.
Our pricing model was broken. Here's how we fixed it(blog.heapanalytics.com)
61 points by drob 13y ago|23 comments
111.
by drob 13y ago
Hacker News, what happened to you? Father time has been cruel to you. Where once was a thriving community of armchair intellectuals eager to share their thoughts on Edward Snowden, Hyperloop, and the latest Snapchat valuation, now there is
112.
by drob 13y ago
Excuse me? This exact behavior happened all the time when Steve Jobs ran Apple. Remember Google Voice, or the countless other apps that Apple banned from the walled garden for whatever reason? If anything, this is evidence that Apple hasn&
113.
by drob 13y ago
It's not quite that simple. Building up can ruin the character of the neighborhood, which is often a big part of the allure. I do think we're chronically underbuilding in a lot of places (SF being an extreme example), but the exis
114.
by drob 13y ago
I swear this article comes out again every two weeks.
115.
by drob 13y ago
That's fascinating if true, since the power to tax is the power to destroy. I don't see a clean division around a domain on which a retroactive tax is justified. I had a hard time coming up with a good citation for this. Retroacti
116.
Finally, A Bill To End Patent Trolling(arstechnica.com)
448 points by drob 13y ago|62 comments
117.
Richard Hamming: You And Your Research (1986)(cs.virginia.edu)
3 points by drob 13y ago|0 comments
118.
by drob 13y ago
We (Heap) would use Manchuria if you were to open source it. We currently have a multi-tab spreadsheet. My previous employer had an awful Salesforce system which was about as fun as eating sand. You might even get a PR or two. :)
119.
Soup Tasting(shyamsankar.com)
1 points by drob 13y ago|0 comments
120.
by drob 13y ago
There's also a general disdain for the poor, rooted in just-world fallacy. As American politics would have you believe, the poor can't be trusted with cash. "They'll just spend it on drugs and plasma TVs!" Thus, the

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