Hacker News Reader

Comment by georgewfraser | Hacker News Reader

Klepmann is a wannabe thought-leader, who repackages old ideas into pseudo-profound “insights”, designed to capture the attention of amateurs rather than move the state of the art forward. He’s the Nassim Taleb of distributed systems. If you’re looking for enlightenment, read Daniel Abadi or Andy Pavlo.

View on HN

That seems really unfair to Kleppmann. I know of all three, and all three are, at the very least, accomplished distributed systems researchers with several peer-reviewed publications. (They still have different levels of expertise/publications depending on the area, of course)

In a different arena, I also know of no better book at the interface of distributed systems theory and practice than Kleppmann's. It's useful for engineers while being enriched by deep references to the literature. If that doesn't demonstrate mastery, I don't know what does.

OK, my comment was over the top, apologies to Kleppmann if you’re still reading. He is a thought leader, and he’s the first introduction to distributed systems for a lot of people, and sometimes people stop with his work and don’t learn how much depth this field has. But that’s not really a criticism of him. And nobody should be compared to Nassim Taleb, I was clearly letting the heat wave get to me ;)

To anyone cutting their distributed-systems teeth on Kleppmann's excellent Designing Data-Intensive Applications: each chapter ends with an essential references section (which include multiple citations to Abadi and Pavlo!).

The book chapters do an solid job laying the ground-work for those papers. The depth is in those references. Read them if you can!

Are you proposing a KAP theorem, that we can't have all of Klepman, Abadi, and Pablo?

YES!

I've lost a lot of respect for you after this comment.

I like Kleppmann, but I also like Pavlo. I have only seen Pavlo's database courses on YouTube, though. Does he have any books?

Not that I know of. His lectures are amazing though.

I feel like if you’re the CEO of a (barely) unicorn startup, you shouldn’t be making comments like this.

And what does that make you, exactly?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com