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RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

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Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#41

Post by mraza007 »

akulkarni wrote: post #21

Read The Economist religiously. It will make you better faster. You can read the Economist if you'd like, but it won't make you a better entrepreneur. Instead, find people who are smarter than you (in your area), do everything you can to convince them to spare you some of their time, and then be a humble (but discerning) sponge of information. The challenge in fast changing markets is that the best information isn't…

This is my favorite comment and I totally agree with you and more you talk to different people the more you discover and that discovery leads to some of the best ideas.

Just curious on what’s the best way to do market research for the product

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#42

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

nodesocket wrote: post #25
plorkyeran wrote: post #13

With four years of hindsight, the estimate of DBaaS and managed database hosting companies of being https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2021/03/10/mo... ), which means that assuming RethinkDB's estimates were correct, the market they wrote off as too small was actually about to explode into something much larger. That's not to say that they would have succeeded if they'd gone after that though; instead we…

I firmly believe that RethinkDB could have been a huge player along with the likes of MongoDB and Elasticsearch if they could have gotten additional funding or focused more on business development. Note: both MongoDB and Elasticsearch are now hugely successful public companies. - Changefeeds were so useful and still to this day not really matched in quality. - Official client libraries were very high quality. I mainl…

Honestly, as the person who is ending up having to do the RethinkDB migration... it's the lack of an AWS hosted solution that killed it for us. Even the import is a great experience and moving to MongoDB wasn't too bad (after a bit of cleanup)

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#43

Post by sbelskie »

akulkarni wrote: post #21

Read The Economist religiously. It will make you better faster. You can read the Economist if you'd like, but it won't make you a better entrepreneur. Instead, find people who are smarter than you (in your area), do everything you can to convince them to spare you some of their time, and then be a humble (but discerning) sponge of information. The challenge in fast changing markets is that the best information isn't…

I really like the Economist, but I cannot possibly imagine one’s decision to read it or not has any bearing on entrepreneurial success.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#44

Post by nodesocket »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #42
nodesocket wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I firmly believe that RethinkDB could have been a huge player along with the likes of MongoDB and Elasticsearch if they could have gotten additional funding or focused more on business development. Note: both MongoDB and Elasticsearch are now hugely successful public companies. - Changefeeds were so useful and still to this day not really matched in quality. - Official client libraries were very high quality. I mainl…

Honestly, as the person who is ending up having to do the RethinkDB migration... it's the lack of an AWS hosted solution that killed it for us. Even the import is a great experience and moving to MongoDB wasn't too bad (after a bit of cleanup)

Interesting, RethinkDB was really easy to setup. Three EC2 instances (cluster), install their apt repo, and install. There were a few config options[1], but really minimal and clean.

[1] https://rethinkdb.com/docs/config-file/

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#45

Post by runawaybottle »

alexashka wrote: post #36
runawaybottle wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know at some point in the last 20ish years, people really got used to the idea of free music. Once people get used to the idea of ‘free’, it’s like, good luck arguing against that. I don’t think something like VSCode should be free, or a single api call on any platform, etc. Absolutely nothing should be free because people get too used to the idea of free. It’s a human failure.

Has it occurred to you that paying for things is a recent, temporary mode of interaction between humans while free and good will is the default? You have it confused - prices is an arguably necessary, temporary condition, until we get back to simply from everyone according to their ability, to each according to their needs.

I’d say that’s about as utopian of an idea as the unrestricted free market.

In theory, sure, sounds great, but the pragmatic timescale it would take to get there would be beyond lifetimes. We’ll all be dead by the time these systems reach their true form.

In your particular example for instance, human nature would wreck havoc in the form of abuse. I will point to (incoming snark) the very rare cases of slavery, underpaid labor, serfdom, like you know, these rare things that happened through the centuries. So yeah, I suppose that idea is ‘still working itself out’ two thousand years later.

Fuck all that is my point, as many souls have been lost waiting for utopia. Ask the guys that built the pyramids.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#46

Post by diplomatpuppy »

alexashka wrote: post #36
runawaybottle wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know at some point in the last 20ish years, people really got used to the idea of free music. Once people get used to the idea of ‘free’, it’s like, good luck arguing against that. I don’t think something like VSCode should be free, or a single api call on any platform, etc. Absolutely nothing should be free because people get too used to the idea of free. It’s a human failure.

Has it occurred to you that paying for things is a recent, temporary mode of interaction between humans while free and good will is the default? You have it confused - prices is an arguably necessary, temporary condition, until we get back to simply from everyone according to their ability, to each according to their needs.

Get back? Please tell me at what point in history could a person just pick every item and have every service for free.

Even if there was a society like that, I don't think I'd want to go - not only did they go extinct, they don't have mRNA vaccines, spacecraft, and Telemundo soaps.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#47

Post by [deleted] »

skolsuper wrote: post #31
alexashka wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MongoDB's stock price is quite remarkable, given how dismissive a lot of people (including myself) on HacherNews have been of their offering. It goes to show that HackerNews consensus != reality. I do wonder where/how Mongo makes their money - if anybody has some insight, please share.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mongodb-inc-announc... - Revenue: Total revenue was $150.8 million in the third quarter fiscal 2021, an increase of 38% year-over-year. Subscription revenue was $144.1 million, an increase of 39% year-over-year, and services revenue was $6.7 million, an increase of 19% year-over-year. - Gross Profit: Gross profit was $104.7 million in the third quarter fiscal 2021, representin…

[deleted]

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#48

Post by spolsky-wisdom »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #22

Database startups suffer from an extreme case of an important truism in startups generally: the product you think you are selling is not the product the customer thinks they are buying. No one buys a database per se , they are just a means to some other end. People that love database technology — that would be me — tend to start database companies. It is very difficult to sell a database. It is much, much easier to s…

Joel Spolsky wrote about this quite a few times, Architecture astronauts take over

"What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don’t want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build. The people? They love twitter. And flickr and delicious and picasa and tripit and ebay and a million other fun things, which they do want, and this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it’s a fun programming exercise that you’re doing because it’s just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can’t figure it out."

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/05/01/architecture-astro...

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#49

Post by sky_rw »

akulkarni wrote: post #21

Read The Economist religiously. It will make you better faster. You can read the Economist if you'd like, but it won't make you a better entrepreneur. Instead, find people who are smarter than you (in your area), do everything you can to convince them to spare you some of their time, and then be a humble (but discerning) sponge of information. The challenge in fast changing markets is that the best information isn't…

I learned this bit of insight from you directly several years ago and reflect on it often. The first thing you did when we sat down was start grilling me on my views of tech trends and emerging areas of innovation. I was caught a bit off guard and gave terrible answers, but adopting that attitude of curiosity has helped me tremendously to find my market and grow my business.

Re: RethinkDB: why we failed (2017)

#50

Post by Nullabillity »

hewrin10 wrote: post #29
alexashka wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MongoDB's stock price is quite remarkable, given how dismissive a lot of people (including myself) on HacherNews have been of their offering. It goes to show that HackerNews consensus != reality. I do wonder where/how Mongo makes their money - if anybody has some insight, please share.

HackerNews is wildly detached from reality

Alternatively: capitalism optimizes for charlatans, not quality.
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