macspoofing

Why Orbital Data Centers Are Harder Than Silicon Valley Thinks

Who thinks they are easy? Elon Musk? The guy that spews obvious (even to him) bullshit like we're going to Mars in the next 5 years?

I don't even want to read the article. It is obvious that Orbital Data Centers have MASSIVE engineering challenges. They may never be cost-effective.

Supporting something is infinitely times easier than building it

No it isn't. That is patently untrue. I've had to deal with in-house solutions many times in my careers. Inevitably what happens is the original author leaves the company or just doesn't want to support it and whatever tool they built atrophies and we end up moving to an off-the-shelf product with a lot of pain.

I'm dealing with a homegrown project management tool like that now. Originally built 10-15 years ago - it now has a feature request list a mile long. Finance is annoyed they can't pull the kinds of reports they want, and that it doesn't integrate into our CRM. IT is annoyed it doesn't support SAML and they have to manage backups. The tool is running on whatever the hot stack was at that time - so it is horribly out of date now ... but the original people that wrote it have long since left the company. The engineers don't want to touch it. Product doesn't want engineers to work on it because it takes away from our core business.

There are commercial off-the-shelf tools that provide the same feature-set (+more) and don't tie up my engineers, but now the thing is engrained into workflow and moving off of it is a major project spamming multiple departments (including engineering).

And sometimes, especially now with AI, coding your own solution exactly tailored to your needs can be simpler than configuring a complex product designed to match as many use case as possible.

Coding a solution was never a problem. Supporting and maintaining it was. I can guarantee you an in-house ticketing system will be more expensive than Zendesk for every small and medium company.

Critics call the SAT inequitable and say high school grades are a good predictor of college success.

Well .. is it? We have decades of data that should either prove or disprove this. Why is this even an argument? There is an underlying, easily-veriable, objective reality.

No country will be truly coal-free

Being coal-free is possible. Being fossil-fuel free is harder. Most of Irish energy comes from Natural Gas and Oil - the former is what supplanted Coal, not Wind.

It's not that bad. It's well integrated into Sharepoint, Exchange, and Office, and does the job. I've used both Slack and Teams and if you're using MS365, then Teams is absolutely the better option.

Next up: Raccoons.

What Mozilla is good at ...

Firefox - the one thing they do not want to work on is the only thing that makes them special.

You don't. When your server crashes, your availability is zero.

As your business needs grow, you can start layering complexity on top. The point is you don't start at 11 with a overly complex architecture.

In your example, if your server crashes, just make sure you have some sort of automatic restart. In practice that may mean a downtime of seconds for your 12 users. Is that more complexity? Sure - but not much. If you need to take your service down for maintenance, you notify your 12 users and schedule it for 2am ... etc.

Later you could create a secondary cluster and stick a load-balancer in-front. You could also add a secondary replicated PostgreSQL instance. So the monolith/postgres architecture can actually take you far as your business grows.

It's sure a corny stance to hold if you're navigating an infrastructure nightmare daily, but in my opinion, much of the complexity addresses not technical, but organisational issues: You want straightforward, self-contained deployments for one, instead of uploading files onto your single server ...

You can get all that with a monolith server and a Postgres backend.

I personally wouldn't like to put caching in Postgres, even though it would work at lower scales.

Probably should stop after this line - that was the point of the article. It will work at lower scales. Optimize later when you actually know what to optimize.

So sure, you can make a unscalable solution that works for the current moment.

You're making two assumptions - both wrong:

1) That this is an unscalable solution - A monolith app server backed by Postgres can take you very very far. You can vertically scale by throwing more hardware at it, and you can horizontally scale, by just duplicating your monolith server behind a load-balancer.

2) That you actually know where your bottlenecks will be when you actually hit your target scale. When (if) you go from 1000 users to 10,000,000 users, you WILL be re-designing and re-architecting your solution regardless what you started with because at that point, you're going to have a different team, different use-cases, and therefore a different business.

Or Lake Ontario to Lake New York.

This is basically an article describing why you can’t just look at an event after it occurs, see that it has some extremely rare characteristics, and then determine it was unlikely to happen by chance.

No. That's not it. In this case, if you properly control for all the factors, it turns out that the odds of Nakamura having that kind of a win-streak (against low-rated opponents) was in fact high.

We're solving real problems now.

Kinda slow when switching sections.

Being a programmer is not about configuring your development environment.

I know what OP is referring to. Back in the day, a programmer was expected to have built their own toolbox of utility scripts, programs and configurations that would travel with them as they moved from project to project or company to company. This is akin a professional (craftsman, photographer, chef, electrician, etc.) bringing their own tools to a jobsite.

Oh come on. I'm sure they care about the users, and they were also hoping to build a business. Why the hostility? You don't have to kick them when they are down.

I’m sure Uber and DoorDash and Lyft and Tinder and Instagram and WhatsApp are regretting the billions and billions they made doing this.

I'm not sure which platforms those companies built their businesses on .. are you equating build an app on iOS or Android with building an app that relies on, say, Facebook APIs and only works on Facebook?

Yeah, if you want to pump oil, you better also build your own railways to distribute it

You're being facetious, but OP is right. For software platforms, this has been a constant. It happened with Twitter, Facebook, Google (Search/Ads, Maps, Chat), Reddit, LinkedIn - basically ever major software platform started off with relatively open APIs that were then closed-off as it gained critical mass and focused on monetization.

Never build your main business on somebody else's platform.

Yep. It’s a lesson that keeps being re-learned the hard way.

That’s exactly what’s rude about it.

By the way, I also hate the "hello"-only message. I am, however, guilty of writing "Hey. Do you have a second to chat" - typically in cases where either through chat or video conference I want to go through something that is more involved, and I also want some confirmation of understanding and acknowledgement.

I didn't make a value judgment on the practice, but it is a reason why you may get a "hello" message.

There's another reason for 'hello' ... it's a way to make sure you have the other person's attention before launching into a topic or question.

Because I doubt there's any difference betreuen a US and EU powerbank.

Based on what? I can absolutely see them having different suppliers. But even if they have the same supplier, it could be the case that only the lots destined for US had the defect.

Are taxis/ubers really better for the environment than a personal car?

Yes. They are part of general non-car transit. You would never build an entire public transit infrastructure on taxis, but they are a component of it. A person who doesn't need to own a car because they use taxis/ubers is a net benefit to the environment, and city congestion - not to mention limiting need for parking spaces.

pub transit degrades bc now it shares service with competition that operates under an entirely different model.

Public transit degrades because bus lanes are now congested with people taking mass transit instead of single cars ... and we don't want this why?

The goal is to get people into taxis/uber, buses, subways, bicycles ... basically anything except a car.

to my fellow local USsians.

I think you illustrated why the concept exists. USA actually has "America" in its name, unlike others - hence 'Americans' and not 'USsians'.

The administration has absolutely no idea what they're doing.

In general, I agree with your sentiment, but there are competent people in the administration. However, all of them are paralyzed because Trump can alter any plan or policy at a whim, and he insists being involved in everything. And you can see that in the interviews Bessent or even Lutnick give - where they hedge everything because they know it could change any minute. For example, there was no plan to set 145% tariffs on Chinese imports, Trump just did it out of nowhere on TruthSocial.

That's also true of foreign policy in general. Rubio and State Department have zero power at the moment. Neither the Russia-Ukraine peace plan, nor Iranian nuclear arms control, nor Gaza-Israel negotiations are going through the State Department.

All of this is happening so the wealthiest 1000 people, who already pay almost no taxes, can pay slightly less in taxes.

I disagree with that. This all happening because Trump is incompetent but also arrogant and highly opinionated. I don't think there is a nefarious plan here. Trump probably really does think that you can replace income tax with tariff revenue.

My thought exactly - this isn't an example of balance between "security vs usability" - this is just wrong behaviour.