Sharing ideas early is not a bad thing and very much encouraged by YC, we are gauging interest in collaboration on the topic. Our company has open sourced almost our entire compute use stack already https://github.com/agentsea
We are in the process of collecting the data right now which is fairly involved, we are going to be opening up that platform for others as well shortly.
It's not my intention to be dismissive because the project idea seems really cool. I'm just curious, why not wait until the source code is ready to post it on HN?
Because gauging interest early and finding other people interested in building is a good idea and frankly very inline with YC thinking. We have already open sourced an enormous amount of code and datasets for computer use https://github.com/agentsea
DynamoDB is a pain in the ass if you want to do too many relational or arbitrary queries. It's not for data exploration.
It is my favourite database though (next to S3)! For cases where my queries are pretty much known upfront, and I want predictable great performance. As Marc Brooker wrote in [1], "DynamoDB’s Best Feature: Predictability".
I consistently get single digit millisecond GETs, 10-15ms PUTs, and a few more milliseconds for TransactWriteItems.
Are you able to complex joins? No. Are you able to do queries based on different hash/sort keys easily? Not without adding GSIs or a new table. The issue in the past few years was the whole craze around "single-table design". Folks took it literally as having to shove all their data in a single table, instead of understanding the reason and the cases that worked well. And with ongoing improvements of DynamoDB those cases were getting fewer and fewer over time.
But, that's what tradeoffs are about. With on-demand tables, one-shot transactions, actually serverless storage/scaling, and predictable performance you get very, very far.
Look at the picture, you can notice who's shockley by just observing their facial expression. The cold-and-smart-than-you shockley in the middle. Shockley's personality becomes his mortal enemy, but that personality is also ncessary for his achievement.
If strength cannot become your weakness, than it's just mediocrity.
I think it’s a balance. You do need to be an asshole sometimes to get things done. But you don’t need to be an asshole all the time. It’s an easy excuse to say you need to be a prick because otherwise you cannot do your great achievements. It’s a false dichotomy. Even Einstein had friends.
Hopefully by now everyone knows the "crazy feminist lady" picture, which was a still frame from a pretty normal conversation where she wasn't even really supporting the feminist side that much, but got spread around the Internet by anti-feminists for years.
The picture is great. The senior manager on the right has a bit of a grimace in realizing yet again he'll need to smooth over Shockley's antagonism. The guy on the left has more of a smile and nod, and everything will be okay, type attitude.
