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Disappearing videos and disappointed grandmothers

rachelbythebay.com

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Re: Disappearing videos and disappointed grandmothers

#31

Post by wstuartcl »

gonehome wrote: post #11
mgkimsal wrote: post #10

> they didn't want to pay for storing all of those recipe and cooking videos twice...videos are big and space is expensive... And yet... from people who never pay the bills for anything, all I ever hear is 'space is cheap, computing is cheap, blah blah blah'. It's all 'cheap' until you have to pay for it.

In this case they destroyed the company instead of just saying 'space is cheap' and paying for it. It isn't free, but it's certainly cheaper than killing your entire company.

...

Not making a reference count and respecting it killed the company using one store of duplicate data, if anything, prolonged the company.

Re: Disappearing videos and disappointed grandmothers

#32

Post by theoh »

mgkimsal wrote: post #10

> they didn't want to pay for storing all of those recipe and cooking videos twice...videos are big and space is expensive... And yet... from people who never pay the bills for anything, all I ever hear is 'space is cheap, computing is cheap, blah blah blah'. It's all 'cheap' until you have to pay for it.

This is basic, though. If the stuff was stored in a Unix filesystem it would be the difference between a symlink (correct strategy) and a hard link (risky). Correctly implementing the hard link strategy (in the Unix analogy, this happens in the filesystem code itself) requires reference counting. Either you invest the time to implement that, or you should stick to symlinks.

Re: Disappearing videos and disappointed grandmothers

#33

Post by nraynaud »

floatingatoll wrote: post #16
farnsworth wrote: post #12

Anyone know what product she's referring to?

Dear HN, This post goes out of its way to avoid naming the site in question. If you know the answer to the above question, think carefully before providing that name here or anywhere. Ask yourself how invoking their name specifically contributes value to this story. Ask yourself why you consider it right to shame them by name, when OP did not consider it right to do so. If you can’t think of a reason that positively…

I agree, you can't complain that every communication is locked and scripted and then try to hurt someone who has tried to be as candid as possible. It's just pushing towards a more and more unauthentic world.

Re: Disappearing videos and disappointed grandmothers

#34

Post by x0x0 »

mechnesium wrote: post #18
floatingatoll wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear HN, This post goes out of its way to avoid naming the site in question. If you know the answer to the above question, think carefully before providing that name here or anywhere. Ask yourself how invoking their name specifically contributes value to this story. Ask yourself why you consider it right to shame them by name, when OP did not consider it right to do so. If you can’t think of a reason that positively…

I respectfully disagree. It should be public record when a product or service fails to perform to the expectation of the customer. This is why we have outlets such as Yelp and Amazon reviews. There is no incentive to improve the product if they aren't put on blast.

That's not what happens though -- people have shrieking tantrums that you aren't doing X for free, or enough, or high quality enough, or that an engineer made a mistake, etc etc etc... And if you ask why they trusted their incredibly precious things to a service for which they don't pay, you get yelled at more.

eg "You said free, and now you're telling me I can't store 20TB of videos on your service! Un-fucking-believable". Cue all the statements (from free customers) that they'll never pay :rolleyes:

See also the threads on here when a company has increased prices.

Re: Disappearing videos and disappointed grandmothers

#35

Post by mgkimsal »

Nasrudith wrote: post #14
mgkimsal wrote: post #10

> they didn't want to pay for storing all of those recipe and cooking videos twice...videos are big and space is expensive... And yet... from people who never pay the bills for anything, all I ever hear is 'space is cheap, computing is cheap, blah blah blah'. It's all 'cheap' until you have to pay for it.

The people who say that are the ones who pay for programmer time which is much more expensive. Telling your programmers to erase all comments and noncompilation important whitespace would be monumentally dumb for instance. It is far cheaper to keep every version of code back to 1997 than to have to reverse compile and reverse engineer to document once for instance. If you are getting anything out of it net greater th…

> The people who say that are the ones who pay for programmer time

TYPICALLY the ones I hear that from are developers who aren't in charge of money/budget, and usually don't ever think about the cost of anything. The 'shiny/new' syndrome, coupled with little oversight, leads to nasty $ surprises later on.

And yep, "programmer time is more expensive" all night long. But at some point, other expenses are coming out of someone's budget someplace. Just because it's less than some other line item doesn't mean those costs can't add up to more than was expected (or needed, or budgeted for).

Re: Disappearing videos and disappointed grandmothers

#36

Post by userbinator »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #20
commandlinefan wrote: post #6

> someone who really gave a damn got their hands dirty Although this person is the hero of the story, I feel obligated to point out that in today's JIRA-driven "what have you done for me lately" close-the-stories what's-your-velocity we're-about-to-downsize-so-you'd-better-prove-you're-valuable culture of "efficiency", the person who did this either had a LOT of job security (as in, compromising photos of the CEO in…

I’ve never worked at companies where using Jira was synonymous with bug quantity over quality. There will always be buglets, bugs, Bugs, and then BUGS. On the flip side, every once in a while in the fish-shell GitHub repo we get an idiot that files an issue titled “is this even maintained?” because there is a non-zero number of opened issues (or I file a bug on GH and the the repo owner closes it immediately as “will…

On the flip side, every once in a while in the fish-shell GitHub repo we get an idiot that files an issue titled “is this even maintained?” because there is a non-zero number of opened issues (or I file a bug on GH and the the repo owner closes it immediately as “will revisit later” so the issue count doesn’t go up).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Re: Disappearing videos and disappointed grandmothers

#37

Post by setquk »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #20
commandlinefan wrote: post #6

> someone who really gave a damn got their hands dirty Although this person is the hero of the story, I feel obligated to point out that in today's JIRA-driven "what have you done for me lately" close-the-stories what's-your-velocity we're-about-to-downsize-so-you'd-better-prove-you're-valuable culture of "efficiency", the person who did this either had a LOT of job security (as in, compromising photos of the CEO in…

I’ve never worked at companies where using Jira was synonymous with bug quantity over quality. There will always be buglets, bugs, Bugs, and then BUGS. On the flip side, every once in a while in the fish-shell GitHub repo we get an idiot that files an issue titled “is this even maintained?” because there is a non-zero number of opened issues (or I file a bug on GH and the the repo owner closes it immediately as “will…

It’s always a people problem.

You have to force people to own every ticket or they will just rot.

Re: Disappearing videos and disappointed grandmothers

#38

Post by ex3xu »

Another even more egregious example -- around 10 or so years ago, I was a big proponent of the writing website Urbis. It was a site where you could submit a piece of writing and get feedback from other users. You can still see its activity on the Wayback Machine. It was an interesting site still without equal as far as I can tell.

From what I understand, one day, the creator decided that the site wasn't making him any money and shut it all down. I foolishly didn't back anything up and all my prose was gone. Granted, my teenage writing wasn't about to win any awards or woo any publishers. But some of the stuff I wrote was meaningful reflections on experiences at the time, meticulously edited and reviewed, and I still wish I would have been able to read them now.

What really irks me is that all he had to do was give me one day and I would have been able to save all my stuff. I have very little sympathy for any company that does anything like what Rachel describes here.

Re: Disappearing videos and disappointed grandmothers

#39

Post by jasode »

floatingatoll wrote: post #16
farnsworth wrote: post #12

Anyone know what product she's referring to?

Dear HN, This post goes out of its way to avoid naming the site in question. If you know the answer to the above question, think carefully before providing that name here or anywhere. Ask yourself how invoking their name specifically contributes value to this story. Ask yourself why you consider it right to shame them by name, when OP did not consider it right to do so. If you can’t think of a reason that positively…

>Ask yourself why you consider it right to shame them by name, when OP did not consider it right to do so. [...] ,

The other possibility that you didn't seem to consider is that the author (Rachel Kroll) is withholding the website's name to protect herself and not the company. If she only heard about the company's video deletion via second hand information, she'd understandably be hesitant to name the company in her blog. The person telling her the story may have not gotten the facts exactly right.

>and without doxxing them.

If a user can factually state that cooking website deleted videos, that's not "doxxing" the company. That's a very peculiar word to use and it doesn't apply to this situation. If someone factually states that the MS Windows 10 upgrade deletes users' files, that's not "doxxing Microsoft".

Re: Disappearing videos and disappointed grandmothers

#40

Post by [deleted] »

domador wrote: post #8

Sounds like another outrageous case of digital sharecropping, where the value of the service was primarily provided by the users and the community they formed, yet such value was not respected, and people's work--a cherished part of their lives--was casually thrown away. My more noble and magnanimous side would wish that unnamed service's owners and developers success in the face of such an awful mistake, while my ha…

[deleted]
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