
RethinkDB looking for a technical cofounder - andreyf
http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/rethinkdb-tech-founder.html
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eserorg
During Larry Ellison's recent interview with Ed Zander at the Churchill Club
in Silicon Valley, someone asked Larry Ellison what he thought was the most
significant distruptive innovation that Oracle was paying attention to.

Larry Ellison said: "Flash".

Apparently, Oracle is taking flash very seriously. They already have a flash-
based Oracle database product that is shipping.

And with the Sun acquisition, Oracle now owns MySQL.

RethinkDB needs to move ahead fast.

~~~
praxxis
Here I was thinking you meant _Adobe_ Flash - cue massive confusion. You can
get an Oracle database in _flash_?! Well it wont run on the iPhone...

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falsestprophet

      - You're not afraid of modifying Linux kernel source code.
      - You're not afraid of modifying MySQL source code.
    

The truth is I am afraid of both of these things.

~~~
cookiecaper
Yeah, I think that's their "nice" way of asking for someone with significant
experience there. The problem is that you only want someone with significant
experience, not just someone who is "unafraid" of it, because any worthy
developer unversed in those projects would be scared to just jump in and start
changing random things if the work is ever going to be used.

Both Linux and MySQL are huge, complex systems and if you want someone who can
immediately start making usable changes to those systems, you should probably
recruit on their respective mailing lists. Developers running in to huge
things like Linux and MySQL ad-hoc and making changes causes lots of problems.
See Debian's SSH-certificate problem from a year or so back for just one
immediate example.

As with any complex platform, it takes a lot of tinkering and experience to
know what flies and what doesn't. Those dudes should change their ad away from
the cute thing to the serious thing unless they plan on allowing the hire time
to figure these things out.

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coffeemug
That's not true. While we'd prefer someone with experience in these areas,
when we say "you're not afraid" we really mean "you're not afraid".

Hacking Linux really isn't _that_ hard. I implemented two kernel-level
projects - a stackable filesystem that gives you an assurance your files
haven't been tempered with, and an "object orientation" system that lets
processes modify and inherit their syscall vectors. Each project took about
four days and I never looked at the kernel code before. I had pretty good
access to a Linux expert who pointed me in the right direction, but I didn't
ask _that_ many questions. It wasn't the caliber of code that would make it
into vanilla, but it was very useable.

The idea that hacking the Linux kernel requires superhuman abilities is a huge
misconception. I can assure you that I'm as far away from being a genius as
anyone. If I could do it, any reasonably competent software developer can. And
the complexity of MySQL codebase pales in comparison to Linux.

We want some degree of experience hacking high performance low level systems,
but we care about competency, determination, and ability to ship working code
far more than experience in any specific area. It's Linux and MySQL today, but
it could be FreeBSD and Postgres tomorrow.

~~~
cookiecaper
I never said it required "superhuman abilities". It just requires some
familiarity, obviously depending on how deep you want to go. The trend of
developers running in guns blazing and changing a complex codebase they don't
understand is bad. I'm glad your stuff was personally usable, but there's a
difference between something that's adequate for personal use and something
that you can distribute as part of your new _database engine_. That stuff
requires serious stability and complex programs are complex and changes can
often have unforeseen consequences even for devs already trained in these
large projects.

I'm not saying one can't learn, but I am saying that most good developers who
haven't changed the source code for ginormous things like MySQL and Linux
_are_ scared to take a new job where they're expected to be able to make
meaningful and/or significant changes to any ginormous thing they don't have
much familiarity changing, especially if you want to changes that are
immediately deployable in your project.

If you're going to give the dudes time to get used to MySQL and Linux and
tinker and discuss adequately, then that's fine. If not, and you expect them
to go from 0 to "usable filesystem" in 4 days, you should probably be more
specific in your ad.

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cperciva
Can we please stop this nonsense about "cofounders" joining a company several
months after it is founded? What's wrong with calling a spade a spade and
saying "RethinkDB looking for 1st employee"?

~~~
jmtame
Is it a fetus or is it a baby? It doesn't matter, it's so early that you can
call it what you'd like. I think it's fine that they're looking for co-
founders. They could just say "hiring first employee," but sounds like they're
looking for a person who will be more involved than that.

~~~
cperciva
_Is it a fetus or is it a baby? It doesn't matter_

If it dies, the law considers there there is a very large difference. :-)

More seriously: The English language says that "co-founders" are "people who
found together"... not "people who found together plus anyone who joins them
shortly thereafter".

~~~
catch23
Not necessarily. LinkedIn technically had 1 founder: Reid Hoffman. But really
he couldn't build LinkedIn solo, after raising a small amount of capital (and
using some of his own from paypal) he recruited 4 others to help him and
become additional co-founders. So LinkedIn actually has 5 cofounders, but
really started with 1.

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mustpax
This is one of those times where I honestly wish I was at a time and place in
my life where I could take the leap. RethinkDB does exactly the kind of low
level, rethink-the-whole-stack systems development that I've been crazy about
from the get-go. Best of luck folks!

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jmtulloss
I'm a pretty good engineer, and I think I'm better than I am, but I'm pretty
sure I'm not smart enough for this gig. Seems like one of the few job
descriptions that requires software/hacking skills as well as computer science
skills.

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ntoshev
RethinkDB seems to implement a functional btree on a log-structured storage.
This would involve lots of copying, I wonder what is the performance impact of
this (compared to a less pure implementation that copies the modified nodes
every thousand updates or so).

Also, the most important feature for SSD storage (no random writes!) is
fulfilled by Cassandra / BigTable implementations based on SSTables, I wonder
how a btree-based implementation compares to them.

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jmtame
The founders are awesome =] This is a group that you'd want to work with,
besides the cool technology challenges and perks of being early in a funded
start up.

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jasonlbaptiste
Certain infrastructure plays really get me wet. This along with push
notifications is one of them. We need to start building the infrastructure for
the future. If I knew anyone who was qualified for this specifically, I would
tell them to drop whatever they are doing and go join the company. Best of
luck with the co-founder search and the future.

~~~
prodigal_erik
As a storage engine, are they in any position to fix MySQL's deeply held
assumptions that the user is generally not interested in validation or
constraints? We should at least begin expecting correct answers if this is the
infrastructure of the future.

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antirez
Please can someone briefly explain why DB on SSD are important? Thanks

~~~
ntoshev
Flash based storage is better than disk because there is no seek latency (the
time for the head to find the location on the rotating platter where the data
in interest are stored), which currently is the major bottleneck of databases.
Also the transfer rate is faster than disks the prices are falling (not as
fast as the prices of disk based-storage, but faster than RAM)

 _Today a gigabyte of NAND costs less than 1/3rd as much as a gigabyte of DRAM
and the gap between the two is growing. ... By the end of 2012, when a
gigabyte of NAND costs 1/19th as much as a gigabyte of DRAM, the optimum
balance of flash/RAM will be very different._

<http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-ram-flash%20pricing.html>

~~~
antirez
Disclaimer: I'm the author of Redis.

The Q is, why don't directly jump to RAM instead to take this intermediate
step?

~~~
Maro
When you turn off the computer, you loose what's in your memory. Solid state
disks don't loose data when power is turned off.

~~~
antirez
ok thanks now I got it.

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gcb
i Don't. why exactly this must be done in the DB, against, say, in kernel or
filesystem space?

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antirez
My "I understand now" was just for fun. It's like LOLWUT... given that I'm the
author of an in-memory snapshotting DB I belive I know at least the difference
between RAM and SSD. So I stopped the thread this way.

That said, seriously, I think that what applies for SSD applies for RAM: that
it's going to be cheaper and cheaper, and bigger, super fast, and unlike SSDs
the writing and reading latencies are comparable, so even if as today it's a
psychological barrier to hold your data in RAM, I think it is going to be much
more common in high load applications in the future.

Actually most people are doing it already, with memcached. Sometimes the total
memcached memory used could be enough to store the whole dataset well
organized given that when you use a K/V cache a lot of space is wasted
compared to using it to hold data.

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ConceptDog
Seems like a really fun gig. Wish I had the chicken guts to qualify.

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pavs
Just curious, whether you are interested in this job or not. Anyone here meets
all or most of those qualifications mentioned there?

~~~
raffi
I think the right person who sees this ad will jump on it. I like the fact
this company is doing something systems oriented and not just another web app.
Pretty cool to see Scott's startup and this out there. Good job YC. It looks
like PG and crew are seeding some folks with potential to make a long term
impact on the plumbing of our internetz.

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Maro
What's your business model?

~~~
Maro
Ah, it's not open-source.

