> The main thing that gives me some doubt is it seems plausible that we'll retroactively find that the deaths directly attributable to COVID-19 were somewhat overstated, in the sense that my understanding is a presumed COVID-19 diagnosis is accepted in lieu of having a positive test.
Looking at the total number of excess deaths (for all causes, ignoring if it is COVID-19 or not), I would say that it looks more likely that it is severely undercounted.
I guess you could argue that the huge increase in deaths was caused by side-effects of the lockdown, but that does not really jive with the results from countries like Denmark, which did an early and hard lockdown, and as result show almost no extra mortality.
Individuals reducing their carbon footprint by reducing consumption is all good, but it is really a drop in the bucket in the big picture. I would be worried that focusing on that could be counter-productive with a higher chance of making people either feel that they have "done their part" (if they have personally done these minor reductions) or induce general apathy over the fact that the only way forward is to reduce your quality of living while knowing that it won't make any real difference anyway.
If we really want to make a change we have to focus on big picture solutions. Instead of being against, we need to focus on what we want to move towards.
The only way to reduce our dependency on carbon fuels within a realistic timeframe is an aggressive rollout of renevable energy like wind and solar, _and_ nuclear. If we were really serious about this, we would do massive investments in nuclear, building lots of new plants and also stepping up the research in technologies like molten salt and thorium based reactors.
If we should take to the street and demonstrate, it should be _for_ actual solutions like that, rather than _against_ minor things that don't make much of a difference anyways.
> with a few exceptions (you have PMF, second-time founder with exit under belt, obvious deep industry/technical knowledge), you have to know someone
I don't think this is true at all. Me and my co-founder had zero connections (being from Denmark, as far from the Valley as you can get), no previous startup experience, only an early pre-prototype (just barely above idea stage) of our product and obviously zero revenue (so no PMF whatsoever). I would hope that it came across that we had deep technical knowledge, but really how much can you communicate that in a 10 min interview?
We got accepted, and we were far from the only ones in our batch like that, so it is clearly possible to get into YC just on the quality of your idea and how well you can communicate it.
The author Ernest Callenbach made a very detailed proposal for just this back in the 80's, called "A Citizen Legislature": https://www.well.com/~mp/citleg.html
Sorry that this is a limitation for you. Currently event handling is only available in the commercial editions, but we do plan to gradually make more and more of this functionality available in the free developer edition as well.
(Alexander from Realm here) Yes, where this approach fits is very dependent on the use case. In our experience the key is to have a data model that is flexible enough to express many different use cases. There might be cases where updating a single field is enough, or you might need it to work as a counter, or maybe your data will be better modeled by ordered insertions into a list.
Having the flexibility to use the exact combination of data types that fits your specific requirements and allows you to express your intent in a way that makes it clear how you want the conflicts resolved is essential to make it work.
> If it were such a great idea for a country, it would have already occurred at a smaller level.
It has. The Svanholm community in Denmark (http://svanholm.dk) raised taxes to 80% for all its members, but in return you free housing, food and all other essentials. They have been doing this successfully since the 70's.
Realms approach to conflict resolution is very different from what you see in products like Couch. Realm is an _object_ database, so in contrast to document databases where conflict resolution happens very coarse grained at the document level, in Realm it happens at the object level (and actually all the way down into individual properties).
This essentially means that the entire object graph is treated as one big CRDT [0], transparently handling conflict across individual objects, properties and relations.
When talking about ordering by time, both in the context of LWW and insertions in lists, we are talking about vector clock time, not necessarily device time (or though that is taken into account as well).
We are very aware of how users of Parse got left in the cold when Facebook dropped the project. That is one of the reasons that we choose to offer Realm, not as a service that can be shut down, but rather as a free download that you can self-host on any provider.
That way, even if something happened to us you would still be able to continue running your apps on your own servers. I know that there could still be concerns about how to maintain the software, which is why we have also open sourced the underlying database.
I think most people will agree that we have a pretty good track record of being part of the ecosystem and being there for the developer community, and we very much intend to stay that way.
One thing that is often overlooked is the impact on biodiversity. Nothing kills off as many species as converting an area to cropland. Turning it into an enforced monoculture destroys the habitat for all the other plants and animals that would usually live there.
Grazing animals can co-exist with other life, and some cases like forest grazing [1] (which used to be the standard way of grazing animals in europe and is slowly gaining traction again), has been shown to actually increase biodiversity.
So paradoxically enough, if what you care about is biodiversity and the livelihood of animals, you might consider reducing your consumption of cropland produced products like vegetables and grains in favor of meats from grazing animals.
Realm - Android Evangelist - San Francisco, CA - Full Time ONSITE
Realm Inc. is the company behind Realm (Realm.io), a mobile database that millions of people rely on. Publicly launched in July 2014, Realm is used by tens of thousands of developers around the world and powers apps by companies like Starbucks, Google, Amazon, Hipmunk, and many more.
Loved by developers and more than a billion users!
What you'll be doing:
Realm is looking for a highly technical, hands-on evangelist to code 50%+ of their time, and represent Realm online or offline. The job will require extensive interaction and travel, and will put you in touch with thousands of developers from different backgrounds, from startups to Fortune 500 companies.
SOME OF THE QUALITIES WE LOOK FOR:
- Significant experience building, maintaining and shipping native Android apps
- Experience speaking at events, organizing events, teaching, or other track record in the community
- Desire to build Realm’s product: you won’t be given a standard deck and forced to recite it for us — you have to build your own!
- Existing track record on Twitter and Github.
We offer competitive salaries, stock options, unlimited vacation, a great health plan, including dental and vision benefits, healthy and yummy catered office lunches, gym reimbursement, and more.
We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
All elements of Realm (queries, lists and even individual properties on objects) are lazy loaded. That is an intrinsic property of the zero-copy architecture where objects directly reflect what is in the underlying database.
> having no ability to share realms/objects across threads is really unusual, and it would be better if the docs made that requirement clearer at the beginning.
Good point that we should be more explicit about threading model of Realm and its benefits.
Realms and their objects can be shared across threads (and processes), you just have to be explicit about it (by having each thread get its own instances of the given objects/realms). The huge benefit you get from this, is that you never have to worry about locking or any other concurrency issues. All threads will always have a consistent view of the data, it will only update to reflect changes done by other threads at safe points in your code (like between events, where you are not in the process of using the data).
> Based on my understanding of realm, I was going to have 3 copies of each object, one on each thread.
You don't need 3 copies, only three instances. That way each thread will have its own instance (and as such not be affected by changes on other threads), but they will all point to the same underlying data.
> I would expect one in-memory copy, with the threads using synchronized methods to modify the data. Then, when thread B completes, it just updates its work item and then notifies the UI thread to re-render.
With realm you don't even have to do that. You can let thread B modify the object, and then the UI thread can just watch its own instance of that same object and be notified when it changes, it can then update the UI. All perfectly safe without any need for manual synchronization between the threads.
Realm | San Francisco & Copenhagen | Realm (YC S11)
Hello,(https://realm.io). We’re currently shipping a mobile database that runs directly inside mobile phones, tablets & wearables. Hundreds of millions of people rely on Realm every day through apps by Google, Amazon, eBay, Intel, Hipmunk, Expensify, GoPro, the BBC, Adidas, IBM, Homeland Security, Walmart, LINE, Starbucks, Xiaomi, the Washington Post and many, many more.
We allow people to build faster apps, faster, and do so in a reactive way with live objects, change notifications, unidirectional data flows and much more.
We’re the 3rd-most starred database on GitHub (https://github.com/realm) and growing fast.
We’re working on some exciting new projects… Some keywords: Mobile, C++, iOS, Objective-C, Swift, Android, Java, JS, React Native, C#, .NET, Xamarin, Unity, distributed systems, cloud, devops, infrastructure, test, QA, evangelism, OS X, Product Manager
We will consider sponsoring work visas to Denmark for the right candidates.
If you’d like to apply it will be easiest if you do so directly on our Lever where we have specific jobs listed: https://jobs.lever.co/realm
We'll be happy to be part of Clickbench. Reach out to me and we can work together to make it happen.