HN user
So to be clear: you care more about the integrity of exercising Arc via HN than you care about your users. Because we both know that writing HN correctly would reduce latency dramatically along with short- and long-term ops effort. It'd also fix all those nasty "dead or expired link" errors. Also, users wouldn't be terrified to click "reply" without copying their posts to the clipboard, first.
Please list your assumptions about what ideas I have - since you're clearly assuming I don't work for a company that knows how to write websites that scale.
Edit: I find it adorable that you all think HN is a hard site to run. Good luck breaking 200 qps.
Yeah... writing a site as simple as HN that doesn't fall over in a week isn't rocket science.
> We restart HN every 5 or 6 days, or it gets slow (memory leaks).
Because competence wasn't worth it a few hundred restarts ago and isn't worth it now.
> Consider everyone who lives in an apartment who doesn't have the option of replacing their lock
I've lived in apartments. Giving other people access to your apartment is - in general - a horrible idea. I let guests into my apartment. Personally. It's a pretty straightforward workflow, believe it or not.
If you keep your landlord out, you're violating your lease. At least under any sane lease.
MongoDB is considered a complete joke by most who've programmed a distributed system.
So.... poor example.
> What an embarrassing post to be occupying the top of this thread. Blaming Markdown.pl for security flaws?
I believe markdown.pl is being blamed for over 100 bugs. Not just security flaws.
> I suppose the memory corruption bugs in the "optimized" C Markdown parsers are somehow his fault too?
Strawman, you're better than that.
> He wrote a text-to-HTML parser with a particularly elegant little language design and got on with his life
And he did a horrible job of it. Horrible. But he considers himself the BDFL of Markdown. Break that down for me.
> which involves writing more than keeping up with bug reports in Perl scripts
He clearly can't keep up with any bug reports, so it's good his life is more broad than bug reports.
> Get over yourself; comments like this make us all look bad.
No, comments like this make us look like we have higher expectations than "it worked on my machine, suck a dick!"
> But there are problems --- like, backend processing, or proxies, or routers and transformers, or feed processors --- where event loops are the most natural way to express a performant solution.
Your backend processing apparently fits in one machine, since you "hook Mysql up through Redis." I'm personally astonished you get so much done without a distributed environment tolerant of the relevant failures I see when I read that sentence.
Your more general adage is useless. The one you responded to is useful. A more useful, also general adage would be "the more choice in selecting parameters to an API, the more likely there will be bugs consuming that API."
Exactly. Money exists to be extracted from fools at their expense, whether those fools are your investors, employees, customers, or all 3. That's real value in the market at work.
If you aren't being DDOSed, you aren't an interesting service.
Google. Amazon. Microsoft. Apple. Facebook. Most startups.
Because high availability is for legacy waterfall chumps. Github's too busy being rockstars.
If you want to make a service worth a damn to the world, you should expect regular DDOS.
Nearly every reasonably popular site on the internet gets DDoSed. It's embarrassing that Github goes down every time they're targeted.
Honestly, grow a pair, fellas. It's part of doing business on the Internet.
That would suggest people in charge know what they're doing.
This is correct. They needed ~90 dynos to keep up with about 500 qps on their status page in the last outage.
You originally wrote:
> Freedom of speech is lagging behind: a company cannot fire you for being black, but can fire you for saying "vile" things online under a pseudonym.
You changed that, likely because you realized that companies have always fired people for saying "vile" things publicly outside of work. Which is why pseudonyms have always existed.
Nothing's changed about freedom of speech. It's just that it's not so easy to hide the vile things you say online as it was, say, 10 years ago.
> You may call it FUD if you wish, but I would either have to be logged out when making Google searches or risk having some of my e-mail with senders and subject lines revealed to anyone watching my screen.
Considering that's just completely untrue based on all your available data, I won't call it FUD. I'll just call it a lie.
Engineers have responsibility.
Otherwise you're just throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks.
I don't think WoW is inherently evil - were you referring to your parent poster, or me? I just think nearly everyone in this addiction subthread is woefully underinformed about the realities of addiction.
Do you actually think Ken disagrees with me?
Hint: he doesn't. He wouldn't accept a line of code starting with "rm -rf $VAR" in ~30 minutes on a Sunday morning.
> It's not like anybody suffers from second-hand MMORPG.
Addicts always say they're making a personal choice that doesn't affect anyone else, whether it's WoW or booze or blow. And they're always wrong.
The last AA meeting I went to, someone spoke for the first time and told a story about a typical night at the bar. Drinking, watching the game and minding his own business. Just like every night. Except this time, 8 beers deep, his daughter walked from home to the bar and tugged on his sleeve - there was nobody at home but her and she was scared.
Bet you'd never heard of "second-hand drinking" either.
I expected an extremely negative interpretation. My criticism is harsh because the failure here was unacceptable.
Look at the pull request they merged in. Any line added to a script which starts with "rm -rf $VARIABLE" cannot be scrutinized enough.
The first commit was created at: 2012-09-30T10:25:44-07:00.
The pull request was accepted at: 2012-09-30T10:59:08-07:00.
34 minutes to accept on a Sunday morning. I suspect that wasn't 34 minutes of review. I suspect it was closer to 34 seconds of review.
Unacceptable.
I've never heard this argument before.
Why was Microsoft owning the desktop and browser market so fundamental to the US economy?
Didn't say I was one of them. Enjoy your strawman. Personally, I prefer a bit more flavor. Though your implicit ad-hominem tastes a bit juicy.
Writing a package manager is actually really serious business. This package manager runs under user credentials and is expected to modify the filesystem. You can't sandbox around those requirements. No amount of whinging avoids that. This story is one of many examples why you can't take it trivially.
If you're afraid to point out incompetence - and where it is most dangerous - you won't know it when you see it. And it will bite you, hard.
You just wrote off everything I said except the word "dopamine." Given your outright advocacy ("anti-gamer") throughout this thread, it seems you aren't interested in a real discussion.
> Except it can do also a lot of other bad things, and its too much to review. So in the end you trust the tree owner, and he blindly trust a zillion people.
> I actually have zero good solution to this, but it'll be interesting when it is used for a large attack.
The only solution is intelligence and prudence on the part of the tree owners. Large software systems need to ultimately be in the hands of smart and wise people. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case here.
I'm 24. I've been addicted to cigarettes, alcohol, cocaine, and WoW.
It's the same fucking thing. They use the same mechanics to tickle your dopamine receptors so you'll come back instead of looking out in the outside world for that same feeling of reward - family, friends, relationships all get fucked up because you spend your time seeking reward from {cigs, booze, drugs, WoW}.