fyrerise

The title is a little misleading. The article itself acknowledges that there was a tulip fever:

> That’s not to say that everything about the story is wrong; merchants really did engage in a frantic tulip trade, and they paid incredibly high prices for some bulbs. And when a number of buyers announced they couldn’t pay the high price previously agreed upon, the market did fall apart and cause a small crisis—but only because it undermined social expectations.

But it implies that it's not all that notable because it didn't collapse the entire economy:

> But the trade didn’t affect all levels of society, and it didn’t cause the collapse of industry in Amsterdam and elsewhere.

Personally, I don't think I'd ever made the assumption that it had. Likewise, if Bitcoin were to implode, it would be similar — some people would suffer, but it wouldn't be all that widespread of an effect.

Tulipmania still makes a great historical anecdote on speculation, and I for one, will keep using it as one.

Fair enough. When I first read your original comment, I thought that you were being unnecessarily pedantic.

I imagined that by using "partitioning" most people would probably know what I was talking about, but I've been working with MongoDB for a long time, so I probably have some cognitive bias here.

"Sharding" is the more specific/better term, but I'd still say that although more general and possibly ambiguous, partitioning is still roughly correct.

> But this isn't the official compiler, this is someone's personal project?

True, but compilers are complicated machines and Rust is still changing at a fairly frantic rate.

The author seems to be doing quite a good job of development today, but if it has any hope of staying current, it probably needs to think about how to increase its bus factor (something happens like changing jobs, starting a family, or they just become interested in something else, and a single person suddenly has less time to contribute).

> Both MySQL and PostgreSQL support out-of-the-box partitioning. Are you referring to sharding?

Hopefully it's fairly obvious from the context, but yes, I'm referring to horizontal partitioning [1], or sharding.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_(database)

This is probably not the answer you're looking for, but MongoDB no longer has much technical justification.

Compared to Mysql and Postgres, it does have an out-of-the-box partitioning scheme, which is something, and a reason to use it (although I'm not sure it outweighs the downsides).

Compared to newer cloud databases like Spanner, Citus, or Aurora which scale well but also provide your with ACID guarantees reminiscent of traditional RDMSes ... there's really not much there.

Can you clarify what you mean by this? You're Matt Kroll and you're confirming that you still work for MongoDB? (I'm afraid that nothing is obvious from anyone's usernames.)

> what other language would you choose?

As far as I can tell the goal of the project isn't to target more platforms (Rust targets quite a few by way of LLVM), so I don't think I'd choose any other language, including C++.

Having a compiler and standard library written in the language that it compiles has some huge benefits for increasing the pool of possible contributors.

Neat project. It looks like this was largely written by one person, and I'm fairly in awe at anyone who can take a big project like a compiler this far alone.

Isn't there a bit of cognitive dissonance in believing that Rust as a language is an important idea (i.e. by the additional code safety and code maintainability that it conveys), but then simultaneously making the effort to rewrite the current Rust-implemented compiler in C++?

C++ is fast, but aside from a shared value around performance, it has fairly little in common with the ideas that Rust is built on.

> I know this will never actually happen, but I sincerely wish the Social Security Administration would publish a complete official database of real name to SSN mappings.

A full list might not even be necessary — a form that would allow you to trade some basic details for an SSN might be enough to scare various agencies straight. At least that way isn't quite as iterable.

Honestly, this doesn't even sound all that implausible to me as long as some sort of sufficient warning was built into the announcement to give organizations a way to build alternatives. Say two years. After that, levy major fines against anyone who's not compliant with certain very basic security standards.

The biggest hurdle here isn't going to be backlash as much as it is comprehension. Just like with net neutrality and encryption, most lawmakers are going to have a hard time understanding why SSNs as secrets aren't a good thing, and they'll have to be convinced.

This isn't accurate. Shaw has recently jumped on the same bandwagon and started enforcing hard caps with overage fees. Just go here if you want to check that:

http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/High-Spee...

($2.00/GB for each GB used above plan’s limit)

AFAIK, Telus isn't doing yet, but I've heard that this is a technical limitation rather than lack of desire to do so.

One more in Calgary. We should organize a meetup, all the cool stuff that's happening in San Fran all the time is making me pretty envious ;)

The trouble is that to run more complex operations, it's nice to have a high-level language to write your tasks in. Rake uses Ruby for this, and Nemesis Haskell.

Either app can be used for other purposes, for example, I use Rake to compile/run tests on my C# projects as an alternative to NAnt.