jakebol's comments

jakebol | 5 years ago | on: TileDB closes $15M Series A for universal data engine

Most every (analytic) RDMS database system can model sparse arrays. A sparse array is modeled by defining a clustered index on the table "array" dimensions and defining a uniqueness constraint on that clustered index. This works well with columnar storage because the data needs to have (and assumed to naturally have) a total sort order on the dimensions. Ex. Vertica, Clickhouse, Bigquery... all allow you to do this. TileDB allows for efficient range queries through an R-Tree like index on the specified dimensions.

Most real world data though is messy and defining a uniqueness constraint upfront (upon ingestion) is often limiting, so for practical use cases this gets relaxed to a multi-set rather than sparse array model for storage, and uniqueness imposed in some way after the fact (if required).

jakebol | 5 years ago | on: How Mormons built a startup ecosystem in Utah

Unfortunately "its just geography" is kind of one of the talking points for not really addressing the problem. Although true, concerted reductions in pollution have happened when there was political will to make it happen (mostly through the federal gov. / EPA clean air regulations).

Ogden and Provo are some of the worst offenders for per household air pollution emissions. Like many western cities they have longish commutes (everywhere) in large cars (trucks / suv's) with a high number of cars / household and almost non-functional public transport system. For the Salt Lake Metro area, per capita carbon emissions doubled between 1980 and 2015 because of increasing sprawl. Air regulations here are spotty for personal vehicles and I'm guessing almost non-existent for commercial vehicles. Oh and the state governments solution to this is to push a publicly subsidized "inland port" that will bring increased truck and rail traffic to the valley. The leaders of these tech companies are starting to point out that terrible air pollution for parts of the year is hurting recruitment so it seems like as the money flows into this sector maybe there will be political will on the state and local side to address some of these issues.

jakebol | 5 years ago | on: Recently minted database technologies that I find intriguing

There are a lot of issues though with S3, latency, poor performance for small reads / writes, timeouts, api rate limits, api costs, and consistency issues poorly understood by third party developers.

A "thick-client" also doesn't perform well unless that client is located on a node in the same region. I think as with everything it works well in some cases and not well in others.

jakebol | 5 years ago | on: Recently minted database technologies that I find intriguing

This is a good description, except that TileDB (the open source client) is not transactional but eventually consistent at least for S3 and other object stores.

I like your point about consuming S3 cleverly, it's often difficult to get good out of the box performance from S3 so abstracting that to the degree possible is good for end-users. The cloud vendors though are always one or two steps ahead of companies that build upon their services. AWS Redshift for instance already can pre-index objects stored on S3 to accelerate queries at the storage layer. It's difficult as a third party vendor to compete with that.

jakebol | 5 years ago | on: San Francisco faces fiscal chaos

Underrated it is not, just search for Cottonwood Canyon traffic jams to see what skiing really is like here when the snow flies. 30 minutes no traffic, can easily be 3+ hours now.

jakebol | 6 years ago | on: Leaving Pittsburgh because of industrial air pollution

Funny that he mentions Salt Lake / the Salt lake valley as the only other experience with significant levels of air pollution. I often wonder how "silicon slopes" companies are able to attract people here, they must never interview during the winter (particulate) or summer (ozone / smoke).

jakebol | 6 years ago | on: Pop_OS 19.10

Made the jump from OSX and for scientific users who don't to endlessly chase a working laptop setup PopOS and it's nvidia driver support (on a thinkpad) has been fantastic, highly recommend as well.

jakebol | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2019)

TileDB, Inc. | Full-Time | REMOTE | Cambridge, USA | Athens, Greece | https://tiledb.io

TileDB is a technology for storing and managing enormous volumes of structured data on the cloud. TileDB efficiently stores data generated from variety of domains (genomics, finance, imaging, geospatial, etc) in a novel unified format as sparse or dense multidimensional arrays. Users can efficiently access this data via a growing number of language APIs, interfaces and our upcoming hosted service. TileDB, Inc. has raised $4M in seed funding over the past 18 months.

We are looking for frontend and backend developers to help develop a scalable service to make data storage, management, and computations easier for practicing data and domain scientists. A few features on the roadmap include designing a web admin console for data management, monitoring resources in real time, integration with JupyterLab and handling user profiles, billing, encryption and key management, and scaling / management of serverless compute resources.

We are primarily seeking:

- UI / UX Engineer (Javascript / Vue.js / Golang / K8s)

- Backend engineer (Go, CGo, K8’s)

* TileDB GitHub organization: https://github.com/TileDB-Inc

* TileDB has been featured on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15547749.

* TileDB blog post: http://bit.ly/2SjkeYR

* TileDB talk at PyData 2018: http://bit.ly/2BfbyJ3

Our headquarters are located in Cambridge, MA. The candidates must be US citizens or permanent residents located in the US, or Greek citizens to be located at our subsidiary in Athens, Greece.

Apply today at https://tiledb.workable.com !

jakebol | 7 years ago | on: Automated Refactoring of a U.S. Department of Defense Mainframe to AWS

My Father works as an engineer for the VA, the hidden costs of this transition is the need to rewire almost the entire VA hospital system to comply with cerner networking requirements at the cost of $100's of millions per hospital before the software can begin to be deployed.

The other hidden cost is that these ancient software systems are extremely efficient in terms of cpu / memory utilization compared to modern equivalents so the hardware requirements go up considerably which impacts power / energy efficiency and direct deployment costs for replacement systems. Not saying modernization is not a win in the long term but there are direct and indirect costs with these big transitions.

jakebol | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2019)

TileDB, Inc. | Full-Time | REMOTE | Cambridge, USA | Athens, Greece | https://tiledb.io

TileDB is a technology for storing and managing enormous volumes of structured data on the cloud. TileDB efficiently stores data generated from variety of domains (genomics, finance, imaging, geospatial, etc) in a novel unified format as sparse or dense multidimensional arrays. Users can efficiently access this data via a growing number of language APIs, interfaces and our upcoming hosted service. TileDB, Inc. has raised $4M in seed funding over the past 18 months.

We are looking for frontend and backend developers to help develop a scalable service to make data storage, management, and computations easier for practicing data and domain scientists. A few features on the roadmap include designing a web admin console for data management, monitoring resources in real time, integration with JupyterLab and handling user profiles, billing, encryption and key management, and scaling / management of serverless compute resources.

We are primarily seeking:

- UI / UX Engineer (Javascript / Vue.js / Golang / K8s)

- Backend engineer (Go, CGo, K8’s)

TileDB GitHub organization: https://github.com/TileDB-Inc

TileDB has been featured on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15547749.

TileDB recent blog post: http://bit.ly/2SjkeYR

TileDB talk at PyData 2018: http://bit.ly/2BfbyJ3

Our headquarters are located in Cambridge, MA. The candidates must be US citizens or permanent residents located in the US, or Greek citizens to be located at our subsidiary in Athens, Greece.

Apply today at https://tiledb.workable.com!

jakebol | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2019)

TileDB, Inc. | Full-Time | REMOTE | Cambridge, USA | Athens, Greece | https://tiledb.io

TileDB is a disruptive technology for storing and managing enormous volumes of structured data, adopting the best ideas from columnar and spatial database research to support fast updates, compression, and interoperability with scalable cloud object storage backends. TileDB efficiently stores data generated from variety of domains (genomics, finance, imaging, geospatial, etc) in a novel unified format as sparse or dense multidimensional arrays. Users can efficiently access this data via a growing number of language APIs and interfaces (C/C++, Python, R and SQL data engines).

TileDB, Inc. has raised $4M in seed funding over the past 18 months. We are looking for frontend / fullstack developers to help us with designing and implementing a scalable service to make data storage, management, and computations easier for practicing data scientists both on-prem and on the cloud.

We are primarily seeking:

- Frontend / fullstack engineers (UI / UX with Vue.js, Go, K8s)

* TileDB GitHub organization: https://github.com/TileDB-Inc

* TileDB has been featured on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15547749.

* TileDB recent blog post: http://bit.ly/2SjkeYR

* TileDB talk at PyData 2018: http://bit.ly/2BfbyJ3

Our headquarters are located in Cambridge, MA. The candidates must be US citizens or permanent residents located in the US, or Greek citizens to be located at our subsidiary in Athens, Greece.

Apply today at https://tiledb.workable.com !

jakebol | 7 years ago | on: California will not complete $77B high-speed rail project: governor

Even after such infrastructure is built, a > 0 multiplier assumes the economic impact of the project would be greater than the lifetime costs of upkeep and maintenance of the infrastructure (and current and future taxes to support such infrastructure + interest on debt payments used in its initial construction). And excludes the opportunity cost of allocating that future capital to other projects. Ex. NY still throws money into the canal project, even though the canal has long since been economically unviable (but politically it is still viable and so it remains...).

jakebol | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2018)

TileDB, Inc. | Software Engineers | Cambridge, MA or REMOTE (US) | https://tiledb.io

TileDB, Inc. is looking for new team members to help develop the future of big data storage. For emerging and growing fields such as genomics, earth science, imaging, and financial analysis, the volume of data is increasing and TileDB is meeting the challenge head on. Data in these areas is well represented as multidimensional dense / sparse arrays, and the open-source TileDB data management software is a novel, cutting edge solution for array storage.

TileDB, Inc. is backed by Nexus Venture Partners and Intel Capital.

Our team combines software engineering expertise with scientific domain knowledge to develop the open-source TileDB array data management software, and we are looking for talented and motivated engineers for the following positions:

- Full Stack Web Developer: Production experience with Kubernetes, payment gateways, and React or Vue.js for frontend work.

- JVM / Spark Engineer: Deep experience with Spark, Scala, Java, native JVM extensions / JNI, Maven packaging and the SBT build system.

- Bioinformatics Software Engineer: Strong C++ skills, experience with R or Python. Genomics data engineering / analysis with FastQ, VCF, BAM formats, bcftools, htslib, GATK, Hail.

Additionally interested candidates with strong C++ skills and experience developing database / data management solutions are welcome to apply.

TileDB GitHub organization: https://github.com/TileDB-Inc

TileDB has been featured on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15547749.

Our headquarters are located in Cambridge, MA. To cope efficiently with the different time zones and hiring processes, priority will be given to candidates that are located in the US, and are US citizens or permanent residents.

Apply at https://tiledb.workable.com or contact us directly: [email protected]

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