HN user

tcannon

24 karma
Posts0
Comments13
View on HN
No posts found.

Last year I sailed my 30' boat from Oakland to Hawaii. I went three weeks with no sign of life aside from Albatross and flying fish. None. I couldn't even get my sat phone to work 90% of the time. I covered, roughly, the distance from Oakland to about Massachusetts. My boat was much smaller, and had very little as far as safety equipment on a passenger jet. While both might be exceptionally hard to spot -- even a 1000' vehicle with 1000' span would be hard to find on solid ground somewhere between CA and MA, add deep water, and that piece of wing was not attached to the plane when it hit the water. I know this as it still was shaped like a wing. I'm also a pilot and can only guess as well as other pilots, but when you over-stress the airframe from a loss of control, you can fold a wing. No life jackets floating as they're still in the plane which likely hit well before that chunk of wing fluttered down into the water. I doubt we'll ever really know. Seems unlikely to have been a bomb, as shit would be washing up.

Interesting contrast, stories like this compared to the stories about how everyone who is successful feels like they are a fraud.

Maybe my study will be of note: If you believe headlines, you should read more.

I'm double posting, sorry.

It's really weird to have these settings to cripple your load balancer, which already is an idea that gives me an involuntary shudder, and to cap it off the idea is that this is somehow a performance hack.

I posit a different idea. Trust the fact that web servers are written by folks who actually realized that their code would be on the internet, serving up web pages, and that some thought has gone into optimizing things already. Artificially shaping traffic and guessing that things run faster because you just figured it would is why ops people will not give you access to machines in production.

Crank the load balancer up to 11. If your code can't handle traffic, don't break the rest of the network to protect it from traffic. Fix the back end problems.

I can pick up two $300 foundry/brocade load balancers on ebay that will handle 1,000,000 connections at wirespeed (each) through custom ASICs, do full health checks, layer 7 header hashing, layer 7 switching, run multiple load balancing algorithms, hand out dhcp, serve as a VRRP gateway with it's peer, and have totally stateless failover on top of it.

I do it. Two data centers, east and west coast. For better or worse I peer with the same providers on each side, which doesn't do much for your traffic so much as juggling ISP maintenance that might affect you. I've not heard a single complaint due to anything relating to anycast.

Considering that you're getting a damn robust global scale load balancer for free, and it mostly maintains itself -- it's hard to argue against it,

Interesting that the article mentioned Jody Sherman. I've worked with him several times. He moved to LA after running a startup into the ground in SF, taking with him the last paychecks of those who he had lied to saying that their pay was just delayed due to a glitch. While on the plane heading to LA he used the in-flight phone to buy a Porsche (sight unseen) from a dealership using his investor's money that he pocketed while leaving his former employees to wonder what the hell was going on.

His plane ticket was paid for by the person sitting next to him -- a mutual friend. Jody was supposed to pay him back for the ticket. He never did.

Interesting that his "business failures" are the causation for a trend, as his businesses were never intended to succeed in doing anything other than separating investors from their money and trying to stay one step ahead of what inevitably caught up with him. People seem to think that he was overly optimistic and just bad at making a business succeed. That might be true; I do not know what he ever actually intended. I told him several times that in order to get one of his former businesses to succeed he would have to spend money on certain key pieces of infrastructure. He refused, saying he'd spend it later. What I didn't know at the time that he wasn't being simply unreasonable. The money was already gone. It just didn't say that on the balance sheet he was showing to those who worked with and who he approached asking to invest.

Your website doesn't list the jobs you're hiring for, the industry you're in isn't very glamorous, nobody want to commute to San Bruno (you either live north or south and driving from one side sucks and driving from the other means you need a car) and I'm guessing low pay and little perks as far as new/fun technology.

Your website is listed on your profile, and I pulled the above together in about 2-3 minutes.