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    OUseful.Info

    blog.ouseful.info · Personal blog · on HN since 2010

    Tony Hirst writes about data tools, Jupyter, R, SQL in the browser, and educational uses of computing, including ChatGPT experiments.

    Visit blogRSSHN submissions
    Data & VisualizationAI & Machine LearningProgramming
    What HN says

    HN links it for his experiments with ChatGPT and search, diagram generation, and teaching computational essays, and for browser-based SQL databases.

    Stats for nerds
    19HN people shared it
    12linked in comments
    67story points
    Nov 2023last shared
    2011people per year2023

    Top posts on HN

    1. 1
      Mapping How Programming Languages Influenced Each Other According to Wikipedia
      1 person · 42 points · first shared 2012 · 14 comments on HN
    2. 2
      Google Lock-In Lock-Out
      1 person · 9 points · first shared 2013 · Discussion on HN
    3. 3
      Docker as a Personal Application Runner
      1 person · 3 points · first shared 2016 · Discussion on HN
    4. 4
      Generating Diagrams from Text Generated by ChatGPT
      3 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · Discussion on HN
    5. 5
      Sports Data and R – Scope for a Thematic (Rather Than Task) View? (Living Post)
      1 person · 2 points · first shared 2015 · Discussion on HN
    6. 6
      When Documents Become Databases – R Wrapper for Tabula PDF Table Extractor
      1 person · 2 points · first shared 2016 · Discussion on HN
    7. 7
      Using Google Spreadsheets Like a Database
      1 person · 2 points · first shared 2010 · Discussion on HN
    8. 8
      Course Management and Collaborative Jupyter Notebooks via SageMathCloud
      1 person · 2 points · first shared 2015 · Discussion on HN
    9. 9
      Some Recent Noticings from the Jupyter Ecosystem
      1 person · 1 points · first shared 2017 · Discussion on HN
    10. 10
      Running PostgreSQL and Jupyter Notebook within a browser
      1 person · 1 points · first shared 2023 · Discussion on HN

    What HN people wrote when they linked it

    • gtaniJul 2013

      Seems like a popular thing to do, but probably time consuming (I probably have dozens more URLs but i'd have to search a lot of laptops, delicious, and... remember magnolia?)

      http://blog.fogus.me/2012/05/02/a-functional-programming-influence-graph/

      http://blog.fogus.me/2012/06/07/an-object-oriented-influence-graph/

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3920619

      http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/paradigms.html

      (the Dewey decimal system congeners) http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2380000/2371137/ACMCCSTaxonomy.html?ip=76.22.37.150&acc=OPEN&key=1B55DF923F77674F55057ED4F3766CA0&CFID=346311616&CFTOKEN=70828105&__acm__=1373473781_10bd00e024e5caa1c72dd84b743d610f

      http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2010/05/types-la-chart.html

      http://blog.ouseful.info/2012/07/03/mapping-how-programming-languages-influenced-each-other-according-to-wikipedia/

      __________

      vaguely related: the Right Tools survey

      http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~lmeyerov/projects/socioplt/viz/index.html

      http://www.storytotell.org/essays/juxtaposition.html

      http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1011/ConceptsPL/ (they spend a lot of time studying ML and the state of the art language)

      http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/exams/pastpapers/t-ConceptsinProgrammingLanguages.html (pretty sure i'd flunk)

      http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1213/DenotSem/

    • lioetersOct 2022

      It probably wouldn't be suitable for a blog or classic CRUD app. The use cases I've heard about are more for education and online editor/IDE.

      For example: interactive documentation that runs code in the browser with an ephemeral/temporary database, possibly imported from the user's desktop. For teaching programming languages in the browser, with the compiler compiled to WASM, so the student doesn't have to set up a local development environment. Or a database explorer that's a purely static site with no server, neither remote nor directly on user's computer - just virtually in the browser, which is a more secure sandbox. You could have a folder of HTML, CSS, JS that's a full-stack application with client UI and server (theoretically).

      Further reading:

      • SQL Databases in the Browser, via WASM: SQLite and DuckDB - https://blog.ouseful.info/2022/02/11/sql-databases-in-the-browser-via-wasm-sqlite-and-duckdb/

      • Pyodide - https://pyodide.org/en/stable/ - Pyodide is a Python distribution for the browser and Node.js based on WebAssembly.

      • Client-side WebAssembly WordPress with no server - https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/09/23/client-side-webassembly-wordpress-with-no-server/

      • Stackblitz - Instant development environments - https://stackblitz.com

    • endisneighMay 2022

      > The point of much of the "SQLite hype" is that there are many applications where read load is high and queries complicated, but the write load is low to non-existent. In situations like these, you can make do with a smaller DB than Postgres.

      Sure, but my point is that unless you know for sure your app will stay the same forever, why not just use Postgres or something more flexible to begin with? With things like Supabase, Hasura, and Managed Postgres why even bother with SQLite? Just seems like you're causing your tech team inevitable pain when you have more writes than expected and have to migrate off of it.

      Both Fly.io and Cloudflare's solutions are a good example of this. If you're going to use another service, why even bother with SQLite? I totally get the SQLite use case when you're using it directly like with X-Range-Requests (https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2021/hosting-sqlite-databases-on-github-pages/) or SQLite.js and a WASM app (https://blog.ouseful.info/2022/02/11/sql-databases-in-the-browser-via-wasm-sqlite-and-duckdb/), but idk.

      tldr: if you're using a service, why bother with one backed by SQLite instead of Postgres? The underlying data store will be abstracted away anyways. One scales decently, and the other, not so much.

    • kragenJul 2022

      If someone were to try to do a bulk download of the data (well, or whatever they thought was the most significant data) through the API for preservation purposes, might it put an undue load on your server infrastructure? Some kind
      of bulk data download might be useful insurance there.

      There seem to be some interesting efforts to run SQLite in the browser so that server infrastructure only has to provide bulk data access, with precomputed indices to avoid full table scans; I wonder if those might be applicable here: https://blog.ouseful.info/2022/02/11/sql-databases-in-the-browser-via-wasm-sqlite-and-duckdb/ (though of course if you aren't using SQLite as your backend now it might be a headache)

      Such an approach, if it were feasible, would have the advantage that bulk data downloads wouldn't look very different from normal use.

    • csbartusNov 2023

      http://computationalculture.net/rss

      https://2019.wattenberger.com/rss

      https://austinhenley.com/blog/feed.rss

      https://blog.ouseful.info/feed

      https://jakelazaroff.com/rss.xml

      https://joshmpollock.com/feed.xml

      https://lilianweng.github.io/index.xml

      https://maggieappleton.com/rss.xml

      https://runzhe-yang.science/feed.xml

      https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/feed/

      https://thesephist.com/index.xml

      https://topos.site/blog/index.xml

      https://www.geoffreylitt.com/feed.xml

    • bjterryFeb 2023

      Perplexity.ai processes Bing search results through GPT-3. It works really well, and you can see the prompt they use at https://blog.ouseful.info/2022/12/09/combing-chatgpt-and-search/

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