frankmcsherry/blog on Hacker News

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Transaction Processing in the Data Plane

story by nate_stewart · 2026-06-23 · 0 comments

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Progress in Graph Processing (2015)

story by tosh · 2026-01-24 · 0 comments

…enumerate, or even understand the full list [...] There are so many things I don't understand here. https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2022...

comment by refset · 2025-10-03 · in Ask HN: What's your experience with using graph databases for agentic use-cases?

…joins can achieve worst-case optimal runtime, given suitable adjustments to the query plan. - https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2025...

comment by davery22 · 2025-06-15 · in Datalog in Rust

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Datalog in Rust

story by brson · 2025-06-15 · 42 comments

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Datalog in Rust

story by Bogdanp · 2025-06-14 · 0 comments

I recommend Frank McSherry's real-time log of working through AoC 2023 using a SQL dialect:: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2024... The most powerful primitive that the dialect has is (mutual) recursion, which is…

comment by ilya_m · 2025-01-03 · in Advent of Code 2024 in pure SQL

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A Diversion into Compression

story by todsacerdoti · 2024-09-11 · 0 comments

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Advent of Code 2023 in Recursive SQL

story by ilya_m · 2024-01-18 · 0 comments

…Datalog, whereas in SQL they are bolted on with recursive common table expressions And similarly: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2022...

comment by refset · 2023-02-15 · in Introduction to Datalog

…could beat out a bunch of these JVM distributed querying tools because... data locality basically. https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2015...

comment by bfrog · 2023-02-07 · in Big data is dead

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Rust for Data-Intensive Computation (2020)

story by Tomte · 2022-11-24 · 0 comments

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Cost in the Land of Databases (2017)

story by Tomte · 2022-11-24 · 0 comments

…is. My experience with differential-dataflow is that it's also galaxy brain. [blog]: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2018... [datafrog]: https://github.com/rust-lang/datafrog

comment by jitl · 2022-11-09 · in Differential Datalog: a programming language for incremental computation

…incrementally-updated Datalog in the Rust community. For example, I think Datafrog is really neat: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2018... But it's great to see more cool projects in this space, so thank you.

comment by ekidd · 2022-11-08 · in Show HN: Cozo – new Graph DB with Datalog, embedded like SQLite

…checker uses `polonius_engine` [3] which uses `datafrog` so it's still used by the compiler! [1] https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2018... [2] https://github.com/rust-lang/datafrog [3]…

comment by akiselev · 2021-06-17 · in Differential Dataflow for Mere Mortals

…monoids (semigroup + explicit zero element) allow for efficient append-only computations [0]. [0]: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2019...

comment by namibj · 2021-01-22 · in Why isn't differential dataflow more popular?

…[1]: https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow/tree... [2]: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2020... [3]: https://mtrlz.dev/api/rust/dogsdogsdogs/calculus/index.html (3rd-party hosting of docs fo

comment by namibj · 2021-01-22 · in Why isn't differential dataflow more popular?

…storage, it should not be a big problem to make it recover quickly from a dead node. [0]: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2020... [1]: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2018... [2]:…

comment by namibj · 2021-01-22 · in Why isn't differential dataflow more popular?

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Rust for Data-Intensive Computation

story by lukastyrychtr · 2020-11-07 · 0 comments

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Rust for Data-Intensive Computation

story by mark4 · 2020-10-29 · 0 comments

…Frank McSherry also has some good resources if you enjoy his writing style: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2016... In particular, I think it's important to keep in mind that differential privacy is as much foc

comment by mattb314 · 2020-08-13 · in Google's differential privacy library

…the change. Feel free to read up on Frank's blog post about how datafrog came into existence: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2018...

comment by namibj · 2020-07-19 · in Turning the IDE Inside Out with Datalog

…to be done as safely as possible are important. If you have free cycles, you can read more here: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2017...

comment by frankmcsherry · 2020-07-04 · in Differential privacy tools from MS Research and Harvard

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Cost in the Land of Databases (2017)

story by memexy · 2020-06-21 · 0 comments

…before making sweeping performance claims. Frank’s blog post on TPC-H is a good place to start: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2017... We definitely have some performance engineering work to do in Materialize, but…

comment by benesch · 2020-02-18 · in Materialize: A Streaming Data Warehouse

For anyone interested in the details behind all of this, you should check out Frank's blog: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog

comment by samuell · 2020-02-18 · in Materialize: A Streaming Data Warehouse

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Differential Dataflow but at what cost? (2017)

story by mrry · 2020-01-19 · 11 comments

…your "almost DP" post expresses and makes criticisms that aren't quite addressed in your post. [1]: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2017...

comment by rpglover64 · 2019-09-06 · in Enabling developers and organizations to use differential privacy

…the added noise to the sensitivity, you cover up the presence or absence of any one individual. [1] https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2016... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace_distribution [3]…

comment by majos · 2019-07-24 · in Algorithm can pick out almost any American in supposedly anonymized databases

…are going to save on power? And is there actually any power savings over a single core anyway? [1] https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2015...

comment by nl · 2019-06-10 · in Graph Processing on FPGAs: Taxonomy, Survey, Challenges

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Monoids and Differential Dataflow

story by pplonski86 · 2019-03-10 · 7 comments

…datalog engine in Rust (which I think might currently be used in Rust's new borrow checker?): https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2018...

comment by kibwen · 2018-12-25 · in Learn Prolog Now

…reminds me of a recent HN post about a simple datalog engine being used in the rust borrow checker. https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2018... via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17107527

comment by ysleepy · 2018-05-21 · in The Power of Prolog

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A relatively simple Datalog engine

story by dmit · 2018-05-19 · 28 comments

…associated with implementations of differential privacy. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02753 [2] https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2018...

comment by Cynddl · 2018-03-25 · in The Algorithmic Foundations of Differential Privacy (2014) [pdf]

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Uber's differential privacy… probably isn't

story by Cynddl · 2018-02-28 · 0 comments

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Deep learning and differential privacy

story by incan1275 · 2017-10-30 · 0 comments

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Differential Dataflow but at what cost? (2017)

story by mrry · 2017-10-24 · 0 comments

Yup. See also this recent followup from him: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2017... Literally the papers are "I built a thing, and it gets faster when you do this thing to it." There's no condition on whether the…

comment by geofft · 2017-10-19 · in When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy

…1000x of a single-threaded implementation (and so, not quite within that of data-parallel systems): https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2017... I don't use databases because they are really quite bad at computation. In…

comment by frankmcsherry · 2017-10-09 · in Readings in Database Systems, 5th Edition (2015)

…trounce some large distributed systems. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15332051 2: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2015...

comment by kbenson · 2017-09-27 · in Stream VByte: breaking new speed records for integer compression

…(comparing to a single-threaded implementation) to his own work once he gets a little further: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2017... I think that answering the "fastest way to do X in a cluster" question is only…

comment by lambda · 2017-09-25 · in COST in the land of databases

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COST in the land of databases

story by jchanimal · 2017-09-25 · 55 comments

This example isn't about branch prediction (not exactly), but it might still be interesting: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2015... It's about how sorting + random access can be faster than random access, because…

comment by frankmcsherry · 2017-09-15 · in Why is it faster to process a sorted array than an unsorted array? (2012)

…locality on traversal. See for example how Frank McSherry uses Hilbert curves in graph processing: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2015...

comment by adrianN · 2017-09-15 · in Why is it faster to process a sorted array than an unsorted array? (2012)

…conventional wisdom with some people, but circa a year or so ago when we did some measurements, no. https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2015... https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2015... If you…

comment by frankmcsherry · 2017-04-29 · in A Trillion Edge Graph on a Single Commodity Node

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Implementing a TPC-H-like evaluation in differential dataflow

story by dmit · 2017-04-24 · 0 comments

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Modular data organization

story by mrry · 2017-02-22 · 0 comments

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Differential dataflow progress report

story by mrry · 2017-02-13 · 0 comments