GitHub: Git operation failures • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub: Git operation failures

#331

Post by closeparen » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 6:33 PM UTC

stinkbeetle wrote: post #262

HardwareLust wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's money, of course. No one wants to pay for resilience/redundancy. I've launched over a dozen projects going back to 2008, clients simply refuse to pay for it, and you can't force them. They'd rather pinch their pennies, roll the dice and pray.

> It's money, of course. 100% > No one wants to pay for resilience/redundancy. I've launched over a dozen projects going back to 2008, clients simply refuse to pay for it, and you can't force them. They'd rather pinch their pennies, roll the dice and pray. Well, fly by night outfits will do that. Bigger operations like GitHub will try to do the math on what an outage costs vs what better reliability costs, and optimi…

Modern internet company backends are very complex, even on a good day they're at the outer limits of their designers' and operators' understanding, & every day they're growing and changing (because of all the money and effort that's being spent on them!). It's often a short leap to a state that nobody thought of as a possibility or fully grasped the consequences of. It's not clear that it would be practical with any amount of money to test or rule out every such state in advance. Some exciting techniques are being developed in that area (Antithesis, formal verification, etc) but that stuff isn't standard of care for a working SWE yet. Unit tests and design reviews only get you so far.

Re: GitHub: Git operation failures

#332

Post by 1718627440 » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 7:37 PM UTC

HardwareLust wrote: post #241

aeldidi wrote: post #238

I'm becoming concerned with the rate at which major software systems seem to be failing as of late. For context, last year I only logged four outages that actually disrupted my work; this quarter alone I'm already on my fourth, all within the past few weeks. This is, of course, just an anecdote and not evidence of any wider trend (not to mention that I might not have even logged everything last year), but it was enou…

It's money, of course. No one wants to pay for resilience/redundancy. I've launched over a dozen projects going back to 2008, clients simply refuse to pay for it, and you can't force them. They'd rather pinch their pennies, roll the dice and pray.

I'm not sure, it's only money. People could have a lot of simpler cheaper software, by relying on core (OS) features instead of rolling there own, or relying on bloated third-parties, but a lot don't due to cargo culting.

Re: GitHub: Git operation failures

#333

Post by tombert » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 11:06 PM UTC

bonesss wrote: post #309

tombert wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Microsoft hadn't tried to actively kill all its competition then there's a good chance that we'd have a much better internet. Microsoft is bigger than just an operating system, they're a whole corporation. Instead they actively tried to murder open standards [1] that they viewed as competitive and normalized the antitrust nightmare that we have now. I think by nearly any measure, Microsoft is not a net good. They…

Alternatively: had MS Embraced and Extended harder instead of trying to extinguish ASAP we’d have a much better internet owned to a much higher degree by MS. A few decades back Microsoft were first to the prize with asynchronous JavaScript, Silverlight really was flash done better and still missed, a proper extension of their VB6/MFC client & dev experience out to the web would have gobbled up a generation of SaaS of…

Silverlight is only “Flash Done Better” if we had the dystopia of Windows being the only desktop operating system. Silverlight never worked on Linux, and IIRC it didn’t work terribly well on macOS (though I could be misremembering).

In fact all of your points are only true if we accept that Windows would be the only operating system.

Microsoft half-asses most things. If they had taken over the internet, we would likely have the entirety of the internet be even more half-asses than it already is.

Re: GitHub: Git operation failures

#334

Post by Zambyte » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 2:02 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #201

jimbokun wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you didn't go all in on GitHub Actions. Like my company has.

Do you think you'd get better uptime with your own solution? I doubt it. It would just be at a different time.

Reproducible builds have a pretty good track record for uptime :-)

Re: GitHub: Git operation failures

#335

Post by parliament32 » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 5:33 PM UTC

drykjdryj wrote: post #294

parliament32 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those sound achievable by email, which, coincidently, is also decentralized.

Email at a company is very not decentralized. Most use Microsoft 365, also hosted in azure, i.e. the same cloud as github is trying to host its stuff in.

365 is not hosted in Azure. Some of the admin portals and workflows are, but the normal-employee-facing applications and APIs have their own datacenters.