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nattaylor

610 karma · joined November 24, 2013

Product Manager. nattaylor at gmail
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nattaylor··on Postgres SELECT DISTINCT Does Not Scale
Loose index scan is made for this https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/group-by-optimizatio...

Postgres doesn't have it yet https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Loose_indexscan

nattaylor··on Router by Ramp
Muse Spark, Gemini, mistral and something from cohere would be nice

That said the current models ain't bad!

nattaylor··on How to Achieve Pruning When Querying by Non-Partitioned Columns in PostgreSQL
I'm drawn to this but it has several foot guns like INSERTs will fail for late arriving data if the constraints have been updated etc
nattaylor··on Show HN: µJS, a 5KB alternative to Htmx and Turbo with zero dependencies
Reminds me a little of htmz

htmz is a minimalist HTML microframework for creating interactive and modular web user interfaces with the familiar simplicity of plain HTML.

nattaylor··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://nattaylor.com
nattaylor··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2025)
Building an email-to-calendar-feed service for all the mails from the multitude of services and attachments that I get related to my kindergartener.
nattaylor··on AP to end its weekly book reviews
My read is that no customers will leave since they are much more interested in news coverage -- and this helps the AP focus more on news.

This is a tangent, but I wonder if they feel that they are just creating LLM training data and that few readers (even of Sunday papers) will actually read their reviews.

nattaylor··on Nanonets-OCR-s – OCR model that transforms documents into structured markdown
The base model is Qwen2.5-VL-3B and the announcement says a limitation is "Model can suffer from hallucination"
nattaylor··on PostgreSQL Full-Text Search: Fast When Done Right (Debunking the Slow Myth)
I wish there were some explain plans in either post, since I don't get what's going on.

If the query uses the index, then the on the fly tsvector rechecks are only on the matches and the benchmark queries have LIMIT 10, so few rechecks right?

Edit: yes but the query predicates have conditions on 2 gin indexes, so I guess the planner chooses to recheck all the matches for one index first even though it could avoid lots of work by rechecking row-wise

nattaylor··on The Llama 4 herd
Is pre-training in FP8 new?

Also, 10M input token context is insane!

EDIT: https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-3.1-405B is BF16 so yes, it seems training in FP8 is new.

nattaylor··on Preview: Amazon S3 Tables and Lakehouse in DuckDB
S3 Tables is designed for storing and optimizing tabular data in S3 using Apache Iceberg, offering features like automatic optimization and fast query performance. SimpleDB is a NoSQL database service focused on providing simple indexing and querying capabilities without requiring a schema.
nattaylor··on Show HN: In-Browser Graph RAG with Kuzu-WASM and WebLLM
This is very cool. Kuzu has a ton of great blog content on all the ways they make Kuzu light and fast. WebLMM (or in the future chrome.ai.* etc) + embedded graph could make for some great UXes

At one time I thought I read that there was a project to embed Kuzu into DuckDB, but bringing a vector store natively into kuzu sounds even better.

nattaylor··on [dead]
500 errors for me
nattaylor··on Web Origami, for making websites where you can understand how they’re made
Doesn't compression make any minification gains negligible?
nattaylor··on TinyJS – Shorten JavaScript QuerySelect with $ and $$
Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest your solution was brittle -- I actually quite like it and want to adopt it!

But I do think the legacy browser behavior with the ID attribute as window properties is very brittle for the reasons you suggest

nattaylor··on TinyJS – Shorten JavaScript QuerySelect with $ and $$
If you like brittle things, the id attribute is already made into an attribute on the window for legacy reasons

Edit: My tone may have indicated that parent's solution was brittle. It's not!

nattaylor··on Pivotal Tracker will shut down
https://we.phorge.it/ is a community fork that appears pretty active.

I was also very fond of Phabricator (all though my team preferred GitHub style pull requests) but I haven't had a need for it recently, so I haven't tried phorge myself.

nattaylor··on Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out
On Chrome, I solve my too-many-tab issues with an extension [0] that closes the LRU tab once a threshold is reached (10 for me). I find the tabs I need are open and wide enough, and the tabs that autoclose were not useful anymore. About once a month I'm doing a research task where I actually want many tabs and I turn it off temporarily.

[0] - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/max-tabs/ghhcibaghj...

nattaylor··on Sqlite-vec: Work-in-progress vector search SQLite extension that runs anywhere
I have a use case for this that I'm excited to try. I'm glad AlexG has put so much effort into this. Even the docs are pretty good!

My pyenv python3.12.2's sqlite won't load extensions even after installing with what I think are the correct command line flags. Argh!

My brew installed python3.12's sqlite will load extensions though, so I can proceed.

nattaylor··on Show HN: ControlFlow – open-source AI workflows
I was checking this out on my train ride home and I'm pretty excited to take it where it's been tonight. Well done team!
nattaylor··on What I think about Lua after shipping a project with 60k lines of code
Yes, speed. 1,000,000+ QPS and 1,000s of ads to evaluate is common. At that scale it's very distributed, so replication is another challenge.

In a way, its a search problem where bid≈relevance and targeting_match≈recall, so I've seen Solr used here too.

nattaylor··on What I think about Lua after shipping a project with 60k lines of code
A friend built a system where the ad campaigns with all their targeting rules were Lua scripts and it was also fast and simple in a glorious way!
nattaylor··on Hacker confirms access through infostealer infection [withdrawn]
In my experience with Snowflake support about a year ago, an administrator of the customer's account had to explicitly grant access to Snowflake in order for the Snowflake team to see or do anything -- and if I recall correctly the access had an expiry.
nattaylor··on Show HN: Auto-generate an OpenAPI spec by listening to localhost
Boring things like running the proxy while I did manual QA / ran automated tests.

I quickly realized that if I wanted an up to date spec then I should do it properly in the application

nattaylor··on Show HN: Auto-generate an OpenAPI spec by listening to localhost
Reminds me of https://github.com/alufers/mitmproxy2swagger which I discovered from this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31354130

I generated some specs from that!

I ran into trouble keeping them up to date.

nattaylor··on Show HN: Stanchion – Column-oriented tables in SQLite
This is particularly interesting to me for Android/iOS. I can't even picture the use case where there'd be enough data on the device for the row-based format to b a bottleneck, but maybe some case that involves many, many aggregations
nattaylor··on Multi-database support in DuckDB
pg_analytics looks promising here https://github.com/paradedb/paradedb/tree/dev/pg_analytics
nattaylor··on Ollama releases Python and JavaScript Libraries
https://pypi.org/project/languagemodels/ can load some small models but forming JSON-reliably seems to require a larger-ish model (or fine tuning)

Aside: I expect Apple will do exactly what you're proposing and that's why they're exposing more APIs for system apps

nattaylor··on US consumer spending dashboard built on data from 50M+ cards now on Snowflake
In my experience it excels at the stated use case of OLAP in the cloud with compute separate from storage and claim it's unambiguously good for this.

For OLTP it would be unambiguously bad (although maybe there's hope with Unistore, which I haven't tried.)

Many workloads are a mix and so it can become ambiguous whether it's a great fit / great value / whatever you're defining good/bad-ness by

nattaylor··on First Version of Vectorpea Released
Photopea is amazing, so I have high hopes for Vectorpea
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