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Who is Rachel and how do her short and simple stories always hit the front-page? They're interesting but I always think they're a little _too_ simple. I mean t

Who is Rachel and how do her short and simple stories always hit the front-page? They're interesting but I always think they're a little _too_ simple. I mean this entire thing can be summed up with: 500s (and other errors) are returned faster than processed requests. Load-balancers will find a misbehaving server's queue empty more often and give it all the requests

vivaan 9y ago
apparently you aren't the first one to wonder that [1]. It is Rachel Kroll, an engineer at fb [2]. Good point about the summary. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13401293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13401293 [2] https://www.facebook.com/wogrammer/posts/1748187012080407:0 https://www.facebook.com/wogrammer/posts/1748187012080407:0
- mcbain 9y ago
  Recently left FB, in fact. Which is important context for many of her posts in the last month or so.
  - Rainymood 9y ago
    So basically she's using HN audience as a marketing blog and people are eating it up?
    - spydum 9y ago
      Marketing? What pray tell is she selling? If this had been some post about lessons learned about a the latest whizbang JS framework people wouldn't have had a second thought. I've read plenty of her posts and have sympathized, as being a long time sysadmin and learning the exact same lessons. She indeed does have a story telling skill which is sorely needed: ops people tend to suck at effectively sharing knowledge - she's doing valuable work here. I don't understand why there is criticism?
      - mrmanner 9y ago
        > I don't understand why there is criticism? If I were to be cynical, I'd say it's because a woman writing on information technology. Or because someone is writing about information technology without it being strict and to the point and boring to everyone that doesn't have a geeky interest in that specific piece of technology. But most likely the former.
baxtr 9y ago
I wonder that too. But it seems she has gift: telling tech stuff as story that resonates with the HN crowd.
- avttre 9y ago
  Maybe she's a trans woman n￸ig￸ge￸r.
xorcist 9y ago
Light hearted introductions to work related stuff you might encounter is always a crowd pleaser. It makes for great lightning talk ideas too. However, it might be prudent to point out that these things will feature in the first chapter of any book on load balancing, as an example of the pros and cons of different load balancing methods: least connections, least load, round robin etc. (Sometimes I suspect picking up a book is becoming a lost art in this day of devops and breaking things fast. Learning from mistakes is all well and good, but there are other ways too.)
- eecks 9y ago
  Do you recommend any books in particular in this area? It's something I need to learn more about.
feiofh398r39rty 9y ago
It's really low value compared to the most of the rest of the front page stuff. Interesting in a way but there is a lot of interesting stuff around that does not hug the front page.
banachtarski 9y ago
My first encounter was the "yak shaving" article that had a bunch of inaccuracies and it was pretty offputting. If that article was any reflection on the general sophistication I wouldn't really want to read any more. It felt like I was reading something out of the 90s.
krab 9y ago
As I read it, this piece wasn't that much about load balancers but rather about teaching. She experienced trouble explaining a problem in a way the students would understand, so she came up with a better method.
thinkingemote 9y ago
Good writing, good story telling skills. I read this the whole way through, and I usually just skim. So she is able to write in such a way to do that. Now, the actual technical or learning content is lower than the usual articles of the same length but it was a pleasanter read.
dqv 9y ago
I think it has to do with how much (quality) content she puts out there. She posts consistently, which helps build an audience. That audience posts her stuff to HN and also upvotes her posts when they see them on HN.
jakobegger 9y ago
Everything seems trivial once you understand it. The author seems to be good at making people understand, so that it seems trivial afterwards. Knowing nothing about load balancers, had I read your summary before Rachels article, I would probably just glossed over it, but I would not have understood its profound importance for designing load balancers. Rachel's story kept me engaged and explained the problem in a way that I will surely remember a lot longer. Teaching is not about reciting facts -- that's what reference manuals are for. Teaching is for engaging students, making them interested, giving background on a topic, telling you why something matters, making it easy to understand, and making sure the student remembers the most important bits. It's something I have been struggling a lot with junior devs and interns. I show them what they are doing wrong, how to do it correctly, and the next day they make the same mistake again. If people were perfect logical machines, just telling them facts might be sufficient. Unfortunately people are people, and it's really really hard to teach them something effectively.
- arkades 9y ago
  I think the truth lies in the middle somewhere. I knew absolutely nothing about load balancing before reading OPs comment and the blog post, and while you’re correct that I wouldn’t have retained OPs bullet point version as well as Rachel’s, Rachel really went on at a length far beyond what was needed to tell the story / explain the concept (eg, the beach ball sized bag of bread). People need an intuitive concept and image to grasp and reason on while they master an idea, but that doesn’t justify any arbitrary amount of over-elaborating.
  - mrmanner 9y ago
    I found that the (over)-elaboration made the article funnier to read. Since it's a Sunday, I wouldn't have read it if it was a boring, efficient, fact-crammed text reading like something from one of the more boring computer science classes I take. I did finish this though, and learned something on the way. So my point is: There are times when efficient and to the point is called for, and there are times when it's not.
- tzs 9y ago
snovv_crash 9y ago
They are short and simple, but looking from her blog it seems she also writes one every single day. Given that the subject matter strongly overlaps with what HN is about and the quality is high, I'm not surprised it gets HN attention fairly frequently.
tyingq 9y ago
Load testers can do health checks, though, right? Like wanting a 200 OK response versus just any response.
- camtarn 9y ago
  The problem comes when enough of the server is up to do a health check, but not enough to actually serve the request. For instance, a Java app server which has one app to respond to health checks, and another app to do processing - the second one can be jammed while the first one's happily reporting that everything's okay. If you then move the health check into the main app, maybe it eliminates a lot of false positives but the same thing can then happen further into the stack...

vivaan 9y ago

apparently you aren't the first one to wonder that [1]. It is Rachel Kroll, an engineer at fb [2]. Good point about the summary. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13401293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13401293 [2] https://www.facebook.com/wogrammer/posts/1748187012080407:0 https://www.facebook.com/wogrammer/posts/1748187012080407:0

mcbain 9y ago
Recently left FB, in fact. Which is important context for many of her posts in the last month or so.
- Rainymood 9y ago
  So basically she's using HN audience as a marketing blog and people are eating it up?
  - spydum 9y ago
    Marketing? What pray tell is she selling? If this had been some post about lessons learned about a the latest whizbang JS framework people wouldn't have had a second thought. I've read plenty of her posts and have sympathized, as being a long time sysadmin and learning the exact same lessons. She indeed does have a story telling skill which is sorely needed: ops people tend to suck at effectively sharing knowledge - she's doing valuable work here. I don't understand why there is criticism?
    - mrmanner 9y ago
      > I don't understand why there is criticism? If I were to be cynical, I'd say it's because a woman writing on information technology. Or because someone is writing about information technology without it being strict and to the point and boring to everyone that doesn't have a geeky interest in that specific piece of technology. But most likely the former.

baxtr 9y ago

I wonder that too. But it seems she has gift: telling tech stuff as story that resonates with the HN crowd.

avttre 9y ago
Maybe she's a trans woman n￸ig￸ge￸r.

xorcist 9y ago

Light hearted introductions to work related stuff you might encounter is always a crowd pleaser. It makes for great lightning talk ideas too. However, it might be prudent to point out that these things will feature in the first chapter of any book on load balancing, as an example of the pros and cons of different load balancing methods: least connections, least load, round robin etc. (Sometimes I suspect picking up a book is becoming a lost art in this day of devops and breaking things fast. Learning from mistakes is all well and good, but there are other ways too.)

eecks 9y ago
Do you recommend any books in particular in this area? It's something I need to learn more about.

feiofh398r39rty 9y ago

It's really low value compared to the most of the rest of the front page stuff. Interesting in a way but there is a lot of interesting stuff around that does not hug the front page.

banachtarski 9y ago

My first encounter was the "yak shaving" article that had a bunch of inaccuracies and it was pretty offputting. If that article was any reflection on the general sophistication I wouldn't really want to read any more. It felt like I was reading something out of the 90s.

krab 9y ago

As I read it, this piece wasn't that much about load balancers but rather about teaching. She experienced trouble explaining a problem in a way the students would understand, so she came up with a better method.

thinkingemote 9y ago

Good writing, good story telling skills. I read this the whole way through, and I usually just skim. So she is able to write in such a way to do that. Now, the actual technical or learning content is lower than the usual articles of the same length but it was a pleasanter read.

dqv 9y ago

I think it has to do with how much (quality) content she puts out there. She posts consistently, which helps build an audience. That audience posts her stuff to HN and also upvotes her posts when they see them on HN.

jakobegger 9y ago

Everything seems trivial once you understand it. The author seems to be good at making people understand, so that it seems trivial afterwards. Knowing nothing about load balancers, had I read your summary before Rachels article, I would probably just glossed over it, but I would not have understood its profound importance for designing load balancers. Rachel's story kept me engaged and explained the problem in a way that I will surely remember a lot longer. Teaching is not about reciting facts -- that's what reference manuals are for. Teaching is for engaging students, making them interested, giving background on a topic, telling you why something matters, making it easy to understand, and making sure the student remembers the most important bits. It's something I have been struggling a lot with junior devs and interns. I show them what they are doing wrong, how to do it correctly, and the next day they make the same mistake again. If people were perfect logical machines, just telling them facts might be sufficient. Unfortunately people are people, and it's really really hard to teach them something effectively.

arkades 9y ago
I think the truth lies in the middle somewhere. I knew absolutely nothing about load balancing before reading OPs comment and the blog post, and while you’re correct that I wouldn’t have retained OPs bullet point version as well as Rachel’s, Rachel really went on at a length far beyond what was needed to tell the story / explain the concept (eg, the beach ball sized bag of bread). People need an intuitive concept and image to grasp and reason on while they master an idea, but that doesn’t justify any arbitrary amount of over-elaborating.
- mrmanner 9y ago
  I found that the (over)-elaboration made the article funnier to read. Since it's a Sunday, I wouldn't have read it if it was a boring, efficient, fact-crammed text reading like something from one of the more boring computer science classes I take. I did finish this though, and learned something on the way. So my point is: There are times when efficient and to the point is called for, and there are times when it's not.
tzs 9y ago

snovv_crash 9y ago

They are short and simple, but looking from her blog it seems she also writes one every single day. Given that the subject matter strongly overlaps with what HN is about and the quality is high, I'm not surprised it gets HN attention fairly frequently.

tyingq 9y ago

Load testers can do health checks, though, right? Like wanting a 200 OK response versus just any response.

camtarn 9y ago
The problem comes when enough of the server is up to do a health check, but not enough to actually serve the request. For instance, a Java app server which has one app to respond to health checks, and another app to do processing - the second one can be jammed while the first one's happily reporting that everything's okay. If you then move the health check into the main app, maybe it eliminates a lot of false positives but the same thing can then happen further into the stack...