My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used • Hacker News Board

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#201

Post by tsegratis » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 11:54 AM UTC

Mavvie wrote: post #151

lmm wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a different problem from your previous examples, and it's the same problem whether it's ACID or not: there's always an opportunity for the user to see the item as being in stock, then request to order it, and discover it's out of stock. Your "recovery" from the case where there's nothing in stock doesn't need to happen in a transaction (and can't meaningfully do so); you just tell the user their order failed,…

I see what you mean, but with ACID you can tell the user right away if the order was successfully placed. With eventual consistency you don't know how long it'll take so you either show them a loading spinner that takes an indeterminate amount of time, or what? Not saying that the spinner solution is wrong (as it definitely scales better), but the immediate feedback is something you lose with eventual consistency, by…

Im no expert but my recent conclusion from writing an ordering system is customers can instruct their banks to roll back many payments a month or even a year after the fact

So actual ACID transactional consistency requires a year. So after basic checks just say you'll give them what they want and accept payment -- since you'll need failure recovery anyway for lack of delivery, refunds, acts of God etc

So accept and plan for failure

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#202

Post by gambiting » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 12:00 PM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #53

> Ubisoft had built an organisation optimised for treating developers like fools I think this whole write up really says more about how video game developers treat entry and mid-level career developers/programmers/graphic artists. Because there seems to be an inexhaustible supply of young idealistic naive persons who will take any salary offered and work for 80 hours a week, because they've been offered a job at a bi…

>>Because there seems to be an inexhaustible supply of young idealistic naive persons who will take any salary offered and work for 80 hours a week

As someone who also works at ubisoft(and I have actually worked with the author), I want to point out that for all the failings of Ubisoft, our work life culture is top notch and there is an incredibly strong focus on avoiding overtime**. It's drilled into our heads constantly that it's NOT normal to work more than the contracted 7.5h a day, if you as much as send someone an email at 8pm someone will talk to you to make sure you aren't working late(and will tell you to avoid doing that in the future, because it makes it look like reading and sending work emails at 8pm is a normal thing). In my 9 years here I have worked overtime only a very small handful of times, usually around launches of our project - for a week or two. I haven't logged more than my standard 37.5h/week on any project for literally years now. I manage juniors now and I wouldn't let them work more than that even if they wanted to.

** at least in the studio where I work and the studios I have interacted with - Ubisoft has 40(?) studios across the world and I cannot possibly comment on every single one of them. But it does certainly seem to be the company policy worldwide.

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#203

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 12:10 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#204

Post by btschaegg » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 12:22 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #195

dijit wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I prefer Windows because of things like Active Directory, GPOs, DSC I felt the same until we had a bug which broke the network adapters under high throughput of packets per second (of course, we didn't know the cause, but the machine was bumped off the network until a reboot which wiped away debug info). Going via the IPMI yielded a "Can't connect to AD" message, and the rotating local "Administrator" account passw…

> The base container image needs to match the kernel version The kernel ABI has been stabilised in 2022 & 11, which means this is no longer an issue. I tested it and it seems to work as advertised. E.g.: both Windows 11 and 11 22H2 OS can both run a variety of 2022 and 2019 containers, and can run "RTM" and semi-annual 2022 containers in process isolation mode. > the instructions to make a bare metal kubernetes windo…

> The kernel ABI has been stabilised in 2022 & 11

That sounds great. As this should be very useful for my workplace, it would be great to have an official source to cite on this. Unfortunately, my Google-fu hasn't returned much right now.

If you know of any Microsoft documentation pages, blog posts or something similar on this, can you point me in the right direction? Thanks! :)

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#205

Post by lmm » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 1:20 PM UTC

Mavvie wrote: post #151

lmm wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a different problem from your previous examples, and it's the same problem whether it's ACID or not: there's always an opportunity for the user to see the item as being in stock, then request to order it, and discover it's out of stock. Your "recovery" from the case where there's nothing in stock doesn't need to happen in a transaction (and can't meaningfully do so); you just tell the user their order failed,…

I see what you mean, but with ACID you can tell the user right away if the order was successfully placed. With eventual consistency you don't know how long it'll take so you either show them a loading spinner that takes an indeterminate amount of time, or what? Not saying that the spinner solution is wrong (as it definitely scales better), but the immediate feedback is something you lose with eventual consistency, by…

> I see what you mean, but with ACID you can tell the user right away if the order was successfully placed. With eventual consistency you don't know how long it'll take so you either show them a loading spinner that takes an indeterminate amount of time, or what?

It's doing the same thing either way though; in either world you can even wait for the order to be processed, or not. In an event sourcing system you'll commit the event quickly and then wait potentially arbitrarily long for the result to appear downstream; in an ACID RDBMS you'll wait potentially arbitrarily long for your commit to execute (and maybe if you're lucky your database has got a deadlock detector, but what are you going to if it tells you you hit a deadlock? 100% of the time I've seen the answer is "backoff and retry").

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#206

Post by lmm » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 1:24 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #145

lmm wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (1) There is no reason you couldn’t, in a stateful, connected web app (or a stateful web service) open backend DB transactions controlled by activity on the client. You probably don’t want to, because, “ew, stateful”, and would prefer to use compensation strategies to deal with business transactions that span beyond a database transactions, but you could. You'd have to break the rules of how web systems are meant t…

> You never need that if these things are the result of a fixed client request; the set of things to be done can't change, so eventual consistency will serve the purpose. Yes, if I wanted to handle orders of magnitude more simultaneous requests than this app could conceivably ever need to, but with more app complexity and greater latency for substantive results even at it's existing scale, I could use an EC solution…

What are you getting out of ACID, and what is it costing you? The main practical effects of using an ACID datastore are that a) your writes don't commit until they've finished updating all your indices (sometimes what you want, but often not) b) if you get your dataflow wrong you'll get deadlocks, occasionally, probably starting weeks after you made the mistake that caused them

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#207

Post by throw009 » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 2:07 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #198

throw009 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>He joined in 2014, when Windows had a superior shell and remoting system that eliminates the requirement for low-level string parsing tools like sed/awk entirely! One mans feature is another mans bug.

These debates always remind me of this quote (referring to C++) here on HN by another user: It seems like grappling with these arcane features feels productive, at first. You enter a flow state and after a while, something works that didn’t work before. It’s only when you step back and ask what actually got accomplished that you realize it’s time wasted. That's what Linux feels like to me. People enjoy solving arcane…

There's not much of a debate. Windows as a server is dead outside sme shops. This isn't the 90s anymore. But it is very nostalgic hearing people talk up microsoft. It's not something I'd heard in the last 15 years.

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#208

Post by rakoo » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 2:07 PM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #163

sgt wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about - Windows was always terrible for an admin. Unix was and is vastly superior when it comes to remote admin. Having used both (Powershell is powerful yes, but it's nowhere as fluid as a Unix shell).

That's just not true. It feels true to Unix admins trying to do Unix things on Windows and getting frustrated when nothing feels familiar. Let me quote the article directly: "no SSH" WinRM is roughly equivalent and superior in many ways. E.g.: It takes quite the effort to produce a report of "some setting or flag" across a fleet of servers with SSH, Bash, Sed, Awk, etc.. Now try this with PowerShell: Invoke-Command -…

    cat list_of_servers | parallel --tag ssh {} ps -aux

The whole point of UNIX is to use independent, composable tools that speak the same interface. If the interface is space-separated values, use space-separated values. If Excel or PowerBI don't use that then don't use Excel or PowerBI.

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#209

Post by ilyt » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 2:26 PM UTC

vishnugupta wrote: post #156

ilyt wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And then... We realized how much politics, uncertainty, churn, screaming, changing requirements, ambiguous priorities and other carp he protected us from :-/ Over years I've noticed like 80% of those is because other managers are terrible and it so happens that the dept. I'm in takes some of the fallout of their mess.

>...because other managers are terrible... It's interesting you should say this because this is one of the categories of Bullshit jobs as defined by David Graeber in his book. And incidentally only y'day I was listening to him on a podcast[1] speaking about BS jobs. His favourite example is corporate lawyers. Companies are forced to hire them just because other companies have them and are in fear of getting sued. I h…

Corporate lawyers are essentially same thing as nuclear weapons, a deterrent that shouldn't exists and just eats resources of both sides.

Same with the way patents are used really.

Re: My manager spent $1M on a backup server that I never used

#210

Post by vips7L » Fri, Mar 03, 2023, 2:41 PM UTC

olavgg wrote: post #174

jiggawatts wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not true. It feels true to Unix admins trying to do Unix things on Windows and getting frustrated when nothing feels familiar. Let me quote the article directly: "no SSH" WinRM is roughly equivalent and superior in many ways. E.g.: It takes quite the effort to produce a report of "some setting or flag" across a fleet of servers with SSH, Bash, Sed, Awk, etc.. Now try this with PowerShell: Invoke-Command -…

The big problem with Powershell vs Unix is lack of documentation. Seriously, everything takes 100x less time to figure out on a Unix platform than Powershell. And my life is to short for that.

Powershell docs are literally built in…

   help

That being said powershell is much more discoverable _for me_ because it’s simple objects that get piped. I don’t have to figure out how to parse the text of a traditional shell. I can just get things done.