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Hacker News has incredibly good long term retention of active users (commenters/submitters). I just published a blog post on the subject (https://probdist.com/2020/03/28/the-graying-of-hacker-news-u...).

Lots of users on HN are actively contributing for years after sign up. This to me is a good sign of health. The counter point is of course, the rapid drop off in engagement after the initial month. Where a large number of users each month never return to the site.

The average comment on Hacker News last month was written by a user with 5 years of tenure on the site. Depending on your perspective you could argue this is a good or a bad thing (new users aren't contributing as much as old users, or old users are continuing to contribute!).


OP here: I'll keep checking in on the comments from time to time. If you are after the raw data in BigQuery it is available here: `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`


This is how RStudio and certain other great open source tools get bigcos to pay for licenses. They are allergic to AGPL and therefore will happily pay for alternative licenses for tools their employees demand.


This appears to be an open sourcing of the Databricks Delta technology which is fairly mature and I personally think very valuable.


I'm a former early employee at a KP backed start up. Nothing but respect and good vibes from the folks I met with or presented to from KP.


This is a good move from Slack. Microsoft teams is an extremely high quality product already. Slack has to be wary of this competitive force nipping at their heels. I've seen teams make good penetration into large companies by starting as the alternative to sharepoint for new projects/working groups.

Team's live editing functionality of excel files is really really valuable for team collaboration. Slack closing the gap on O365 integration is important for enterprise sales.


> Microsoft teams is an extremely high quality product already.

This has not been my experience with MS Teams. If I respond to a message on my phone, and then return to my laptop, Teams has disconnected and I have to restart the app on my laptop in order to get updated messages. Scrolling back even 5 minutes in Teams' message history incurs multi-second latency sometimes, so reviewing the context of a conversation you're in is very painful. Threading is handled very poorly in teams and makes teams feel much more like a decades old forum than a chat application.

I do agree this is a good move for Slack, but only because organizations are adopting teams due to its bundling with Office 365, something most companies are already using. Slack has no other way to survive because the people in the org making these decisions aren't concerned with the quality of the tools they are choosing, just the idea they are getting something for free.


yep, teams has a lot of potential, but there's a lot of rough edges. for example until recently copy-and-paste didn't work. i was just thinking of moving from teams to slack. hopefully this is good news


We've moved from Teams, to Slack, and back to Teams over the last 2 years. Teams has come a long way since 2017, but the basic chat functionality is still pretty far behind Slack.

Next time, I'll stick with Slack.


>as the alternative to sharepoint for new projects/working groups.

>Team's live editing functionality of excel files

Teams is a Client, SharePoint is the server. When you use Teams to view a file list or open an excel file, all its doing is streaming the SharePoint web interface, like an iframe. Teams, as far as the file side goes, is a new form of browser chrome (the toolbars not Google Chrome, albiet Teams is also based on electron aka Chrome.) for SharePoint, instead of the Modern SharePoint Web interface.


I don't really see how MS teams is a "high quality product". We have been forced to move from Slack To Microsoft teams in the past month. And I'm already missing it. Even though that Slack's threads were a mess, at least they always appeared in chronological order. Now in teams I miss a lot of messages because the way it reorder them when someone respond to an old thread.

TBH the feature I miss the most, is reacting to a certain message with emojis! It added liveliness to the whole chat.


>Microsoft teams is an extremely high quality product already.

Lolwut? Have you used Teams? The product is bad ripoff Slack. So many issues, crashes all the time.


Seems positioned to compete with Azure Data Explorer (MSFT's log/time series optimized service). I know Azure runs a lot of services on top of Data Explorer (previously called Kusto) I wonder if this is a true internal battle tested product or a me-too offering.


I use Kusto daily and it is by far my favorite dev tool. It's incredibly fast and actually fun to use. I'm interested to compare it to Timeseries.

Kusto is still the name of the query language and the desktop application (Kusto.Explorer), the service was just renamed to Azure Data Explorer.


Kusto is architecturally closer to Dremel (or BigQuery). It's a columnar compressed datastore with a nice query language. Not the most efficient way to store and query timeseries data though.

Back then (internally) we actually had a lot of issues with ingesting and querying time series data at scale.


I might be mistaken but wouldn't Data Explorer be more similar to AWS CloudWatch which has been around for a long time.


Azure Data Explorer/ Kusto is more of a database that is optimized for the log use case than a service. There is a front end tool and a lot of the use-cases are around log management, but it is database you can do general SQL or KQL things with. Time series is one of the core use-cases for it also but it has less marketing around it.


Sounds more like AWS CloudWatch Log Insights launched yesterday.


I've seen a broken link from this url parameter already.


Went to a similar event at Harvard some years ago. Was interesting but if you are a HN regular you probably get as much out of blog posts following happenings online as at the event.

YMMV if you are a better net-worker than I am.


> get as much out of blog posts following happenings

Curious, what are some of the best blog posts/sites to follow?


Azure has already had a great spark experience available with HDInsight.


The startup time of a HDInsight cluster is quite long; it's not really suited for ad hoc clusters (which are really easy to spin up quickly in Databricks).


It takes around 20 minutes to spin up HDInsight clusters. So it is not instant but I wonder if databricks on Azure can do any better given they are running in customer environments so wont have a big pool of preallocated multitenant machines available.


AFAIK it is not multitenant, you get your own machines.

They spin up the VMs with either open source Spark or the Databricks runtime - you get to choose the distribution and version before spinning up the cluster.

If you have enough workloads you can run your own pool of VMs to provide a 'serverless' experience to your Spark users: https://databricks.com/blog/2017/06/07/databricks-serverless...


agree, if you have batch jobs for spark, Azure Batch Service may not be a bad solution either. HDInsight includes too much other complexity if all you wanted was spark. Databricks will be interesting, as they can take away even they mysticism of touching azure beyond initially provisioning them some rights.


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