text: Behind all the Big Data hype, there is one common thread: Apache Hadoop and its associated components ARE the technology platform of choice. And here at Hortonworks, that’s what we do: Hadoop.
  That is also why we are so excited about the incredible growth in customers who have chosen to work with us to ensure their implementation of Hadoop and realize their vision of a modern data architecture.
  We believe in the power of community-driven open source to fundamentally change the landscape of the enterprise software market. There is ultimately no way for proprietary development to outpace or outthink the legions of amazing developers contributing to open-source projects every minute of every day.
  This makes us uniquely positioned to help our customers get involved in delivering to the right requirement. A great example is eBay. A team at eBay partnered with Hortonworks to improve Apache HBase’s mean time to recovery. Ming Ma, software development manager at eBay reflected that, “The collaboration between Hortonworks, eBay, and Scaled Risk has resulted in numerous improvements (proposed and implemented) in Apache HBase and HDFS itself.”
  The team at TRUECar expressed a similar sentiment: “For Hortonworks, partnership and deep collaboration with customers is more than just talk. Their completely open-source approach means collaboration is built directly into the DNA of the company.” John Williams, Vice President of Platform Operations, TRUECar.
  With a truly open approach, the possibilities for integration are endless, and attractive to the ecosystem of technology vendors. Hortonworks has a broad array of partners of all types and we also have deep relationships with the most strategic partners found in the data center today. Industry leaders such as Microsoft, Rackspace, SAP, and Teradata have all chosen to resell the Hortonworks Data Platform and deeply integrate it with their stacks.
  Our partners rallied around the launch of HDP 2.0, as excited as us about the possibilities of the platform. Here’s what Microsoft and Teradata had to say.
  The new YARN architecture is designed to give the Windows community the flexibility to run multiple application types in Hadoop …
  “We are excited to see the next generation of Hadoop delivered with HDP 2.0,” said Eron Kelly, General Manager, SQL Server at Microsoft. “The new YARN architecture is designed to give the Windows community the flexibility to run multiple application types in Hadoop, all sharing a common resource management infrastructure. We are proud to have had the opportunity to contribute significantly to key Apache projects with Hortonworks such as Stinger and Hive to make this a reality. ”
  “Hortonworks Data Platform 2.0 is a big leap in Hadoop capabilities,” said Scott Gnau, President, Teradata Labs. “Customers require and expect resource management to maintain consistent performance and service level agreements between IT and the business. HDP 2.0 fits with our approach and within the Teradata Unified Data Architecture to enable organizations to unlock value from all their data assets, and power deeper insights and new business applications.”
  If you already have one of those partners in your datacenter – and there’s a good chance you already do – then talk to them about their endorsement of the Hortonworks Data Platform.
  We work in the community, and we work for the enterprise. We have a singular focus on a community-driven open source process to deliver enterprise-grade Apache Hadoop. Hortonworks has broad and deep Hadoop expertise which extends across all of the crucial projects within a Hadoop distribution. This means that we are exceptionally well positioned to deliver on enterprise requirements we have heard from our customers, both in terms of innovation to the platform and support of existing installations.
  Hortonworks support gives us peace of mind, as we know we can depend on them to fix any operation issue quickly.
  WD, a Western Digital company, manufactures half of the world’s hard drives. Our deep technical expertise is one reason WD chose Hortonworks. According to Li Yi, Engineering Director at WD, “Hortonworks support gives us peace of mind, as we know we can depend on them to fix any operation issue quickly.”
  Similarly, our collaboration in delivering enterprise requirements was important to XING, a German-language social network for professionals. Daniel Olmedilla, XING’s vice president of data science summed up their commitment:
  “We looked again at the main Hadoop distributions and chose Hortonworks because of their commitment to full open source. XING shares that commitment and contributes to it in order to keep Hadoop innovation in the open source community.”
  Hadoop is THE technology platform of choice for big data. At Hortonworks we aim to continue to innovate on this incredible platform and ensure our customers see successful implementations not just of a revolutionary technology, but a revolutionary way of doing business.
  Now that the dust has settled from more than twenty countries of travel, dozens of conferences, major events and community meet and greets this year, I’ve finally had the time to reflect on the progress of the Cardano project as well as some of the lessons I’ve learned. It’s honestly been the most challenging year of my life filled with drama, stress, death and some unbelievably cruel people.
  It’s also been one of the most rewarding and joyful having the chance to meet thousands of passionate and kind fans, technologists and scientists- I can see the inspiration that Charles Dickens had when he said it was the best of times and the worst of times.
  The reality is that the internet and in particular the cryptocurrency space can be a really toxic place if you allow it to get to you. There were times after reading some blog post or comment on reddit that I seriously questioned if this effort was worth it. I can understand why Mike Hearn left Bitcoin.
  But I’ve never been here for the short term, it’s always been the dream of finding a way to get financial services to the three billion people who don’t have them using technology that was only a dream a generation ago. And I think we are making great progress there.
  In January of 2017, Cardano was still mostly in a very early alpha stage. We had tremendous engineering difficulty getting Haskell, our devops and the new protocols such as Ouroboros and Scrape to play nicely together. Rather it was a constant learning curve of how to tame the three headed dragon of research, decentralized teams and exotic programming languages while managing the expectations of a huge community.
  As an aside, Cardano has one of the fastest growing and most intelligent fanbases. We actively invited people who care about formal methods, peer review and functional programming to come see what we are working on. These people aren’t swayed by jargon or flashing marketing. They were born with bullshit detectors in their cribs
  I’ve gained significant strength and a much needed boost in morale from interacting with our community. For example, one member asked about how we were verifying the proofs in the Ouroboros paper and I posted a link to Kawin’s Isabelle repo. Most would simply say that’s nice and move on. This member took the time to read the code and mentioned we have a long way to go with specific examples.
  For most people, Isabelle is a name followed by a lake in Minnesota. For our community, some can actually read the code and comment on it. That’s a rare gift and it’s the privilege of a lifetime to be in this kind of environment (we ending up hiring the person who commented on the code).
  Moving through the months, Cardano moved from the lab to a series of testnets to eventually being released in September. Dealing with these transitions gave us a newfound appreciation for just how many different computer and network configurations exist. I can almost feel a windows force ghost whispering “I told you so” in a smug voice.
  We designed the Byron (the September release of Cardano) to be the minimum viable product necessary to test the concepts Cardano is built upon. We wanted to run Ouroboros in a production setting to see epochs function properly. We wanted extensive logging of both the edge nodes and relays to see how our network is being used. We wanted to have third parties play with our APIs and tell us where we screwed up (boy did they ever!). We wanted to test the update system a few times.
  Overall, the experiment has been a tremendous success. There are several thousand edge nodes concurrently connected to the network. There are several exchanges and other third parties using our software in the harshest possible way. There is a wealth of data flowing in that is giving us a much better sense of what we need to do to make Cardano better.
  Since launch, we’ve already pushed three updates to the network without incident. We’ve started a very rapid redesign of our middleware and its associated APIs to make it easier for third parties to integrate. We’ve started a series of systematic improvements to our network stack that will be finished with the Shelley release that should dramatically improve things.
  However, what excites me most about 2018 is that Cardano is starting to open up to the world. Delegation and staking will be rolled out all throughout Q1 and Q2 in coordination with the community. Soon we’ll have a testnet running IELE allowing developers to play around with our smart contract model for the first time. And we’ll be deploying our first verified protocol with Praos thereby engaging the formal methods community.
  Constantly living in the moment, one tends to eschew Cardano’s vast scope in exchange for the problem of the week. But looking at our ever growing whiteboard series demonstrates how many brilliant people wake up every morning thinking about how to solve the problems of scalability, interoperability and sustainability. These aren’t just hypothetical lectures. They are backed by papers, funding and developers working full time.
  Then there are the new things. Professor Rosu’s and Runtime Verification’s work on K and semantics based compilation isn’t just really smart competitive differentiation, it’s literally moving the chains of the entire field of programming language theory. The Cardano project is creating a financial incentive to have correct by construction infrastructure from virtual machines to compilers. Our success means you don’t have to hand write this code ever again- not just in a cryptocurrency context; in a general context.
  Our research efforts at Tokyo Tech under Professors Mario Larangeira and Bernardo David with multiparty computation is rapidly bringing these protocols into practical use. Kaleidoscope and Royale are case studies on how to achieve everything that Ethereum does off chain, in a low latency setting, privately and at a scale of millions of concurrent users each in their own domain. Further abstractions will push this work into more useful domains like decentralized exchange. And eventually DApp developers will be able to integrate these protocols into their code via libraries.
  Professor Bingsheng Zhang’s research on treasuries and voting is groundbreaking. It’s giving our project the ability to have a discussion about how should changes to cryptocurrencies be proposed, debated, approved and funded. What’s most special here is the interdisciplinary nature of the effort that can draw from political science, game theory, sociology, open source software governance and computer science. There is something for everybody.
  Moving into 2018, we are going to open this discussion up by both engaging the community directly and by holding a conference in Switzerland. More details will be published later, but the basic idea is that this area isn’t a Cardano problem. It’s a cryptocurrency problem. And there are many great projects from Dash to Pivx who are trying to solve it in a novel way. We ought to talk to each other.
  I could continue enumerate our research efforts (there’s a lot more to write), but I think the point has been made. Cardano isn’t a cryptocurrency as much as it is a movement of minds who are frustrated with the way technology works in practice.
  The functional programming community has had for decades great solutions to many of the problems plaguing modern developers, but they have been historically ignored. Our RINA guys if given a chance could build a much better and more fair internet. Layering protocol development with formal methods extracts a much cleaner and more meaningful design process where ambiguity and hand waving is slain.
  What Cardano has given us is a chance to answer if only the world worked this way with why not? We have the freedom to dream again and the freedom to try new things without asking permission. I even have a chance to work with my heroes like Phil Wadler. 2018 is going to be one hell of a year.
  Woah that was intense but we got it. Thank You for all the hard work guys. Looking forward to big things come 2018 and beyond as we grow as a community together.
  Keep going Charles! Don't let internet nay-sayers get you down. Cardano is the most promising project out there.
  Great Article! Glad that I chose to be a part of this wonderful opportunity! Keep up the good work Charles!
  Decentralization is definitely the path forward. It thrills me to no end that smart, nerdy people will once again change the world for the better. A huge thank you to Charles and the Cadano Team / IOHK — your hard work does not go unappreciated!
  Collaboration between ICOs is going to be king and possible company buy outs...or unification..ADADASHPIVX!..... Thanks for the HARD work!!!! here is to a great 2018!
  I’m by far not an expert in none of the technology above mentioned. But I certainly am excited about Cardano’s project. Not only about the crypto but all the new concept and ideas you guys are bringing to life. I will keep supporting the project in anyway I can. Merry Christmas to all.
  From an ageing uneducated truck driver in a small outback town in Central Queensland Australia I would like to extend to you and through you Charles,to the whole Cardano / IOHK team a very Merry Christmas and an exciting, fulfilling and prosperous year ahead.
  Even though I do not understand the technical of your whiteboard presentations and writings somehow through the ether of the universe I feel intensely the dream and passion that you have for this project and it honestly brings tears to my eyes.
  When Charlie Lee tweeted "Either the market is crazy or Cardano will end world hunger" I thought well, maybe not end world hunger ..... but it seems to be building a platform so that others may do so ! I was reminded of the metaphor of Bernard of Chartres and dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants!
  I believe the inhabitants of the earth of the future will see Charles Hoskinson and all involved in the Cardano Project as GIANTS !
  All the best and I look forward to following the progress of you and the many teams involved through the coming year.
  Beside the ADA which I hold, you have been an inspiring force in my life as of recently, as I'm fascinated by you, Cardano &v the information regarding the tech. Merry Christmas Charles.
  As an investor i started out with Cardano to see if i could earn some money. But now after hours and hours of reading and watching youtube and the Cardano website i am fascinated by the project and earning money is the least of my concerns.Keep up the good work and thank you Charles for making my world a better place
  One of the few projects that make sense. Thank you Charles for explaining things that well, so non-techies can understand. Future is bright (present also)
  I haven't been this excited about the future since my daughter was born. Thank you for intellectually applying your philosophy to the short comings of the crypto-tech.
  Cardano is reported to have correctly predicted the exact date of his own death but it has been claimed that he achieved this by committing suicide. :)
  Great job Charles, I can’t imagine the amount of pressure that came on to your shoulders all while I’m sure people were trying to take advantage of you....I have been a fan for a while and think you will change the world the way you say you will.....I’ve been trying to get as many people educated on your projects potential especially with the Emurgo integration platform....these parallel projects will succeed and I look forward to helping you guys amyway possible.....I know the feeling a little from the projects I’ve been part of that went worldwide overnight (edible six pack ring)....keep your Focus and you will continue to prevail as you have in the past....now go crush the banking system and empower the people....cheers and happy New Years chris@saltwaterbrewery.com
  THANK YOU! If you are spiritual, as am I, you are doing the work of God. Tis' the truest definition of a Good vs Evil paradigm. However, positivity shall always prevail.
  I pray that the great minds at Dash, Eth and various Hashgraph groups will find a way to work collectively as a community. A community of brilliant minds tasked with saving this planet one block or graph at a time.