HN user
The entire NIST budget is pretty large. This is one of the most visible things they do. By threatening to cut this if their budget shrinks, perhaps they're hoping to preserve their original budget request.
Also, the drones may never have existed.
With that much RAM, you'd be insane not to use ECC, which is another good reason for Xeon.
Really? I won't use a computer without it for production work. You get one bit-flip/GB/year. With 128GB or more in most of our desktops, it's not worth the risk.
Here's how we do it:
All the databases and other data are backed up to s3. For mysql, we use the python mysql-to-s3 backup scripts.
But the machines themselves are "backed up" by virtue of being able to be rebuilt with saltstack. We verify through nightly builds that we can bring a fresh instance up, with the latest dataset restored from s3, from scratch.
This makes it simple for us to switch providers, and can run our "production" instances locally on virtual machines running the exact same version of CentOS or FreeBSD we use in production.
We routinely run 5MM simultaneous TCP/IP connections on a single 12-core box (with Erlang!).
There's no reason for Twitter to need all those employees and all that hardware. If someone can get it at a fire sale price, and reduce it to 100 employees, they can have a nice business.
What's their business model? Why would I type my thoughts there instead of, say, "google docs." Or putting text files in a dropbox.
I like the idea of quiet and uncluttered. But it's hard to trust my writing to some new web app with to viable way of monetizing it.
LAX is the second largest (by passenger boarding) airport in the country. So until ATL allows Uber, I guess this is true.
Wikipedia says the data rate from Pluto is effectively about 1 KBit/second. That's why it takes so long to get the photos....
I'd like to find more detailed information about the hardware and software on this thing. It's amazing that it was launched back in 2006. My 2006 Mac Pro is basically useless now....
I like the concept; you wonder why Dropbox didn't enter this space.
There's a chance that reddit is simply not a viable business, and just because you amass a large audience doesn't mean it's monetizable.
Cut through all the drama, and maybe it's really about that. A weak, messy platform, with no focus, and no possibility of getting.
How many of us here would take a job at reddit? Not many, I'd bet. There's no real Engineering problem to be solved.