tolitius

The “Dad” Problem

My kids are navigating the ways of middle/high school: one is deep in ionic bonding in Chemistry, another one is grappling with graphing sine waves in Pre-Calculus.

I can explain these concepts to them with words, or I can scribble on a napkin (which I love doing), but some concepts just need to move. They need to be visualized. I could write a Python program or a D3.js visualization for every single problem, but that takes too long, even when done directly with “the big 4“.

I needed a way to say: “Show me a covalent bond in H₂O” and have the visualization write itself, test itself, run itself, and show me that interactive covalent bond moving step by step.

Great fit for a “Skill” I thought and built Salvador that can do this.

more details here: https://www.dotkam.com/2026/01/06/mad-skills-to-learn-the-un...

Claude Skill to visualize anything

what needs to be written to create a project and build/run it is:

    lein new twitter
    lein run

that's it.

Most of the info in this article just reflects the rightful excitement form the author, but not in any way the best or the simplest way to do things. Just take it as "I love it, let me share" vs. "Clojure is better than..."

a simple fact that you get defensive and personal reveals that you are not happy with your confidence level. but that's ok, as you get more mature, and acquire a certain perception depth (and I wish you do), you'll prefer being constructive vs. angry.

I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. Hazelcast solves similar problem that all of the valuations in the list: "storing and retrieving data". By the way, "file system" does it too (let's valuate it as well @ $3.6B).

As far as "enterprise support" in case of Mongo, it's like running a political campaign: nobody really knows "who" is inside, until "he" gets elected, and when "he" does, the "support" needs to make sure reality stays hidden, by white (and not so white) lies. And yes, MongoDB is great at "support", most OSS aren't.

Ok. Time to change how the hype and good marketing drive mediocre products, with average people behind it, to silly valuations.

So here it comes. It is only a VALUE if WE say it is. So here is what I say.

I value

    * Redis      @ $4.5B
    * Datomic    @ $4.5B
    * Riak       @ $3.2B
    * Hazelcast  @ $3.0B
    * HBase      @ $2.5B
    * Spanner    @ $2.1B
    * Neo4j      @ $2.0B
    * MongoDB    @ N/A

Congratulations to MongoDB sales and marketing team (really!). It is a tough job to sell a trojan horse to masses.

or, given the quality of existing async/fsync guarantees, they'd be better off with just taking the money and running.. away.. fast

it's so rings a bell: http://www.dotkam.com/2008/11/19/zx-spectrum-child/

Раз ты так хорошо шаришь в английской грамматике, и тебя так напрягает нехватка запятых и дефисов, подскажи как лучше сформулировать и "пруфридать" вот это самый комментарий, или... у тебя эта самая пустота в одной из частей твоего, грамматически заточенного мозга (там, кстати, дефис можно поставить) мешает тебе справиться с задачей?

в следующий раз (кстати с заглавной буквы можно начать) перед тем как насилывать свою клаву, лучше пойди на подкурсы русского или китайского или хотя бы того же английского.

очень не сложно оставлять мусорные комментарии, не относящиеся кстати к теме разговора, и называть себя викинг кодером. гораздо сложнее соответствовать своему имени, и "викинговать" архитектуру, код, мысли, философию создания.

если бы в интернете и/или на хакер ньюз была бы общая корзина для мусора, и можно было бы голосовать за вещи которые туда отправляются, можешь расчитывать на мой голос.

hey VikingCoder, I heard you are a fan of grammar? see above? grammar that.

1. Timestamps in your seed data might benefit from nanoseconds if you really talking about "high" frequency.

2. I agree with you comment that it is easier to think about concurrency in Haskell than in something like C++, however you can't really compete with C/C++ in Haskell. Not even with cgo (Go packages that call C code), not with OCaml or any other higher level beasts that promise the speed. Fortran would be the only one faster for the "algo" part of your initiative. But again, if this is just an exercise, Haskell and others (I prefer Clojure for example :) will do just fine.

3. Would make sense to split the "platform" in two (very different) parts: "Quantitative Analysis" (a collection of tools and rules) and "Technical Glue to Read and Stream". Each can/should be divided further of course, but the two above are essential yet very different for a true "HTF Platform".

market makers work (have deals) with exchanges. e.g. a market maker M guarantees to provide liquidity (e.g. orders) for a certain set of securities to an exchange E, and gets certain benefits in return.

This market maker M makes sure that he is as close as possible to the exchange metal, so he has an upper hand.

The importance of colocation is directly proportional to the liquidity (amount of orders) you provide. e.g. if you send orders manually every minute or so, it does not really matter where you are in comparison to a large bank that sends orders every several microseconds..

there are several books including a "public book" that all exchanges publish and an "internal book" that each exchange has.

in case of the "internal book", it is always ahead of the "public book", as changes to it "published" after events occur internally and this "internal book" is updated.

this is important bit, as an individual exchange "knows better/earlier" than the "public".

how cool would a white Thinkpad be looking like a a beautiful Macbook Air...

I hope Lenovo gets their shit together and release a sexy version of Thinkpad with Apple's trackpad. So I am no longer hooked on Apple and can get back to Ubuntu, as it is a far more superior platform for development.

Until then, a touchpad alone on my Mac Book Pro kills all the laptop wannabes..

great post. direct and to the point, although there are many more flaws that I am sure you could have shared.

we tried MongoDB to consume and analyze market feeds, and it failed miserably. I can add a couple of things to your list:

* if there is a pending write due to an fsync lock, all reads are blocked: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-4243

* data loss + 10gen's white lies: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-3367?focusedCommentId...

* _re_ sharding is hard. shard key is should be chosen once and for all => that alone kills the schemaless advantage

* moving chunks between shards [manually or auto] can take hours / days depending on the dataset (but we talking big data, right?)

* aggregate (if any complex: e.g. not SUM, COUNT, MIN, MAX) over several gigs of data takes hours (many minutes at best). Not everything can be incremental..

Those are just several. MongoDB has an excellent marketing => Meghan Gill is great at what she does. But besides that, the tech is not quite there (yet?).

Nice going with Riak + PostgreSQL. I would also give Redis a try for things that you keep in memory => set theory ftw! :)

the point is there are only several. and there is a huge difference between a "loud mouth marketing engines" and "true tech".

I find SO rather too addictive. I "played" it for a month, even got in "top 0.2%" for one of the weeks. It was tons of fun, but... no healthy balance.

Now days I still consume almost every day, but produce a bare minimum ( very similar model to US economy :) ).

I love SO, but I understand complaints about "rude" comments and lots of duplications. The thing is most people even with 10K+ ratings don't really know the subject (and got there by producing that same "duplication" instead of "closing as duplicate"), and these very people tend to be a lot ruder, since it is a "self defensive" way to a "self proof" that they really are worth something ( e.g. Psyc 101 ).

However people who really "grok it" tend to be the most helpful and fun to talk to.

Oh.. and the search. SO search sucks. I always Google my way into site:so in order to find anything.. But I guess SO knows there is Google, and does not care. Well I do! Fix it! :)

Again, SO rating mostly became a game, and since now it can also mean something on a resume (although personally I don't believe that resume itself means anything), more and more people try to game the system, and many of them winning the game. e.g. two years ago the content on SO was _really_ to the point. Now you need to click around to "find it". Two years from now... something new will emerge? :)