deobald

Thanks for this! I'd like to drop a note of explanation here, for future readers:

Yes, anyone can "just create a LinkedIn account." However, quite a few people across the globe are trying to decrease their online surface area. While many of us (myself included) just have a password manager filled with thousands of entries and 32-character passwords, some folks are not comfortable living that way. I also find myself unsubscribing from or filtering emails from these services at least once a day, so I can appreciate why many folks are increasingly trying to simplify their lives by eliminating SaaS logins.

Even without creating a LinkedIn account, one could fill in a dummy URL to satisfy the JavaScript validation and submit the application. However, we chose not to do this because of how the YC application itself is structured. The submission requirements are intentionally strict (60 second founder video, <3mins demo, very specific questions, etc.) and subverting the application process feels antithetical.

Having the option to opt out of the LinkedIn field is greatly appreciated.

We did try to get WASI to work, but ECL itself doesn't yet target it. It fell down on missing set/longjmp support in wasi-libc. We haven't tried WASIX yet.

There are other approaches than the one we've taken so far, and we're still experimenting. But for the current demo, we're quite happy with Emscripten. The entire Wasm ecosystem feels pretty darn magical. :)

Endatabas team here. Thanks for clarifying why this post was marked as a dupe.

We recently released our Beta, including a live in-browser demo built on Wasm. It seems the OP noticed our release somewhere, but didn't mention the Beta or the Wasm build in their new post.

Take care, -steven

This is really handy and, frankly, less confusing than doing all of this with GUI tools on MacOS. ;) Thanks for publishing this!

As mentioned in another branch, I took a stab at writing up a "What?" page to pair with the "Why?" page: https://docs.endatabas.com/appendix/what.html

It tries to be less wordy. :)

Same as above, I'd love your feedback, if you have any. Our Discord is on the homepage, if that's easier than email.

I took a stab at writing up a "What?" page to pair with this: https://docs.endatabas.com/appendix/what.html

It tries to be more concise. :) Would love your feedback, if you have any. Our Discord is on the homepage, if that's easier than email.

I think the documentation you're looking for is here:

https://docs.endatabas.com/sql/path_navigation.html

I've just pushed a change mentioning that paths can be used in both SELECT and WHERE clauses. Sorry for the ambiguity.

For example:

`select * from stores where addresses[0].city = 'New Jersey';`

...can be used on the demo data, found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDHGjUMqPvI&t=140s - demo

https://github.com/endatabas/marketing/tree/main/2023-09-dem... - code

HTH!

txtai looks cool! It's not obvious from the title of the post, but Endatabas isn't really comparable to SQLite in this way. Endb is a cloud-native columnar immutable database with separated storage and compute. Only the SQL grammar is SQLite-inspired.

That said, the significant dialect difference is that Endb's JSON-like documents are strongly-typed. One of the places the Endb SQL dialect diverges from SQLite's is typing. In this respect, SQLite is "more schemaless"... at least at the level of weakly-typed scalars and nested JSON (since JSON supports a diminutive set of types).

Endb's data types, their exposed JSON-LD types, and internals: https://docs.endatabas.com/reference/data_types.html

Endb's SQL data types: https://docs.endatabas.com/sql/data_types.html

...all of these can be used at any nesting level, which makes nested data in Endb quite different from JSON.

Hope that helps explain the difference!

(I'm involved in the Endatabas project and happy to answer other questions or clarify this.)

While acknowledging you're only addressing the Copeland paper (and not Endatabas, where the OP found it), here's the Endatabas solution to this problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDHGjUMqPvI&t=129s

Apologies for the hijack. :)

I'm involved in the project.

The temporal columns are intrinsic to Endb, but they are completely optional. By default, Endb queries run as-of-now, which then return the same results one would expect from a regular Postgres database.

Postgres temporal tables can't make Postgres natively aware of time, so temporal queries tend to be awkward, even if you want the default as-of-now result.

There are temporally-aware databases (SAP HANA, MySQL, SQL Server), but they all treat time as an additional concept layered on top of SQL-92 via SQL:2011. It's difficult for a mutable database to assume immutability or a timeline without becoming another product.

`entity_history` and similar audit tables aren't comparable at all, since they don't even involve the same entity/table, which means all querying of history is manual. Indexing of audit tables is at least a bit easier than the SQL:2011 temporal solutions mentioned above, though.

In all these cases, schema is still an issue that needs to be resolved somehow, since (again) incumbent relational databases assume a Schema First approach to table layout. Endb is Schema Last and allows strongly-typed nested data by default.

The Endb demo is pretty recent, and explains all of this in more detail, with examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDHGjUMqPvI

I get the impression this was discovered in the Endatabas bibliography, since the same user just posted a link to the quickstart.

https://www.endatabas.com/bibliography.html

...Copeland's paper is a fun and inspirational read. If you enjoy that, you'll probably enjoy other papers from this list.

I'm a huge fan of Luis Villa's "Open(ish) Machine Learning News":

https://www.openml.fyi/

There's a heavy focus on the intersection of AI and law ... but that's definitely an interesting space right now (and for the foreseeable future).

The argument for pure functions holds in a real system; these particular signatures will be familiar to anyone who's built a few Clojure web services. In reality, some of the functions listed (say, `get-article`) would disappear entirely into a system-specific convention. There's a balance to be had between the number of seams the team is managing directly and those which, by their creation, mean less cognitive overhead. The seams then exist only if they are required, as certain handlers might choose to diverge from the conventional functions used in a generic way.

It's of course not easy to see that next step from the article, since it doesn't eliminate any code by creating pure functions. But even in a toy example, there is value of creating pure functional abstractions. In some codebases, you might even see the team lead segregate pure functions by namespace: "Pure stuff over here, tainted stuff over there." In those situations, teams try to reduce impure surface area -- in this case, anything that touches the `db` namespace.

I haven't used `temporal_tables` but I have built similar temporal systems on Postgres in the past. (Judging by https://github.com/arkhipov/temporal_tables#usage at least.)

The trouble with these sorts of approaches is that they solve temporality the same way we did in the 90s: Add an `entity_history` table, timestamp your tx-time and valid-time, and add a trigger to version your entities. This must be done for each entity you want to version across your temporal plane.

It would appear that `temporal_tables` doesn't support bitemporality yet. It only has tx-time (system time). But even if it did, this approach doesn't help you with live data. Because the `entity` table corresponding to the `entity_history` table still permits destructive updates, temporal queries are always in the realm of audits and can't answer questions about the application data directly. Add to that a completely manual system of querying the temporal information, and the resulting systems tend to get quite hairy, which is why Martin recommends avoiding bitemporality whenever you can. Unfortunately, that recommendation (while sound, for relational databases) means that bitemporality is expensive and manual if and when it's implemented.

A bitemporal database like Crux encodes the temporal plane into all the data stored in it, making it transparent to the user. There's no up-front setup cost to bitemporality and a query's default time on both time axes is "now", allowing the user to ignore temporality entirely except in those few instances where it is required -- but when it is required, it is global.

[Continued]

## The Discourses Seem Religious ################################

I am quite happy to drop 90% of the theory and I intentionally left 100% of the theory out of my paper. It's not necessary. I haven't found another community with a comparable practice or environment and I am quite certain at this point that self-taught meditation isn't enough for me.

There is a very good chance this isn't true for you.

I wrote the paper with the interest of poking at peoples' curiosity. I have learned a number of yogic meditations, I have sat Zazen (including 7-day Sesshin), I have tried Tibetan and Thai Forest meditation practices. Vipassana is, far and wide, the most systematic meditation practice I have encountered and after years of meditating, my first 10-day course (as difficult as it may have been) was the first time I really saw not only how to meditate but why to meditate. A 10-day Vipassana course is self-described as "The Kindergarten of Vipassana"; as far as curiosity goes, it's a great way to get your feet wet.

Yes, Vipassana courses include Buddhist philosophy... but not much of it. Expect to encounter much more (and much worse) through Thai Forest, Sinhala, Zen, Chan, and Tibetan traditions. Also expect to find out much later. The advantage of a 10-day Vipassana course is that all the spiritual gobbledygook is laid out on the table, up front: "Here, take it or leave it." With other schools of meditation (Yogic, Buddhist, and "Secular") I have found there's a lot more concealed from students early on. It varies. The Thai Forest Tradition doesn't hide much but they will certainly water down their beliefs to keep you engaged. Tibetan sects have explicit "secret" and "magical" practices. Not for me.

Clojure is the least-worst programming language I have ever used in earnest.

Democratic governments based on proportional representation are the least-worst political structures I am aware of.

Vipassana is the least-worst school of meditation I have found so far.

YMMV.

## Ugh, Reincarnation #####################

Although a person can leave reincarnation out of the picture completely, one can take stock of it in Theravadan terms as a thought exercise: If there is no "I" and no "self", what is there to reincarnate? If I am "reincarnating" constantly, moment to moment, just what is consciousness and what is the stream of consciousness?

"There is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming." - Whitehead

...I would suggest spending enough time with this quote and all its surrounding literature to understand precisely what it means (and why it is correct) before bothering with the concept of reincarnation.

Reincarnation is not very interesting, no matter how you look at it, which is precisely why I left it out of the paper completely.

## Sam Harris #############

I'm not a huge fan but I appreciate why some people enjoy his writing. His guided meditations are pretty light — don't expect to get much out of them.

## Other Literature ###################

"The Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book" — I didn't like this and I don't recommend reading it but if you are going to try it, sit a couple thousand hours first... without experience to back it up, this book is far too easy to misinterpret.

"Mindfulness in Plain English" — This is a great (and light) starting point. Very introductory, though.

"Satipattana: The Direct Path to Realization" — This is a great book for examining a core Buddhist text from many angles. If you want to compare Goenka's teachings to others, this is a good starting point.

"Nothing Special: Living Zen" — Ostensibly about Zen practice, I found this book to be a huge help in understanding what was going on with my deeper meditation experiences. Highly recommended.

"The Mind Illuminated" — I have a copy but I haven't read it. I've heard great things and this comment thread has encouraged me to go back and read it. Thanks. :)

## Vipassana is Anti-Science ############################

Most Vipassana teachers seem to be PhDs. Goenka was a well-educated businessman. Many students on courses I've attended have been neuroscientists or neurosurgeons and they didn't take issue with the course material.

I'm really not sure where or how anyone has experienced "anti-science" in Vipassana courses. Even on my first course, when I found everything Goenka was saying rather distasteful, I didn't interpret his little understanding-the-depths-of-particle-theory-won't-bring-you-happiness anecdote to be "anti-science".

Are the tiniest sensations in my body representative of quarks, strings, or leptons? Probably not and I don't believe it... but no one's asking me to, either.

## In Summary #############

I wrote this paper with the intention of eliminating all spirituality, pseudo-science, and even Buddhism itself from the equation. I find Vipassana very helpful in my life, regardless of its Buddhist origins. I do not find the nature of the teaching to be too offensive. I expect many hackers to be in the same boat.

That said, if Buddhist philosophy freaks you out, do not attend a Vipassana course. Also, I noticed that a few people have referred to it as a "retreat". Vipassana courses are not "retreats" and one should not expect them to be an escape from normal life. Join a Vipassana course fully expecting to work harder than you ever have.

Hope this helps someone while reading the paper and this comment thread. Thanks for reading and if you have constructive criticism on the paper itself (which is a work-in-progress), please feel free to tweet at me or email my address in the PDF.

https://twitter.com/deobald https://toot.cat/@deobald

Sorry this was so long-winded. :P

[Author of the paper here. I am not the OP, though.]

The post on religious-ness / culty-ness has quite a few replies and I thought I'd bundle up my thoughts and experiences here, so here goes:

## Goenka / chanting / Pali / Hindi ###################################

I definitely had a negative response to the chanting and to Goenka himself on my first 10-day course. The teacher's response of "the chanting provides atmosphere" was pretty unsatisfying. Worse than the chanting, I found myself really hating Goenka. At times he was "cute". At times he was serious. I felt like I was being played and it really rubbed me the wrong way. However, I did find I was seeing utility in the meditation by Day 6 or 7, so I stuck it out. After my first course, I was so horrified by the experience and turned off by the cult-like atmosphere that it took me two years and a lot of research before I returned to my second 10-day course.

By the end of my second course, I had really not come to terms with the chanting. As a monolingual English speaker living in Bangalore, it really had the religious overtones of Hindu shlokas. It was quite a bit later that I started reading translations of the Pali used in the chanting. There are two things to note here:

1) The Format: Pali, like Sanskrit, was probably spoken in a sing-song manner. Although we don't know what either sounds like today, the rhythmic chanting is basically Goenka's best guess. [Aside: there is one village in Karnataka which still speaks Sanskrit natively but the language is obviously not the same Sanskrit spoken 3000 years ago.] Like it or not, the chanting is likely the "correct" way to verbalize Pali.

2) The Content: To my English ears, the Pali still sounds like cult music, even though I know what it says now. But all the Pali chanting is a repeat of the instructions given in Hindi and English; there is nothing said in Pali which you aren't otherwise hearing as part of the course instruction.

A note on call-and-response chanting: "Sadhu Sadhu Sadhu" is the only chanting students are offered to (optionally) participate in. This is less than any other school of meditation I have tried.

After sitting 5 courses, I am now quite comfortable with the chanting. Particularly for English speakers, it will take some getting used to. Listen to it on YouTube before taking a course if it concerns you; if you find it too weird or off-putting, don't take a course. If you find it weird but tolerable, you can probably ignore it when you attend your first 10-day course.

## This Really Feels Like a Cult Guys #####################################

My worst Vipassana "cult" experience occurred on my third 10-day course. One of the volunteers ruffled my cushion after the 2-hour Vipassana session on Day 4. I had curled up into a ball after a very painful meditation. He had decided it was necessary to break noble silence to tell me not to touch the soles of my feet to the cushion. It was my third course but I almost walked out.

You will run into people like this. The courses are volunteer-run, and some of those volunteers will believe in magic crystals and energy waves and crap like that. Some of the volunteers will be CEOs and scientists. The mix is pretty hard to avoid. Vipassana attracts every sort of person from every walk of life. Try to be tolerant.

After that awful third course experience, I decided to take my Vipassana experiment outside of India. As a Canadian living in Bangalore, I wasn't sure if the cult-like appearance of some of the students had more to do with India or Vipassana itself. I did my fourth course in Japan and found the volunteers and the atmosphere to be MUCH less culty. After that, I served (volunteered) for my first course back in India — in Gujarat — I wanted to see if it was any more cult-like on the inside.

What I found while serving was a huge relief. Yes, some volunteers you meet are "looking for something"... sometimes they are serious Buddhists or responding to an Orthodox Hindu upbringing with something they felt countered that (like many New Atheists today). This was still off-putting, obviously. However, the senior volunteers (one fellow who had done a 60-day course) and the teacher were fantastic. Their only concern was the safety and well-being of the meditators: When you get 200 people in one room for 10 days, there's a good chance someone will have a medical issue. Thankfully the teacher for the female side was a doctor. All the volunteers worked tirelessly for 12 days. I myself found I was working harder than I ever had in my life. The older ladies working in the kitchen were lovely. The teacher had a great sense of humour and was very approachable. Behind the scenes, I didn't see any cult-like behaviour at all.

This is one thing I find (perhaps unfairly) reassuring: Most of the teachers I have met are either doctors or PhDs. The inexperienced volunteers may be new age spiritual quacks but the people who have clocked 20,000+ hours meditating Vipassana are not.

First off: Thank you for the mobile-friendly link! I didn't realize this would work... I'd always just interpreted the broken PDFs on phones as "GitHub has a bug". ;)

This wasn't really "shared" on GitHub... this is a work in progress. A colleague of mine (the OP) posted a link to my paper without asking me about it. I've shared it on Twitter before, which may have given him the impression that the paper was complete.

I do plan to put the paper up on a website with some additional material (anecdotes, other meditation resources, etc.) this summer. Apologies for the current format.

They are published (not leaked) on YouTube in video format. They're also written down and published as a book:

https://store.pariyatti.org/Art-of-Living-The-English-br-spa...

"Art of Living" can be off-putting thanks to its use elsewhere. It took me a long time to realize that "Art of Living" as Goenka uses it has nothing to do with (Sri Sri) Ravi Shankar's church or the business he's built on top of it. Ravi Shankar was actually a student of Goenka's who went on to sell meditation later in life with The Art of Living Foundation. There's no connection between the two organizations.

It helped me come out of alcohol and drug addiction (not after a single 10-day course, mind you). It's helped me a great deal with long-standing anger issues. I find myself much more lucid and generally more effective; my decision-making capability is a lot sharper than it was 5 years ago.

Some effects which coincide with my Vipassana practice that I would say are hard to attribute to it (but I'd be tempted) include: calling my parents more often, giving people my attention more meaningfully, an improved diet, and better results from exercise.

[Steven here. I wrote the paper.] No, there hasn't. Vipassana courses generally reject applications from anyone with clinical depression or anxiety as the meditation practice is not meant to "heal" anything but also because it can be a bit intense for anyone... much less someone with a clinical mental health issue.

There are exceptions. I volunteered for a 10-day course in Gujarat last year and 3 of the men attending had clinical depression. A friend of mine has a very serious history of Bipolar Disorder; she was rejected from her first course application but permitted into her second. In all 4 cases, the individual needs a personal interview with the area teacher and a recommendation from that teacher before they are permitted to take the course.

The black-and-white line is "are you medicated?" — medicine is permitted on Vipassana courses with the permission of the teacher but painkillers, antidepressants, and anti-anxiety meds are not allowed for obvious reasons.

This makes such a study (scientifically) impossible; the applicants are heavily filtered so the sample has quite a significant bias. Positive conclusions would also be dangerous: It could be a very bad scene if someone with a very deep psychological issue lied to attend a course because of its supposedly scientific benefits, found in students with much milder mental health issues.

For what it's worth, in these anecdotal cases I'm aware of, everyone found the practice to be extremely beneficial. Zazen, which in most teachings is also a nervous-system-focused meditation, can also be helpful for people with clinical depression.

Relay is a Slack alternative: https://www.relay-chat.com

So far, a Relay organization is a hosted Mattermost instance. Slack isn't exactly revolutionary software and it seems silly that persistent IRC (that's all Slack is) should cost so much money or run on a proprietary, users-as-inventory, data-gobbling platform.

1. Why does Relay exist?

We built Relay for precisely this reason. Mattermost is pretty cool but we (nilenso.com) are not a military contractor or a bank. We didn't need Mattermost hidden deep in our datacenter; we just wanted hosted Mattermost so we could stop handing over every byte of our internal data to Slack, Inc.

If Relay existed a year ago, we would have paid for it. So we built it (for) ourselves.

2. What's the plan, Stan?

As long as we can, we want to stay in sync with the Mattermost mainline. All our code is open source (https://gitlab.com/nilenso/relay-backend and https://gitlab.com/nilenso/relay-ops so far) but we'd like it if our users could move to their own self-hosted Mattermost instance as easily as a self-hosted Relay instance.

We have some pretty specific near-term plans: First, Integrations are a pain with Mattermost and we'll be releasing a server to make that a one-click operation (like it is on Slack) soon. Second, a fully-automated (one-click) Matterbridge server so you can migrate from Slack slowly or keep or IRC users happy.

But beyond that? We're not sure. There are some UI/UX bugs that annoy us (especially on the Mattermost/Relay mobile clients). Some of the issues Abe mentions are low-hanging usability fruit, but from a lot of the replies on this thread, it sounds like not everyone feels the pain. It's not immediately obvious to use what we should prioritize; we don't have an issue people at nilenso sending us photos of their cats, for example. We're probably far from the norm, though.

If you want to shout at us about how we can fix Relay (née Slack) and, as a consequence, Mattermost, usability we'd really like to hear it. This is our 9-to-5.

Shout on Twitter: https://twitter.com/relay_chat/status/962936101919838208

Shout on Open Relay [1]: https://open.relay-chat.com/signup_email

Or shout on this thread, obviously.

Thanks HN.

-steven

[1] This is our open Relay server. Create channels, teams, whatever. Think Freenode or any other community IRC network. No 10k message limits or any of that garbage (it seems insane to me that language communities like Elixir and Clojure moved chat to Slack, given this restriction).

We would love a rule like that. Unfortunately, Indian LLP (Limited Liability Partnerships -- the only way of creating a technology co-op in India at the moment) Partnership Agreements are easily 6 pages at a bare legal minimum. :)

Super cool. We're primarily looking for senior folks at the moment, but it never hurts to start a conversation. We do contribute to open source projects commercially as well and sometimes we staff newer members of the team on these projects. Give us a shout at careers@nilenso.com

Good question, yuvi! We've answered this in the Q&A at the bottom of the article. The short answer is "no". :)

The [ dictatorship => democracy ] imagery is helpful and was part of how we envisioned nilenso as it formed. On a long enough timescale, it also seems to make sense since those forms of governance have worked well for, well, governments -- why not businesses?

I have a read a lot of legal paperwork around co-operative corporate structures available in Canada (where I'm from) which permit external investment or distribution of shares in a variety of configurations. However, I'm not familiar with a single co-operative that actually operates this way.

Having additional motivation for avoiding VC has been helpful at nilenso because it often feels like the streets might as well be lined with suits trying to throw money at us. We have considered taking VC funding if necessary, but probably only the expansion of a business which isn't purely software: hardware, logistics, manufacturing and distribution of physical assets... we've repeatedly acknowledged that doing any of these might require more capital than we can commit by bootstrapping.

Most co-ops (including ours) are run by a representative democracy. The difference between a co-op's hierarchy and that of a privately-owned corporation is that the co-op gives you transparency into the decision-making process.

I've never felt I've known whether the decision makers at my previous employers valued solid/logical argument... because I've never been party to the top level decision-making process unless I was a part of it.

So far at nilenso we've seen it swing both ways but the difference is largely a factor of age. Young(er) people are just not that interested in a co-operative corporate structure. The advantages (and disadvantages) of a co-op are all intellectual to someone graduating from University and the majority of these folks are more focused on their own career and personal finances than their employer's legal entity. I remember when I was 21 -- I didn't care whether I worked for government, a private corporation, a public corporation, or a non-profit. All I cared about was salary and an interesting technology problem to solve.

When it comes to lateral hires, there is more interest from people who have been burned. If someone has suffered from the opaque nature of a large corporation or suffered an opportunity due to an unfair equity structure their eyes light up when they hear about us.

The lack of interest seen in lateral hires comes from a pretty narrow segment: software developers who (in the present economy) want to be entrepreneurs. The "I HATE HIPPIES" attitude generally comes attached to an individual capitalist motivation to be on top. This is our biggest hiring/retention challenge, because these are precisely the people we want on board. We have plenty of entrepreneurial folks in the office but we've also lost some because a co-op will never let a person "be on top".

As for a "segment of the population", I don't think we've felt restricted there (though we of course suffer from our own bias). We've had a surprisingly wide set of demographics for a tiny Bangalore-based consultancy. :)

The huge advantage to hiring in a co-op is agency. The company is inherently democratic and change largely comes from individuals who exact it. There are a number of concrete examples we can give potential hires: moving most of the business to Clojure, running Haskell classes, everyone buying hardware for themselves, speaking at conferences, installing a garden and composter on our rooftop patio... everyone is attracted to a company where they can make the changes they really want to make.