zzzcpan
Joined 15 years ago
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Member since
Dec 27
Recent submissions
Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
Right, there is plenty of confidence that climate change is real and caused by humans, but pretty much zero confidence in the long term effects of climate change on human population.
Comment · 6 years ago
You are missing the point. Solving the truck problem is exactly what you shouldn't do, well, at least until your system is resilient. Because it could be something entirely different, it could be law enforcement raiding a data center and your wall around it won't protect it from them. So instead you approach the system in terms of what it has to rely on and all possible states of the thing it has to rely on. Which maps to a very small number of decisions. Like whether a server is available or not. If it's not available it really doesn't matter which of the infinite things that could happen to it or to a data center it is in actually did, you simply don't return it to users if it's not available and have enough independent servers to return to users in enough independent data centers to achieve specific availability. It's really not difficult.
I understand that most of those leetcode corporations don't care much about resilience, likely even incapable of producing highly reliable systems, and may give you a false impression that reliability is something of an unachievable fantasy. But it's not, it's something we have enough research done on and can do really well today if needed, we are not in titanic era anymore.
I have high confidence in these things (not in "predicting the unforeseeable"), because I've done them myself. My edge infrastructure had like half an hour of downtime total in many years, almost a decade already.
Comment · 6 years ago
It's not difficult, it's just different. It's the difference between predicting that a truck might crash into a data center and building concrete wall around it, and designing a system in a such way that users only ever resolve to servers that are currently available regardless of what happened to some of them in a data center that had a truck crashed into it.
Comment · 6 years ago
The whole idea behind resilience is to cover unforeseeable risks, the turkey problem just doesn't apply here. I would even say if the system doesn't solve the turkey problem it cannot be called resilient. And high availability without resilience is not practically possible.
Comment · 6 years ago
Honestly, you are not making any sense. This is not how engineering works. If you design for resilience, you get more resilience and you build confidence as you see the evidence how the system works in real world. Furthermore, with resilience you have to always cover all risks, it's just that you don't immediately reach fine granularity of decisions that don't trigger failover to servers in different countries, you improve granularity as you learn from actual operations and modify your designs accordingly.
I remember when I first deployed DNS routed system it was too reactive, constantly jumping between servers, monitoring was too sensitive, it didn't wait for servers to stabilize to return them into the mix and exponential backoff was taking servers out for far too long. But even given all that it was still able to avoid outages caused by data center failures and connectivity problems.
Comment · 6 years ago
In web and online infrastructure pretty much nothing is out of your control except for two things: ISPs people use and domain name registrar you use for your domain name. And even domain name registrar centralization can be mitigated against by having multiple domains from multiple registrars and promoting different domains to different users and having backup communication channels to inform users about new domains in case something happens.
Other than that it's your choice whether to make your infrastructure dependent on a bunch of unreliable centralized SPOFs from big corporations or build highly available infrastructure relying on servers from many different providers running your own DNS servers with DNS routing, failover, etc. You will definitely beat Cloudflare's availability this way many times over.
Comment · 6 years ago
Wouldn't that make you more happy, not less? Always figuring out how to improve things and having endless possibilities to improve them is almost a definition of fun.
Comment · 6 years ago
> once-objective mainstream journalism
Objective journalism was never ever a thing. That's why Manufacturing Consent happened and all the works from Edward Bernays and all the way to Noam Chomsky.
What journalism had before though is just more consistency in worldview, because mass media was very centralized and pushed much more consistent propaganda with nothing to oppose it.
Comment · 6 years ago
It's more like a mix of solar and wind energy investors with fossil burning energy investors, both benefit from shutting down nuclear reactors. Solar and wind investors just want to have their huge returns with nothing wasted, as each kWh is pretty expensive, but lacking nuclear power most of the energy generation will still go to burning fossils, who will profit massively from it. Happened in other countries too, like Ukraine, which was recently forced to temporary stop some reactors to benefit those two groups and of course make things worse for the climate.
Comment · 6 years ago
It takes a lot to produce and push government propaganda. It would require a tech company to essentially turn into a government run news organization if they were to do it. Which kind of defeats the purpose of even having different businesses, rather than all of them being propaganda producing news outlets.
Comment · 6 years ago
It's a private company, it's very unlikely for them to outright push government propaganda. They'll probably just censor "political activism" on the platform altogether and someday if government establishes tighter control of the platform they might be forced not to censor some of it, like things that undermine the US government.
Comment · 6 years ago
You are confusing opinions with evidence and facts. Obviously you acquire knowledge by reading papers where people are doing research and experiments and presenting evidence, analytics and all the facts from which you can make your own conclusions.
Comment · 6 years ago
But isn't this part of the point? Philosophically science is about being interested and studying broad range of topics and areas to judge everything for yourself and make your own conclusions, not trust expert opinions. In my experience, whenever I have to rely on an expert opinion I usually feel bad later when I acquire more knowledge in the area myself, as those opinions are almost always wrong.
Comment · 6 years ago
The original comment is about dang jumpyness and unfairness in moderation. He won't touch some people for the things he will shadowban or downweight others. Whatever you can praise dang for, moderation isn't one of those things. On HN there are effectively no rules and no objectivity, only what moderators say goes.
For most websites today if someone can intercept traffic somewhere close to the server they don't even need the keys, they can just fake responses to pass CA validation and issue valid certificates with their own keys and MITM like there is no encryption.
And coldboot attacks performed by a hosting provider staff of dumping memory and finding keys isn't that realistic of a threat, just like putting servers into a locked cage on someone else's property isn't much of a protection.