links.lmorchard.com - #data

XML is a cheap DSL

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 22:19:02 +0000

The lesson I took from this is that a universal data representation is worth its weight in gold. There are exactly two options in this category. In most cases you should choose JSON. If you need a DSL though, XML is by far the cheapest one, and the cost-efficiency of building on it will empower your team to spend their innovation budget elsewhere.

Tags: #data #xml #xpath

Cooklang: recipe markup language

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 02:35:24 +0000

Cooklang is a simple, human-readable text format for writing recipes that can be understood by both cooks and computers.

Tags: #cooking #data #recipes

Virtual Scrolling for Billions of Rows — Techniques from HighTable

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:57:13 +0000

TL;DR: In this post, I present five techniques related to vertical scrolling used in , a React component that can display billions of rows in a table while keeping good performance and accessibility.

Tags: #data #react #ui #ux #webdev

sohzm/jasonisnthappy: simple, embeddable document database with acid guarantees

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 04:48:58 +0000

A lightweight, embedded document database written in Rust with ACID transactions and MVCC support.

Tags: #data #db #mongodb #rust #sqlite

Backing up Spotify - Anna’s Blog

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:52:17 +0000

We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB), grouped by popularity. This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs. It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.

Tags: #archives #data #metadata #music

Of the web

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:50:06 +0000

most web apps are on the web, but not of it. This seems right to me, and I suspect web instigators like Tim Berners-Lee would agree. The odd thing is that, for a while, desktop software did exactly this. Word would save a document in a particular format, and another application written by someone else entirely could open that document. When we moved to the cloud, we signed up for a computing environment that was as much about siloing and isolation as much as it was about ease of access and maintenance.

Tags: #apps #data #web #webdev

Why Tim Berners-Lee still believes in the web | The Verge

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 19:35:22 +0000

The right place to end up is where you’re totally in control of your data. As the power of local devices becomes greater, then the amount of stuff which gets stored locally increases… a lot of the things that people are building out there on the web are local-first, meaning that they’re designed to be able to work without the cloud. They store data either on the web, or they store the data on your local device. The good place to be is that the data is all stored on your local device. The inference is happening in your device, and you’re in control.

Tags: #ai #data #privacy #webdev

xvw.lol - Indexing coffee with Notion

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 15:25:23 +0000

To sum up, this article will present how I set up an infrastructure to index the coffees I taste, with the goal of providing precise metrics to help characterize my preferences, using the Notion tool, while also sharing some techniques and tricks I learned during the creation of this system.

Tags: #coffee #data #notion

Scripting News: Think different about developers

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 18:34:27 +0000

This is the same problem web devs have, we have to become resellers for Amazon S3. Why can't Amazon, who already has an account for every freaking person in the world, let the user own their own data, which I believe they would reallllly like. I don't want access to it, I just want to make great tools for them to use. And they're free to use other products with the data. This helps encourage data format standards. It's why the PC software market was so much more vibrant than the web developer market.

Tags: #amazons3 #data #selfhosting #webdev

Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 22:47:20 +0000

Personal Data Storage has long since escaped containment as a concept pertaining to any specific protocol. Some implementations of it will be more mainstream than others, but pragmatic data coops can be protocol-agnostic and storage formats are transmutable. As long as we have sufficient control of our own data there will always be a way to restart our social graph and digital presence elsewhere in the event of platform collapse. Let’s make the web personal again.

Tags: #atprotocol #data #personal #solid #web #webdev

File over app — Steph Ango

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 21:44:32 +0000

File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom. File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.

Tags: #apps #data #fileoverapp #freedom #localfirst #tools

Synthetic Survey Data? It's Not Data

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 21:13:04 +0000

My personal conclusion — as a matter of logic, empirical findings, statistical reasoning, and scientific principles — is that synthetic data has no place in survey research. I also believe the purported use cases for synthetic data are unconvincing; alternative approaches are superior in their results and are less risky in practice. And there are important questions about research ethics that each of us should consider.

Tags: #ai #data #genai #llms #research #science #surveys

How I Track My Blog’s Analytics with Val Town

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 20:39:15 +0000

Random morning thoughts: how many people actually visit this blog? Where do they come from? What if I could just spend a little time to build my own analytics?

Tags: #analytics #data #serverless #sqlite #valtown #webdev

xan/docs/LOVE_LETTER.md at master · medialab/xan

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 23:39:13 +0000

It is therefore my intention, through this article, to write a love letter to this data format, often criticized for the wrong reasons, even more so when it is somehow deemed "cool" to hate on it. My point is not, far from it, to say that CSV is a silver bullet but rather to shine a light on some of the format's sometimes overlooked strengths.

Tags: #csv #data #formats

Maintaining control of our data with personal databases | N=1 (marcua’s blog)

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 21:08:09 +0000

The fundamental problem is that in using most modern consumer-oriented applications, we lose control of the data we share with those applications. In creating documents, writing emails, or tracking our exercise or other activities, we share data with an application that’s useful for a particular purpose, but also allow the data live in a database controlled by the application’s owner. With the data outside of our control, it can then be restricted, lost, leaked, sold, resold, and exploited. The groups that control these databases accrue most of the benefits, and we accrue most of the costs.

Tags: #data #indieweb #personal #privacy #sql