[roeme]

When I read your responses, I can‘t shake the feeling I'm talking to some snake oil salesman in a nice suit.¹

And to be honest, GUN‘s docs sound similar. Heavy on how to use, and how awesome everything is, but as soon as one tries to understand stuff, it‘s either WIP or “team up with me/us!”. eyebrow rises

And the claim of “building up connection with academics and hiring them” falls perfectly in line with this. Why the hell can‘t you describe what you did by yourself? If it's so awesome, why don‘t you just die to explain it to everyone who asks? Or, $DEITY forbid, should the “academics” lend some credibility to GUN, even if it's with just their title? What's this HAM about?

Maybe it's just me, but all this with a rather complex naming convention (souls...) and code...

eh, I'll go with “show us teh algoz”. Or describe it.

¹) To illustrate: « I'm actively working [...]» – I'd like to see you passively working.

[marknadal]

Have you looked at the Wiki?

https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/Conflict-Resolution-with-G...

https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/How-to-Create-GUN

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1VIOJc0bdzUNs7yXMLKCc...

No snake oil. It is a state machine operating over a boundary function. However words like that sound super jargony which sounds vague, despite the fact that people spend their entire lives working on just these problems sets and their nuances.

I'm happy to discuss the workings, and I'd encourage you to try and use GUN and see if it can withstand your concurrency attacks. Challenge accepted?

Edit: This person (in the comments below, please upvote him), and my reply, best addresses the most important questions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077969

[sseveran]

Its up to you to prove your algorithm is correct, not everyone else to prove that its wrong.

[zero_iq]

You're happy to discuss the workings? How about writing them down somewhere...? All your documentation, such as it is, describes things using terms that you never actually define or explain. Your code is just as bad. Worse in fact, because it introduces yet further terms that are not in the documentation.

Your Conflict-Resolution-with-Guns page simply says 'see gun.HAM' for the explanation. No indication where this can be found. It isn't in the source repository and it isn't in the wiki. A google search reveals nothing.

The 'algorithm' presented on How-to-Create-GUN is meaningless because you don't define any of the return values. I can see how it maps some input values to some output values, but nowhere do you say what any of those return values actually mean, what I should do with them, or why they are useful.

e.g. return {amnesiaQuarantine: true} ... what does this mean? What should be done with that return value? What is an amnesiaQuarantine?

e.g. return {quarantineState: true} ... what does this mean? How does it differ from amnesiaQuarantine: true? What is a quarantineState? How should I react to receiving this return value?

Your documentation says a lot, but doesn't actually define anything, and is ultimately meaningless. This is why people are giving you a hard time and asking so many questions.

Most people reading will not know: what amnesiaQuarantine is, what amnesiState is, what the Hypothetical Amnesia Machine thought experiment is, what a boundary function is (there are multiple definitions - what are you using?), what 'converge: true means', what 'incoming: true' means, what state: true means (given that you say other 'state' variables are times* -- how the hell does a boolean represent a time, what 'you have not properly handled recursion through your data' means. What is a 'soul'? What happens to the data when particular values are stored? Where are things stored? What is the data flow? How are things shared? How does sync happen?

Imagine you don't know what any of your terminology means - like everybody reading your documentation. Treat each term like an undefined variable. Now try to understand your document. You can't. Those undefine terms are never 'set' anywhere. It doesn't make any sense. As soon as it gets close to actually explaining anything it just handwaves, or leaves you with undefined terminology.

You don't define what kind of persistence you implement or what consistency guarantees (worse: your explanations do not seem consistent). You don't define how your conflict resolution works (the 'explanation' given is tantamount to Star Trek technobabble). You don't define how data is transferred. Your slides are useless without any notes.

In your code you say that ACID is vague. It really isn't. Your explanation of how you meet ACID is extremely vague however, using what appear to be truisms and contradictions, and yet more undefined terms that seem to have little to do with anything mentioned in the documentation. Your code is poorly structured, and badly commented. It uses 'cool' sounding gun-related terminology ('shot', 'roulette', etc.) without defining what the hell those things mean. There is nothing in the code that actually seems to do anything with consistency

Your HAM algorithm - the very crux of your system as stated in your documentation, remains unexplained, and WORSE.. has a TODO: comment noting that it might not work and needs further investigation. This comment also mentions rollbacks.... yet nowhere else in the code or documentation says anything about rollbacks, and it's not clear why rollbacks would even be needed according to the (vague) explanation of HAM.

Your further explanations in these comments STILL do not actually describe precisely what HAM is or how it works. If you cannot do this in a simple and elegant manner, then NOBODY will be able to use or trust your database system.

If you want anybody to take you seriously, you must write a simple and concise explanation of HAM, including definitions of all your terms.

Frankly, it is so vague, and so unclear how it works that I am starting to think this is the product of some kind of mental illness...

Sorry to be so harsh, but nobody seems to be getting through to you.

EDIT: I'm reminded of Einstein's quote: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

[karlgrz]

It's not just you.