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Hi, I'm the CEO of http://www.clever-cloud.com/ and I'll be happy to help you on this, ping me on twitter : @waxzce
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Not to discount the value of HackerNews, however there is great benefit to YCombinator being associated with it; They could let it go down and never host it again but they would lose value.
Yes, but I don't think such shortages do them much harm.
How about error page show the last static HN page? Most people just need likns
By tolerating the loss of two disks, do you mean raidz2 or do you mean 3-way mirror? Raidz2 is not fast. In fact, it is slow. Also, it is less reliable than a two way mirror in most configurations, because recovering from a disk loss requires reading the entirety of every other disk, whereas recovering from loss in a mirror requires reading the entirety of one disk. The multiplication of the probabilities don't work…
Why not Raid 60 with Btrfs? It'll tolerate two disk loss with pro-active parity protection via btrfs and be faster and provide you with more disk space.
The trend I'm noticing is people mentioning that if only HN was moved to , problems would go away. Instead of doing that, they probably dropped a bit more than a thousand dollars on a box, and are probably saving thousands in costs per year. This is money coming out of someone's pocket. This site is here, and it's a charity, being provided free of cost, to you. Who cares if HN is down for a few hours? Seriously? Has…
HN is not a charity, it is a marketing platform for YC with some community aspects. There is a very strong bias to everything YC. The HN community has also outgrown the software HN was built on you can see this in threads like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7051091 but even that thread is an extreme many front page items that gain traction are hard to go through because of things like lack of foldable comments…
https://gist.github.com/maxerickson/8456792
Credit to http://alexander.kirk.at/js/hackernews-collapsible-threads-v... which I referenced for dealing with the structure.
This reminds me I'm still looking for a (pki?-)encrypted zfs snapshots as a backup service, /wink-wink @anyone Hoping the box has ECC ram, otherwise zfs, too, can be unreliable ( http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/zfs-corruption... )
Tarsnap?
I'm sure it has been asked many times before, but I'd love to hear the latest thinking... Why in 2013 is HN still running on bespoke hardware and software? If a startup came to you with this sort of legacy thinking you'd laugh them out of the room.
In many circles, you would be laughed out of the room for cargo culting like this, and for trying to draw a bias against a legitimate deployment choice by declaring it "legacy".
There are many scenarios where hosting on your own hardware is a superior option for a variety of reasons: Financially, security, performance, flexibility.
In the case of HN it seems like it's on some pretty meager hardware, making compromises like software RAID. If this were a critical system for YC, they would have it on redundant machines with redundant, flash-based, hardware-RAID equipped platforms, clustered with redundant 10Gb cross connects, etc. Criticizing a deployment strategy because of the peculiar issues they have faced is like writing off AWS because someone's unbacked up small instance got killed and they had no strategy for it.
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No, 2400 baud - phase shifting is used encode the bits, so the actual frequencies used are complex. 300 baud used two tones for Tx and two tones for Rx so it is easy to whistle (albeit the characters coming out are garbage). Higher baud rates are probably impossible to whistle because the encoding is much more complex. I never tried, acoustic couplers didn't work above 300 baud. ;-) Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
I am pretty sure he meant 2600Hz anyway Besides everyone knows, nobody whistles 2600Hz, they just get the toy out of the Cap'n Crunch box to do it for them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Draper#Phreaking
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this sort of legacy thinking That's the kind of facile statement that makes people riotously mock the entire startup community, like "MongoDB is webscale" but even less valid. Cloud services are not a panacea, and there are myriad situations in which running one's own infrastructure can be a good idea. What matters is that the issues and benefits are taken into account; if one can show research demonstrating that a c…
The advantage of cloud servers is if one experiences corruption or goes down you just kill it and start a new one. If your cloudy EBS equivalent experiences corruption, you restore from snapshot and off you go again. Either way it involves less downtime than HN seems to have. The downside is it costs more (usually, depends on how high your server management and data center overheads are.) I'd like to point out that d…
Do you even have access to that snapshot if the system is down?
the cloud simply exchanges know levels of failure with unknown level of failure. You pay someone else to think about it for you.
If there is a massive data loss at amazon, and people have been backing up to glacier, the recovery times will jump from hours to days even weeks, simply because there aren't enough drives to recover from.
The cloud may be more reliable, but when it goes down, it'll gown down hard, leaving you high and dry if you don't have real backups.
may i ask where are the machines hosted? is that on AWS? if not, why don't you move to a more reliable hosting, like AWS?
why don't you move to a more reliable hosting, like AWS? As a fairly heavy ($x00,000/month) user of AWS, this is the funnniest and most-misguided thing I've read in a long time. AWS is horrible . It's extraordinarily bad, with all sorts of insanely complex failure modes to account for. There are some reasons to consider using it, but reliability is most definitely NOT amongst them.
aws is a lot of things, but cheap and reliable aren't on that list.