[qqueue]

Is the Hypothetical Amnesia Machine algorithm backed by any scholarly research, or can you at least cite some papers with similar techniques? Blog posts and javascript are nice, but I have a certain fondness for LaTeX-generated PDFs whenever data integrity is involved, e.g. HyperDex's pretty excellent papers:

http://hyperdex.org/papers/

[marknadal]

No papers yet, but I've been working on building up connection with academics and hiring them. So hopefully expect to see something published, but the process takes a while.

Meanwhile I'm actively working on building towards a simulation system and an actual high-scale deployable battle testing environment. Think of these as taking the theory from scholastic research, and actually implementing them in practical settings that anybody can run.

I'd also like to get a TLA+ specification going. If you have any experience in this stuff, please please please contact me [e-mail] because this is important to me.

[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.

[marknadal]

If people aren't interested in reading the materials I've provided that go over the concepts and algorithms, there is nothing I can do to "prove" anything to them, they just remain agnostic.

Did you read the link to the other comment and my reply? I'd really appreciate it if you could critique it.

[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."

[marknadal]

Terms, defined here: https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/semantics

Explanation of the conflict resolution in simple terms, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077969 .

Return values, with comments explaining their purpose, here: https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/How-to-Create-GUN (I know you referenced this already, but did you read the comments explaining each return value? Edit: upon further reading your comment, it looks like you did, you just didn't like them. Perhaps I should make them more concise)

Slides (no audio/video unfortunately) on what operations to apply given the HAM return values, here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1VIOJc0bdzUNs7yXMLKCc...

Persistence, currently S3 or localhost-testing-only disk. Persistence is a plugin.

ACID: Please link me to your favorite explanation of ACID that is clear and concise. I'll try and base my reply off that. I haven't found any good ones. GUN is AP, not CP.

People are taking me seriously, enough that I have contributors and funding. Some people don't take me seriously, and I'm trying hard to open up to them and be honest.

Do I need better documentation? Yes. Do I have documentation? At least some, yes.

What else can I handle for you?

[zero_iq]

You still have not described HAM except in the vaguest of terms. You have addressed very few of my questions.

What is the Hypothetical Amnesia Machine thought experiment? Where have you described this, or where can a description be found? What do the return values mean? The comments are very little help. What situations do they cover?

How does this relate to your algorithm? Please explain the algorithm in simple terms, with precise definitions.

Your slides provide NO USEFUL INFORMATION WHATSOEVER. If you cannot see that someone who doesn't already know what HAM is will be TOTALLY UNABLE to understand your slides, then you have a serious problem seeing things from another's point of view and should get somebody else to do your documentation for you.

Believe me, it's not from lack of trying on my part. I'm not stupid. I'm an experienced developer and familiar with the internal workings of many different database systems. It's my job and my hobby. I have maintained and contributed to several database systems. Your slides are intriguing but meaningless to me.

Your list of definitions ('Semantics') redefines many things that already have perfectly good definitions, and declares new terminology for concepts that already have perfectly good labels.

Many of the definitions are vague or even nonsensical/self-inconsistent.

For example: "soul': is the practically unique, immutable identifier for a node".

OK, so it's an identifier for a Node. So it's a Node ID. Why don't you just call it that?

But what does 'practically unique' mean? Something is either unique, or it isn't. It might be unique in a particular context, e.g. only in one instance of the database, or application, or server, ... or... what?

And what's a 'node'? "A group of no, one, some, or all fields, as they change over time." Well, you've redefined a perfectly good piece of jargon with a new and vague description. Node seems like a really bad word for this. In what way is a set of fields anything like a 'node' in the general sense? How does a node capture things over time? Is it a list, a history, an event log....?

"A group of no, one, some, or all" is better known as a 'set'. This is universally-accepted mathematical terminology. Except you've redefined that too.

And if something is a set of fields.... hey, how about calling it a field set? You know, like everybody else does...? Oh, no, let's call it a node instead....

My favourite: "Sent: proof that a message was received, might contain data that needs no receipt." The more you study this sentence, the more nonsensical and ambiguous it becomes. For a start, why not call it 'Received'? Or even 'Receipt', because that's the common noun for an item showing proof of receipt. Except, that you might need to prove receipt of data that needs no receipt... It is a ridiculous definition.

I'm sorry, but I can't take you seriously.

Frankly, it sounds like you yourself don't understand the domain and concepts you are describing, and are handwaving to cover your lack of knowledge. The fact that you provide your own terminology for things that could quite easily be described in standard terms betrays a lack of theoretical background, and ignorance of the state-of-the-art.

I'd venture a guess that your being REALLY, REALLY bad at explaining things may be correlated with the fact that you're apparently really good at describing tiny things in the most grandiose and self-aggrandizing terms. This seems to be ubiquitous across all your github projects. Redefining things unnecessarily, solving things that already have simple solutions, describing toy apps as radical revolutionary game-changers. I suspect your inability to explain things stems from this narcissism/egocentrism.

[karlgrz]

Yes, exactly this +100.

[karlgrz]

It's not just you.

[sseveran]

I am not quite sure where to begin. I read your wiki. The casual disregard for years of distributed computing research struck me as a bit scary. It would be fine if the website did not claim "Data integrity is now a breeze." but it does. It turns out data integrity in a distributed setting is actually quite a hard problem given the number of boundary cases that exist. For that reason experienced practitioners building distributed algorithms start with proofs, not try to come up with them later.

From reading your page on conflict resolution, which is quite light on details, it seems like you want to have a transaction log but unless the data is purely commutative that is impossible in an AP environment.

If you are going to reference a "Hypothetical Amnesia Machine" it would be helpful to at least define it. Looking at the code you hand someone two versions of their data and ask us to merge it.

It's nice that you are enthusiastic but it might be nice to build some proofs (or use someone elses) before making claims that our distributed state problems are solved.

[marknadal]

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

But to address your other comments:

Why can't a transaction log be commutative? You just have to make sure to be explicit about the ordering of events (like by using linked lists or progressively incremented hashes). This is the realm for CRDTs and stuff though, which GUN core doesn't touch.

Yes the HAM deals with merging any two logs/streams/history, any two snapshot/states, but also merging any log/stream/history with any snapshot/state.

This is important, because it allows you to merge more than just two, you just have to do it serially (in any order). That merge algorithm guarantees the deterministic resolution (see the comment link I posted above).

[sseveran]

It relies on the data being commutative. If the data is not commutative then we need, wait for it, drum roll please, some consistency, which by your own admission is not provided. The consistency is the hard part which is why there is an entire field of study on just this problem.

I fail to see how your merge algorithm is deterministic in case of failures.

[karlgrz]

You -cannot- have a distribute database without consistency. Prove us ALL wrong, please.

[marknadal]

Maybe I wasn't clear... GUN does have Eventual consistency, but not strong/global consistency.

Aka GUN is AP and Eventually consistent. You manually at the application layer can decide to lock, sacrificing Availability, and get strong consistency.

The merge algorithm works in an Eventually consistent case, but obviously is too naive for global Consistency, you'd need some form of consensus.

Or does that not address your comment?

[roeme]

Seconded, I plowed through the “wiki” (not really one) and the code for a bit, but gave up after while.

Doesn't have to be LaTeX for me, as long as it’s a comprehensive documentation.

(When OriFS was introduced here, the papers really helped to grok).

[marknadal]

Did you read https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/How-to-Create-GUN ? It is only introductory though. The slides might be helpful.

I've demonstrated GUN before handling conflict resolution across machines with significant drift. I need to get a video of this and more docs out on it.

[roeme]

I did, but as you said by yourself, it's short on info.

The conflict resolution is where the meat is, isn't it? And https://github.com/amark/gun/wiki/Conflict-Resolution-with-G... is incredibly hard to read and doesn't really answer questions.

[marknadal]

Yes, that is where the meat is.

Do the slides from my tech talk help at all?

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

I'll be working on getting a recording of the tech talk up, more blogs/documentation on the algorithm specifically. And as others have mentioned, some actual academic papers (but that could be a while).

Anything specific I can address?

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