from Hacker News

Datomic and Content Addressable Techniques

by lvh on 9/16/24, 3:53 PM with 40 comments

• by w10-1 on 9/16/24, 4:37 PM

  Their content-addressing hash would seem critical, but the "combineUnordered" hash they use just adds each byte. The API is clear that this is only as good as possible, and I'm not sure I would rely on it for data used for security investigations. I suspect they'll come up with something like an arbitrary but fixed order over keys that would improve hash quality.

  More generally, while I can maybe understand what they're doing, it's hard to imagine how to QA it in a way that's convincing to customers without a lot of data/compute/coverage analysis.

• by linotype on 9/16/24, 4:25 PM

  Separate question: are there any new startups out there writing code primarily in Clojure?

• by jchanimal on 9/17/24, 12:01 AM

  Fireproof is taking the lessons of cloujure and Ipfs and applying them to the browser, to create a realtime database that runs anywhere.

  As cofounder of Couchbase I got to meet Rich Hickey, whose work was a big inspiration to Fireproof.

  Content addressing makes causal consistency easy to implement. We are fast approaching readiness for consistency checks and ACID characterization.

• by lvh on 9/16/24, 7:36 PM

  FYI: we're planning a followup post for people who are less interested in the Datomic mechanics and more interested in the usefulness to investigations and other security functions. Informally, I think of it this way: your SIEM has the deltas, but often you want the contextual states in between the deltas (and a lot of investigation is about trying to reason about that state). We built this tool originally to support that, and it turned out that approach was also super useful for things like compliance, CSPM...

  We already wrote a high level blog post here: https://www.latacora.com/blog/2023/11/01/our-approach-to-bui... -- but the one I'm hoping to write is more of a case study.