jsmthrowaway

I couldn’t imagine it, no, because I care more about the number of hairs on my scrotum than whether you consider me boring or, really, any larger opinion you’d have of me at all. HN opinions of my character are like fruit flies: annoying, tiny, and wholly irrelevant once disposed of appropriately.

Thanks for the content-laden rebuttal!

Correct. They had it first, which is why I lightly check the “they use $ too? That’s confusing.” sentiment.

The Dutch, ever innovative in trade, can lay claim as a bigger influence on the word “dollar” and the currency form itself, however, and colonial Americans traded regularly in Dutch daalders (we still pronounce it that way, unlike doh-LAHR/doh-LAHR-ehss for the Spanish varieties). Daalders themselves were descendants of Bohemian thalers, as were Spanish dollars. We just borrowed the neighboring dollars when the time came, probably due to our foreign policy environment at the time, trade with Florida, and so on.

Context. Canadian dollars use $ too, and you only see CAD near the border or when it isn’t clear. If I’m a Colombian using a Colombian site and pesos use $, I don’t need the context. Also, properly, you’d say 5 USD, not USD $5; the dollar sigil is then redundant.

There’s a bit of americentrism down the confusing line of thought, for what it’s worth.

The Y axis of the graph which actually has relevant information. You are looking at a campaign page, and assuming those Colombian pesos are available to the author’s team.

When you said “the image” I thought you were looking at the right one, and I thought it odd you were off several orders of magnitude from what I assumed to be your misunderstanding. That explains that. I had to go back and find your figure.

No, it doesn’t. In many other locales “mil” means thousand, unlike slang for million. This is why in finance, $5mm means five million dollars. Five mil mil. Five thousand thousand. Five million.

The graph shows a spike to around $5,000 per day ($5 mil por día). The entire dashboard is in USD, presented in a Spanish locale. That is also why the dollar sign is suffixed, the months are not capitalized, and why May has a dot after it, because it is abbreviated there (mayo).

Every programmer should understand locales even if they do not speak the language.

That’s like saying “we hired the getaway driver, we can rob the bank now, right?” You’ve identified the first step of the plan. There are about nineteen more, and the theoretical network of conspirators required to accomplish this Oscar-winning screenplay would be quite large, which always spells trouble.

To that end, I’m amazed it took that long for the FBI to take down the network in the article. The more people who are read in to criminal activity, the risk exponentially increases, as anybody who has been on either end of investigative leverage can tell you. I’m stunned one person in the early days of this scam, particularly when it started involving colorful people, didn’t flip as a bargaining tool for other things they were into.

One of the largest and most secretive companies in the world, the same one obsessed with preventing all leaks from exiting the company, the same one who produces ubiquitous devices with occasional national security implications that interest foreign governments, the same one who deals with serious IP problems in the very example nation you just happened to choose, has no thinking or plans around the well-known threats of industrial espionage or sabotage, is what you’re essentially saying. Consider for a moment whether that could be remotely plausible, and I think you’ll see it isn’t.

As tomnipotent said, it’d make a cool movie.

Borg will remain orders of magnitude beyond Kubernetes until Kubernetes is completely rearchitected. It’s not scalability bugs. It’s decisions regarding how the cluster maintains state that hamstring it, and that’s so fundamental to everything it’s not a find/squish loop.

As I said in my comment, those major customers (one personal experience, three anecdotally, eight or nine I’ve consulted with) have quietly ruled out Kubernetes, either by trying it or prying it apart and deciding not to try it. That feedback isn’t coming. At Borg scale, Kubernetes is very much considered a nonstarter.

I don't disagree that Kubernetes is not positioned to be a replacement for Borg

Good. Because that was my point, but the verbiage “don’t disagree” says a lot. We agree, except for the timeline. We will all be dead before Borg is replaced with Kubernetes. You can take that to the bank.

Kinda weird to fire up a throwaway, presumably to conceal your Google credentials, then attack a Xoogler who used to work on Borg SRE (alongside sjh under Peter Dahl, and long enough my NDA has long since lapsed) and has run Kubernetes since it was able to OOM as I described, for spreading FUD. The term FUD implies that I don’t know what I’m talking about and I’m making shit up, while I’m one of the few people, including presumably you, who can actually coherently comment on both.

It can only span multiple clouds now because other clouds had to ship Kubernetes. Remember the timeline: hello world, we made a container thing. Now we offer it as a service. Now Amazon does too. Oh, we are now multicloud. Your rebuttals are quite disingenuous, and casting them with a mocking aspersion doesn’t sell your point. It makes you come across nothing like you intend.

Get back on your real username and stop being offended I criticized Kubernetes. I know I’m one of the few who does, but there are legitimate concerns, and sharing them toward a “why Borg isn’t going anywhere” point is a weird hill for you to die on.

So it descends from Borg, which is fine. It does not replace Borg or indicate a Google strategy to replace Borg with Kubernetes, which was my entire point with supporting points on why, and explaining why you made the choices in Kubernetes that were made does not dispute that at all.

I note you were careful to use the word descendant, instead of my successor.

What I mean is simple: Borg has borgmaster. Kubernetes approached the same concept like a Web application, and now Kubernetes has an entire SIG to play on the same field as Borg. It was a poor architectural decision, along with many others in Kubernetes, but I wasn’t discussing that. I was discussing why Google won’t replace Borg with it.

I suppose that’s fair, but I’d argue against switching even being a primary motivation for anyone at Google, which is why I don’t think of it that way. You do have a point, though.

Without intimate knowledge of Borg, I can understand the successor discussion. With knowledge of what changed (i.e., was getting rid of borgmaster really that important to sacrifice that much perfwise?) I can’t even remotely fathom any purpose for Kubernetes other than what I’ve described. You, however, know far better than me. :)

You heard wrong.

There’s a meme out there, helpfully nudged along by Google, that Kubernetes is Borg “done right” and the successor. It’s even mentioned in this article. Neither of those things are true. Not even remotely. Please pass along to everyone to stop repeating the meme, because it distracts from Kubernetes’ true purpose, which is to lock people into GKE and force competitors to ship a Kubernetes runtime to compete. It’s partly the OpenStack playbook: if everybody runs the same platform, competition inherently drifts toward other aspects of the businesses, such as customer support. Seriously, I’m the only one who noticed the timing of Kubernetes and Google Cloud? Really? But Google shipped it, so now it has an ecosystem, and zealots who force entire teams onto it for zero upside and nonzero overhead, while the system that actually looks like Borg, the far superior to k8s HashiCorp Nomad, twiddles its thumbs with pretty much no mindshare.

For one, if Kubernetes were the successor to Borg, they wouldn’t have hobbled it architecturally as much as they have by marrying it to both Docker (kinda) and etcd, and deciding in the beginning to do every cluster mutation via external consensus in etcd, because you know, that’s a great idea and a classic Google design. Remember when Kubernetes pushed all job state changes through consensus and a flapping job could OOM etcd? I do too. Someone cynical could argue its fundamental architectural limitations are intentional. (I would argue simply that it didn’t have Paul Menage and most of the other names on the Borg paper working on it, to my knowledge.) I hear keyboards getting angry to yammer about how it just works. Not at seven-digit machine scale, it doesn’t, and never will. I’m happy it works for you. It’s a toy for a large fleet, which I’ll revisit in another point. Everyone I am aware of at Borg or Mesos scale has ruled out or failed with Kubernetes. No, really.

Relatedly, if Kubernetes were the successor to Borg, it’d be in C++. It just would be, and that’s not a language flame war. Ever wonder what percentage of systems at Google are C++? Ever wonder what that number does when you qualify “infrastructural”?

For two, Google containers aren’t an entire operating system, unlike Docker without crazy gymnastics. Seriously, this paragraph could be an essay. To paraphrase Jeremy Clarkson, Docker looks like a proper container system described over a blurry fax. Maybe we do need seventy probably-not-deduplicated copies of getty on every machine, and I’m yelling at clouds. I doubt it, and it reeks of “disk is cheap, fuck it.”

For three, Kubernetes is several orders of magnitude behind Borg and Omega, if that’s still alive, in terms of scheduling performance and maximum “cluster” size (I quote cluster because Google identifies a Borg unit as a cell, and a cluster means something else). This is not fixable in Kubernetes, in my reasonably informed opinion, without doing consensus differently. To my point, Borg does consensus and cluster state much differently, and you know what? It’s fine. Anybody who has used fauxmaster will back me up on that, and John Wilkes even said yup, every time we hit a limit we manage to double it with no end in sight. Why would that suddenly change? etcd remains Kubernetes’ Achilles heel, and this is why messaging around Kubernetes has gravitated toward smaller, targeted clusters. Bonus: if you find a bug in etcd make sure it loudly affects Kubernetes so it gets properly prioritized. Double bonus: someone was brave enough to suggest Consul in #1957 and children. Go read and sigh.

For four, when’s the last time you ran a 10,000+ node MapReduce on Kubernetes? Surprise, the underpinnings of Borg handle both batch and interactive with the exact same control plane, which is where the billions of containers a day number they occasionally talk about comes from. I mean, several JARs of glue might get you to Hadoop scheduling via Kubernetes, but that’s a much different animal than the platform thinking in terms of jobs with different interactivity requirements.

For five, half of Borg is the shit around it. Borg works because everything behaves the same. Everything is a Web server. Everything exposes /statusz. Everything builds and monitors the same way. Everything speaks the same RPC to each other. All of this is implemented by forcing production systems at Google to choose from four (as of my tenure) languages which are well tended and manicured by hundreds of people. Google has a larger C++ standard library team than many startups have engineers. Borg works because apps let it work. They’re not black boxes. Unlike Kubernetes.

Which brings me to point the sixth, which is that the reason you haven’t seen open source Borg is (a) they’re not moving off it, like, ever (I’d bet my season tickets on it), because significant parts of every production system and tool would have to change and (b) they can’t unravel Borg and the rest of the google3 codebase, because it’s so fundamental to the Google ecosystem and half of Borg’s magic is wrapped up in other projects within Google which they aren’t keen to show you.

Link to this answer next time anyone gets tempted to relay what they’ve heard about Borg and Kubernetes, please. For years I’ve watched this tale evolve until it’s barely recognizable as factual. Saying Kubernetes is Borg’s proper successor not only drastically insults Borg and the hundreds (thousands?) who have worked on it, it also calls to mind thinking of a cotton candy machine as the successor to the automobile. They’re that different.

The original joke involved simply the demonym for the servicemember and can be used with any service, and says “they teach sailors/soldiers/airmen to ...” and “well they teach marines/etc ...,” which would probably make you less confused by the joke. I heard that joke growing up involving airmen in both directions of the joke, and it was common until that film.

Relatedly, in case you don’t know this, never think you can call a marine a sailor based on the lineage you’re discussing here. Soldier is also only an appropriate term for someone in the Army, and there are countless films that screw this up. It’s less about the service and more of an identity.

Nobody should ever type the words “every citizen can generate cryptographic certificates” in that order. That’s like saying every citizen can compose jazz; technically true, which engineers love, but basically a lie that evidences how distant the engineering mindset is from an average person. Every citizen would instead reply what is a certificate? You mean the one I got for my marriage? Do I have to go wait in line for it? It involves my computer? Oh, you mean the computer that has spyware on it to lift the private key as soon as it’s created because TPM is still, you know, only deemed worthy of corporate security?

The gap between engineering and regular human beings continues to widen. Passwords remain difficult for people, but don’t let me stop the whiteboarding of a solution to the problem that will undoubtedly involve machine learning, Facebook OAuth, and GKE at some point. Add blockchain and pitch it to USDS before Thiel guts them and you’ve got yourself a hot party!

That is the interpretation I’d expect from someone bought in, to only see people and their perspectives along an axis of wealth generation impetus. I’m sorry to disappoint, but also realize I’m probably incapable of explaining it to you, since my perspective is an imaginary component way off of your real number axis.

I’m boxed in a corner. If I explain it one way, you’ll interpret a Luddite sentiment. If I explain it another, you’ll interpret an affinity toward socialism. Yet another, and you’ll conclude I’m mentally challenged. I’m still working on vocalizing my detest for the valley and this audience in a form which is productive as opposed to punitive, so you’ll have to check back with me when I’ve matured that.

Utopian hubris, perhaps. Subtle distinction.

Actually, it’s a well-founded specific criticism (all of them are; no accidents there) of an underlying problem which contributes to the very concept I’m laboriously explaining. I note you didn’t refute my point at all, choosing instead to somewhat ironically call it unintelligent, and that you’re vaguely upset about it without a clear path to proving me wrong should speak more to what I’m trying to tell you.

Though I'm looking forward to the next cringeworthy cali startup meme.

Like half a cringeworthy Cali startup’s engineers spending their morning at Sightglass discussing an article about a password manager software being bought and lamenting whatever that future holds for Windows support, you mean? While their white male founder is parading around saying he’s making the world a better place with his singular vision about a grand Kubernetes mumble mumble, but entertaining a slow progression of M&A offers to cash out and just dump the entire company on Red Hat or Google to sort out because “serial entrepreneur” is a better title than ever hitting one nail or dropping one load of fries? Meanwhile, deadlines keep missing because the engineers are busy commenting on this article as noted, and arguing about JavaScript frameworks, and “WFH” every Tuesday and Thursday because commuting like everyone else for $175,000 cash is just too hard for precious snowflake engineers (seriously, have you smelled BART?), and God help anyone who schedules a 10am meeting. Remember, machine learning is this cycle’s password to get a YC check, and start your own journey to enriching your wealth and throwing a bunch of starry-eyed people who mystifyingly trusted you into whatever horrible business unit of whatever horrible corporation writes you the check you’ve earned on account of your complete lack of professional experience, biological fortunes, and who you’ve done cocaine and/or Bitcoin with most recently. Oh, and you were so busy making money, you didn’t stop to notice you’ve literally handed every nation state in the world citizenry command and control capabilities they only could have dreamed of before this stupid industry found a whiteboard and daringly ventured, “what if we put millions of dollars into letting Justin Bieber type 140 characters to fans, because that could never go wrong?”

Did you mean that kind of meme? If not, I may have some bad news.

You added an unnecessary level of indirection. The startups don’t have memes. They are the meme.

Well, the meme isn’t that far off. This community is starting to sound like the Soviet Union. Did everyone read that thread this morning and take it as a challenge or something? It’s not a goal to which to aspire.

These are lives you’re talking about here, kids, kids that happen to be currently sharing the same planet as you. Human beings are not figures on a balance sheet, and I lament anyone’s soul that would dispute me on that point. The pillars of this community sit on billions and get hospitals named after them, but some brown kids in a cave are a theoretical exercise to think about economics? They have memories. Families. Hopes. Should we debate your worth? What’s the figure where you are no longer considered worthwhile?

If I can’t meet you on something as fundamental as every life is worth saving, we simply aren’t having the same conversation, and I’ll be honest, your side gives me pause. And I see it far too often among people here who simply consider themselves pragmatic. Many throughout history have convinced themselves of their pragmatism, and we have all paid for it for centuries.

What unfortunate times to live in where the scions of high tech debate the value of individual lives in a far flung part of the world. This thread should disgust.

None of the adjectives nor concepts you have applied to SMS apply, including the assertion that any number of clients can interconnect peacefully, that it is open, that it is a standard, that the steering of the technology is not actually done by the private surveillance companies you’ve mysteriously overlooked, not to mention how SMS is easier for law enforcement to acquire than a pack of cigarettes, because the carrier is sitting there waiting for a warrant on account of not angering the government that, you know, gave them spectrum and allowed them to exist in the first place.

Aside from all of that, good analysis.

Aware iPhone owners literally have the “oh, they’re green, looks like I have yet another plaintext compromise in my life and they’ll never figure out Signal” conversation with themselves every time they exchange numbers with someone new, and I’ve met more than one person who has remarked negatively to the person’s face that they are using SMS, including in a dating scenario as a dealbreaker. You might be the only person who likes it, aside from misguided parts of the Android community that praise SMS roughly like you do when discussing the lack of something like iMessage in that ecosystem, all without realizing the surveillance calculus you’ve correctly established is the real reason the carriers tie Google’s hands (even beyond Google going through messaging systems like socks).

At least buy OP a drink before psychoanalyzing their relationships that aggressively without any evidence to go on beside your cultural assumptions. Mere participation in this community is a beaming, reliable signal that you’re probably not Dr. Phil, so I’d suggest listening rather than explaining familial bond to someone you’ve never met.

If you said something like that to me in person, your evening would not go the way you think it would, and you’d find yourself in a conversation about your departure from the circumstances that allowed you to offer that perceived wisdom.

Would you like a five minute lecture on frequency response and bandwidth of what you upload based on the dynamics compression, filtering, and other processing YouTube does to make videos sound good and all of which have nothing to do with a transport compression algorithm, but how said transport algorithms reduce bandwidth when double compressed because you’re probably not uploading 32-bit PCM to YouTube, and how none of that matters anyway because most people uploading to YouTube aren’t familiar with a spectrogram nor DC offset? (Seriously, one track I got via youtube-dl was the most offset I’d seen in my life. They either don’t fix it, or the fix goes horribly awry.)

I’d simply offer it but this thread thinks I’m an angry ranter so I’m making you not cower in fear out of respect.

I know they were. What’s your point?

Now that's a strange rant.

It’s called “expanding a conversation with additional perspective that most of this audience is probably unfamiliar with,” including watching it happen to a close friend who thought she could get away with it, but sure, interpret me as angrily ranting at absolutely nobody in this audience because you skipped the “if” that qualifies my pronouns in the part that made this thread upset and would rather talk about your much more interesting obscure classical collection instead.

I love how stupid Hacker News thinks I am, and it’s telling me I’m on the right track in the conduct of my life. Feeling’s mutual, rest assured.

Aspiring DJs do this, then play out the files they got from youtube-dl via Serato or whatever, then every other minimally competent DJ in the room immediately knows what’s happening based on how obviously shit it sounds. Practice mixing in headphones and playing room scale PA are two different ballgames, and when amplified, any youtube-dl format is as obvious to me as a file being ripped from source vinyl. YouTube does more processing than people realize, and it doesn’t take much ear for me to identify a pirated crate (even beyond YouTube specifically).

If you spin and use youtube-dl to build a crate, we all know, and we don’t respect you. You might win the crowd, but the people who actually bought into their profession and contributed to the community are also in attendance, and are very aware of your intrusion. You will quietly lose gigs without any explanation, and assume promoters simply can’t see your genius until you’re furiously working on 100 precious listens on SoundCloud. Fair use sampling? Go nuts and clean it up after youtube-dl. Five minute record? Make a Beatport account and get it overwith.

Interesting calculus of choices there: I don’t miss the distraction or privacy implications of my personal phone, yet I expect a company to issue me a phone which comes with distraction and privacy implications (the subject surveillance of the article disregards whether a pocketed phone is corporate because it can work with numbers directly), and I also don’t maintain a landline to sit for a phone screen to find that opportunity in the first place, so I expect to talk to you over Zoom (ceding more privacy; surprise, cellular call content is legally sensitive for LE, video packets aren’t) or in person.

You probably don’t realize nor intend this, but that can be a large red flag for your candidacy from the other side of the table, particularly if the role involves security because you’re broadcasting a slight misjudgment of your threat vectors and exposure. The number of resumes most folks go through, expecting ravens from Winterfell will get you dropped fast. Torvalds could probably get away with making initial hailing frequencies that difficult, but you or I should just buy a phone number of some kind, as much as it sucks.

The phone isn’t the problem if you apply opsec correctly, buy the right one, and operate it like a compromise hazard. (It is.)

One of the unique pleasures of Hacker News is the slightest of smiles caused by someone unafraid to share a feeling that is powerful to them, followed up immediately by an exhaustive and somewhat mocking explanation of how their feeling is grievously incorrect.

To contribute to the conversation, the fast service convenience chain with ‘hot’ ‘dogs’, an electrical and surprisingly loud ‘nacho’ ‘cheese’ squirting device representing a vast achievement of modern engineering, half gallon fountain beverages, and many delightful American locations is called 7-Eleven. No, I don’t get it either, and I hate that I know it. Merely helping international folks Google just what the hell this thread is about, though I wonder if you were missing much without my aid, because 7-Eleven is practically Americana made into a storefront and I’m pretty sure you already know exactly what goes on at one.

Within this audience, they’re known as the place to step over homeless sleepers and incognito buy cigarettes before their morning standup sees them at Sightglass or Four Barrel or whatever.

Considering it reinforces a commonly held engineering ideology that only engineers understand or are capable of solving a problem or goal, and every other job function in a corporation is clueless deprivation of engineering, I’d say the response is fair. Apple is quite successful despite organizing in a way that baffles engineers, and will spend a bit recovering from this, then everyone will forget about it within a few Christmases. That’s not even advocacy, that’s just, like, exactly what will happen. It’s dust in the path of an asteroid at this point, with well-documented prior art. All of us with the keyboard get a bum deal, but events are probably proceeding exactly as engineered, if we are all honest with ourselves.

The correct following step is “what can I learn from that,” including, yes, many pitfalls and questionable decisions to learn, rather than “I know exactly what’s wrong with that success, and it’s business leaders.”

I realize the irony of saying this here, as many are at least amenable to said ideology. It also doesn’t strike me as an intentional color, just subtle thought basis underlying the sentiment.

One does not end up in prison from a lawsuit. Tesla cited the criminal codes in question to try to make that happen, but only the government can bring criminal cases, and criminal cases aren’t brought on unproven allegations in a civil lawsuit. If they were serious about putting him in prison, Tesla would have discussed referrals to law enforcement in their communications and we’d likely be hearing from district attorneys by now, given the attention on the case.

Martin Tripp ending up in prison is extraordinarily unlikely, even if Tesla is 100% correct. That you even considered the possibility means that Tesla’s strategy of sprinkling the word “illegal” throughout the complaint to paint a criminal picture worked.

While I don’t think the referenced technology is a solution to the problem, think a bit about the first question that you’re asking.