Also probably don't give up a controlling share of equity too soon?
1,287 karma · joined March 5, 2011
https://catwell.info
The clock is not used to say that the time is exactly the same on all nodes, it is used to guarantee that if two events have timestamps whose difference is larger than some threshold they can be ordered reliably. You don't need an atomic clock to do it, for instance CockroachDB only requires NTP, but of course, the smaller the error margin, the faster the system is.
That being said, given that speed will be limited by the distance traveled by information and the speed of light, I suppose those systems won't have much edge over purely causality-based ones. In other words, CRDTs will rule Space :)
That would make a lot more sense, I am pretty involved with the Lua community. :)
I am pchapuis but I don't have a weekly newsletter :) Not sure what you are talking about.
I did contribute to Redis a little a long time ago, but for a few years I am mostly just a user.
That doesn't mean Redis Labs is the only Redis provider you should consider though. For instance, OpenRedis has been founded before Redis Labs (early 2011) by people who have been very involved with the community (contributed the Ruby and Lua clients, the original website...). They are a much smaller company than Redis Labs (bootstrapped, when Redis Labs raised over $50M...) so it wouldn't make financial sense for them to have Salvatore on their payroll.
EDIT: Salvatore himself is addressing this on Twitter right now. https://twitter.com/antirez/status/1032192722755571714
I won't get into details here but 40k€ before taxes ("brut") for a developer between junior and senior is not considered that good in Paris anymore. It would have been decent 8 years ago but wages went up with the increase in demand. Of course it depends on skills, position, stack, etc...
That being said, you will almost always make more money working as a freelancer, and you will definitely make more working remotely for a California-based startup (which may be difficult because of French employment laws but is still definitely possible).
> What's the startup scene in Paris like?
Booming. A bit too much, if you ask me.
The ecosystem started growing fast when I arrived, basically. In 2011, the first real startup accelerator (Le Camping) opened. At that time, there was a very interesting meetup for the Parisian HN community called Paris Hackers, with very interesting people including founders of Docker (then dotCloud), Capitaine Train (acquired by Trainline), etc.
Today I would say there are at least 10x more startups and 20x more people working in them, which resulted in the average level of people in the ecosystem going down. There are accelerators and incubators everywhere, as well as very interesting things like eFounders (https://www.efounders.com). Meeetups have grown unwieldy large (e.g. the machine learning meetup is often having a hard time finding rooms large enough to fit its 200 - 300 people per session).
As for companies, some startups have become large (Criteo, LeBonCoin, BlaBlaCar, ...); some are obviously growing fast (Algolia, Aircall, Platform.sh, ...); some (like Moodstocks where I used to work) have been acquired by US companies which have set up offices in Paris, among other things to tap into the well known talent at French research labs in CS and AI (Google and Facebook in particular). To accompany all this, more VC funds are opening and rounds become larger and larger.
There is a lot of good to all this, but personally I feel like this is kind of a bubble and I miss the time, not so long ago, when we were all a bit more reasonable.
> How good does my French need to be?
It depends on the company. I would say most tech startups do most of their written work (including chat etc) in English. People might still speak French, but will switch to English when non-French speakers are around if they want to.
> Are there any languages/platforms/etc. that are popular there more than in Silicon Valley/Fairfax County (the places I'm used to working)?
I would say the obvious one is Python for Web backend. The French (and European in general) tech community has adopted Python a lot more while the US was going with Ruby. Some of the larger and older startups use a lot of Scala as well. Newer companies tend to use Go.
There are interesting startups using less popular stacks, especially functional programming. What is propably the largest French startup, Vente Privée, is using some Haskell, and so is https://www.fretlink.com (whose CTO is a former Capitaine Train CTO). https://margo.com is building a bank from scratch with Elixir and Scala (the CEO is the former CEO of Capitaine Train). There are a lot of Erlang people around too.
As you may see I mentioned Capitaine Train a lot because this is how the ecosystem is growing: thanks to disaporas of people from acquired startups (à la Paypal mafia). A few years earlier it was Exalead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exalead).
If you need more information feel free to get in touch. My email address is on my home page, which is linked in my HN profile.
Also, QNX has never seen usage as a general purpose OS on a PC, even though I remember trying a QNX Photon Live CD years ago. I wonder what would work well, and what wouldn't. In particular, are there security issues related to the use of message passing for drivers...
Yes, TUN is not 0-copy. Is there an equivalent that's as fast as the kernel in any other major OS? (I'm asking that honestly, I have no idea.) If there is, is in-kernel networking on that OS as fast as on Linux?
The Linux network stack is what it is, there have been recent improvements for it (e.g. DPDK), but I think it must not be so bad given it powers most of the Internet.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1520156881/openbook-the...
Also, the fact that a grandma doesn't know what Open Source means doesn't really concern me, but the fact that the children of someone who posts on HN and works at Google don't, does. Maybe that's part of the reason why proprietary, centralized services are winning.
Anyway, I do have concerns along the same line, not because "Open Source" is on the front page but because:
- The team is not diverse enough in terms of experience. The COO is an "information-security expert"; the CMO is a "security and international relations expert"; the Chief of Product is a "pragmatic software engineer" and "crypto-geek". This is a problem, even though not necessarily deadly.
- They plan to allocate 70 % of the budget to software engineering, and basically 0 % to marketing / user acquisition / community management. This is the biggest red flag for me.
Any argument, including being Open Source, is good to get early adopters. Communication can change later on.
Too many products try to appeal to the general public too soon. This is not how user acquisition works.
add = (+)
f = add 1
f 2
Now we see a use case (call it "microservices" if you want) where people want to run a single application as if it was alone on a machine, and where the concept of "user" doesn't even make sense.
This second use case is what unikernels are for. It may make a lot more sense to run a Unikernel application on an hypervisor than a whole OS in a VM, and probably than a container too.
You can try it out at https://peertube.cpy.re
Former discussions on HN:
- About the crowdfunding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17153023
- About Peertube: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16714453
$ apropos -a change password
chage (1) - change user password expiry information
kpasswd (1) - change a user's Kerberos password
passwd (1) - change user password
PKCS12_newpass (3ssl) - change the password of a PKCS12 structure
$ apropos -a space disk
df (1) - report file system disk space usage
df (1p) - report free disk spaceI don't agree with this, but I think you may be confused because "Object Storage" can mean several different things.
"Object Store" in Ceph (as in RADOS - Reliable Autonomous Distributed Object Store) basically means key-value store. I typically say "blob store" instead to avoid the confusion with more sophisticated systems. It is exposed through a S3-like API. As far as I know, this layer of CEPH is pretty good, and you need a layer like this in most distributed systems anyway.
Ceph provides something called RBD, RADOS Block Device, which exposes a Block Device interface and is implemented on top of RADOS blob storage. It is useful for VM disks and has decent performance because it makes heavy use of the cache.
Some people use filesystems on top of RBD, but as far as I know CephFS itself does not sit on top of RBD. It is not as widely used as RBD because it is pretty recent (first release in 2016). The data is stored in RADOS and the metadata (which is the hardest part in a distributed filesystem) is dealt with by a Metadata Server cluster (MDS). This sounds like a typical distributed filesystem architecture to me, similar to GFS (the MDS replaces the GFS master and RADOS is used instead of chunk servers).
People tend to have a lot of issues with Ceph, but I think this is because:
1) It is used in reasonably large scale production settings where you are going to have issues anyway ;
2) It is not as easy to understand and fine-tune as it should be ;
3) Some people expect it to solve all their issues magically with perfect performance...
4) Some people use filesystems on top of RBD when they should have used CephFS or even direct interfaces to RADOS when possible.
But in general, I think Ceph is an example of a decently architectured complex distributed system.
Unrelated to the original topic, but I had never come across that talk and it is great. I use the same basic approach to testing distributed systems (simulating all non-deterministic I/O operations) and that talk is a very good introduction to the principle.
Back in the early '10s however it had things like usable widgets on the home screen, application cards, gestures instead of buttons... which all landed in the two major OSs years later.
The saddest thing here is those alternative OSs innovate a lot. WebOS in particular was years ahead of both iOS and Android in terms of UX (after all they had Matías Duarte on board... [1]). Sailfish is more interesting technically, in that it was probably the fastest OS to do "zero to non-trivial native mobile app" on thanks to its development tools (the Qt environment, with QML, a standard build VM...).
I backed the tablet as well, but I don't hold a grudge. What they are trying to do is incredibly hard, failures have to be expected.
If you want to meet the developers from Jolla, I think they have a BoF room at FOSDEM every year. I sat in to listen for a while in 2017, it was pretty interesting.
Often markets where the barrier to entry is lowered this way tend to grow overall, so I don't think it is an unreasonable bet that the size of the satellite launch market will increase in coming years.