141–150 of 194 posts
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Many people, myself included, were skeptical of the value of Twitter until they used it. In that sense, we literally did not believe how useful Twitter was. Also, Twitter is almost nothing like IRC in any respect other than being an electronic communication medium.
> Many people, myself included, were skeptical of the value of Twitter until they used it. I'm still skeptical and I have used it.
I think this is another good example of how we as an industry are still unable to adequately assess risk properly. I'm fairly certain that the higher-ups in Twitter weren't told "We have pretty good failover protection, but there is a small risk of catastrophic failure where everything will go completely down." Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn't really understand the risk. Just like the recen…
Accidents happen. (expanding my reply) No risk assessment in the world will stop a cage monkey from tripping over a pile of 1Us and falling onto the big red button. Figure out what your pain threshold is and live with it.
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"I think this is another good example of how we as an industry are still unable to adequately assess risk properly." It is likely that what you mean by "properly" is impossible. At large enough scales, what you end up with is a Gaussian distribution of errors in accordance with the Central Limit Theorem... except that there's a Black Swan spike in the low-probability, high-consequence events, and you basically can't…
I didn't imply at all that all failures can be prevented. I'm saying that most peoples' assessment of risk are usually wrong. And the occurrence of a single point failure that can take down an entire system that is deemed low-risk seems to happen an awful lot. It not only occurs in the technology industry, but also even in things like financial risk analysis. For example, people could mitigate the risk of a bond defa…
So, yes, many if not most people are very poor risk assessors.
Then again, this might be rather a capacity (or the lack thereof) of the organization within the risk is assessed. This is what the software engineering quip "Most problems are people problems" means, I think. In some environments it is hard to bring up the unlikely, catastrophic scenarions without being seen as overly pessimistic and somehow not enough subscribed to the success of the undertaking as a whole. So you assess risk success overly optimistic in order to further your career, not to assess risk accurately.
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Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn't really understand the risk. That's not necessarily true. People don't die when twitter is down, and whatever twitter's business model actually is, I am not even sure there is a monetary penalty to them being down (unlike, say, Amazon being down which results in lost orders). They may have made the calculation that it was not cost effective engineering-wise t…
They definitely lose money - their ad model is based on engagement, so if tweets aren't seen/can't be acted on, money is lost.
There is no such thing as bad publicity.
I think this is another good example of how we as an industry are still unable to adequately assess risk properly. I'm fairly certain that the higher-ups in Twitter weren't told "We have pretty good failover protection, but there is a small risk of catastrophic failure where everything will go completely down." Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn't really understand the risk. Just like the recen…
> I'm fairly certain that the higher-ups in Twitter weren't told "We have pretty good failover protection, but there is a small risk of catastrophic failure where everything will go completely down." Whoever was in charge of disaster recovery obviously didn't really understand the risk. Is this really a valid conclusion to come to at this point? I expect downtime in any service I operate. It's just how the world work…
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Conversely, this has always been my complaint against the general hoopla and bandwagonning around Twitter -- they didn't do anything technically innovative. When they first started generating buzz, I instantly thought, "Oh, did they create a new messaging protocol that is universally accessible, redundant and easy to use? That's killer!" But, that was not the case. Yes, they had a good idea and executed very well, bu…
Once the user base is big enough, that's the main draw.
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I didn't imply at all that all failures can be prevented. I'm saying that most peoples' assessment of risk are usually wrong. And the occurrence of a single point failure that can take down an entire system that is deemed low-risk seems to happen an awful lot. It not only occurs in the technology industry, but also even in things like financial risk analysis. For example, people could mitigate the risk of a bond defa…
Another striking example is the failure of Fukushima I and II. Basically what happend was that they had a power failure (of the external line)! They thought that was somehow too unlikely to account for, which I really have trouble with understanding. Isn't it obvious that multiple systems can fail because of some unaccounted for event external event? One that affects both, on-site and external power? And in the Japan…
If they'd had a couple of gennies on the rooftops, they ... well, they wouldn't have been fine but they'd have had a fighting chance to keep the scrammed reactors from melting down. Or if they'd had a higher sea wall (like Onagawa) they'd have been fine.
So: not one, not two, but four power systems failed in order to result in the meltdowns -- and one of them would have worked if they had been located slightly differently.
(Otherwise, your point about people being poor risk assessors is spot-on. And worse: even if some people are acutely conscious of risk, once decision-making responsibility devolves to a committee, the risk-aware folks may be overruled by those who Just Don't See The Problem.)
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I don't believe it is newsworthy. In fact, it's sad that it is being written about because it shows the utter shallowness of what passes for 'Silicon Valley News' at the moment. And it's sad to see this as a 'top story' on Hacker News taking up space.
If one of the largest services in the valley being down is not tech news, then what exactly do you think would be news? Think of "twitter being down" as Silicon Valleys equivalent to hollywoods "Lindsey Lohan is drunk in jail again".. The tech companies, their founders staff and services are our pop-culture to gossip about.
This is Hacker News, not Globe for Hackers. Seriously, tabloid-esque coverage of tech companies adds nothing of value at all.