HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Gulthor

20 karma · joined October 4, 2013

submissionscomments
Gulthor··on Netlify Celebrates 5M Developers – 3D Game
Another great 3D experience, right into your web browser. Netlify is a fantastic hosting solution with a great developer experience.
Gulthor··on Infinitown
This project makes me want to play SimCity 2000 again. Congrats, nice execution.
Gulthor··on Equinox.space
A finely crafted piece of art. Out of curiosity, do you plan to make this project open source? I'd be curious to learn about some the technical details.
Gulthor··on Effect 3.0: Production-Grade TypeScript
We've been using Effect in production since late 2021. Fantastic tool, can't wait for persistent workflows.
Gulthor··on Amazon Neptune – Fast, reliable graph database built for the cloud
Recommended reads on the native vs non-native topic:

* https://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/a-letter-regarding-native-... (tldr; there is no such thing as a native graph database)

* https://neo4j.com/blog/note-native-graph-databases/ (tldr; native graph databases do exist)

Regarding Cypher vs Gremlin: serialization could be a thing but what matters among other things are efficient query optimizations, algorithm and (physical) data model. Ultimately, databases are all reading from 1-dimensional spaces (RAM or disk), either randomly or (best) sequentially. If you can colocate vertices with their respective edges, you're fine: this is trivial for graphs with no edges or graphs that form a linear chain. If not, then things start to become fun, especially in a distributed way. This will impact performance; the language, not so much.

Gulthor··on Keep Out – WebGL Game Experiment
Nice piece of game! Any chance you could write a couple blog posts about the technical challenges you had to face, if any? I'm especially interested in the way you generate levels. Thanks.
Gulthor··on Show HN: Linkurious, the first data visualization platform for graph databases
To clear out a possible minor confusion for readers here - Titan's only API is Gremlin (though there also is a lower level Java API). You guys should also have a look at ArangoDB, which also supports Gremlin. Linkurious with upcoming TinkerPop3/Gremlin will definitely be quite interesting to use. Keep up the good work.
Gulthor··on Startups should use a relational database
People too often forget about graph databases when talking about NoSQL solutions. Graph databases offer an interesting and elegant alternative to relational databases and I could definitely see a startup decide to use this kind of technology.

As far as I know, most graph databases support transactions and offer great scalability. Such databases are also schema-less and can be queried with Gremlin, a powerful graph traversal language (see www.tinkerpop.com).

With respect to scalability and transactions, Titan (http://thinkaurelius.com/) looks very promising: it supports various backends for storage (Cassandra, HBase, etc.) and indexing (currently Elastic Search and Lucene). Graph analytics can be done via Faunus (http://thinkaurelius.github.io/faunus/), backed by Hadoop.

There are other vendors out there (Neo4J, OrientDB, etc.) which offer interesting solutions worth looking at - I'm just a bit less familiar with them.

The major downside I see with graph databases is that most of them are fairly recent and their ecosystem is tiny (though growing). Should a startup venture on such young technologies, or stick to mature and battle-tested solutions (ie. relational databases)?

Could startups use this kind of graph "NoSQL" databases? I don't see why not. If your startup is some kind of social network, graph databases are certainly an option worth considering. If I were to create a startup, I'd hardly use a document database like MongoDB but I will really consider using a graph database. In the end, it's all about having the right tool in hand, and knowing how to assert what is "right" for you.