381–390 of 619 posts
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It's still sky-high to most of the world outside the US
Not true at all, most Western Europe 100k$ (80k EUR) is barely above average, you'd still be firmly middle class even on two such incomes, sky high would be at least twice that much.
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As someone who worked in a sandwich shop to survive while going to college($7.5/hr, 30 hrs/week), I can't imagine the universe some people live in where an income of $375,000 doesn't seem sky high. It's like there is a section of people who live in a different world. I understand that it isn't much for an executive, but then that stuns me even more. Edit: median US salary is around $70k. This executive's pay is over…
On the same HN front page there has _just_ been a "senior developer drunk post", where a guy was complaining that full stack developers are being paid peanuts, and they deserve a compensation of at least 500k USD—and the comments were cheering "amen to that". I don't understand anything about US IT salaries anymore.
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I think it's absolutely great that Wikipedia is able to pay competitive salaries in a good location. It's probably one of the reasons why they can run such an amazing site. I consider my donations well spent.
The average software developer salary in Germany is €50 000 per year, just to take one western country as an example. I doubt Wikipedia would be much worse with European developers. American IT salaries are not the norm, and they're a bit insane. When your budget consists of donations, I think it's disrespectful to spend it on frivolous things like San Francisco salaries. The average programmer salary in Sweden is $5…
If one look for reasons not to donate, they can always be found by thousands.
I find it beautiful that there is such a site as Wikipedia, that is free and open, and I am happy to contribute a tiny bit to it.
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It's still sky-high to most of the world outside the US
Not true at all, most Western Europe 100k$ (80k EUR) is barely above average, you'd still be firmly middle class even on two such incomes, sky high would be at least twice that much.
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Wikipedia is bleeding editors and keeping others away because of the ever more hostile environment. Try to edit something and you get blasted of Wikipeda very fast with a boatload of jargon. This is something they should work on. But as every club that get successful and was open (I attended many Wiki/Wikipedia meetups 20y ago) it gets more restricted and close to keep the masses out. What a shame.
> Try to edit something and you get blasted of Wikipeda very fast with a boatload of jargon. "Trying to edit something" is a bad idea these days - the content is far too developed for that. Instead, post on the talk page with a description of your suggested edit, wait for people to object/complain/discuss, refine the text on talk if needed, then edit. It's pretty indistinguishable from a "pull request" workflow on gi…
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The average software developer salary in Germany is €50 000 per year, just to take one western country as an example. I doubt Wikipedia would be much worse with European developers. American IT salaries are not the norm, and they're a bit insane. When your budget consists of donations, I think it's disrespectful to spend it on frivolous things like San Francisco salaries. The average programmer salary in Sweden is $5…
> Why should I donate to people who earn more than twice my salary? If one look for reasons not to donate, they can always be found by thousands. I find it beautiful that there is such a site as Wikipedia, that is free and open, and I am happy to contribute a tiny bit to it.
It’s the fact that they are begging for donations while hoarding $300M in cash, and only 5% of your donation goes towards Wikipedia itself. The rest is on the hands of a foundation for them to use at will.
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As someone who worked in a sandwich shop to survive while going to college($7.5/hr, 30 hrs/week), I can't imagine the universe some people live in where an income of $375,000 doesn't seem sky high. It's like there is a section of people who live in a different world. I understand that it isn't much for an executive, but then that stuns me even more. Edit: median US salary is around $70k. This executive's pay is over…
I don't understand why people are downvoting you. I am from Brazil, mentioned in the article. I see wages of 60k USD year as a dream job (by the way, if you need a C or Lua dev, and don't want me to relocate to an expensive place to live, I am for hire, for that price tag, I really need it. I currently make around 11k USD year)
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Anything above 100K is sky-high, and you need to have drunk a lot of the SF kool-aid to think anything else. That the cost of living in SF is so high that a wage like that doesn't cover basic living costs is not because the wages aren't high enough.
Which came first, the high cost of living or the sky high tech salaries. I would guess that they co-evolved in a vicious cycle of inflation. But I know very little of economics.
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> English Wikipedia gets about 250M page views per day, which is only about 3,000 per second. If they used an efficient language instead of PHP, that's well within the capability of a single modern server! This type of comment betrays a complete lack of knowledge about how large scale internet systems operate (which is something I've worked on for the last 10+ years) and comes across as incredibly naive. I can immedi…
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I would host a site like Wikipedia on a single server, I'm saying that it's more than possible. Also, don't assume I'm speaking from a position of ignorance here, I know more than a little about how Wikipedia works. I've perused the source, played with the database dumps, etc... I find comments like yours amusing, because I hear similar things in the industry all the time! People…
This is incorrect. Many of the numbers you throw out ignore that in order to serve its content a server must do some work, which requires both CPU time and memory. Assuming you were able to eliminate hard drives and fit everything into RAM, you still have the problem that to serve requests and do that work you need RAM.
>That server can have something like 4 TB of memory in it. The entire Wikipedia database is just 5.6 TB uncompressed. >Yes, you really can fit most of Wikipedia in memory!
This is incorrect. According to Wikimedia[2], the entire uncompressed size of Wikipedia is 19TB as of 2019, and the site has grown since.
Talking specifically about hard drives:
> Spindles!? Are you kidding me? There are gaming PCs being built right now with 2 TB NVMe drives in them that can individually put out 7 GB/s and 1M IOPS! Who the hell puts servers on spinning rust in this day and age? That lone, single NVMe drive is putting out 56 Gbps by itself. Throw in a smidge of caching, and it could saturate those aforementioned 2x200 Gbps ports.
Firstly, gaming PCs are almost always ahead of the curve when it comes to performance on everything.
Secondly, to your question about who puts servers on spinning rust -- Pretty much everyone. Backblaze even releases HDD reliability ratings[1] based on what they observe in terms of the spinning platter drives.
Also, your 2TB NVMe drive is going to cap out at around a quarter of what the large-spindle raid controller can, and you can have a few of those in each system if you want. Sure, a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive is going to get you 7.88GB/s in your motherboard slot but a PCIe 4.0 raid controller can have four times that bandwidth available to it.
But for argument's sake let's say you decided to swap out your raid controller for a PCIe 4.0 card that does NVMe and has onboard raid (these don't exist for purchase yet that I can find at my usual suppliers but I imagine they're coming). Now you have a size problem. The largest current best available SSDs are Sabrent's 8TB PCIe 3.0 drives. This will cut the performance considerably but is probably the sweet spot for size & speed. You need 4 of them just to host current Wikipedia, limiting any growth, and certainly without factoring in any other parts of the system that may take away from the operation.
For comparison's sake to the 2TB NVMe drive in your example, my old homelab can hit 5 GB/s on five spindles that I bought in ~ 2011-12 and they're all old and cheap, not enterprise-grade gear.
> So no, I would not put the entirety of Wikipedia on just one server, that would be silly.
> I would put it on two.
> Okay, maybe three, for redundancy. Just in case.
Then you have issues of bandwidth by having so few connections, as well as the poor user experience of trying to visit a site that exists and is served in only three places (hopefully around the globe). It's also bad for reliability because if any one site loses its connection suddenly your 200GB/s traffic is pushed onto the other servers. If you want a sense for how reliability engineering works you should look at how Netflix does testing and why they've managed to withstand regional AWS outages despite being hosted on AWS[3].
Wikimedia lays out their system set up pretty well on their own page[4].
Could you technically host wikipedia on your own systems? Sure, lots of people do, go visit Reddit's r/datahoarders and I'm sure you can find more than a few who have their own local copies. Could you actually replace production wikipedia on the Internet with the setup you describe? No, you cannot.
I also suspect you haven't costed out the server setup you describe, as it seems incongruous to say that they spend too much while advocating replacing their entire server stack with cutting edge hardware (and will they need to do so annually in order to keep up?).
[1]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-fo...
[2]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps/Dumps_sizes_and_g...
[3]: https://netflixtechblog.com/lessons-netflix-learned-from-the...