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285 points ajhit406 | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.607s | source
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stavros ◴[] No.41832728[source]
This is a really interesting design, but these kinds of smart systems always inhabit an uncanny valley for me. You need them in exactly two cases:

1. You have a really high-load system that you need to figure out some clever ways to scale.

2. You're working on a toy project for fun.

If #2, fine, use whatever you want, it's great.

If this is production, or for Work(TM), you need something proven. If you don't know you need this, you don't need it, go with a boring Postgres database and a VM or something.

If you do know you need this, then you're kind of in a bind: It's not really very mature yet, as it's pretty new, and you're probably going to hit a bunch of weird edge cases, which you probably don't really want to have to debug or live with.

So, who are these systems for, in the end? They're so niche that they can't easily mature and be used by lots of serious players, and they're too complex with too many tradeoffs to be used by 99.9% of companies.

The only people I know for sure are the target market for this sort of thing is the developers who see something shiny, build a company (or, worse, build someone else's company) on it, and then regret it pretty soon and move to something else (hopefully much more boring).

Does anyone have more insight on this? I'd love to know.

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gregwebs ◴[] No.41832877[source]
There are a lot of cases of low traffic applications that aren’t toys but instead are internal tools- this could be a great option for those.

For higher traffic they are asking you to figure out how to shard your data and it’s compute. That’s really hard to do without hitting edge cases.

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stavros ◴[] No.41832894[source]
Why would you use this for an internal, low-traffic tool over Postgres?
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1. fracus ◴[] No.41832962[source]
Could this be used to get a time edge in trading? I'm not an expert, just thinking out loud. I remember hearing about firms laying wire in a certain way because getting a microsecond jump on changing rates could be everything for them.
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2. crabmusket ◴[] No.41833310[source]
I'm also no expert, but from reading around the subject a little (Flash Boys by Michael Lewis was pretty cool, also Jane Street's podcast has some fantastic information)... no. I doubt you'd be on a public cloud if low-latency trading is what you're doing.
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3. aldonius ◴[] No.41834751[source]
Aren't the HFT boxes usually stock exchange colocations? Each trader gets a rack (or multiple racks depending on size) in the exchange's datacenter, every rack has the same cable length to the switch, etc.