3 ms·
Nope. There's man-years of effort per day in keeping it reliable; as evidenced by the point that it takes major political meddling over a prolonged period to th
by Piskvorrr 9y ago
Nope. There's man-years of effort per day in keeping it reliable; as evidenced by the point that it takes major political meddling over a prolonged period to throw it off, and an article on HN for people to even notice "it has been acting sort of weird, now that you mention it".
"I didn't notice until now" is quite the opposite of happenstance, on par with the PHB mantra "what do we need devops for, anyway, the network seems to be up!" Well it's up because devops is keeping it up. Likewise, the grid doesn't just magically self-balance around 50 Hz.
- gpvos 9y agoI definitely noticed this in the last few weeks already, since my alarm clock is set to switch the radio on in the half minute before the news on the top of the hour. I was already searching for reasons, and I would have expected an announcement about this a lot sooner.
- spdionis 9y agoI mean, in software engineering we try to avoid unnecessary dependencies right? This is exactly what's happening, why would those clocks ever depend on the power grid?? EDIT: Nevermind, sounds like there are precision concerns that justify using the power grid for timekeeping.
- LaGrange 9y ago> I mean, in software engineering we try to avoid unnecessary dependencies right? I/you wish.
- Piskvorrr 9y agoIndeed. There's a tradeoff in both directions - either you trust the cloud^W grid, or you trust your local clock, and both of them have failure modes; there's no one clearly superior option here. You could combine them, but then it gets complex in short order.
- baq 9y ago> in software engineering we try to avoid unnecessary dependencies leftpad would like to have a word
- Piskvorrr 9y agoPutting Lego blocks together is engineering now? Edit: NPM has engineering challenges, and Node as well...but I would be extremely hesitant to call a library of ~ten LoC "engineering."
- baq 9y agoi'm not a fan of what the JS ecosystem looks like, but you can and will get bitten by transitive dependencies if you don't store them all in a local mirror that doesn't respect upstream deletions...
- Piskvorrr 9y agoOf course. But that's an engineering problem worthy of the name (cache-invalidation and whatnot).