This post is pretty vague. Having heard of Couch a few times over the years but not used it, it would been more helpful if he said something like: "I started a company and forked the open source CouchDB project that I founded. The company and new commercial product is CouchBase and it will be better for these reasons..." And I would be curious about some examples of where the open governance limited the CouchDB project as he's implying.
Those seem to be orthogonal things -- he could have just created a non-Apache open source project rather than making it commercial.
He is beating around the bush so much and using such vague wording that I wonder if he is hiding something, or just ashamed that he's cashing in on his creation. There's no shame in making money and no shame in making a commercial fork of your own project. But the CouchBase website looks awfully "enterprisey" now and I think there is some shame in that...
I don't use couchdb either but I do follow the nosql space a little and what I read was that he's creating an all-new project.
Couchdb is an Apache foundation-led project and will continue on its own path. Couchbase is an all-new project that will solve some of the same use-cases but be better at scaling. It's not a fork at all.
True, the website is full of bs. But since it actually talks about the products and technoloies (kind of) it only rates 6 of 10 on my enterprisey-bullsht scale. Others are far worse
It's great to see a researcher with such passion and love for his subject. I never knew about Oberon -- my only exposure to this side of the universe was programming Pascal in high school. This was a great read.
Yes. This is a trivial exploit of a designed weakness in hashtables.
I shall, arrogant as I am, scoff at people who are surprised when this happens. I mean, honestly, what kind of developer doesn't know the basic properties of their data structures?
You make it sound like you're somehow disagreeing with him, but what he says is true even of Ruby's hash algorithm. Introducing randomness into the hash function is really just a band-aid on this vulnerability. The inherent vulnerability is there either way; you just need a bit of runtime information to do the attack when runtime information is introduced into the hash function.
Upvoted because you're right that it is a troll, and it is sad and telling that the WSJ stoops to this level. However, I think it is worth considering that some of the ideas in the article have merit, and if the WSJ hadn't chosen the most extreme and inflammatory example they could find, it might have stimulated a very interesting argument here on HN.
I also wonder whether there is an element of anti-Chinese xenophobia here as well as the obvious for-profit journalistic trolling.
Push your children to succeed. Don't let them give up at the first impasse, because kids really can be lazy if you let them get away with it.
Take that sentiment and mix it with some freedom: Instead of making them play the violin/piano and study pre-med, let them choose their goals. "Want to be an actor? Great! But you're going to be the best actor in that play and I won't tolerate anything less." "Guitar? Sure! ... You're not coming out of your room until you nail Stairway."
Not all Chinese folks are as psycho as this gal. A Chinese guy I worked with told me that he put it to his son this way: "You can do what ever you want, I just want you to excel at whatever you do."
First, that it's possible to speak harshly to children and make them feel ashamed without harming them, if they feel secure in your love.
There are many parents who never say an unkind word to their parents but who leave their children feeling insecure and unloved. There are parents who achieve the opposite. A child who feel unvalued and insecure may feel most scared and vulnerable when his parents are critical of him, but the fault lies with the child feeling unvalued -- that is where his parents went wrong, not in criticizing him. The two things are independent. Parents should concentrate on making their kids feel loved and valued enough that a little criticism won't traumatize them, instead of trying to be so bland and positive that their kids' security is never tested.
That's exactly what she illustrates in her two contrasting examples: "Once when I was young—maybe more than once—when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me "garbage" in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn't damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me." And later: "I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her 'beautiful and incredibly competent.' She later told me that made her feel like garbage."
That squares with my experience quite well. Many children of unfailingly polite and supportive parents will tell you they hate their parents' guts, that their parents never loved them, and that their parents made them feel worthless. Perhaps most of those kids are wrong about their parents not loving them -- perhaps -- but their feelings show how ineffective it is to mask your negative emotions and deal with your children through a rose-colored facade. Children are quick to sense (or wrongly assume) that flattering words hide a lack of real affection, or even hide resentment, and they know when they're being disciplined by a parent who loves them and would lay their life down for them. Of course, it's easier to simply suck up to your kids than to take on the much harder task of loving them unshakably and making sure they understand that. (Easier not just in the sense of being more pleasant, but also in the sense that people often try and fail to convince their children they really love them. In engineering we would say that something with such a high failure rate has no place in a well-designed system, but I think in childrearing you have to accept that this is a vital step that cannot be designed out no matter how hard it is.) Being careful never to say anything harsh to your children because they doubt your love and loyalty is like driving extra carefully because you failed to buy car insurance -- it doesn't change your fundamental irresponsibility.
Second, that most of parenting is predicated on taking freedom away from children because parents know better.
It is better to state that up front than to try to pull off a sham where children are told they have freedom, but at the last second their parents lose their nerve and try to stop them from doing things. My own parents were a bit like this -- they would maintain the fiction that I had freedom of choice, trying persuade me to change my mind, until absolutely the last minute. Then they would find some excuse for stopping me from doing what I decided to do. That was common behavior for my friends' parents, too. It's better to be honest than to practice this kind of hypocrisy.
Third, that hard work and mastery lead to greater satisfaction than dabbling. No need to explain that here. Why shouldn't parents teach this to kids with the same urgency and insistence that they teach other facts of life?
Fourth (related to two and three), that forcing kids to work can lead to benefits that the children appreciate later. "Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up." Americans are schizophrenic about this, accepting it readily in the case of athletics and rejecting it with horror in other areas. Why is the piano so much different from basketball? Or we cling to the cop-out of playing the compassionate "good guy" and leaving the less pleasant job to coaches and teachers. Once again, children are sensitive to hypocrisy: do you approve of the discipline imposed by coaches and teachers or not? If you do, why are you such a softie yourself? Don't you love them enough to be tough with them? At report card time, I always felt most sorry for the kid who got bad grades and didn't get in trouble with his parents. The other kids are talking about how their parents yelled at them, and this kid gets to say... what? That he has great parents who love him so much they are nice to him even when he gets bad grades? He knows that isn't the reason.
The article caricatures all of these ideas. Possibly the author assumes they are alien and unacceptable to American culture and just wants to make them clear and memorable, but the vibe I got was that the author is arrogantly, perversely savoring her readers' inability to accept her ideas. In either case, the WSJ picked an author whose presentation of these ideas is so inflammatory as to alienate readers. The article does not make a sincere effort at addressing the predictable concerns of the audience. That was a deliberate rhetorical choice, by the author and definitely by the WSJ. If we want to evaluate these ideas fairly, we should imagine how they could best be presented to our own sensibilities and reconciled with our own ideas, instead of allowing the WSJ to dictate the outcome by presenting the ideas in such a negative light.
In the final paragraph of the article, the author presents a false opposition where a sincere author would offer a synthesis: "Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they're capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away."
Since the author did not offer a synthesis, it's up to us to provide one for ourselves.
P.S. Here's another interesting angle, better written and more persuasive for a western audience:
The author herself is Asian... and it refers to not just Asians, but immigrant families in general. Though I didn't know that about Jamaican and Irish-American families, as she states.
I would submit that this refers not to Asians in general, but specifically to those Asians who are also immigrants. The simple act of uprooting and replanting oneself in another country for the sake of better economic potential is probably a far better indicator of the over-achieving drive described.
I think the author was trying to be provocative, but the beginning was absolutely trollish. As I was reading, for a moment I thought the article salvaged itself somewhat, but once it started again on the topic of grades it descended into troll-dom big time.
Is it really? Scaling today means running on more than one machine (google, facebook, twitter, etc.)
That means no shared memory. He helpfully makes this distinction on his front page ("I'm mostly interested in shared-memory system, so if you are looking for information about clusters, web-farms, distributed databases and the like, it's the wrong place")
According to Google's Jeff Dean, "to Google, multi-core computers look like separate servers with really fast interconnections" (i.e. memory).
So if you are running your applications on many machines anyway, you might as well drastically simplify your code by writing it "single-threaded" and running #cores copies on each machine.
> Scaling today means running on more than one machine
Of course it's not. Hundreds of millions of people use just a single computer for a lot of tasks.
>you might as well drastically simplify your code by writing it "single-threaded" and running #cores copies on each machine.
It's not the worst approach. However there may be significant penalties in terms of performance and latency in some contexts. You are definitely don't want to use your approach for games and browsers. As for server software it depends on performance/latency requirements. For example, if you will use it in High-Frequency Trading marker, count you loose all your money.
Exactly, tons of different technologies are POSSIBLE. But it's a matter of what's economically feasible (what consumers will pay for, etc.)
We could have had Web TV in 1995 if it was really economically feasible... but no on figured out the business model. And it looks like it still hasn't been figured out, although Google is trying again with Google TV.
That said, I think Kurzweil, while grading himself overgenerously, did a pretty good job, and no one else is making these kinds of predictions. I actually did the same thing back in 2009, since I am a Kurzweil fan. It's a little interesting how many things came true in 2010 -- he cheated by a year but it helped him a lot!
> So, the only reason you would now use yacc is parsing speed.
"speed" means a couple different things. Someone might say the only reason you would use C++ rather than Python is speed -- i.e. you can always get within a constant factor with Python. Ignoring other aspects of the languages, let's call that true.
But Russ Cox is saying that you would also use yacc when you want a O() bound on the parsing algorithm (a linear algorithm). That is, the technique they advocate will produce parsers more than a constant factor slower than yacc.
Frankly I don't understand their rebuttal at all. The rebuttal is that it doesn't matter for practical purposes? That doesn't sound like computer science to me.
And practically speaking, it does matter, because plenty of people write exponential time regexps and don't know it, and it will blow up in their face on large input.
Those seem to be orthogonal things -- he could have just created a non-Apache open source project rather than making it commercial.
He is beating around the bush so much and using such vague wording that I wonder if he is hiding something, or just ashamed that he's cashing in on his creation. There's no shame in making money and no shame in making a commercial fork of your own project. But the CouchBase website looks awfully "enterprisey" now and I think there is some shame in that...