Tape. SQL databases emerged when data was stored on tape.
join table1, table2 where table1.id = table2.customer_id
type operations would have a tape for table1 in one drive, and a tape for table2 in the other drive. Things like fixed length records emerged to make it possible to fast forward the tape a specific number of inches to the point where the next record would begin, facilitating non-linear access.
Once that model was completely baked into the tooling, it didn't go away when the data moved to HDs then SSDs. The paradigms have outlived the hardware.
It's a bit like the save icon still being a floppy disk.
That's wrong. Since its inception, on of the main points of the relational mode is physical data independence.
No assumptions on how or where the data is physically stored is made by the model. Besides, it seems more plausible to me that Codd would be working on machines with disks, not tapes, by the time he proposed the model. See this, for example: https://www.theregister.com/2013/11/20/ibm_system_r_making_r...
So my understanding is relational databases were born on disks, not on tapes, but that distinction doesn't really matter to it. Additionally, it is the physical independence of the model that let all implementations based on it adapt when SSDs (and newer) storage systems arrived.
Finally, saying "the paradigms have outlived the hardware" doesn't make sense in this context. To repeat: the relational model was proposed precisely to isolate logical database design from hardware details. As a paradigm, it has been independent of hardware from conception, so of course it would outlive any specific hardware incarnation.
I’m no historian, but indexed disk-based structures - upon which relational databases were built – have been around a very long time. For example, IBM brought out ISAM in the mid 1960’s, roughly contemporary with the publication of the relational model. I could be wrong, but it doesn’t seem likely to me somehow that that those guys had tape foremost in mind.
Data locality still mattered in mechanical disks as it avoided seeking, and data locality still matters in SSD as a read brings in a whole block instead regardless of how much you need.
Tape was before ISAM iirc - things like merge-sort were big then, and the spinning tapes you'd see in those old black and white movies from the 60's. ISAM needed disks, and so did RDB's
Do you really believe B Gates and W Buffet made their wealth without armed bloodshed? I find it hard to believe that we are supposed to solve problems simultaneously adopting high moral accountability while also turning a blind eye to those who invested in and profited from the defense industry.
I think he means direct armed bloodshed as he was comparing them to the kings of old who would conquor with armies.
The author directly says capitalism is bloodshed in general whether it's profiting off of the defense industry or just exploiting people in foreign countries for iphones.
I did not read the whole text. I will go back and take another look on a larger screen, or maybe even print it for the sake of ease of reading.
I did catch the mention of the trust fund kids hitting up ashrams and retreats and Burning Man. My instinct is to accept that this indeed has something to do with poor spiritual principles, however in the somewhat traditional teachings of Indian philosophies and religions couldn't we conclude these are people with generally good karma who are maintaining it somewhat (and burning it quite a bit) yet at least not eating meat, dealing drugs, beating their kids, etc.?
I am sensitive to the possibility that those individuals are indeed self-serving in some fashion, though I also am at least somewhat impressed with a subsection of those same individuals who truly are bright souls (in relation for instance to my poor life choices!)
What I see being examined here is the obvious enormous disparity between genuine altruistic service to humanity and the bizarre tendency for people to tourist-away their inner seeking by merely denying their own culture and escaping into a Disneyland version of someone else's (washed clean of the truth of its own exploitation.) I feel like that might be the frustration/ analysis here?
The feeling is that a false version of Asian spirituality (dodgy gurus in pleasure palace beach ashrams teaching "tantric yoga" in sarongs) has replaced the real asian spirituality, which (in most cases) displays a healthy respect for the value of feeding the hungry and housing the homeless.
Gandhi. We just sort of pretend he never happened.
I will add another comment that is about half a question:
My feeling is you are accelerating into the great ride of frustrated discovery that we all do as the working parts of society become clearer and the injustices of any one person being born into any one lifetime become obvious.
I have until recently been so intensely frustrated with the obvious disparities and glaring ugliness of human systems that I (literally) drove myself to madness and homelessness as a result.
As the smoke has cleared it did so presenting some beautiful insights into myself, others, and the longer-game realities that are not easily proven to exist beneath a materialist analysis.
So what I am admitting is that I had a bonafide spiritual awakening complete with utter destitution, hallucination, visions of beings and glimpses into those workings that great teachers assure us are very really, actually churning out reality.
It has brought me an extraordinary degree of peace with the exact same impassioned, treadmill-despising, revolting obvious inequalities you're riffing on in your writing.
My instinct is to believe you are on the way into a (hopefully less degrading) awakening similar to mine.
At a time when I had arguments similar to what it is you're sharing I was back from a war, doing Occupy Wall Street protests, anti-NSA and pro-openess animations, anti-corruption campaign finance reform marches.. I went crazy with effort to solve exactly what you're pointing out.
I think there was no other way. You can not unsee what you find unlivable. So my guess is you have to push through into whatever is next for you and I bet if you are able to find a workable value-base to hold to, you will emerge with evidence for yourself on how it is actually (now) livable.
8 years ago I was like: "no way, it's gotta change"
Now I'm like: "okay.. it IS changing.. just like it always has."
Yeah - I did that phase in the late 1990s - I've been enlightened nearly half my life due to a very early meditation practice and an absolutely ruthless guru.
A very slightly different version of me could sit on a cloud and spectate. This version of me got assigned the personal responsibility to do something about this mess, which I continue to work towards.
Not quite on the topic of the text but..
I often wonder about this is the context of pacific Island cultures. Christianity is a huge part of community and cultural life in many PI countries. As something that was originally imposed on their ancestors by colonisers, does the work of de-colonisation also have to include a re-evaluation of religion?
Bad there. 1000 times worse in India, relative to both Christianity and Islam, and with the great aggravating force of Yogi Adityanath pouring salt into those wounds.
I know of no framework to look at that question which isn't basically just a bunch more questions: in Scandinavia there are old pagan branches coming back up, Latvia too - but was the original tradition lost and they're neopagans, or was it alive on the farms and it's now coming back above the surface. It's like financial reparations: once you begin, where do you end?
I grew up in the West. I'm glad it's not my fight, I'd sweat hard finding a position!
Great article! What do you consider some simple things the average person can do on a day to day basis in addition to avoiding meat to improve the moral state of affairs?
1) Individual practical action - that's your standard "low carbon lifestyle" stuff, reduced meat, bicycles, insulated housing, minimal consumption, all of that.
2) Individual mental action - this is actually getting to know what the goals of yoga are, if you're doing yoga, and Buddhism, if you're doing mindfulness etc. Actually understanding the goals and objectives is key.
3) Collective practical action - how do we actually build things which we can ethically use? I've been banging on about the Fair Trade Laptop for years, but if we had a lot of demonstrated collective willingness to buy such a thing, maybe Fairphone or System 76 or somebody would be willing to manufacture one for us. Demand aggregation is a thing the internet is good at.
4) Collective mental action - where is our objective map of the risks to the human species, and list of efforts to mitigate those risks, ideally with drill down to budget line items so we know how our money is being spent?
Third time's the charm.. I found your definition repeated and I want to dissect it:
"Spiritual colonialism is the appropriation of the methods of indigenous spiritualities for the goals of capitalism."
Reselling anything gotten from one culture into another is definitely what you're describing. My impression of this is that it has always been going on and it has worked extraordinarily well for everyone involved.
When the Phyrgian cult of the Magna Mater became popular during a crisis period for the Roman Empire, what resulted appears to be the earliest merging of that Asiatic tradition into Roman religion. There was a governing body eventually called the Quindecimviri. It literally oversaw the absorption of once foreign religions into the lives of Romans. Why was this done? Well.. people from that region were becoming Romans! Some Romans started practicing Phyrgian religion and many Phyrgians defended Rome and became Roman and benefited from citizenship/inclusion for about a thousand years.
So although it most certainly is a great catastrophe for traditionalists defending their authentic practices, it would appear this has been going on for a very very long time.
All those people sojourning in India seeking nirvana and samara are there because they are really seeking. All those landing in Western nations endeavoring to be a part of the (currently, things change fast!) predominant political economy participate and have added inclusion benefits because a bunch of foreigners are now no longer suspicious but worshipful of their indigenous practices.
Sure! Cash rich spoiled kids seeking after a person's culture while that individual has to labor in their imperial connect is certainly frustrating. The alternative seems MUCH MUCH WORSE.
If those same kids think that the nation they're going to are morally and spiritually backwards (and want that the original real colonialism problem nearly everywhere? ) then those self-described superior people will attempt to subject those people to their culture.
Of course you're already familiar with that.
Somewhere along the line, probably due to convenient geography and necessity the Roman Empire realized that:
1) their client kingdoms had brilliant traditions and thinkers to go with the trade goods e.t.c.
2) the sociology of inclusion meant a thriving empire with a composite cultural and military defense
3)??
The cult of the Magna Mater is still present in the world in Roman Catholicism. Some great Anatolian mother goddess culture operates successfully in South America now.
Its appropriation and so on, yes. From a dialectical materialist analysis it looks like pure oppression.
To a realpolitik melting pot planet it seems like trial and error. All those people are visiting India because about two hundred years of ignorance finally bore the fruitful and appropriate realization that Indians have a undeniably deep and ancient series of useful insights into the workings of existence. I would feel inclined to believe the hoards of white interlopers are a sign that India invested its few thousands of years wisely!
My interest is in a more complete export: the world-destroying nonsense of industrial society as it is currently practiced needs reining in, and the mental / philosophical toolkit of asia does seem to have a lot to offer (AT ITS BEST) in terms of producing people who don't fall into that kind of limited thinking. If Steve Jobs had been 20% more Ashoka, or Bill Gates meditated and people imitated him, we might be starting to build some of the Right Action toolkit necessary to build the spiritual backbone necessary to make environmental action work properly in western society (which is where all the power and money are right now.)
The half-baked hippie efforts aren't cutting it. We need something fully baked, and I think we could get it: a comprehensive overhaul of Buddhist and Hindu concepts of Right Action / Dharma for the modern situation of ecological and existential risks.
That's what I want. I don't give a crap about appropriation in most cases, but I despartely want better governance of the West, and that means ingesting all of the Asian trip, not just the convenient 5%.
I've read a variety of reports. I've come to the conclusion that a bunch of weird shit went down, but that he did not have sex with anybody. The weird shit is well documented, and not that far from his claim of "testing his celibacy."
If I find 14 year old girls willing to sleep naked in my bed, I’m going to get arrested. Apparently Gandhi never considered whether someone is old enough to consent to his “experiments”.
It's been built in Haiti, Africa, Sri Lanka - test units, results positive. Getting over the hump on a deployment with refugees living in one (rather than the odd aid worker / volunteer) is taking time.
There's also this: http://files.howtolivewiki.com/somalia_or_sudan.mp4
I found the video on a search, and have not discovered who made it or what the story is, but it's clearly the kind of diffusion we've always hoped for!
PS: we've got at least five or seven companies doing short run commercial hexayurts for Burning Man, and one start up in the UK doing different markets.
I bless all of 'em, without wanting to get too involved (for fear people will think I'm picking favorites - my political neutrality (ironically) is important!)
I could have taken the politics out in one of 99 ways, but I did not, and I'm willing to sacrifice 5 or even 10 years of hexayurt growth to keep the politics in.
The reason is simple: I want to politically organize the people who grow up in hexayurt refugee camps, getting their education over wifi and dreaming of a better, fairer world. So if I sell out my core values now to reach the refugees faster, I'm going to have a vastly less powerful offer of aid when I finally arrive there.
It's a very dark calculus, but the years of active sabotage that I've faced from aid organizations like UNHCR and Red Cross blocking the hexayurt's participation in testing programmes and similar bureaucratic interference have convinced me that the only way out of this mess is to disintermediate UNHCR and the Red Cross - to route around them as dark legacy - and to have refugees directly raise funds themselves over (say) YouTube and Bitcoin (or, hey, Ethereum) rather than hope for political change in the big orgs.
The big orgs need to lie that the status of refugee is temporary, and not tied to deeper political problems. But the average refugee is in the field for 15 years, and lying about their status being temporary is great for fund raising and locating host governments who are willing to have them, but absolutely horrible for the refugees: endless years in boiling hot / freezing cold tents, no services for education and long term health care, and so on. It's just garbage: if it was you in one of those camps, you'd think you were in a prison camp.
So we stand in defiant opposition to those lies: refugee is a generation-long or longer condition in most cases, and we insist on cycle-of-life support for the people who will be spending an entire phase of life in these camps.
In the short run, this insistence on truth costs me the short term support of the (hugely corrupt) NGOs. In the long run, I hope it buys me recognition and credibility among the refugees and former refugees that I hope will be the backbone of hexayurt deployments in the fullness of time.
I have to speak the truth as I recognize it today, in order to be recognized as not having been full of nonsense by the refugees when they are assessing where to put their support later.
Hard calls all round. Thank you for your thoughtful comment!
Thanks for the reply sir! Yeah it's definitely a Hard Problem. The futurist in me does agree with you that eventually a form of crowd-sourcing will likely come along which helps dramatically reduce bottlenecks and waste in the overall aid pipeline while increasing transparency for individual donors. I think that this is likely to come about due to the onrushing incline in global smartphone penetration rate paired with donation systems may which leverage emerging technology around micro-transactions. The first wave of low-cost android smart-phones will hit the developing markets in the not too distant future, so suddenly everyone will have a camera, and I think once that happens it'll be a whole new ball game.
(and of course the hexayurt is those hexagonal pod things you see all over Burning Man - I'm sure quite a few of you have camped in them and will be camping in one again in a couple of weeks, having the time of your lives!)
Hi, I'm Vinay, the hexayurt guy, a Hacker News regular, also the release coordinator for Ethereum. You might remember me from a post I did about Ethereum recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9977146
I just watched one of your youtube/talks, and you address the rural-vs-cities issue by saying half of everyone lives rural and its much harder to solve cities so its a place to start.
But as the suburbs have taught us, sprawl is incredibly costly. Raising the standard of living for spread out peoples is harder because by definition its going to involve more transport energy cost and less economies of scale.
Also, at an almost philosophical sense, the single-family dwelling is itself a symptom of the problem. Castle doctrine and every-man-is-an-island and all that. Shared walls mean shared lives, or more importantly, acknowledge the fact that we have shared lives and need to make the best of it.
I don't think we solve this via 1-unit structures housing <10 people a pop. And history shows that hundreds-unit structures over did it. How do we create cheap, open-source 10 - 100 unit, 2 - 6 floor, structures. Something that could actually go in those slums you mention (which these yurts would get destroyed in).
Anyway hope this didn't come off too critical, I really appreciate that you're even working on this problem and presenting it so clearly.
Ah, you want to take a look at https://angel.co/houslets which is looking at multi-story stuff with much the same design philosophy as the hexayurt (use whole panels, get modern materials deployed in sensible ways, keep the building process simple and so on) but pointed at urban densities.
Why focus on housing? Housing is one thing that people will find no matter where they are. It's hard to beat corrugated steel and tents in terms of cost. The bigger issue is land. Where are you going to put these yurts, aside from burning man?
Hashes in the blockchain, when necessary, and then markets which will sell you a file when presented with the hash. Storage technology can be whatever.
That's the smart plan, I think. I really want to take a crack at those storage markets in-browser, use a distributed hash table and WebRTC to pay people for leaving a browser open and allowing us to store stuff on their hard drives!
36 cents will get you a gigabyte stored for a year with 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability at S3, accessible at multiple gigabits per second.
When gigabit class connections are pervasive, the idea of paying people to store data in an open web browser is maybe feasible, but certainly not profitable for any involved party.
Ethereum doesn't aim to store massive data within the blockchain itself. Instead, we're building an additional component into the network, Swarm, which essentially acts as a DHT/DFS. There are already experimental branches within the main repos, they function, but probably at a POC state.
Furthermore, a 1Gbit DL/200Mbit UL link costs $13.70/month where I live, so I think it it is already very much viable, but maybe the distribution will be skewed towards more internet friendly countries :)
Agreed. Right now it's a single shared processor emulated with cryptography and massive replication - but that's not an architecture that will get you supercomputer performance.
The work on that thread - getting Ethereum to supercomputer status - is called CASPAR and you can read more about the efforts to get a formal proof for it here:
join table1, table2 where table1.id = table2.customer_id
type operations would have a tape for table1 in one drive, and a tape for table2 in the other drive. Things like fixed length records emerged to make it possible to fast forward the tape a specific number of inches to the point where the next record would begin, facilitating non-linear access.
Once that model was completely baked into the tooling, it didn't go away when the data moved to HDs then SSDs. The paradigms have outlived the hardware.
It's a bit like the save icon still being a floppy disk.