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>Accidental Billionaires: How Seven Academics Who Didn’t Want To Make A Cent Are Now Worth Billions We'll see for how long.

by prvc 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sam_lowry_ 4y ago
I worked for a competitor. This business is built on ignorance and exhuberance and is durable as egg shells.
- hahaxdxd123 4y ago
  Can you elaborate? I don't use Databricks, but it seems to me a like a bread and butter SaaS infrastructure offering.
  - dwater 4y ago
    As a data scientist, the greatest thing about Databricks is their marketing and sales departments. Not that they have a bad product, but they're not selling anything brilliantly unique.
    - moneywoes 4y ago
      Anything they do so well? What’s their moat
  - Kon-Peki 4y ago
    We use Databricks on a data processing pipeline. I don't know of anyone in love with it. It is by far the number 1 source of problems on that pipeline. Just in the last week: * It deleted hundreds of log files without warning * We had a failure starting a cluster; the web UI listed the cluster, but in fact it no longer existed - we had to recreate it. * Log files that it didn't delete show that it is having problems pulling some internal metadata from an AWS IP address (we are on Azure). If the directive from on high came down that we are to rip it out and replace it with something else, nobody would be surprised, or care.
    - kdazzle 4y ago
      Ugh - the disappearing clusters are frustrating
    - rxin 4y ago
      Databricks founder here. Doesn’t seem like DM work on HN anymore. Do you mind shooting me an email? Would love to follow up and understand the issues. rxin@databricks.com
  - 988747 4y ago
    Most use cases currently served by Apache Spark clusters would run 10x faster on a laptop with fast SSD (Macbook perhaps), and an ad hoc cat/grep/sed pipeline /s
    - glogla 4y ago
      There's a DuckDB and Polars and similar tools now, which can finally outperform the venerable unix tools. Once the data is on the laptop you can get order of magnitude faster execution than Spark. The unsolved problems are 1) what if the data and what you do with it suddenly doesn't fit on a laptop (giving everyone 64 GB RAM laptops for example seems like a waste) and 2) how do you deliver the relevant subset of the data from the petabyte place where you store it to the laptop. If someone could solve that, Spark could finally go to hell.
      - 988747 4y ago
        The solution to that is called Snowflake

>Accidental Billionaires: How Seven Academics Who Didn’t Want To Make A Cent Are Now Worth Billions We'll see for how long.

by prvc 4y ago

>Accidental Billionaires: How Seven Academics Who Didn’t Want To Make A Cent Are Now Worth Billions We'll see for how long.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

sam_lowry_ 4y ago

I worked for a competitor. This business is built on ignorance and exhuberance and is durable as egg shells.

hahaxdxd123 4y ago
Can you elaborate? I don't use Databricks, but it seems to me a like a bread and butter SaaS infrastructure offering.
- dwater 4y ago
  As a data scientist, the greatest thing about Databricks is their marketing and sales departments. Not that they have a bad product, but they're not selling anything brilliantly unique.
  - moneywoes 4y ago
    Anything they do so well? What’s their moat
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  We use Databricks on a data processing pipeline. I don't know of anyone in love with it. It is by far the number 1 source of problems on that pipeline. Just in the last week: * It deleted hundreds of log files without warning * We had a failure starting a cluster; the web UI listed the cluster, but in fact it no longer existed - we had to recreate it. * Log files that it didn't delete show that it is having problems pulling some internal metadata from an AWS IP address (we are on Azure). If the directive from on high came down that we are to rip it out and replace it with something else, nobody would be surprised, or care.
  - kdazzle 4y ago
    Ugh - the disappearing clusters are frustrating
  - rxin 4y ago
    Databricks founder here. Doesn’t seem like DM work on HN anymore. Do you mind shooting me an email? Would love to follow up and understand the issues. rxin@databricks.com
- 988747 4y ago
  Most use cases currently served by Apache Spark clusters would run 10x faster on a laptop with fast SSD (Macbook perhaps), and an ad hoc cat/grep/sed pipeline /s
  - glogla 4y ago
    There's a DuckDB and Polars and similar tools now, which can finally outperform the venerable unix tools. Once the data is on the laptop you can get order of magnitude faster execution than Spark. The unsolved problems are 1) what if the data and what you do with it suddenly doesn't fit on a laptop (giving everyone 64 GB RAM laptops for example seems like a waste) and 2) how do you deliver the relevant subset of the data from the petabyte place where you store it to the laptop. If someone could solve that, Spark could finally go to hell.
    - 988747 4y ago
      The solution to that is called Snowflake