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Hacker News, the only place in the world where you’re equally likely to encounter articles about Kafka, the brilliantly paranoid Bohemian writer, and Kafka, the
by libraryofbabel 6y ago
Hacker News, the only place in the world where you’re equally likely to encounter articles about Kafka, the brilliantly paranoid Bohemian writer, and Kafka, the data streaming platform.
I couldn’t tell which one this was until I opened it up.
- canjobear 6y agoThe domain name is a clue
- trizzle21 6y agoI was trying to figure out why the New Yorker would care about data streams
- IBCNU 6y agoI was feeling lucky... either way
- libraryofbabel 6y agoYou’re right. I should have examined more carefully. “Isn’t it more surprising if something succeeds than if it fails?” — a parable for the whole business of software engineering.
- jacobush 6y agoOr Life
- Scarblac 6y agoI saw the domain name and thought it was some journalist using Kafka as a pseudonym, to comment on current world events.
- LaxisB 6y agomy first reaction was to assume kafka-the-technology exectly because of the domain name. Then i realized that the one i meant was the "New York Times", and not the "New Yorker". NYT is one of the case studies from a kafka provider [0] skimming is a double-edged sword [0]: https://www.confluent.io/blog/publishing-apache-kafka-new-york-times/ https://www.confluent.io/blog/publishing-apache-kafka-new-yo...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hypewatch 6y agoIt’s no coincidence! Apache Kafka is named after Franz Kafka. From Wikipedia: > Jay Kreps chose to name the software after the author Franz Kafka because it is "a system optimized for writing", and he liked Kafka's work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Kafka https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Kafka
- triangleman 6y agoBut, but, the irony! https://qr.ae/pNKM3k https://qr.ae/pNKM3k
- tome 6y ago> Few of Kafka's works were published during his lifetime ... Kafka instructed his executor and friend Max Brod to destroy his unfinished works ... but Brod ignored these instructions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka
- jacobush 6y agoDamn, I thought did his friend execute him?! That is very Kafka-esque. But no, his friend was the executor of Kafkas' last will.
- geodel 6y agoIn my experience Apache Kafka is indeed a real world incarnation of that Kafkaesque bureaucratic rigmarole that he described in his novel 'The Castle'.
- arjunnarayan 6y agoJay Kreps is an extremely well read man; the reference is surely ironic. Enterprise middleware, after all, is and always has been a bureaucratic rigmarole. The nightmare has existed since the first ETL job was written, but by democratizing pub/sub access throughout companies, we can't help but be horrified by what we see going on in the dataplane. Apache Kafka, rather than creating this nightmare, brings light to it, just as Franz Kafka's literature brought light to the absurdity of life under evil bureaucracies. Now he can't quite say this outright lest he offend some set of his customers who have to live in this reality, so we have that vague quote about "he's one of my favorite writers", but surely we can take a direct literary reference as a wink and a nod and read between the lines?
- seesawtron 6y agoOne could look at the website name. Usually it helps to guess before you open it. For example, the likelihood of Newyorker writing an article on an open-source stream-processing software is low.
- estensen 6y agoAnd line 3 in the article mentions Prometheus
- melling 6y agoThe source is the world famous The New Yorker. That alone will tell you which one.
- hannofcart 6y agoSame here. I was wondering if the New Yorker had a new tech section.
- shanev 6y agoI thought it was about resque, the ruby queuing library, switching from redis to kafka.