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This bit really caught my attention: > In contrast, this website runs on an off-the-grid solar power system with its own energy storage, and will go off-line d

This bit really caught my attention: > In contrast, this website runs on an off-the-grid solar power system with its own energy storage, and will go off-line during longer periods of cloudy weather. Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the-grid solar system, because above a certain threshold the fossil fuel energy used for producing and replacing the batteries is higher than the fossil fuel energy saved by the solar panels. This, in particular, is an amazing take: > Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the-grid solar system Saying that sacrificing uptime is a good thing for achieving a particular goal is a take that's so wildly out of line with what most of the industry believes is refreshing, because it really makes you think. What would the world look like, if instead of being obsessed with SRE we simply assumed or accepted that there will be downtime, and treated it like something perfectly normal. Maybe a nice message at ingress/load balancer level, telling everyone that the site will be back in a bit. I have no illusions that any company would want something like that, or that it's even feasible for many industries, e.g. healthcare, though the Latvian "e-health" system is an accidental experiment of this at the cost of around 15 million euros of taxpayer money: https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/latvija/par-e-veselibas-galveno-diagnozi-atzist-slikto-planosanu-un-vadisanu.a350191/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=lt&_x_tr_pto=nui https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/latvija/par-e... . However, if companies have working hours, why couldn't websites? What a funny thought. Edit: on an unrelated note, it's wild how different setups can be. For example: > The web server uses between 1 and 2.5 watts of power... While at the same time, i have two servers with 200GEs (essentially consumer hardware) running in my homelab, with a TDP of 35W each, though with the UPS and its inefficiencies, as well as the 4G router, the total energy consumption that i have to deal with is around 100W. Granted, i also use them for backups and as CI nodes, but there's still a difference of 20 - 50 times more power usage between one of my servers and one of theirs. I guess one can definitely talk about the differences between x86 and ARM there as well.

bennyp101 5y ago
"However, if companies have working hours, why couldn't websites?" There is a UK Gov website that only works during certain times (I think it's something to do with DVLA) - although I assume that is a technical thing, rather than it being powered by solar!
- blowski 5y ago
  Companies House used to have this. You could only register a new company 9am-5pm, Monday to Friday (and public holidays were also excluded).
gnur 5y ago
> Less than 100% reliability is essential This is actually a take most SRE's would / should believe. Every added 9 to the reliability increases the price exponentially. Finding the correct level of reliability is something most companies should focus more on, because sometimes a single physical machine that could go down once a year for a few hours is perfectly capable of providing all the resources a medium seized business could need. Proper backups, monitoring and recovery runbooks can even decrease the downtime of such a simple system to minutes, while easily saving you maybe thousands per month.
- y4mi 5y ago
  Esp if you consider bare metal servers. I'm currently paying 45€ for a Ryzen server with 64gb ECC ram and 1tb nvme storage (raid1). The speed is incredible if compared to ec2 or root server performance from other vendors. Even if they've dedicated resources.
  - kuon 5y ago
    May I ask you were you rent it?
    - bennyp101 5y ago
      I pay about the same for a server from Hetzner - from the server auctions (https://www.hetzner.com/sb https://www.hetzner.com/sb) - AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor (Cores 12) - 64GB - 2 x 2TB HDDs
      - kuon 5y ago
        That's cheap. We really underestimate the costs of running in the cloud.
        bennyp101 5y ago
        I guess a lot of the cloud costs are due to not having to really manage anything yourself - you are essentially paying for a team of people to keep the 'server' up and running and make sure that things 'Just Work' (largely, anyway)
colechristensen 5y ago
B&H Photo website observed the sabbath and won’t sell you anything during. There are things which are actually life critical that you want to be up and then there’s everything else, many people have really strange opinions about downtime and treat it like some kind of immorality. I don’t really buy the power arguments about extra capacity but that’s a big thing.
- rambambram 5y ago
  In The Netherlands there are (or were) Christian political parties shutting down their websites on Sunday automatically.
  - belter 5y ago
    For real? Do they request medical services to be up on Sunday or the Lord protects them? :-)
    - asoneth 5y ago
      I can't speak to the Christians, but even the most orthodox Jews I know support emergency services on the Sabbath -- and they'd absolutely drive someone to the emergency room if it came to that. Doing your best to observe a day of rest doesn't mean you can't choose to do work if it serves a greater good. (Whereas I'm pretty sure people won't die if they have to wait an extra day to order their camera equipment.)
      - belter 5y ago
        In the scenario you mentioned sounds tricky... https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1553-2712.1999.tb01226.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1553-2712....
        asoneth 5y ago
        That's a great article and spot on. And it's definitely complicated. Just because work necessary to preserve human life is allowed doesn't mean anything done in a hospital is therefore permitted -- a sizeable fraction of the work in a hospital is about bookkeeping, billing, insurance, scheduling followups, paperwork, etc which can wait a day or two without anyone dying.
delusional 5y ago
So the load balancers would still need 100% reliability? If they go down your browser can't connect to anything which would render you unable to send the "nice message". I think we'd have to have a pretty different internet in this hypothetical world.
- Juliate 5y ago
  That's how most of the internet operated in the 2000's, before SRE & DevOps really took traction (practices were already there somehow, but not pushed to that extent for web sites/apps). And we were not so much worse than today (I'd say even better, but that may be loosely coupled to 100% reliability - although FOMO also has a taste of it).
yoz-y 5y ago
> However, if companies have working hours, why couldn't websites? What a funny thought. Because of day/night cycle these working hours would usually overlap. This would put people who can’t afford to do their administrative business on the internet during work hours at a disadvantage.
rglullis 5y ago
> However, if companies have working hours, why couldn't websites? B&H Photo famously goes offline every Shabbat and I think it is great. It goes to show that you can have an sustainable and profitable business without sacrificing on principles.
New_California 5y ago
I love this website and the experiment. But you implying that more service downtimes is somehow progress of civilization is ridiculous. Civilization progress needs more reliability, not less.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  This. Also because if your energy source is solar, who cares if you're using a bit more power to provide extra reliability? Heck, even just charging a battery with the extra solar power would provide better reliability. I totally agree on saving power for users given that's a energy cost you pay N times - albeit I'd prefer some better defaults (in terms of colours and fonts). I guess we need a better, lightweight browser.
- vaylian 5y ago
  That's a very technologist perspective. But what about a more philosophical take? Life is not about technology or work. Life is about living. A bit of downtime and slowdown can be very refreshing.
  - WJW 5y ago
    Sure, but by taking your website down at certain times (or allowing the system to take itself down), you force your ideas about slowing down onto others who may or may not have time for that right now. It is actively hindering other people from trying to live the way they want (by reading about solar powered websites, in this case). It does not really matter for the Low Technology website of course, but if you get into a serious car accident and the surgeon is like "sorry but our solar powered operating theater is down right now, that's just life sometimes" that would be a very unwelcome thing to hear.
    - asoneth 5y ago
      There exists a middle ground between everyone gets five nines of reliability (expensive) and everyone only gets three nines of reliability (people die in hospitals). If we focus the same resources on providing reliability where it is needed most, we could actually improve reliability of outcomes. That is, for the same cost of providing a few hours of battery backup for the entire grid we could provide weeks of battery backup for hospitals and data centers.
yakubin 5y ago
One of my pet-peeves is how common it is for applications these days to assume you always have a reliable Internet connection. The shift to webapps makes the whole system really fragile. All it takes for an app to become unusable for everyone is a failure in just a couple nodes in the system. I don't use GitHub for work, but it's always amusing to see the cries of people who do, when it does down from time to time. The ability of many companies around the world to continue operating depends on just one company continuously making the right calls. In the future, when Ubisoft's servers go down, I won't be able to play Assassin's Creed games anymore, even though the servers don't really provide any value to me as a player. On Spotify I keep downloading the same songs over and over again. Poisoning the environment more than if I got a CD. These days I try to buy songs to download once and then play in my favourite offline music player. And of course SSH, the "secure shell", application which doesn't really optimize for shells. Responsiveness of typing things in the shell prompt relies on the quality of the Internet connection and the CPU load on the server machine - a process during which the server doesn't really have anything interesting to say. I'm working on the side on creating a company and those opinions lead me to choose the harder path of desktop applications which don't need Internet connection for anything that doesn't require it by definition. They're more resilient and comfortable to use. I'll probably fail, but I really can't make any other choice at the moment, I need to at least try and see for myself.
- xena 5y ago
  When those Ubisoft servers go down for good, the pirated copies of those games will be the ones preserved forever instead of the release ones.
  - throwaway946513 5y ago
    See Driver: San Francisco One of my favorite games, if not overall favorite. It's impossible to find a new copy now. Any legal copy you find is likely only a CD-key from some reseller site, or a physical disc for PS3/Xbox 360. It's not available from Ubisoft's store, nor Steam's store (where I purchased my copy).
- ehnto 5y ago
jhgb 5y ago
> Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the-grid solar system, because above a certain threshold the fossil fuel energy used for producing and replacing the batteries is higher than the fossil fuel energy saved by the solar panels. I wonder if whoever wrote this has actually done the calculations. These days it's not really difficult to provide fairly reliable solar power by overgenerating while still beating fossil fuels - perhaps not beating them as much as with zero overgeneration, but beating them anyway. So I'd take the quoted text with a considerably large grain of salt.
masklinn 5y ago
FWIW the article is from 2018, here's the followup from 2020: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-powered-website.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is... Notably wrt uptime: > Uptime > The solar powered website goes off-line when the weather is bad – but how often does that happen? For a period of about one year (351 days, from 12 December 2018 to 28 November 2019), we achieved an uptime of 95.26%. This means that we were off-line due to bad weather for 399 hours. > If we ignore the last two months, our uptime was 98.2%, with a downtime of only 152 hours. Uptime plummeted to 80% during the last two months, when a software upgrade increased the energy use of the server. This knocked the website off-line for at least a few hours every night. And while they found inefficiencies in their energy conversion system, > One kilowatt-hour of solar generated electricity can thus serve almost 50,000 unique visitors, and one watt-hour of electricity can serve roughly 50 unique visitors.
tarsinge 5y ago
Indeed I’m now curious what would happen if e-commerce shops had business hours?
- rvense 5y ago
  Most of my dumb eBay purchases are made when I should be sleeping. Hmm...
littlestymaar 5y ago
> Saying that sacrificing uptime is a good thing for achieving a particular goal is a take that's so wildly out of line with what most of the industry believes is refreshing, because it really makes you think. What would the world look like, if instead of being obsessed with SRE we simply assumed or accepted that there will be downtime, and treated it like something perfectly normal. My bank's website has been down for maintenance for 24h this week-end. And French government website for declaring VAT will be down for a few hours tomorrow. Many people still consider downtime as normal. It's not trendy to talk about it, but downtime isn't such a big deal. (Going down because you cannot handle your peak load is very bad though)
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  This depends. If it's a planned downtime with stuff, people can plan around (eg pay your bill before the weekend), that's bearable. But if the government wants you to do something (eg. declare VAT), but then the page isn't available, and they still expect you to do it, and you could get fined if you don't... that's a really shitty thing to happen.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    It's a social thing. When you know the service might be down when you need it at the last moment, you just plan and do things quite some time before the deadline so you don't get caught. In the twenties century, trains in Spain where completely unreliable: they could leave one hour early, or 3 hours late, yet people would get fired if they couldn't get to work in time. But it still worked: people just didn't run into the train station 5 minutes before departure.
rakoo 5y ago
> Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability Less than 100% reliability is going to be mandatory as part of the degrowth we'll need if we want to seriously tackle climate change. Less reliability, all the way towards offline-first, is the most sensible way to go
- Juliate 5y ago
  Actually, you can achieve 100% reliability with any kind or extent of downtime. As long as downtime is expected and bounded, as long as the uptime planned period is actually up, you're at 100% reliability (but not 100% uptime).
  - rakoo 5y ago
    I think you're being pedantic over the meaning of words; true, a website that announces being up 1 minute per year and is up 1 minute per year is 100% reliable. But in common discussions, reliable really means "up and running". Now, maybe you're right and we should be using another word, and aim towards less uptime ?
    - Juliate 5y ago
      Well, maybe that's pedantic, but reliability has a precise meaning that means hard money through service level agreements. So yes, it's worth it to be specific over the difference between being available and being reliable (== meeting expectations, including being unavailable at times). If I claim a 99.5% uptime SLA guarantee for my webservice and that it does, it's reliable. However, 0.5% of the time, it may be unavailable _and that's not an issue_.
ricardolopes 5y ago
OTOH with global replication, it should be possible to keep closer to 100% uptime running on solar. We would need continued cloudy weather globally to bring every solar powered server down at the same time. Global replication could also give us more edge computing, which puts less load on global infrastructure (assuming good weather to use the nearest server), which in turn should be able to reduce resources consumption a bit more.
- sprkwd 5y ago
  Like this: http://solarprotocol.net/ http://solarprotocol.net/
  - anthk 5y ago
    That's bad, it depends on web tecnologies. Give a check to NNCP: https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      I don't necessarily disagree with using web tech, but I do think store-and-forward is a lot more resilient than an always-pull model like the web. I mean, that's what a CDN is essentially: content is stored and forwarded to other CDN instances so that a user can consume it.
  - ricardolopes 5y ago
    Yes, like exactly like that. That website may look a bit too hobbyist, but that setup could definitely be used for other websites as well.
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the-grid solar system" 100% reliability is a terrible, dangerous lie. People make mistakes.This is well and good when we are talking about entertainment and Instagram. However we are now adding fragile Internet-connected code in critical infrastructure: cashless society means that if your bank is down, you can't get food. All cycling stands in London need to talk to their server, and when it's down, you lost ability to get transport. Same for public transport and Uber - if they fail in during a winter night, someone somewhere will freeze to death. The door dialing in my house needs the internet to do IP-calling to your phone. They were digging up my street and cut the cable, and I was stuck in the cold for an hour. This is going to spread - imagine a failure of the system managing running water, or god forbid the suer?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Heneeque 5y ago
I just don't think it is a real issue. It is much easier to have it from renewable sources as your DC doesn't move and the CO2 to social benefit is so huge. Imagine giving up all mass CO2 producers, alone transport of people and goods but still being connected to everyone and sharing knowledge and learning etc. I would like to see addicting things like reddit having office hours but being able to shop at night for something I need (like a new pair of pants after the ol d one ripped) is saving tons of CO2.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
> However, if companies have working hours, why couldn't websites? What a funny thought. Our banks have those, and it's a really shitty experience. Yeah, sure, e-bank works, you pay, but if the person receiving the money is at another bank, that my bank has no extra contract with, I have to wait until the next workday for the funds to be transfered. If I want to buy something with a bank transfer on a friday night, the funds won't get transfered until monday morning.
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  You are in the US? In Norway it typically happens within the same day but my bank (SBanken.no) also offers instant transfers to other banks even at the weekend. If both sender and recipient use a mobile phone service like Vipps then the recipient also receives the money immediately (within seconds) regardless of whether they use the same bank. I think similar services exist in other countries too.
  - anthk 5y ago
    Spaniard here. Yes, we have something similar like that.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nwsm 5y ago
> Saying that sacrificing uptime is a good thing for achieving a particular goal is a take that's so wildly out of line with what most of the industry believes is refreshing, because it really makes you think. What would the world look like, if instead of being obsessed with SRE we simply assumed or accepted that there will be downtime, and treated it like something perfectly normal. Maybe a nice message at ingress/load balancer level, telling everyone that the site will be back in a bit. The difference is that here, the downtime saves energy. "Normal" downtime is unintentional. Servers are still running, just in an error state. They may be constantly attempting to restart themselves at some level (looking at you, k8s). Users are still trying to hit them and their requests may be partially handled. Traffic may be pushed over to newly spun up instances. We can accept that things happen and running large internet services is hard, and SREs and developers everywhere will rejoice, but it won't save energy.
1-more 5y ago
> if companies have working hours, why couldn't websites B&H Photo is offline on Saturdays to keep the Sabbath.
vageli 5y ago
> However, if companies have working hours, why couldn't websites? What a funny thought. You may be surprised to hear that some websites _do_! I was trying to search for the page but can't find it at the moment, but I've experienced this with a Dept. of Homeland Security page that would only be available during certain hours. I believe it was due to some batch-processing related task but can't recall exactly now.
IAmNotAFix 5y ago
Whoever has the best uptime wins.
ranger_danger 5y ago
In Japan many websites still go offline every night "for maintenance" for most of the night.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  Any idea as to why. I mean it's a create time for maintenance, but every night seems like a bit much.
toss1 5y ago
Yup, assumptions of less than 100% connectivity and designing for that would really change the world. While I know everyone likes to hate on Lotus Notes here, once of it's key architecture features was that it assumed a seldom-connected and replicated data model - the clients and servers would contact each other at intervals to get updates, and otherwise everything was local. Decades later, I still miss this functionality a lot - just force and update/replicate before you go somewhere (either office-home or a trip across the world), and everything is the same. No worries about connectivity quality; if it was choppy, just give it more time to handle the retries/ecc, and get the good updates. (of course, many system managers/admins/devs didn't really consider that much of a feature and treated it like any other network app, so not taking advantage of it, but those who understood it's power...) I really wish others would think in such a seldom-connected model, as the network is becoming increasingly brittle, and working in that model was such a joy.
- anthk 5y ago
  >I really wish others would think in such a seldom-connected model, as the network is becoming increasingly brittle, and working in that model was such a joy. https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org Also, the old NNTP and email lists are still alive. I use SLRN on batch mode on Usenet and tildex (Unix based micronetworks), and it rocks. In batch mode, I pull down all the comments/articles and I push down the answers and written articles. No need to be online 24h/7d. For email, i use Getmail against an IMAP server. Thus, I can fetch all the data offline at once with a 'do_the_internet.sh' script in a breeze. I would love to use HN over NNTP.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    > I would love to use HN over NNTP. How would you represent upvotes and ranking over NNTP, or would you just drop that for comments altogether? (I'm asking because I've been thinking of implementing something exactly like this, with NNCP also maybe, but the ranking is what I'm not sure on.) > tildex (Unix based micronetworks) Ooh what are these tildexes?
    - 5y ago

bennyp101 5y ago

"However, if companies have working hours, why couldn't websites?" There is a UK Gov website that only works during certain times (I think it's something to do with DVLA) - although I assume that is a technical thing, rather than it being powered by solar!

blowski 5y ago
Companies House used to have this. You could only register a new company 9am-5pm, Monday to Friday (and public holidays were also excluded).

gnur 5y ago

> Less than 100% reliability is essential This is actually a take most SRE's would / should believe. Every added 9 to the reliability increases the price exponentially. Finding the correct level of reliability is something most companies should focus more on, because sometimes a single physical machine that could go down once a year for a few hours is perfectly capable of providing all the resources a medium seized business could need. Proper backups, monitoring and recovery runbooks can even decrease the downtime of such a simple system to minutes, while easily saving you maybe thousands per month.

y4mi 5y ago
Esp if you consider bare metal servers. I'm currently paying 45€ for a Ryzen server with 64gb ECC ram and 1tb nvme storage (raid1). The speed is incredible if compared to ec2 or root server performance from other vendors. Even if they've dedicated resources.
- kuon 5y ago
  May I ask you were you rent it?
  - bennyp101 5y ago
    I pay about the same for a server from Hetzner - from the server auctions (https://www.hetzner.com/sb https://www.hetzner.com/sb) - AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor (Cores 12) - 64GB - 2 x 2TB HDDs
    - kuon 5y ago
      That's cheap. We really underestimate the costs of running in the cloud.
      - bennyp101 5y ago
        I guess a lot of the cloud costs are due to not having to really manage anything yourself - you are essentially paying for a team of people to keep the 'server' up and running and make sure that things 'Just Work' (largely, anyway)

colechristensen 5y ago

B&H Photo website observed the sabbath and won’t sell you anything during. There are things which are actually life critical that you want to be up and then there’s everything else, many people have really strange opinions about downtime and treat it like some kind of immorality. I don’t really buy the power arguments about extra capacity but that’s a big thing.

rambambram 5y ago
In The Netherlands there are (or were) Christian political parties shutting down their websites on Sunday automatically.
- belter 5y ago
  For real? Do they request medical services to be up on Sunday or the Lord protects them? :-)
  - asoneth 5y ago
    I can't speak to the Christians, but even the most orthodox Jews I know support emergency services on the Sabbath -- and they'd absolutely drive someone to the emergency room if it came to that. Doing your best to observe a day of rest doesn't mean you can't choose to do work if it serves a greater good. (Whereas I'm pretty sure people won't die if they have to wait an extra day to order their camera equipment.)
    - belter 5y ago
      In the scenario you mentioned sounds tricky... https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1553-2712.1999.tb01226.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1553-2712....
      - asoneth 5y ago
        That's a great article and spot on. And it's definitely complicated. Just because work necessary to preserve human life is allowed doesn't mean anything done in a hospital is therefore permitted -- a sizeable fraction of the work in a hospital is about bookkeeping, billing, insurance, scheduling followups, paperwork, etc which can wait a day or two without anyone dying.

delusional 5y ago

So the load balancers would still need 100% reliability? If they go down your browser can't connect to anything which would render you unable to send the "nice message". I think we'd have to have a pretty different internet in this hypothetical world.

Juliate 5y ago
That's how most of the internet operated in the 2000's, before SRE & DevOps really took traction (practices were already there somehow, but not pushed to that extent for web sites/apps). And we were not so much worse than today (I'd say even better, but that may be loosely coupled to 100% reliability - although FOMO also has a taste of it).

yoz-y 5y ago

> However, if companies have working hours, why couldn't websites? What a funny thought. Because of day/night cycle these working hours would usually overlap. This would put people who can’t afford to do their administrative business on the internet during work hours at a disadvantage.

rglullis 5y ago

> However, if companies have working hours, why couldn't websites? B&H Photo famously goes offline every Shabbat and I think it is great. It goes to show that you can have an sustainable and profitable business without sacrificing on principles.

New_California 5y ago

I love this website and the experiment. But you implying that more service downtimes is somehow progress of civilization is ridiculous. Civilization progress needs more reliability, not less.

jokethrowaway 5y ago
This. Also because if your energy source is solar, who cares if you're using a bit more power to provide extra reliability? Heck, even just charging a battery with the extra solar power would provide better reliability. I totally agree on saving power for users given that's a energy cost you pay N times - albeit I'd prefer some better defaults (in terms of colours and fonts). I guess we need a better, lightweight browser.
vaylian 5y ago
That's a very technologist perspective. But what about a more philosophical take? Life is not about technology or work. Life is about living. A bit of downtime and slowdown can be very refreshing.
- WJW 5y ago
  Sure, but by taking your website down at certain times (or allowing the system to take itself down), you force your ideas about slowing down onto others who may or may not have time for that right now. It is actively hindering other people from trying to live the way they want (by reading about solar powered websites, in this case). It does not really matter for the Low Technology website of course, but if you get into a serious car accident and the surgeon is like "sorry but our solar powered operating theater is down right now, that's just life sometimes" that would be a very unwelcome thing to hear.
  - asoneth 5y ago
    There exists a middle ground between everyone gets five nines of reliability (expensive) and everyone only gets three nines of reliability (people die in hospitals). If we focus the same resources on providing reliability where it is needed most, we could actually improve reliability of outcomes. That is, for the same cost of providing a few hours of battery backup for the entire grid we could provide weeks of battery backup for hospitals and data centers.

yakubin 5y ago

One of my pet-peeves is how common it is for applications these days to assume you always have a reliable Internet connection. The shift to webapps makes the whole system really fragile. All it takes for an app to become unusable for everyone is a failure in just a couple nodes in the system. I don't use GitHub for work, but it's always amusing to see the cries of people who do, when it does down from time to time. The ability of many companies around the world to continue operating depends on just one company continuously making the right calls. In the future, when Ubisoft's servers go down, I won't be able to play Assassin's Creed games anymore, even though the servers don't really provide any value to me as a player. On Spotify I keep downloading the same songs over and over again. Poisoning the environment more than if I got a CD. These days I try to buy songs to download once and then play in my favourite offline music player. And of course SSH, the "secure shell", application which doesn't really optimize for shells. Responsiveness of typing things in the shell prompt relies on the quality of the Internet connection and the CPU load on the server machine - a process during which the server doesn't really have anything interesting to say. I'm working on the side on creating a company and those opinions lead me to choose the harder path of desktop applications which don't need Internet connection for anything that doesn't require it by definition. They're more resilient and comfortable to use. I'll probably fail, but I really can't make any other choice at the moment, I need to at least try and see for myself.

xena 5y ago
When those Ubisoft servers go down for good, the pirated copies of those games will be the ones preserved forever instead of the release ones.
- throwaway946513 5y ago
  See Driver: San Francisco One of my favorite games, if not overall favorite. It's impossible to find a new copy now. Any legal copy you find is likely only a CD-key from some reseller site, or a physical disc for PS3/Xbox 360. It's not available from Ubisoft's store, nor Steam's store (where I purchased my copy).
ehnto 5y ago

jhgb 5y ago

> Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the-grid solar system, because above a certain threshold the fossil fuel energy used for producing and replacing the batteries is higher than the fossil fuel energy saved by the solar panels. I wonder if whoever wrote this has actually done the calculations. These days it's not really difficult to provide fairly reliable solar power by overgenerating while still beating fossil fuels - perhaps not beating them as much as with zero overgeneration, but beating them anyway. So I'd take the quoted text with a considerably large grain of salt.

masklinn 5y ago

FWIW the article is from 2018, here's the followup from 2020: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-powered-website.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is... Notably wrt uptime: > Uptime > The solar powered website goes off-line when the weather is bad – but how often does that happen? For a period of about one year (351 days, from 12 December 2018 to 28 November 2019), we achieved an uptime of 95.26%. This means that we were off-line due to bad weather for 399 hours. > If we ignore the last two months, our uptime was 98.2%, with a downtime of only 152 hours. Uptime plummeted to 80% during the last two months, when a software upgrade increased the energy use of the server. This knocked the website off-line for at least a few hours every night. And while they found inefficiencies in their energy conversion system, > One kilowatt-hour of solar generated electricity can thus serve almost 50,000 unique visitors, and one watt-hour of electricity can serve roughly 50 unique visitors.

tarsinge 5y ago

Indeed I’m now curious what would happen if e-commerce shops had business hours?

rvense 5y ago
Most of my dumb eBay purchases are made when I should be sleeping. Hmm...

littlestymaar 5y ago

> Saying that sacrificing uptime is a good thing for achieving a particular goal is a take that's so wildly out of line with what most of the industry believes is refreshing, because it really makes you think. What would the world look like, if instead of being obsessed with SRE we simply assumed or accepted that there will be downtime, and treated it like something perfectly normal. My bank's website has been down for maintenance for 24h this week-end. And French government website for declaring VAT will be down for a few hours tomorrow. Many people still consider downtime as normal. It's not trendy to talk about it, but downtime isn't such a big deal. (Going down because you cannot handle your peak load is very bad though)

ajsnigrutin 5y ago
This depends. If it's a planned downtime with stuff, people can plan around (eg pay your bill before the weekend), that's bearable. But if the government wants you to do something (eg. declare VAT), but then the page isn't available, and they still expect you to do it, and you could get fined if you don't... that's a really shitty thing to happen.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  It's a social thing. When you know the service might be down when you need it at the last moment, you just plan and do things quite some time before the deadline so you don't get caught. In the twenties century, trains in Spain where completely unreliable: they could leave one hour early, or 3 hours late, yet people would get fired if they couldn't get to work in time. But it still worked: people just didn't run into the train station 5 minutes before departure.

rakoo 5y ago

> Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability Less than 100% reliability is going to be mandatory as part of the degrowth we'll need if we want to seriously tackle climate change. Less reliability, all the way towards offline-first, is the most sensible way to go

Juliate 5y ago
Actually, you can achieve 100% reliability with any kind or extent of downtime. As long as downtime is expected and bounded, as long as the uptime planned period is actually up, you're at 100% reliability (but not 100% uptime).
- rakoo 5y ago
  I think you're being pedantic over the meaning of words; true, a website that announces being up 1 minute per year and is up 1 minute per year is 100% reliable. But in common discussions, reliable really means "up and running". Now, maybe you're right and we should be using another word, and aim towards less uptime ?
  - Juliate 5y ago
    Well, maybe that's pedantic, but reliability has a precise meaning that means hard money through service level agreements. So yes, it's worth it to be specific over the difference between being available and being reliable (== meeting expectations, including being unavailable at times). If I claim a 99.5% uptime SLA guarantee for my webservice and that it does, it's reliable. However, 0.5% of the time, it may be unavailable _and that's not an issue_.

ricardolopes 5y ago

OTOH with global replication, it should be possible to keep closer to 100% uptime running on solar. We would need continued cloudy weather globally to bring every solar powered server down at the same time. Global replication could also give us more edge computing, which puts less load on global infrastructure (assuming good weather to use the nearest server), which in turn should be able to reduce resources consumption a bit more.

sprkwd 5y ago
Like this: http://solarprotocol.net/ http://solarprotocol.net/
- anthk 5y ago
  That's bad, it depends on web tecnologies. Give a check to NNCP: https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    I don't necessarily disagree with using web tech, but I do think store-and-forward is a lot more resilient than an always-pull model like the web. I mean, that's what a CDN is essentially: content is stored and forwarded to other CDN instances so that a user can consume it.
- ricardolopes 5y ago
  Yes, like exactly like that. That website may look a bit too hobbyist, but that setup could definitely be used for other websites as well.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

"Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the-grid solar system" 100% reliability is a terrible, dangerous lie. People make mistakes.This is well and good when we are talking about entertainment and Instagram. However we are now adding fragile Internet-connected code in critical infrastructure: cashless society means that if your bank is down, you can't get food. All cycling stands in London need to talk to their server, and when it's down, you lost ability to get transport. Same for public transport and Uber - if they fail in during a winter night, someone somewhere will freeze to death. The door dialing in my house needs the internet to do IP-calling to your phone. They were digging up my street and cut the cable, and I was stuck in the cold for an hour. This is going to spread - imagine a failure of the system managing running water, or god forbid the suer?

deleted 5y ago
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Heneeque 5y ago

I just don't think it is a real issue. It is much easier to have it from renewable sources as your DC doesn't move and the CO2 to social benefit is so huge. Imagine giving up all mass CO2 producers, alone transport of people and goods but still being connected to everyone and sharing knowledge and learning etc. I would like to see addicting things like reddit having office hours but being able to shop at night for something I need (like a new pair of pants after the ol d one ripped) is saving tons of CO2.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

> However, if companies have working hours, why couldn't websites? What a funny thought. Our banks have those, and it's a really shitty experience. Yeah, sure, e-bank works, you pay, but if the person receiving the money is at another bank, that my bank has no extra contract with, I have to wait until the next workday for the funds to be transfered. If I want to buy something with a bank transfer on a friday night, the funds won't get transfered until monday morning.

kwhitefoot 5y ago
You are in the US? In Norway it typically happens within the same day but my bank (SBanken.no) also offers instant transfers to other banks even at the weekend. If both sender and recipient use a mobile phone service like Vipps then the recipient also receives the money immediately (within seconds) regardless of whether they use the same bank. I think similar services exist in other countries too.
- anthk 5y ago
  Spaniard here. Yes, we have something similar like that.

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nwsm 5y ago

> Saying that sacrificing uptime is a good thing for achieving a particular goal is a take that's so wildly out of line with what most of the industry believes is refreshing, because it really makes you think. What would the world look like, if instead of being obsessed with SRE we simply assumed or accepted that there will be downtime, and treated it like something perfectly normal. Maybe a nice message at ingress/load balancer level, telling everyone that the site will be back in a bit. The difference is that here, the downtime saves energy. "Normal" downtime is unintentional. Servers are still running, just in an error state. They may be constantly attempting to restart themselves at some level (looking at you, k8s). Users are still trying to hit them and their requests may be partially handled. Traffic may be pushed over to newly spun up instances. We can accept that things happen and running large internet services is hard, and SREs and developers everywhere will rejoice, but it won't save energy.

1-more 5y ago

> if companies have working hours, why couldn't websites B&H Photo is offline on Saturdays to keep the Sabbath.

vageli 5y ago

> However, if companies have working hours, why couldn't websites? What a funny thought. You may be surprised to hear that some websites _do_! I was trying to search for the page but can't find it at the moment, but I've experienced this with a Dept. of Homeland Security page that would only be available during certain hours. I believe it was due to some batch-processing related task but can't recall exactly now.

IAmNotAFix 5y ago

Whoever has the best uptime wins.

ranger_danger 5y ago

In Japan many websites still go offline every night "for maintenance" for most of the night.

mrweasel 5y ago
Any idea as to why. I mean it's a create time for maintenance, but every night seems like a bit much.

toss1 5y ago

Yup, assumptions of less than 100% connectivity and designing for that would really change the world. While I know everyone likes to hate on Lotus Notes here, once of it's key architecture features was that it assumed a seldom-connected and replicated data model - the clients and servers would contact each other at intervals to get updates, and otherwise everything was local. Decades later, I still miss this functionality a lot - just force and update/replicate before you go somewhere (either office-home or a trip across the world), and everything is the same. No worries about connectivity quality; if it was choppy, just give it more time to handle the retries/ecc, and get the good updates. (of course, many system managers/admins/devs didn't really consider that much of a feature and treated it like any other network app, so not taking advantage of it, but those who understood it's power...) I really wish others would think in such a seldom-connected model, as the network is becoming increasingly brittle, and working in that model was such a joy.

anthk 5y ago
>I really wish others would think in such a seldom-connected model, as the network is becoming increasingly brittle, and working in that model was such a joy. https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org Also, the old NNTP and email lists are still alive. I use SLRN on batch mode on Usenet and tildex (Unix based micronetworks), and it rocks. In batch mode, I pull down all the comments/articles and I push down the answers and written articles. No need to be online 24h/7d. For email, i use Getmail against an IMAP server. Thus, I can fetch all the data offline at once with a 'do_the_internet.sh' script in a breeze. I would love to use HN over NNTP.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  > I would love to use HN over NNTP. How would you represent upvotes and ranking over NNTP, or would you just drop that for comments altogether? (I'm asking because I've been thinking of implementing something exactly like this, with NNCP also maybe, but the ranking is what I'm not sure on.) > tildex (Unix based micronetworks) Ooh what are these tildexes?
  - 5y ago