
The Next 10 Years: Megalith - dantiberian
http://progrium.com/blog/2015/10/05/the-next-10-years-megalith/
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jacknews
... if you don't recognise me, for some reason...

Hmmm. I guess I've been living under a rock.

I love to hear grand visions and so on, but I didn't get anything out of this.
What is this thing?

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whalesalad
Yeah I have a ton of respect for the guy due to the things he's created but
this post was devoid of meaning and the video was douchy

He complains about the direction a startup might be forced to take due to a
need to satisfy investors or business needs. He mentions wanting to design and
build things for the sake of innovation and not profits... Sounds like
academia to me.

You can't just "build cool shit" for no reason. Ya gotta keep the lights on
somehow.

~~~
tedks
Academia is totally divorced from building things and is far more about
internal politics, pumping up your internal brand, and doing juuuuuuust enough
to get published than it is about building things or even doing science. At
least in computer science. You can look at the adoption of most CS academia
(outside of machine learning, which is really a form of applied probability
theory/math more than it is CS) in industry and get a very good idea of its
relevance.

To get an idea of this, try to imagine how you would publish Docker. The
OS/systems community is the closest fit, but containers have been around since
1998 as an academic concept, and they aren't novel. Getting them to actually
work in a usable way on modern GNU/Linux distros is just engineering, and not
academically interesting. There's no formalism, there's nothing trendy like
sustainable computing, machine-assisted verification, or noSQL databases.
Basically, all Docker really is is a thin layer of engineering around
established OS concepts. It's been done. Strong reject.

I think wanting to build useful things for the common interest is a pretty
worthwhile goal considering the entities that have historically done that,
namely academia and governments, totally suck at it and are not going to get
better anytime soon due to the entrenched misincentives that are totally
pervasive in their respective areas.

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vezzy-fnord
We have conflicting views on this. I see academia as pretty much the _only_
culture that actually builds interesting things in system software and CS
research anymore, which I think should be quite an indictment on the industry,
given how much academic software ends up abandonware quickly.

Docker is an _awful_ example. You actually have your history of containers
off. By 1998, they weren't just academic, but already an emerging industry
standard in at least IBM i machines.

The only reason Docker exists is because an ex-Plan 9 developer (Al Viro)
introduced namespaces into the Linux kernel to make the VFS model more
tolerable, and some years later some Google developers lifted Solaris process
contracts to make cgroups. The first and central part of Linux containers,
then, is a direct result of half-assing an academic system software advance
for its usefulness.

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tedks
I'm not in systems so I can't really make claims to that. (Obviously you're
right about my getting the containers history wrong.)

That said, spanner seems like it does what it needs to do far better than any
academic system. For example. And there are many, many other academic pursuits
that are totally ignored by industry.

This can't be just narrow mindedness -- if there was any utility in, say, most
of the type theory that's directly pumped from academia into Haskell, startups
would be using it. But they aren't. They're not using that, they're not using
academic database concepts, they're not using anything from academia. And
virtually everything academic is open sourced at some point, so it's not like
that's an excuse.

(Are Plan 9 or Solaris academic systems? They're both the result of industrial
R&D groups...)

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techdragon
Plan 9 is a mostly academic project. It was born out of the research lab and
never really became a "product".

Solaris was a 30 year series of successive engineering projects focused on
providing valuable concrete improvements to what was previously just an
academic project, the early unix releases were definitely academic regardless
of their future commercial impact.

~~~
tedks
There's a very, very large difference between corporate research and actual
academia. The motivation of the people involved are totally different. I
wouldn't consider either project "academic" even if they were primarily
conducted in industrial research labs.

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techdragon
Not to be presumptuous but I think I know what it is. Or at least what it
might be. I think it's s vision. His vision for the future of computing. I
think he has to be a bit vague for now since he has apparently only recently
decided that he should "preach the vision" more and isn't yet sure how to
describe all of it.

The most amazing thing for me is that I get it. I've wanted to build the next
Xerox PARC or Bell Labs for at least a decade and much of my current work is
in pursuit of that goal.

Someone above said you can't just build shit and keep the lights on. You can
by building shit people care about. I've been working on a way to give some
employees of a company 80% time the way Google gives 20% time. The 20% company
time isn't even "do this" it's time for talking, sharing problems with them,
asking for insight, etc. I have been thinking I'll be able to do this one day
and I think so even more today after reading/watching this.

I'll definitely be in touch with him. And watching live.

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beardicus
I'm really in love with dokku:

[https://github.com/progrium/dokku/](https://github.com/progrium/dokku/)

so I signed up for the mailing list based on that alone. I would've put out a
bit more information up front myself, but I guess if you've got enough
whuffie, you can be a tad handwavey for a while.

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jitl
So... what is it?

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jay_kyburz
I assume he is going to find money for people who want to make great
interesting things and not have to worry about business stuff or the interests
of investors.

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dantiberian
I'm really interested to see what Megalith turns out to be. The broad thread
of his work seems to be in the same sort of space as Hashicorp: automating and
improving development and production environments. I'm expecting it to be
something around that.

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danboarder
Megalith, great name. Not sure what it is but it sounds cool, reminds me of
GaboCorp from back in the day.

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panhandlr
Maybe it is a cure for ADD?

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daxfohl
He's forming an 80s metal cover band.

