Launch HN: Sarus (YC W22) – Work on sensitive data with differential privacy
So, I work in an org that has truly sensitive data and this has been a barrier for us more times than I can count, so this is obviously very interesting to us and something we&#x27;ve thought about a lot. A couple questions I have are:<p>1. How well does Sarus work with data that is not in a database, like unstructured data such as documents&#x2F;text?<p>2. How does Sarus handle &#x27;legacy&#x27; DB&#x27;s, where the schema for a table might not be quite right, but due to operational constraints these schemas can&#x27;t be easily corrected? The canonical example I&#x27;m thinking of is date times that have been specified as strings and no one bothered to change them.<p>3. What kind of language support exists for interacting with the Sarus proxy? Obviously, you have Python support but for large enterprises that might need Sarus oftentimes there are a few languages that are popular internally and all need equal support. I think the comprehensive list of analytics languages in use in large orgs would look something like, [python, R, Julia, Matlab, SAS]. Rust&#x2F;C++ support would be ideal as well as they&#x27;re commonly used in Python&#x2F;R to accelerate hot code. Do you have plans to develop SDK&#x27;s? Would they be hand crafted or do you plan to develop generated SDK&#x27;s similar to how GCP does it?<p>4. Are you moving to get any security certs? Of course you&#x27;re a startup right now, but I know from experience enterprise orgs will still blindly ask questions like, &quot;Are you FedRamp Moderate&#x2F;High certified?&quot; (This doesn&#x27;t even make sense for your sales model and I&#x27;m certain you&#x27;ll still have to answer this question and explain why over and over.) or &quot;Do you have a Soc 2 Type 2 report we can look at?&quot;. The orgs that actually need something like this are going to be asking these questions pretty quickly.<p>5. When I use Sarus, do I have to use your IDE&#x2F;interface? One of the things I noticed when looking at your demo gifs is there is a lot of use of notebooks, which of course are popular, but you&#x27;ll be met with a lot of resistance if your users can&#x27;t use the tooling they prefer (PyCharm Pro &#x2F; DataGrip plugin to interact with DB&#x27;s in my teams case).<p>6. How exactly is Sarus deployed? Terraform? Is it a containerized application? Does it scale vertically or horizontally? Can its logging mechanism integrate with StackDriver, Splunk, or Cloudtrail?<p>7. Have you proved out the technology with more complex time series data? I&#x27;m thinking of sensitive trading data.<p>8. Do you provide benchmarks for showing that a model trained on a real dataset is equivalent in performance a model trained on the synthetic dataset?<p>Super cool product and you&#x27;re in a great position to make a ton of money if you nail the execution and get some large customers!