Ya, reading this article makes me think this person has never actually used a taxi (at least not one outside of Manhattan, which has probably the best cab system in the world). This guy certainly hasn’t tried catching a cab at midnight in San Francisco where they’ll reject you if you’re not going the right direction, insist their credit card machine is broken, and otherwise be insanely difficult to use. Every comment in this thread has started “I don’t like Uber, but…” and it’s absolutely true, Uber has problems but the service and the app have been a game changer. And his taking exception with the drunk driving study is a bit infuriating, he insinuated the data is compromised, but doesn’t offer any evidence. I can only speak anecdotally, but within my social circle Uber has absolutely decreased the likelihood of someone driving drunk, and if it even contributed to 1% less driving fatalities, that’s and enormous achievement.
The terminology around seed vs a vs b is so skewed right now, but a 50 person series a startup, just estimating, is a 5 mil per year burn. Hard to say exactly the raise, but personally I’d be uncomfortable with less than 3 years runway, so let’s call it a 12mil raise. 12 mil raise for 25% of the company (again, totally back of the napkin here) puts us at basically 50mil valuation. 50 mil valuation on 1mil ARR seems way high to me, basically this all seems sort of shifted left on the headcount side (series b should be 50 people) and right on the revenue side.
I wanted to sign up for this as an individual, but you need to be at least a 10 person company, so I couldn’t. No idea why they’d have that restriction
I'd say the counter example to this is Powershell - if you've ever used it, it's quite verbose and can be less than pleasant to write. I think having both options is the best, when you're getting started it's nice to have verbose, highly self explanatory commands. As you get more familiar with the environment, it's nice to move to something more concise.
How do you think you compare to Cockroach? Besides the query semantics, I’m curious about the depth of the thought around cross region / cross continent and horizontal scaling concerns?
Does anyone know much about the tech on this? I assume when they say persistent they mean across VM restarts, but are they actually doing some sort of disk persistence too?
I love GCP’s postmortems - they’re open, honest, insightful, and I wish I could get my company to OK us releasing details like this when we have outages. It’s part of the reason I personally like GCP more than AWS (and certainly azure, those guys don’t admit to shit regardless how bad the outage is).
Edit: Wow, downvotes because I like transparency from my cloud hoster, super interesting...
I don’t really mind these buildings - juxtaposition is always a legitimate form of artistic expression, I don’t think that goes away in architecture. Would it perhaps be better to commit one way or the other? Maybe, but it makes sense for a country with as much history as England (while wanting to be progressive as well) to make trade offs, and seeing how styles change is kind of interesting.
It relies on the parties to take an action (that they are both incentivized to take in order to see if they won). This is similar to atomic swaps - they setup a time boxed window when people must take an action. If one of the parties fails to act in time, they will, in fact, lose their coins.
There have been some other answers, but I’ll add first, people may just want to bet BCH - if it’s possible to do, even with a limited instruction set, why not figure it out? Second, turing completeness is not a panacea, and as we’ve seen now several times, the expressiveness of Eth’s VM actually opens it up to more bugs.
Am I missing something? End 2 end implies client to client, no server access to keys...doing server to client with full key access isn’t even a particularly hard problem, the tough part of most e2e systems is the ECDHE exchange, that’s where I thought this was going.
I actually really like Visual Studio Code, I could imagine a great product coming out of the marriage of Code and Atom. I could also imagine infighting killing Atom, but I’ll try to be optimistic.
But isn’t that sort of the issue? If you make assumptions about overall code quality, you’ll probably let smaller stylistic things slide because “this is a good coder.” I think about this in terms of some of the more contentious project (think bitcoin, this would be great for removing some of the personality clashes there).
I've found my life is a lot happier and I'm a lot less frustrated if I replace "blockchain" with "distributed database" in my mind any time these types of discussions come up. Technically they're different, but what is actually potentially revolutionary about everything happening right now isn't the hash chain, it's the idea of moving apps to distributed databases, self contained databases and away from the database tech of old. This could apply to consumer apps, enterprise apps, pretty much anything. When I think about it that way, I'm much more ok with the broad overuse of the term blockchain.
Interesting article, but there’s this architect type out there I’ve been encountering who are like, Kafka maximalists. In this case, the overall model is ok, but the insistence to put the keys into Kafka instead of a normal data store, and then to rely on hot access and the Kafka streams state stuff for potentially millions of keys seems misguided. It’s ok to use relational db’s when they make sense. It almost feels like with Kafka we’re going through the whole NoSql or die thing all over again, just so in a few years we realize Postgres isn’t that bad.
CRDT is definitely a good pattern for the data passing itself, but one of the really tough parts of these distributed apps is the plumbing work, just getting peers to reliability communicate. That's part of what I'm looking for.
That's interesting, I hadn't thought about IPFS - it doesn't really have a strong message passing semantic so much as it has good replication properties, but maybe you could build a distributed log on top of it.
Had not thought of that, though it would only really work if it was Zuck getting caught up, I don’t think a lower level person getting netted would change how he acts.
That’s interesting, hadn’t thought about that, but undoubtedly there are hundreds more examples of this. That’s a congressional investigation they would probably like to avoid...
But that’s sort of my issue, this is Mark Zuckerburg and Cheryl Sandburg, engaged, liberal leaning (to my knowledge) individuals, you’d think regardless of the business model, they would be taking extreme steps to understand Facebook’s role in all this, not ostriching....