sixdimensional

Thanks, fixed it!

I can go one step further with an anecdote- in the small town I live in, private equity bought our small hospital, and the land it sits on.

Consequently, it changed policy, raided the equipment to take expensive equipment to other hospitals, ran it into the ground, and then closed it permanently on the grounds that it was too expensive to operate.

The hospital sat derelict for probably more than 6 years as the city fought with the owner to try to get a hospital + emergency room back to no avail.

It was then promptly razed to the ground, and now the highly valuable real estate is currently sitting there growing weeds, as the owners contemplate what to do next. We believe they will build luxury senior housing there, but nobody knows.

The closest ER to my house used to be less than 5 miles away. Now it is more than 15 miles to the north, and it is shared by a much larger area. The nearest ER in any other direction is 30+ miles away.

It destroyed the hospital, and our local medical community in the process.

So yeah, at least in my case (and I suspect I'm not alone), private equity was completely destructive to our hospital.

Seeing this news is a nice tribute to Ed Stone, who was one of the core project scientists for Voyager and recently passed [1] (and all those who work/worked on the program).

I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Stone at a public NASA event many years ago. I asked him, perhaps a silly question: "what does it feel like to know you built the furthest man-made known object in the universe?".

He paused for a moment, after which he responded, with a smile: "Pretty darn good".

RIP, Dr. Stone and go Voyager go!

[1] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/ed-stone-former-director-of-jp...

That's quite interesting, would you be willing to share any sources?

I wouldn't be surprised if the term SQL/MED had been spoken in healthcare/medicine circles (I worked in that industry before). That said, it's the first time I've ever seen anyone connect the term/concept specifically to medicine as the driver for the term.

I'm actually someone who has gone deep down the SQL rabbit hole (I worked for a company that built a data federation platform previously), I'd be interested to read more if you can share.

My apologies, I thought the confusion of the acronym simple came from the "MED" part, which as I mentioned, stands for "management of external data".

In that respect we are in complete agreement :)

EDIT: Perhaps you might be referring to something like this paper about data federation in general? https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...

You're right, but this problem doesn't go away when you use Python - because you still have to interact with the type systems of the platforms you are integrating. It's a much more difficult and nuanced problem than I think most people realize.

Even a SQL query can suffer the same fate. Ever tried writing a SQL query against a distributed database that isn’t optimized for that read path?

I think that’s what’s really pointing out the root cause issues here, it’s not purely GraphQL’s problem, it’s the problems inherent to distributed systems.

The MED stands for management of external data, nothing to do with medical data.

It’s actually a chapter in the ISO/ANSI SQL specification.

In traditional security training, you learn the "AAAs" of security - authentication, authorization and accounting (and don't forget the last one!).

It's good to have ways to easily capture the meaning of these words, but permissions and login are implementations that fulfill the requirement of the As, not the As themselves.

Commercial offering that's been around a long time - InRule [1].

I don't have any affiliation with them, it was considered for a project I worked on in 2005.

[1] https://inrule.com/

I mean it in the sense of a "public utility" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_utility

This is a good reminder that what we call the public cloud today is actually a misnomer - it’s not actually a public cloud, it’s someone else’s cloud. Just like we used to say the cloud is really just someone else’s computer.

I think people started calling it the public cloud simply because of the scale and seemingly easy access to everyone, where the current clouds are seemingly in open competition with each other.

I haven’t read the details of US vs Apple [1] (only recently heard about it), but presumably this may be part of it?

[1] https://www.theverge.com/24107581/doj-v-apple-antitrust-mono...

So what should change?

Seeing the downvote, let me add relevant context - VLC is one of the most awesome products I have ever seen that is open.

My feeling is that an equally great “open App Store” that is popular enough does not exist (and if it did, I suspect Apple for example would actively have prevented it from being an option on iOS). Probable Google too for Android? I am not as sure in the second one.. is there an open Android App Store/marketplace/catalog?

Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure it all takes hard work/effort.

Which App Store would we say is the “open” one? I don’t know that one truly exists.. and I feel confident it would be hard work to make such a thing (but it might be worth it).

Marketplaces are either open or closed. For open marketplaces to thrive, they must be under the control ultimately of decentralized, federated authority. This means light governance based on interoperability standards, followed by independent, autonomous organizational units and individuals participating in open standard process frameworks.

That doesn’t mean closed marketplaces don’t work - they do, and well (to a point and certain scale) and are necessary, and there is an interplay between the two.

That said, open marketplaces and standards are for certain the superset of closed ones, this is where we get the interplay of public and private.

App stores as a model aren’t necessarily the problem, they are just a distribution model. The control and operation of app stores as they are currently controlled mainly as closed/private could be perceived as an obstacle. But, why not then pursue what an open App Store/marketplace might look like?

I believe the above is like physics, and some may label me a heretic for the strength of my belief in the above.

I truly believe that the sooner humanity advances to this understanding more broadly and we can more easily converse and cooperate in decentralized, federated, open marketplaces as an everyday pursuit, the better off all will be.

The Internet, and me being able to post this right now on the open forum of HN is proof of the value in fully understanding and being comfortable with the concepts.

Htmx 2! 8)

There are some tools like Apache Nifi which call this pattern an HTTP listener. it’s also basically a kind of a sink, and also sort of resembles webhook architecture.

Because people don’t know what they don’t know, and, learning from others (along with human knowledge sharing and transfer) doesn’t seem to be what society often prioritizes in general.

Not so much talking about the original post, I think it’s awesome what they are building, and clearly they have learned by observing other things.

Disclaimer - I'm not a ridiculously successful expert, but below is what I've gleaned from my experience:

I feel the question isn't where a tool/idea originates.. it should be, does this tool/idea provide effective, appropriately-priced, accessible, problem-oriented features that target market-derived problems?

Also, there are problems seeking solutions, and solutions seeking problems. It's important to know which case you're looking at. It can be more difficult to be a solution seeking a problem.

I have been both an engineer and a product manager. I built internal tools, and tools for sale externally. When I learned more about formal product management, it made so much more sense where to start.

This is an oversimplification but, if you're doing fundamental R&D or internal tools, and not trying to yet build a publicly facing business, then focus on the purpose you are trying to unlock. If you're trying to build a publicly facing, sustainable business, focus on identifying a market problem, and building problem-oriented features to address them, making those solutions available and visible to those who need them, and acquiring/serving customers.

The beauty of some of this is that, these days it can be possible in some cases to focus on identifying something that is a market problem, make a minimal version of the solution visible with low investment, find out if this is something that makes sense to continue to build, and then iterate rapidly.

A lot of the above is regurgitated "best practices in product management", to be fair, but overall I've found it really helpful guidance.

Also an interesting post referencing the term in a previous comment on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31182790

For the curious, this might be it: "I've cracked our marketing code, y'all! Pulumi: Implerative Appfrastructure" [1] @funcOfJoe, Joe Duffy: CEO of Pulumi

[1] https://twitter.com/funcOfJoe/status/1319667607214067712

"Implerative" - thank you for this, this is the term I've been searching for to describe the weird blending of the two things.. I immediately Googled it and saw that it has previous uses as well, I would love to know who originated the concept. I see so many times, confusion and arguing about what is imperative and declarative, to the point where I question the value of the terms any longer.

FWIW, I have flirted with my own DSL implementations in a few cases. Certainly, language design is much more complex, but I also felt that once you understand enough of EBNF/parser generators (and some of the simpler alternatives), this is a very powerful option as well.

FWIW, my grandfather had dementia and knew it before he passed, and for a long time when it was developing.

The interesting part is he could not remember the word for it, but the part of his brain that knew what dementia was, still functioned.

So he would say, "I have that thing that starts with the letter d, where I can't remember things".

I also remember after he passed, going through things in his home, and finding papers and things he had collected, which were his reminders to himself that he had seen in himself that he couldn't remember.

I think for me, one of the most emotional moments I had was finding this poem printed and sitting on his desk: https://www.ellenbailey.com/poems/ellen_112.htm

I still miss him and was in awe of the fact that he was going through the stages of dementia but still remembered me, and was aware of it. I think being aware of it almost made it worse, in my opinion.

This reminded me of when when I first learned HTML in around 1995… anybody else remember Kevin Werbach’s Barebones Guide to HTML?

It was basically a site that listed all the HTML tags and what they did.

That plus a text editor and early version of Netscape Navigator was all you needed, and you were off to the races to learn and experiment!

I had not, thanks for sharing this is really interesting! I see "Self-Modifying PKZIP Object Store" and this is very much what I had in mind. Neat, will have a look!

Tangentially, I've been exploring something kind of fascinating...

So, in compiled binary executables it was not uncommon to include encoded binary resources, like files or images. Not tons of them, because they would explode the size of the executable.

For example, for C or C++ https://github.com/graphitemaster/incbin

So here's the interesting part - we decided to build executables in a way that data in those executables could not be changed (makes sense since it's compiled and the compiled code runs on the machine, and for security reasons).

That said, think about what a container (e.g. docker) is. A running container is kind of like a packaged executable, except it also has a filesystem.

So if you pack data (which can be modified and runtime!) into a container, it's a similar concept to an embedded resource in an executable, except it can change.

Now, in a container, any changes made to data at runtime inside the container won't persist unless the container is given persistent storage.

What I've been wondering lately is why we didn't invent some kind of single "executable plus volatile data space embedded within the executable", so that programs and data (say, a database) could couple together into a single file.

Just a musing but tangentially related to your "baked data" - basically, embedded resources in executables just embeds the encoded data right into an executable.

For scripting languages, of course, we can just make a script file that contains a variable with the encoded data as base64 directly.

For the latter 2, it's only good for relatively small static data of course, but it would be interesting to build tech that somehow lifted that constraint of executables.

I am wondering this too. I waited years hoping the .ing gTLD would be released, and it never happened.

It is amusing that in 2005, "VLDB" (precursor term to "big data") was defined in Wikipedia to be "larger than 1TB".. after reading through the post and the author's experience.. it would appear that this was not actually a completely terrible estimate, although there are larger and smaller: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Very_large_databa...

The current version of that article states: "There is no absolute amount of data that can be cited. For example, one cannot say that any database with more than 1 TB of data is considered a VLDB. This absolute amount of data has varied over time as computer processing, storage and backup methods have become better able to handle larger amounts of data.[5] That said, VLDB issues may start to appear when 1 TB is approached,[8][9] and are more than likely to have appeared as 30 TB or so is exceeded.[10]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_large_database

Or replace Pandas with Pandas API on Spark [1]?

[1] https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/api/python/user_guide/p...