nlavezzo

Do you guys offer any kind of evaluation or guarantee around your product? I don't see myself parting with $1,500 based on a relatively summary level description. If it is helpful in the ways it says though, I'd think the price was certainly fair.

Anyone have any experience with his product - the "PR Hacker Toolbox"? Was it worth the $1,499?

I second this. A great story and it focuses, as the title implies, on the virtues of the warrior. Lots of those virtues can be applied to entrepreneurship, in my opinion.

I came to this conclusion between the sophomore and junior years of college when I had the money to take a trip to Italy but none of my friends did. I'd never been further than Mexico, but I did it.

Being there alone was exhilarating - almost like the feeling of being hiking in the wilderness far enough away from people that if you broke a leg, you'd be in serious trouble. There is something wonderful about being far away from everything you know is safe and comfortable. I think there's a part of you that you can only find doing things like that.

I'm that guy too. If you really want to throw people for a loop, bring a notebook to thoughtfully write in and snap pictures of your delicious food. I had no idea until after a few times doing this in Italy that everyone was assuming I was a travel writer / food critic. I literally had people at other tables ask me who I wrote for, and when I told them no one they didn't believe me and begged me to tell. It was awesome :)

If you've got comments or questions for the FoundationDB team on this article, ask away. We're monitoring this thread today.

IE8 only, no internet / cell access at work... I'm from the DC area and all of my friends that have these issues work for "the government".

This kind of amazing customer care is something every company can aspire to - and not just for the obvious reason of making people smile. This cost LEGO maybe $300 and has netted them an incredible amount of positive press and rekindled emotional connections with their brand.

If you want to read two great and inspiring books about this, read The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk and Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh. We're working to build a culture of over the top customer service and these books are our bibles.

We can all hope so.

Yep, those types of operations are less frequent in k/v stores, but we believe it is because of the lack of ACID in most of them. When you have ACID and ordering you can use transactions to keep data and multiple indexes on that data in synch, and use range operations to query the indexes.

You can build all manner of higher level data structures with a transactional ordered k/v store, which is why our concept of "layers" is possible: www.foundationdb.com/#layers

ACID and NoSQL are not mutually exclusive, although that is a common misconception due to the fact that almost all NoSQL databases gave up ACID in exchange for BASE (eventual consistency), making the development of their distributed databases much easier. However, ACID is simply a set of properties that allows you to group a set of reads & writes to a database into a transaction that is Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, and Durable. That set of reads & writes does not need to be SQL - in our case, it is a set of reads from and writes to a database of ordered keys and values.

For example, you could read the values associated with keys "a" and "b" and "c" and based on that information, make a change to the values associated with keys "c" and "d" and then commit the transaction. The transaction then either fails completely (if one of the keys you read had been written to since your read, in which case you re-try the transaction) or succeeds completely. That is an ACID transaction in a (NoSQL) key-value store.

It's interesting to see that the creators of BigTable and the early proponents of eventual consistency have invested the last 4.5 years building a system that adds back strong consistency guarantees.

If the Spanner paper is as important as BigTable, ACID may become the new goal for those building distributed systems.

Full disclosure: I'm with FoundationDB, which is a distributed NoSQL database with high performance cross-node ACID transactions. http://www.foundationdb.com

Hi Erich - I'm curious... you refer to your "internal database" doing distributed ACID but state that you're not with Google. Can you say who you're with? It's interesting to us to know who is also working on this problem.

Congratulations on shipping - looks like a very well thought out product.

Regarding your last comment on high-performance distributed ACID, that's what we've built at FoundationDB, although FoundationDB is a key value store so transactions are multi/cross-key instead of cross-document.

+1 for Autopager. I love it.

FoundationDB - Vienna, VA (DC Suburb) - Evangelist remote, core engineer must be local but we would consider relocation expenses.

FoundationDB (http://foundationdb.com) is fundamentally new database technology, built completely from the OS up. It is a NoSQL database (distributed, ordered key-value design) with high levels of fault tolerance and performance, but with the most important missing feature given up by other NoSQL databases - true ACID transactions. Our primary value proposition is that we give you the best of both worlds - the distributed design / scalability, fault tolerance, and flexible data models of NoSQL, and the strong data consistency guarantees of single machine relational databases.

We are well funded, and are currently in the latter stages of our alpha program and have a very long and impressive list of alpha users that includes "household" tech names. Public beta is expected soon.

Who we're looking for:

A software engineer to add to our core development team. The most important traits this person should have are a strong background in computer science, experience working with distributed systems, and a desire to work on and solve difficult problems in an interactive team setting. Some pluses would include C++ and Java experience. Must be a friendly person who enjoys working with other people as we are a very team-centric environment.

A Developer Evanglist - this person should have experience building interesting applications using popular technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Django, etc. and be able to show us a few cool projects they've worked on. They should also be able to interact well with new people (they will be attending conferences on our behalf, visiting offices of other startups, etc.) and be well spoken, both in small groups and on stage giving presentations. Must also be willing and able to interact heavily with the developer community on popular social networking sites. The ability to write some thoughtful blog posts would be great as well. Ideally this person would be located in (or willing to move to) NYC or the Bay Area, so that we can have a more ongoing presence in those places.

Apply at info@foundationdb.com

Here's the full context of the 90% statement:

"There's no guarantee, but I see people work pretty hard at school, and if that same effort were put towards the Hustler's MBA, I thnk the chance of being self-sufficient and prepared for "real life" is about 90%. I'd estimate that non-laywer/doctor college is somewhere around 50-70%. So, like anything, this plan is not totally foolproof, but I think it's a lot better and cheaper than the alternative."

I don't know what kind of experiences you've had with random college graduates and their level of preparation for real life, but I think he's being generous at 50-70%.

I'd certainly be more interested in talking to someone who had the initiative to follow his plan (poker, reading, starting a business, good health, etc.) for 4 years, versus someone who just graduated with a bachelor's in a randomly selected discipline and had no real life experience.

Also, I don't know if you've ever actually played poker seriously for a long period of time, but the reality is that if you're relatively intelligent, have self control, and are disciplined enough to constantly learn new things, you are truly a shark swimming with goldfish. The average person at a poker table in most casinos has no idea what they're doing. There is a reason that professional poker players exist. It is not purely a game of chance, although there is chance involved. Kind of like startups :)

If you're talking casual play, off and on for a year, then yes it's highly unlikely. If you're taking about spending a good part of a year, reading some of the best books out there (I recommend Harrington on Cash Games Vol. I and II) and then methodically applying the techniques in those books to your play, it's doable. Or at least, when I took some time off between startups, I was able to average being a reasonably profitable poker player at cash games in casinos.

However, I came to the conclusion that it was a good learning experience and that $80k a year was not worth having to sit in a room with a bunch of guys, hunched over a table, breathing in their germs, and listening to their half drunk rants. Great lessons to be learned from poker though, but you must be dedicated to average being profitable. If I go back and try now, I'm probably going to lose more often than not.

I see what you mean - thanks for the clarification. We'll be working on a FAQ to get up on the website soon, and we'll also be putting up a blog where we'll cover areas of particular interest in detail. I'm sure CAP will be one of the earliest topics covered, but we've made a lot of important design decisions while building this product and they should all make for interesting reading.

We've done our best to take the technical high road in those hard decisions - generally trading in ease of (our) development for stronger guarantees, more rigorous testing, and higher performance. We're excited to talk about our development process and decisions with the world. Looks like we've got some writing to do :)

A FoundationDB database can scale "horizontally" by adding multiple machines to a cluster, and you can scale the cluster up by adding more machines. This is opposed to standard SQL databases which provide one or more databases per server, but never one database from multiple servers.

Hi - FoundationDB founder here. I'll point you to a comment thread from a previous HN discussion where my co-founder Dave Scherer addressed how we deal with partitions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4295770

Please let us know if you have any questions this doesn't answer and we'd be happy to answer. Also, if you'd like to actually SEE us deal with a data partition, we can show you that live at Disrupt with the demo cluster we've built :)

Different FoundationDB founder here :)

We'd be happy to give you information that would be helpful for your document - your offer to put something like that together is generous, helpful, and we'll definitely take you up on it.

Why don't you shoot me an email at nick dot lavezzo at foundationdb. If you're at Disrupt or in the SF area we might even be able to get together before we head back to DC on Thursday morning.

Thanks again for the helpful comments and interest!

Yes, this story is amazing. He came to speak at my university with some of the members of the tribe, one of whom was in LOVE with flying. He couldn't speak English, read, etc. but he was apparently a pretty good pilot. By the way, this same guy was one of those in the group that killed his father. Amazing stuff.

I totally agree with what he's saying. At the beginning of this year, I weighed 236 pounds (6'1") and felt terrible about how I'd let my body get so out of shape. So, I made a commitment (mostly with myself, but let everyone else know) that I wouldn't eat out at restaurants (one of my favorite things to do - I'm a big foodie) until I got under 200 lbs. That was the only commitment - all of the details, as in what to eat, how to work out, etc. I figured I'd optimize as time went on because I wanted to go out to eat again.

It's been 4 months and I'm at 203 now - so I've lost about 2 pounds a week (while gaining a bunch of muscle too), and am closing in on my (initial...) goal of 200 lbs. Going to have a bit of a celebration, and then set another one for 180 and some type of cardiovascular measurement / achievement. This has been one of the best things I've done in my life so far.

That is an awesome comic. I'm going to totally use that.

Sweet! They need to add Quest for Glory I and II though - those were the best.

To those who would say "it'll be optional - you won't need one to search Google, check you email, etc." I point out that there are already huge efforts to track people across domains and build profiles of them. Private companies are ALREADY slobbering over this, and paying good money for even anonymized datasets. If this system goes into practice, it will simply be good business for websites to require your ID as part of the signup process. Also, open networks (like attwifi, etc.) may begin to require these as well. They could build nice juicy datasets of the Starbucks laptop crowd, and believe me they'd be hot selling items.

That's probably a best case scenario by the way. How long until it's mandated that your ISP has your internet ID, and public networks (attwifi, etc.) are required to get it to let you out into the internet?

Why exactly is this on Hacker News?

"Further, throughout this entire process, apparently I was accruing fees which were non-transparent to me until 6 months later when I received a check [I think he means bill] that was about 3 times what we had originally negotiated."

A bill from a law firm is normally more like a proposal / starting negotiation point :)

I think most successful technology companies are going to have one (or all) of these types.

The urgency of the issues at hand in a rapidly growing company and the relief a bad, but smart, employee can bring to those issues often makes it incredibly difficult to make the decision to take strong action against the offender. This article is a great reminder of how short sighted that line of thinking is, and that the issue must be addressed - often (but not always) by letting them go.