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

Elasticsearch Raises $70 Million

elasticsearch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 67 posts

Re: Elasticsearch Raises $70 Million

#31

Post by michaelochurch »

clubhi wrote: post #19
michaelochurch wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open-source is becoming the only way to develop (and, especially , maintain) complex software. The fact that the engineers can gain employer-independent reputations gives them an incentive that's astronomically expensive (as hedge fund compensation goes) to replicate otherwise. The world is finally figuring out that it's impossible to employ top talent, but that it can be quite lucrative to sponsor it.

It's not impossible to employ top talent. That is a very ignorant statement.

In technical fact, not impossible but, in fact, common. In spirit, you don't really employ top talent, in the sense that subordinating it wastes it. You sponsor it and become a beneficiary of it.

Re: Elasticsearch Raises $70 Million

#32

Post by latj »

jasonkolb wrote: post #13

I'm sitting in Elasticsearch training right now (during a caffeine break). These are some really great guys that know their stuff, and they're committed to contributing back to the OSS version everything that makes sense. They contribute a ton of code back to Lucene and employ a lot of the brightest minds in this space. On the product side, I'm sitting here being amazed at some of the problems they've solved very ele…

How is it better than Solr?

I havent looked at Elastic Search in a long time, so I really do want to know. Not trying to pick a fight. ;)

Re: Elasticsearch Raises $70 Million

#33

Post by diminish »

latj wrote: post #32
jasonkolb wrote: post #13

I'm sitting in Elasticsearch training right now (during a caffeine break). These are some really great guys that know their stuff, and they're committed to contributing back to the OSS version everything that makes sense. They contribute a ton of code back to Lucene and employ a lot of the brightest minds in this space. On the product side, I'm sitting here being amazed at some of the problems they've solved very ele…

How is it better than Solr? I havent looked at Elastic Search in a long time, so I really do want to know. Not trying to pick a fight. ;)

I m using it since earlier versions for almost 3 yers, i guess. It makes config easier, offers a well designed, easy API. Especially for Rails, PHP, Django crowd, an easy choice to create a sensible text search. The main benefit was an easier Lucene with JSON/http API. Yes a lot more advanced features are there too.

Re: Elasticsearch Raises $70 Million

#34

Post by drgath »

ig1 wrote: post #9

If people are curious as to why VCs are interested in open-source businesses: http://indexventures.com/news-room/blog/a-perfect-storm-now-...

Along those same line, here's another good read about the recent npm, Inc. investment. Feel free to skip down to 'Open Source and $$$' section. http://words.steveklabnik.com/is-npm-worth-26mm

In short, it's debatable whether an investment into npm, Inc. will directly pay off for the investors. What the investment is more likely about is creating the infrastructure for new, billion dollar companies to pop up, giving those investors an inside track to the new companies.

In the case of ElasticSearch, investing in this infrastructure project absolutely makes sense. "Big Data" is becoming huge, but it's still relatively dumb. Up until now, we've primarily been focused on tools and technologies to source, aggregate, and analyze the data. But lots of companies are now popping up who are built on the idea of making intelligent use of all this data, far beyond what humans are naturally capable of. ElasticSearch of course isn't the whole solution, but it's part of it.

(I work for one of those companies, and we use ElasticSearch)

Re: Elasticsearch Raises $70 Million

#35

Post by grouma »

I have been prototyping with Elasticsearch for the last couple of months. I have nothing but great things to say about the software and documentation. Several other partner teams have taken notice of my work and will likely incorporate the software as well. Very exciting!

Re: Elasticsearch Raises $70 Million

#36

Post by 7952 »

enscr wrote: post #22

Could someone explain in a few lines why & how is elasticsearch a revolutionary thing (technically) ?

I am just starting to learn elasticsearch so am not a good source. But I didn't want something that was technically revolutionary. I wanted a tool that would be easy to get started with and provide something that is completely trivial as far as the end user is concerned (search).

Re: Elasticsearch Raises $70 Million

#37

Post by mhitza »

latj wrote: post #32
jasonkolb wrote: post #13

I'm sitting in Elasticsearch training right now (during a caffeine break). These are some really great guys that know their stuff, and they're committed to contributing back to the OSS version everything that makes sense. They contribute a ton of code back to Lucene and employ a lot of the brightest minds in this space. On the product side, I'm sitting here being amazed at some of the problems they've solved very ele…

How is it better than Solr? I havent looked at Elastic Search in a long time, so I really do want to know. Not trying to pick a fight. ;)

Advantageous may be the fact that you can extend ElasticSearch with JavaScript, whereas I think as easy for someone who understands the Solr codebase, I've wanted to try that once, but I had to resort to doing the necessary computation in the language calling the Solr service.

Re: Elasticsearch Raises $70 Million

#38

Post by jack_jennings »

spencera wrote: post #25
jack_jennings wrote: post #21

Hopefully this means that the documentation gets some help, especially some of the official libraries. So far working with ES has been a mixed bag… seems good in theory but I've had a hard time getting over the learning curve.

Want to highlight some of your specific pain points?

I guess I'm in the minority based on the other comments here…

After spending a few hours with the documentation, I felt like I had a generally good feel for how you would interact with ES through curl, but then jumping into using the Ruby library there seemed to be a big leap and I felt like I needed to have a much more intimate knowledge of how ES worked to "get" it. A lot of guess and check before I figured out how to query properly. I've also been unsuccessful in figuring out how to implement accent folding. At this point I assume that this has something to do with "mapping", but I couldn't figure out where that was supposed to be set up (again, through the Ruby lib, but I was also unsure where to start to just accomplish that via curl…).

Who knows, maybe I just need to spend more time reading the docs, and maybe the information that I need is in there somewhere, but to me it felt incomplete or disorganized. I'd love to stop using Solr for document search, but making ES do things that I know how to do in Solr ended up being too time consuming.

I ended up feeling like I probably had to go to a training session to really get it, which is a shame…

Re: Elasticsearch Raises $70 Million

#39

Post by dguaraglia »

spencera wrote: post #25
jack_jennings wrote: post #21

Hopefully this means that the documentation gets some help, especially some of the official libraries. So far working with ES has been a mixed bag… seems good in theory but I've had a hard time getting over the learning curve.

Want to highlight some of your specific pain points?

I don't know OPs pain points, but mine were quite simply that the query DSL for ElasticSearch seems to be a thin wrapper over Apache Lucene. If you have experience working with Lucene, picking ElasticSearch isn't that difficult. If you've never worked with Lucene before a lot of the concepts aren't necessarily obvious, and it's incredibly easy to write queries that won't return what you expect but won't fail either. My experience trying to configure analyzers and trying to adjust search parameters involved a ton of trial and error.

Re: Elasticsearch Raises $70 Million

#40

Post by jack_jennings »

dguaraglia wrote: post #39
spencera wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Want to highlight some of your specific pain points?

I don't know OPs pain points, but mine were quite simply that the query DSL for ElasticSearch seems to be a thin wrapper over Apache Lucene. If you have experience working with Lucene, picking ElasticSearch isn't that difficult. If you've never worked with Lucene before a lot of the concepts aren't necessarily obvious, and it's incredibly easy to write queries that won't return what you expect but won't fail either.…

Agreed completely.
Post reply on HN