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Fuck the Cloud (2009)

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Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#31

Don't we keep our entire life's savings in companies aka banks that we don’t run, don’t control, don’t buy, don’t administrate, and don’t really understand.

They are much more tightly regulated (legally), and insured, often by governments.

The reason they are is because of their intrinsic propensity to destabilization, vis-a-vis Minsky and the Financial Instability Hypothesis.

Of course, how you structure your regulatory framework can have adverse consequences, as well (i.e. implicit guarantees by GSEs on mortgage-backed securities). It is further arguable whether or not fractional reserve exacerbates these effects.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#34
>Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of.

I don't understand this logic. Amazon's S3 offers service level agreements with failure rates that at one point implied the statistical likelihood of losing an object to be once in "thousands of years". When dealing with any sort of stable storage this is simply something I cannot offer. I couldn't produce a set up locally with the resources I have for making guarantees on the decade level let alone millennia.

With that said I keep personal copies, but the authoritative copy is what's in the cloud, because its a hell of a lot more stable.

TL;DR I hear this argument all the time. The cloud isn't perfect but its a hell of a lot closer to anything I could achieve. "not invented here" syndrome won't save your data.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#35

Don't we keep our entire life's savings in companies aka banks that we don’t run, don’t control, don’t buy, don’t administrate, and don’t really understand.

Our life's savings are not unique, and can be replenished from a different source. Our childhood pictures and personal correspondence are, and generally can not.

Besides, banks are subject to rather a lot of external control, through regulation (oh noes!). Here in NL the government actually guarantees your savings (but not investments) should a bank go belly-up. I believe the US did something similar, although I didn't bother to follow the specifics about who bailed out who for whom.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#36
I think this gets to the heart of "what people value" and Jason is looking at it from a perspective of a collector. I'm also a collector so I feel much like him.

I wonder if there's a relationship between collecting and being an introvert. I have no evidence but feel like there is. I think most people just don't value "things" the way our types do. What most people value is their social life. They post pictures to Facebook not to store the pictures but to get a reaction from their friends about the picture. That's what they value. The social interaction, not the thing.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#37
post #28

Don't we keep our entire life's savings in companies aka banks that we don’t run, don’t control, don’t buy, don’t administrate, and don’t really understand.

I think most people have more of there savings in stuff than banks. (Clothes, PC, car, House etc.) At scale cash is a proxy for wealth not actual wealth. PS: A home loan might seem like the bank owns your house, but they can't say no when you sell it.

How about 401K and Social Security ?

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#38
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suppose that this person wants to keep his data forever, but many people just don't care that much about their social media photos and the like. "This person" is Jason Scott, who works as the Internet Archive and also heads up Archive Team (the loose band of internet folks who race to archive sites about to go dark). He's a digital historian; his job is to save everything he can. https://twitter.com/textfiles htt…

This article doesn't really stand on its own; it comes across as a rambling diatribe by someone who is out of touch. If you have to know who the author of an article is to be persuaded by the argument given then it isn't very good. There are much better articles expressing this point of view.

Respectfully disagree, although I appreciate the reply.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#39
post #34

>Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of. I don't understand this logic. Amazon's S3 offers service level agreements with failure rates that at one point implied the statistical likelihood of losing an object to be once in "thousands of years". When dealing with any sort of stable storage this is simply something I cannot offer. I couldn't produce a set up locally with the resources…

Until your control panel gets hacked and you lose all your data. See: codespaces.com (assuming it wasn't an inside job or a dumb mistake, but even then the same rules apply). So no, DON'T BLOW ANYTHING INTO THE CLOUD THAT YOU DON'T HAVE A COPY OF.

It has nothing to do with 'not invented here', it has everything to do with your inability to outsource your responsibilities.

The degree to which people rely on others to take care of their stuff is a huge blind-spot. Jason's advice is spot on in this respect, no matter what the up-time guarantees of the cloud solution you are using (and no matter what the redundancies), if you store all your data in the cloud without an off-line copy your company is 3 mouse clicks away from being history.

Re: Fuck the Cloud (2009)

#40
post #34

>Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of. I don't understand this logic. Amazon's S3 offers service level agreements with failure rates that at one point implied the statistical likelihood of losing an object to be once in "thousands of years". When dealing with any sort of stable storage this is simply something I cannot offer. I couldn't produce a set up locally with the resources…

I think you missed the point. S3 isn't free. You pay for that service:

    and if you’re a person they are giving it to you without
    you signing anything accompanied by cash or payment that
    says “and I mean it“.
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