ntoll

They just made it. :-)

The campaign is still open for a few more minutes.

"My God! What has sound got to do with music!" ~ Charles E.Ives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ives)

(and I'm inclined to agree)

Blimey... at £104.95 I think I'll grab it from the library. ;-)

Thanks for the recommendation. It's in my to-read list ~ along with far too many other books ;-)

I'm currently reading "Ant Encounters - Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior" by Deborah M.Gordon. It covers a lot of related material and is a very engaging read.

Correct - as the article demonstrated, we achieved rather buggy results in the short time we had available to us. We're continuing to work on the project and have plans to get the piece performed for LeedsDataMill by a real brass band. I'm guessing the performance will be blogged and I'll cross post it to HN when it's published.

Thanks!

Buy it and you'll find out... ;-)

I wrote this high-level piece of fluff as a taster for the Guardian's developer blog:

http://www.theguardian.com/info/developer-blog/2013/sep/17/d...

"If Doctor Who were a programmer, he'd use deferreds!"

Can't get enough of deferreds and promises? Want lots more examples of interesting, cunning and mind bending ways to use promises and deferreds? As luck would have it, this:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920030508.do

...has just been published.

(N.B. I'm one of the authors - all feedback would be most welcome and apologies for the shameless plug).

Regarding Clojure: If the drogulus comes to anything then I'm building a working reference specification. I chose to write it in Python and comment ubiquitously to make sure the code is easy to re-implement in other languages or on other platforms. Adding a dependency on Clojure would make this less likely to happen; the drogulus would instantly be linked to the JVM (and other platforms upon which Clojure runs).

I've used Clojure before "for fun" and I like it - it's not a problem with the language per-se. Rather it's more a case of wanting Logos to be small, simple and "fit" the drogulus. Does this make sense?

I agree with you about developing new languages. That's why I chose to re-implement a Lisp: I don't want to invent a new language. However, I do want a language that meets my need for "fit", simplicity, portability and compactness (I'd like my kids to be able to understand and program in Logos). To use a musical analogy, Logos is a re-arrangement an old classic (Lisp) for different ensembles. ;-)

This is a work in progress and I need to push ideas in to code and get feedback as soon as possible. Only then will you be able to tell if I'm playing with fireworks or doing something impressive. Furthermore, while I have a very clear idea of what needs doing, I don't think this is a one-person job. That's why the biggest challenge for me right now is to transition the drogulus from a one person playtime project hacked together during a daily 40 minute commute in to London in to a functioning multi-person project with an active community of users.

Now, that would be impressive!

As always, I'm happy to answer questions and welcome constructive comment, critique and feedback.

N.

Thanks, all feedback most welcome.

Yes, the crypto identity aspect goes some way to address Sybil like problems.

Regarding anonymity: you're only as anonymous as your association with your public key[s]. Given that items (k/v pairs) stored in the DHT are self-contained in terms of proving provenance it doesn't matter from what node they originate. Put plainly, there is no need for a node id (a SHA512) to be linked to a specific user (identified by their public key). I explain how signing items works here: http://ntoll.org/article/drogulus-questions-and-clarificatio...

For me, the most curious fact about the drogulus is that it is a ubiquitous ecosystem for asynchronously processing Logos code and data. If you see the implication of this then you'll get where I'm trying to go with the drogulus.

:-)

I did seriously look at Clojure but it doesn't quite fit my requirements. Also, I didn't say the drogulus was an academic experiment... that makes it sound far too impressive. ;-)

Hey, I get user unknown from cs.gsu.edu.

Hi,

I'm the originator of the drogulus.

First things first: it's an unfinished work in progress and an experiment on which I've been hacking during my 40 minute train journey in to work. So, yes, "something something - Kademlia-like crypto-signed homoiconic datastore - something" just about sums it up.

I can't spend a lot of time answering right now, but I gave a short presentation about the drogulus at this year's Opentech in London which resulted in the following blog post (giving a high-level overview of my motivations and intentions): http://ntoll.org/article/ppdd I followed up with some clarifications in this post: http://ntoll.org/article/drogulus-questions-and-clarificatio...

I have several more blog posts in draft form about other aspects of the system.

It's very early days and I'm pretty sure there are lots of problems with what I'm doing. But, as I mentioned in the first post referenced above, I'm having too much fun to stop. ;-)

Happy to answer questions and constructive feedback, comment and critique is most welcome.

N.

I wrote about this, from a UK based perspective, 18 months ago: http://ntoll.org/article/teach-our-kids-to-code-or-not

Your loss. :-/

A lot of what Peter says makes great sense and resonates with me.

Nice one jtauber... :-)

As if by chance Chris appears on Hacker News. I ordered some tea from him a few weeks ago and will definitely order again. Yes, I know Chris, but no, I wasn't asked to post this - it's great to see a buddy doing a great job.

Heh... :-)

It's meant to be the latter (centralized) but there is nothing to stop you from using it in your own projects. :-)

I'd be up for getting that sorted. Where is this XML dump of which you speak..? ;-)

Seriously, we're interested in importing datasets that people would find enjoy hacking around with. I know I would enjoy exploring/linking/annotating a Hacker News dump.

Hey, I'm the author of the linked post. More than happy to answer questions...

I've pasted a copy of the original email I sent to the ReadWriteWeb guy below. Inevitably some of the interesting stuff was edited out in the article:

<quote>

In a nutshell, FluidDB is an openly writable hosted service for storing, sharing, searching and annotating data. While this is an accurate description it doesn't tell the whole story (in the same way as describing Twitter as, "writing messages to friends in only 140 characters or less" doesn't tell the whole story).

Perhaps the best thing to do is take a look at a recent (short) presentation I did that attempts to answer exactly the questions you're asking (what is FluidDB?, how does it work?, what's different about it? etc...). The slides and notes are on Slideshare here:

http://www.slideshare.net/ntoll/fluiddb-in-a-nutshell-628958...

With regard to Google's DataWiki, the obvious similarity appears to be that both accept contributions from everyone (i.e. they're openly writeable). However, I've just had a look around their site and it appears that it's quite a different project to FluidDB in several important ways.

If I understand things correctly, each page in the DataWiki represents a discrete dataset conforming to a pre-defined structure/schema (in FluidDB we don't impose schema on our users and individual things are represented by objects rather than entries on a list).

In addition, there doesn't seem to be any way to validate the trustworthiness or source of the data (in FluidDB the permission system makes sure there is control over who uses specific tags and namespaces - for example only I can add data using tags under the "ntoll" namespace).

Also, DataWiki's search seems to be on a per-page basis rather than across all datasets (in FluidDB it is possible to search for and retrieve anything using any tag for which you have a "read" permission - including tags created by others).

Finally, the DataWiki site says they're a wiki for structured data. FluidDB is more forgiving about the structure of data - in fact one of its strengths is how easy it is for the structure of data to evolve and change to reflect changes in the "real" world.

</quote>

This is very similar to FluidDB (Fluidinfo, the creators of FluidDB have recently closed series A funding with some great backers).

Amen!

I practice Zen, but since there is no concept of God or other supernatural "magic" I can also accurately describe myself as an atheist although this might be better categorized as "it's complicated".

Nice video... shame about the song. (Ref "Not the 9 o'clock News" - classic British 80s comedy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQamw4xxxHY)

Documents -> People -> Places -> Objects. What's next?

You should check out FluidDB from the FluidInfo guys... http://fluidinfo.com/

such a shame...