HackerNews Summary (2023-05-25 08AM)

Source: You Don’t Always Need Indexes

Summary
Preprocessing data to build an index for quicker searches might not always be the best option. Here are examples of cases where full scans were better engineering choices than building an index.

Facts

💬 An interoffice messaging application for a small billing service with ten years worth of messages searched through MySQL without indexing and still remained responsive.

🔍 Someone maintained a 0.5GB full-text index of 100k commands for shell history, but using grep on a flat file takes only 200ms for a query across 180k history entries.

💃 A contra dance search tool ranked each of about 350 dances without geospatial indexing.

🦠 A viral count explorer searched the taxonomic tree of human viruses in real-time by scanning ~15k names with JS’s “includes” command about as fast as one can type.

🔍 When debugging issues using production logs in ads, Dremel was used to run a distributed scan of very large amounts of data at interactive speeds as an index would have been far more expensive to maintain.

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Source: Deploy Django: Appliku

Summary
Appliku is the best way to deploy Django apps, providing a PaaS-like experience while allowing users to control costs and increase resources. It also offers better support for Postgre features than competitors such as Heroku.

Fact

🚀 Appliku offers a PaaS-like experience while allowing users to control costs and increase resources.

🐘 Appliku provides better support for Postgre features than competitors such as Heroku.

🤝 Appliku came to the rescue for a company when their old platform, Heroku, completely broke down due to arbitrary limitations.

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Source: New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI

Summary
🧬🔬 Researchers developed a new AI tool to identify potential antibiotics. Thousands of drugs were manually tested on Acinetobacter baumannii to train the AI.

Fact

💻 The AI tool was trained by manually testing thousands of drugs on Acinetobacter baumannii to identify potential antibiotics.

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Source: The end of King Dollar? The forces at play in de-dollarisation

Summary
The dollar’s position as the world’s dominant currency is being reviewed. The fall in its share of official FX reserves, the shift in commodity trade and rivalry with China have fuelled speculations of de-dollarisation. But a fragmented future with mushrooming alternatives would create a multipolar world, and de-dollarisation is unlikely.

Fact

💸 The dollar share of official FX reserves fell to a 20-year low of 58% in Q4 2022.

🌍 The yuan’s share of global over-the-counter forex transactions rose from almost nothing 15 years ago to 7%.

🌐 The dollar is on one side of almost 90% of global forex transactions, representing about $6.6 trillion in 2022.

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Source: New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI

Summary
Researchers trained AI to find new antibiotic by testing thousands of drugs on Acinetobacter baumannii.

Facts

💻 Researchers trained AI to find new antibiotic

🧪 Thousands of drugs were manually tested

🦠 Acinetobacter baumannii was used to test drug effectiveness

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