Live data from Hacker News

MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

cnbc.com

291–300 of 425 posts

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#291

After being introduced to the MongoDB stale read issue in 2015 [1] we abandoned MongoDB and never looked back. Anyone knows if this is resolved in the latest versions? [1] https://aphyr.com/posts/322-jepsen-mongodb-stale-reads

It got significantly better in 3.4 -- this analysis claims that the issues were finally resolved in 3.4 (although they were in the RC) https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3

Thanks. Seems they did some good work indeed. Though it takes time before they get back the trust they lost over this.

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#292
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speculation: You were being downvoted because software types often express ideas that can be summed up as business is easy and the people doing the business aspects aren't important. They seem to think that everyone and anyone can do it and, when they hear success stories as examples, it reinforces those ideas. A good example is some of the comments that software folks make about the sales department. They are differ…

I did not downvote the parent comment, but I did downvote you, because I think your comment stereotypes "software types" in an unfair way. It is possible to both have a lot of respect for the difficulty of building the business side of an organization and for the folks who can do it well, and to think that it is unwise to build a business based mostly on sales and marketing without focusing enough on the quality of t…

You missed the part where I said 'often.' That is okay by me. Karma is only good if you spend it.

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#293
post #290

I don't understand why everyone is so happy when IPOs go up and make it sound like a good event. I see it as the founders needlessly missing out on 30% of money (in this case), which ends up going in the pockets of the Wall Street middle men that get first access to the stock offering.

I actually gambled on this one. I'd noticed the hype and read around this morning. I didn't go in that big, but we will see. I bought 700 shares at $29.12, sometime around noon. I was a bit busy so didn't pay much attention to this thread, but they closed at a bit over $32.00. I haven't yet set a mark to sell them. I do have it set to notify me I'd they go below 29.00 and will sell them all if they go below $24.00. I…

In what world is 20k on one stock not "too much risk"?

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#294
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. EAVT is great as an intermediate format but it is absolutely useless to query for since most of the time you are trying to find a set of attributes for a given entity i.e. full table scan. What you want is a "wide table". One entity column and all the attribute columns to the right. Often with most of the values set to null. This is the dream use case for MongoDB since it you can ignore sparse values yet when you…

> EAVT is great as an intermediate format but it is absolutely useless to query for since most of the time you are trying to find a set of attributes for a given entity i.e. full table scan. This is what indexes are for. An index on the entity id should avoid any full table scans.

EAVT table with 100 million entities and 10000 attributes = one trillion row table.

And you want to build indexes on half the table ?

Good luck with that.

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#295
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not downvote the parent comment, but I did downvote you, because I think your comment stereotypes "software types" in an unfair way. It is possible to both have a lot of respect for the difficulty of building the business side of an organization and for the folks who can do it well, and to think that it is unwise to build a business based mostly on sales and marketing without focusing enough on the quality of t…

You missed the part where I said 'often.' That is okay by me. Karma is only good if you spend it.

Sure, but your speculation suggests that the "often" is enough to explain the parent's downvotes. I think there's a better explanation that doesn't impugn certain "types" of people. I'm just speculating too of course.

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#296
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EAVT is great as an intermediate format but it is absolutely useless to query for since most of the time you are trying to find a set of attributes for a given entity i.e. full table scan. This is what indexes are for. An index on the entity id should avoid any full table scans.

EAVT table with 100 million entities and 10000 attributes = one trillion row table. And you want to build indexes on half the table ? Good luck with that.

> Often with most of the values set to null.

Your math is at odds with your own requirements, null values don't need a row.

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#297
post #290

I don't understand why everyone is so happy when IPOs go up and make it sound like a good event. I see it as the founders needlessly missing out on 30% of money (in this case), which ends up going in the pockets of the Wall Street middle men that get first access to the stock offering.

I actually gambled on this one. I'd noticed the hype and read around this morning. I didn't go in that big, but we will see. I bought 700 shares at $29.12, sometime around noon. I was a bit busy so didn't pay much attention to this thread, but they closed at a bit over $32.00. I haven't yet set a mark to sell them. I do have it set to notify me I'd they go below 29.00 and will sell them all if they go below $24.00. I…

This comment is a nice illustration of the Keynesian beauty contest: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#298
post #98
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they had done so by presenting a product that was picked up due to it's merit and continued to gain traction based on that then I'd be rather impressed. Instead the story of MongoDB seems to be how extremely well targeted marketing and sales can build a so-so product into a huge IPO, there have been performance comparisons showing it isn't even the best at what it does so this IPO is riding on the network effect o…

Most people forget that with startups, what you are trying to create is a business... the technology behind is only one element to it. It is extremely difficult to do good marketing and sales and they did it. Solve a customer problem while building a healthy business... a success story in my book.

I'm not sure HN celebrates products for simply being successfully marketed.

That said, I do think they made a way of handling a data model pleasurable. Different paradigm++

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#299
post #277

Having gone through a few acquisitions where MongoDB was used, I would never recommend using it from a legal/compliance perspective. You either have to pay for a very expensive commercial license OR adhere to their AGPL license (which is very difficult). https://opensource.google.com/docs/using/agpl-policy/ https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/blob/master/GNU-AGPL-3.0.tx...

Why do you need a commercial license or have to do anything special for AGPL compliance if you aren't modifying the codebase and using the binaries from Mongo's website/repo?

It looks like all of the drivers you would use to connect to it are Apache 2.0 licensed so that wouldn't be a reason.

Re: MongoDB shares jump more than 30% in $192M IPO

#300
post #101
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people forget that with startups, what you are trying to create is a business... the technology behind is only one element to it. It is extremely difficult to do good marketing and sales and they did it. Solve a customer problem while building a healthy business... a success story in my book.

Agree - I think there is a perception that if you build an awesome product it sells itself. There is so much work to running a successful business, especially at that scale. Marketing, Sales, Implementation, Support, on top of G&A, and that's not even touching on HR and retaining employees in a competitive market. There is a reason some people are known as the "business" guys, I think expertise in that area is underr…

Mongo as a business has largely catapulted itself to where it is by making money off of information assymetry more than actual technical superiority. They may have since corrected a lot of the fundamental technical isssues with their product, but that doesn’t change the fact that (contrary to SV dogma) their success doesn’t rest on the creation of wealth, only its extraction from magpie-type customers. Downvoters likely chafe at the notion that such a strategy is laudable or valid.
Post reply on HN