[HN Gopher] B-Trees and Database Indexes
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       B-Trees and Database Indexes
        
       Author : samlambert
       Score  : 128 points
       Date   : 2024-09-09 15:57 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (planetscale.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (planetscale.com)
        
       | VeejayRampay wrote:
       | beautiful interactive visualizations, this is top shelf in terms
       | of pedagogy and vulgarization
        
         | bddicken wrote:
         | That's the goal! Thanks for the kind words.
        
         | eclectic29 wrote:
         | Slightly off topic: Learnt a new word today 'vulgarization'
         | which seems to have a completely different meaning from the
         | obvious. Thanks.
        
           | egwynn wrote:
           | Note that, in the abstract, "vulgar" means "common" (as in
           | "vulgar latin"). Indeed, its negative connotations come from
           | that same sense: "common" people are unrefined.
        
             | hinkley wrote:
             | The association between vulgarity and propriety (and class
             | distinctions) sort of ruins that word, particularly in the
             | english speaking west.
             | 
             | I wonder if that's as big of a problem in the romance
             | languages (which all treat left/right the same way - left =
             | bad, right = good)
        
               | jjgreen wrote:
               | Indeed: are you sinister or dexterous?
        
               | hinkley wrote:
               | In French the same word for "right" means the same notion
               | in English for
               | 
               | - direction
               | 
               | - straight ahead
               | 
               | - civics
               | 
               | - propriety
        
               | LtdJorge wrote:
               | Yes, in Spanish vulgar is used as inappropriate. We have
               | "el vulgo" (el pueblo, the people), which kinda teaches
               | you the correct meaning, popular, unrefined. But "vulgo"
               | is seldomly used.
        
       | hinkley wrote:
       | I realized after a few years of doing it that my strategy for
       | keeping Wikis useful is to treat them as B-Trees.
       | 
       | When the landing page gets too full/too many outgoing links, I
       | start pushing links and paragraphs down into the child pages, to
       | leave space for a fair share of timely links and on-boarding
       | docs.
       | 
       | Similar and older links get pushed down into the sibling that
       | best represents the topic. Then if the destination page is now
       | too big, similar and older links get pushed down to their
       | children. Eventually all of the outdated docs are three levels
       | down from the landing page, where only historians and experts
       | will see them. And sometimes as we finally decide how part of the
       | system really should work, siblings get combined into one page,
       | minus the speculative work that gets pushed down deeper in the
       | tree. It works remarkably well. At the end of the day
       | documentation is a search problem.
       | 
       | I highly recommend it for a Friday afternoon exercise when you
       | want to be productive but you know starting a new task is a
       | complete waste of time.
        
         | caseyohara wrote:
         | Do you have a recommendation for Wiki software you like to use?
         | My team is in need of an internal knowledge base, and I like
         | the structure of wikis. Most of the SaaS products I've tried or
         | looked at are a bit too shiny/fancy and don't seem to match my
         | mental model of how a wiki-style knowledge base should work.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-09-09 23:00 UTC)