Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is something bugging you?

antithesis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 438 posts

Re: Is something bugging you?

#61

Post by candiddevmike »

jwr wrote: post #53

FoundationDB is an impressive achievement, quite possibly the only distributed database out there that lives up to its strict serializability claims (see https://jepsen.io/consistency/models/strict-serializable for a good definition). The way they wrote it is indeed very interesting and a tool that does this for other systems is immediately worth looking at.

> quite possibly the only distributed database out there that lives up to its strict serializability claims

Jepsen has never tested FoundationDB, not sure why you claim this and link to Jepsen's site.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#62

Post by timwis »

rvnx wrote: post #48
timwis wrote: post #44

Gosh, I know it's a bit late, but I wish they'd called the product _The Prime Radiant_ Fans of Asimov's _Foundation_ series will appreciate the analogue to how this system aims to predict every eventuality based on every possible combination of events, a la psychohistory. P.S. amazing intro post. Can't wait to try the product.

It would be the opposite of the product: For a software not interacting with the real world, there is only one possibility for frame N+1, if you know the state of a system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism PRNG are illusions, just misunderstood by humans.

Feels like I may have brought a spoon to a gun fight, but I would have considered psychohistory to be the ultimate extrapolation of determinism, and the fact that the prime radiant is able to predict _which_ version of events will happen is because it (somehow) knows the state of the system.

Of course, to argue against myself, it would surely be based on layers of probabilities, and they say several times in the series that it can't predict low-level specific things, just high-level things. And perhaps the whole underlying question posed by the series is whether the universe really is deterministic. But anyway I don't think it's all off-base.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#63

Post by mcmoor »

jwr wrote: post #53

FoundationDB is an impressive achievement, quite possibly the only distributed database out there that lives up to its strict serializability claims (see https://jepsen.io/consistency/models/strict-serializable for a good definition). The way they wrote it is indeed very interesting and a tool that does this for other systems is immediately worth looking at.

Is it that good? I've been tasked to deploy it for sometime and it always bit me in the ass for one reason or another. And I'm not the one who use it so I don't know if it's actually good. For now I much prefer redis.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#64

Post by laiysb »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #41

I was mentally hijacked into clicking the jobs link (despite recently deciding I wasn’t going to go down that rabbit hole again!) but fortunately/unfortunately it is in-person and daily so, so flying out from Chicago a week out of the month won’t work and I don’t even have to ask! More to the point of the story (though I do think the actual point was indeed a hiring or contracting pitch), this reminds me a lot of the…

> I was mentally hijacked into clicking the jobs link (despite recently deciding I wasn’t going to go down that rabbit hole again!) but fortunately/unfortunately it is in-person and daily so, so flying out from Chicago a week out of the month won’t work and I don’t even have to ask!

given their PLTR connection, probably not

Re: Is something bugging you?

#65

Post by xbar »

_dain_ wrote: post #30
vinnymac wrote: post #17

I wonder if they are working on a time travel debugger. If it is truly deterministic presumably you could visit any point in time after a record is made and replay it.

[I work at Antithesis] The system can certainly revisit a previous simulated moment and replay it. And we have some pretty cool things using that capability as a primitive. Check out the probability chart in the bug report linked from the demo page: https://antithesis.com/product/demo

Now I want a simulation-run replay scrubbing slider MIDI-connected to my Pioneer DJ rig to scratch through our troublesome tests as my homies push patched containers.

Seriously: impressive product revelation.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#66

Post by traspler »

Checking their bug report which should contain "detailed information about a particular bug" I am not sure I can fully understand those claims: https://public.antithesis.com/report/ZsfkRkU58VYYW1yRVF8zsvU...

To my untrained eye I get: Logs, a graph of when in time the bug happened over multiple runs and a statistical analysis which part of the application code could be invovled. The statistical analysis is nice but it is completely flat, without any hierarchical relationships making it quite hard to parse mentally.

I kind of expected more context to be provided about inputs, steps and systems that lead to the bug. Is it expected to then start adding all the logging/debugging that might be missing from the logs and re-run it to track it down? I hoped that given the deterministic systems and inputs there could be more initial hints provided.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#67

Post by nlavezzo »

candiddevmike wrote: post #61
jwr wrote: post #53

FoundationDB is an impressive achievement, quite possibly the only distributed database out there that lives up to its strict serializability claims (see https://jepsen.io/consistency/models/strict-serializable for a good definition). The way they wrote it is indeed very interesting and a tool that does this for other systems is immediately worth looking at.

> quite possibly the only distributed database out there that lives up to its strict serializability claims Jepsen has never tested FoundationDB, not sure why you claim this and link to Jepsen's site.

FDB co-founder here.

Aphyr / Jepsen never tested FDB because, as he tweeted "their testing appears to be waaaay more rigorous than mine." We actually put a screen cap of that tweet in the blog post linked here.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#68

Post by wilkystyle »

amw-zero wrote: post #45

I'm trying to avoid diving into the hype cycle about this immediately - but this sounds like the holy grail right? Use your existing application as-is (assuming it's containerized), and simply check properties on it? The blocker in doing that has always been the foundations of our machines: non-deterministic CPUs and operating systems. Re-building an entire vertical computing stack is practically impossible, so they…

Does it even need to be containerized? According to the post, it sounds like Antithesis is a solution at the hypervisor layer.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#69

Post by wwilson »

bloopernova wrote: post #59
wwilson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No comment. :-) Disclosure: I am a co-founder of Antithesis.

It looks amazing, nice work! Do you have any plans to let small open source teams use the project for free? Obviously you have bills to pay and your customers are happy to do that, but I was wondering if you'd allow open source projects access to your service once a week or something. Partly because I want to play with this and I can't see my employer or client paying for it! But also it fits neatly into "DX", the De…

Pricing suitable for small teams, and perhaps even a free tier, is absolutely on the roadmap. We decided to build the "hard", security-obsessed version of the infrastructure first -- single-tenant, with dedicated and physically isolated hardware and networking for every customer. That means there's a bit of per-customer overhead that we have to recoup.

In the future, we will probably have a multi-tenant offering that's easier for open source projects to adopt. In the meantime, if your project is cool and would benefit from our testing, you can try to get our research team interested in using it as part of the curriculum that makes our platform smarter.

Disclosure: I'm an Antithesis co-founder.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#70

Post by nlavezzo »

bloopernova wrote: post #59
wwilson wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No comment. :-) Disclosure: I am a co-founder of Antithesis.

It looks amazing, nice work! Do you have any plans to let small open source teams use the project for free? Obviously you have bills to pay and your customers are happy to do that, but I was wondering if you'd allow open source projects access to your service once a week or something. Partly because I want to play with this and I can't see my employer or client paying for it! But also it fits neatly into "DX", the De…

We've actually done quite a bit of testing on open source projects as we've built this, and have discussed doing an on-going program of testing open source projects that have interested contributors. We'd probably find some interesting things and could do some write-ups. Reach out to us via our contact page or contact@antithesis.com and let's chat.
Post reply on HN