Hacker News Reader

I believe that was the intention of the author, write a DIY post to demonstrate usefulness of Spark, not to gain insights out of the Amazon reviews.

View on HN

A bit of both. I wanted an excuse to test out Spark to find the kinks which were ommited from the documentation (and boy did I find kinks), and also provide a practical demo.

Thanks for writing this! I'm thinking about using Spark for a little 2M-data-point project that I'm working on, just for the learning experience.

Out of curiosity, what kinks did you find?

Essentially the same Spark caveats of lazy evaluation and immutability of caches: neither are a big deal on small datasets, but making a mistake on either on a large dataset can result in a lot of lost time or confusion.

Then there are the massive shuffle read/writes that result in 50GB i/o which are not great for SSDs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com