5 ms·

I love this website and the experiment. But you implying that more service downtimes is somehow progress of civilization is ridiculous. Civilization progress n

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.
  - snakeboy 5y ago
    Your example which is why everyone in this thread has been bending over backwards to emphasize that certain services (like medical ones) should aim for full reliability. Suppose twitter/reddit/HN shut down for 10 hours a day.
    - WJW 5y ago
      Which 10 hours? Timezone differences alone would shut out large portions of the world. A service which is only up when I'm asleep or at work is not very useful to me.
      - snakeboy 5y ago
        And 90% of Twitter's problems would be solved if they weren't trying to be maximally "useful" to every single person on earth all the time. 10 hours was just an arbitrary number, but there are plenty of more creative solutions. Shut down every March, or Weekday mornings, or every other hour.
- threatofrain 5y ago
  > A bit of downtime and slowdown can be very refreshing. That's up to the customer to decide. Insofar as we live in a world where customers decide the fate of businesses in a do or die way, I feel the conclusion is obvious. Either the customer shares your philosophy that your downtime is part of an enjoyable rhythm of life, or you die.
  - vaylian 5y ago
    Not everything on the internet is for-profit. The low-tech magazine website is a prime example of that.
  - asoneth 5y ago
    That's a good point, but note that providing reliability adds production cost as well. Services and businesses with guaranteed high reliability cost significantly more than those with low reliability, and I'd expect that cost to be reflected in their prices. That's why guaranteed overnight delivery generally costs more than waiting a week or two for your package. I work at a company that provides business services, and some customers are fine dealing with irregular availability of resources if it means the service cost an order of magnitude less. It's not common in power yet, but in the future a hospital might pay $1/kWh for high-uptime power whereas someone else might pay $0.01/kWh for excess capacity provided as available to charge their car.
  - rakoo 5y ago
    Most websites aren't businesses. How do you vote with your wallet to decide you accept that a website slows down ? Even when a website is a business, you pay for the whole service; there is no competition on uptime alone.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- New_California 5y ago
  "Technologist perspective" - BS, you can only afford to entertain your philosophical takes because of strong reliability of the services around you, from your grocery store being full of goods to electricity at your place, to HN being online.
  - KronisLV 5y ago
    To me, that sounds like perhaps choosing a lifestyle which has significant reliance on those services, while at the same time not accounting for any possible downtime and expecting everything to work - that's akin to running your application on a single VPS with no backups. If there are any issues with the grocery store or the technologies in it, then perhaps it's possible to pay in cash. If there are larger problems with the grocery store's supply chain, i can just go outside to my greenhouse and get some fresh veggies. If i don't have a greenhouse, i have a bunch of beans and other canned goods in my cellar, as well as crackers and so on. If i don't have my cellar, i have a bunch of frozen meat in the fridge. If i don't have said meat, i have a rifle and a forest with animals for that. And if i don't have any of that, i can always just go to my neighbours and ask whether they have anything to share (or offer the same sort of help, should they be dealing with the same hypothetical situation, instead of me; things would only break down when everyone would be starving). If there are electricity interruptions, i have a few UPSes in place. If the UPSes run out of power, then i have a diesel generator in the cellar (with the appropriate ventilation system in place). If i don't have any diesel, my house has a stove that burns wood and has central heating with radiators, as well as candles or a petroleum lamp, or even a flashlight with a generator for lights. And if HN isn't online, i'll just read a book, since there is a shelf with some lovely literature to be enjoyed, or will simply write something in my diary, as people do. I'm saying this not to discredit the fact that many people choose to live in the larger cities, since there are definitely different advantages to that choice, however at the same time you have to consider the overall trends in society, when you take things as electricity or a stable food supply for granted, which may not always be the case. That said, there are relatively few things that are truly time sensitive, such as having a supply of important life sustaining medication. I wouldn't expect my grocery store to have a 99.99% uptime, nor would i expect that even out of my electricity supply, hence the UPSes and generator, and HN going down wouldn't be the end of the world either. And when we are talking about the greater supply chains that we don't see in our daily lives, honestly there always should be a business continuity plan in place - if your computer system goes down because of Y2K, a solar flare or the data center burning down, then you should be able to keep on trucking with calculators and some paper. Anything less is not all that responsible, if we're really talking about important domains.
- lostmsu 5y ago
  Philosophical take is useless here. This thinking only works on a primitive society, where life is wrapped around a relatively small group of people. Today we have supply chains that have 20+ components. If they'd have 5% downtime each, the entire chain would only work 35% of time.
KronisLV 5y ago
What I'm implying is that it's interesting to consider an alternative point of view: where certain non-critical (at least to the greater society) systems would be treated as such, instead of paging people at 6 AM because a CRUD is down. Reliability often comes at the expense of making some people's lives much less pleasant (especially in situations of underfunding or not having the corporation back any of your SRE initiatives), or, alternatively, with exponentially increasing costs, since all of the sudden everything needs to be high availability and have redundancy in place. Consider the recent Roblox outage. No one died because of it, yet countless engineers were working around the clock to ensure the profitable operation of the platform. When the Latvian Electronic Tax Declaration system goes down on the first day of the year when you can declare your taxes (basically every year), the ministry representatives shrug their shoulders and essentially say: "Nah, we can't make it cope with the load. Just wait a day." And you know, maybe they can't, but at the same time even so everyone still manages to submit their taxes eventually. Thus, perhaps it's worth it to consider when and where we need the scalability and high availability, e.g. government centralized auth services under Latvija.lv which also went down because of the load and as a consequence people had to wait longer to sign up for COVID vaccines and couldn't use other systems until it was resolved: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/manavakcina-lv-and-apturicovid-lv https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/manavakcina-lv-and-apturico... Then, we should focus on those more important cases. Now, I'm not trying to suggest that the incompetence or dismissive attitudes are (always) okay, instead, I'm merely suggesting that we should consider our priorities and wonder what a more laid back environment would look like. I still recall once sending a hotfix for a prod issue at 3 AM. I wonder what things would look like if instead of worrying whether a certain business process can take place at a certain date, the attitude would have been more like: "We'll just tell everyone to wait a day or two. It's not like our product is time sensitive."
- threatofrain 5y ago
  You're talking about situations of what is essentially a de jure monopoly on a critical need. People sign up for COVID vaccines and file their taxes to avoid being screwed. In places with competition the customer is the one who decides whether you are screwed. Is downtime from social media or news rather trivial? The business deadliness of downtime is different from the societal deadliness of downtime, but what significance this takes on is up to the customer to say, and the customer develops expectations based on the competition.
asoneth 5y ago
> Civilization progress needs more reliability Not necessarily. Similar to software, each nine costs (in money, pollution, effort, etc) at least an order of magnitude more than the last, and at some point it's more efficient to focus on resilience elsewhere in the system. Wind and solar are great but they're far too irregular to rely on so in places without hydro storage you're often left with either chemical batteries, which would be prohibitively expensive to support the entire grid for a few days, or fossil fuel peaker plants, which will ultimately result in coastal flooding. One alternative has been to use demand response to pay people to cut back and dynamic (wholesale) prices to encourage people to conserve when supplies are low. Perhaps at some point electricity providers could even institute different prices for different levels of service. That is, one would pay $1/kWh for any capacity that requires less than an hour of downtime per year like servers and medical equipment, but $0.01/kWh for excess capacity used for vehicle charging that is irregularly available day-to-day. The "smart grid" and meters necessary to support this kind of thing don't exist, but may in the future, and adapting to this kind of irregularity would allow us to have a much lower-cost electricity grid.

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.
- snakeboy 5y ago
  Your example which is why everyone in this thread has been bending over backwards to emphasize that certain services (like medical ones) should aim for full reliability. Suppose twitter/reddit/HN shut down for 10 hours a day.
  - WJW 5y ago
    Which 10 hours? Timezone differences alone would shut out large portions of the world. A service which is only up when I'm asleep or at work is not very useful to me.
    - snakeboy 5y ago
      And 90% of Twitter's problems would be solved if they weren't trying to be maximally "useful" to every single person on earth all the time. 10 hours was just an arbitrary number, but there are plenty of more creative solutions. Shut down every March, or Weekday mornings, or every other hour.
threatofrain 5y ago
> A bit of downtime and slowdown can be very refreshing. That's up to the customer to decide. Insofar as we live in a world where customers decide the fate of businesses in a do or die way, I feel the conclusion is obvious. Either the customer shares your philosophy that your downtime is part of an enjoyable rhythm of life, or you die.
- vaylian 5y ago
  Not everything on the internet is for-profit. The low-tech magazine website is a prime example of that.
- asoneth 5y ago
  That's a good point, but note that providing reliability adds production cost as well. Services and businesses with guaranteed high reliability cost significantly more than those with low reliability, and I'd expect that cost to be reflected in their prices. That's why guaranteed overnight delivery generally costs more than waiting a week or two for your package. I work at a company that provides business services, and some customers are fine dealing with irregular availability of resources if it means the service cost an order of magnitude less. It's not common in power yet, but in the future a hospital might pay $1/kWh for high-uptime power whereas someone else might pay $0.01/kWh for excess capacity provided as available to charge their car.
- rakoo 5y ago
  Most websites aren't businesses. How do you vote with your wallet to decide you accept that a website slows down ? Even when a website is a business, you pay for the whole service; there is no competition on uptime alone.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
New_California 5y ago
"Technologist perspective" - BS, you can only afford to entertain your philosophical takes because of strong reliability of the services around you, from your grocery store being full of goods to electricity at your place, to HN being online.
- KronisLV 5y ago
  To me, that sounds like perhaps choosing a lifestyle which has significant reliance on those services, while at the same time not accounting for any possible downtime and expecting everything to work - that's akin to running your application on a single VPS with no backups. If there are any issues with the grocery store or the technologies in it, then perhaps it's possible to pay in cash. If there are larger problems with the grocery store's supply chain, i can just go outside to my greenhouse and get some fresh veggies. If i don't have a greenhouse, i have a bunch of beans and other canned goods in my cellar, as well as crackers and so on. If i don't have my cellar, i have a bunch of frozen meat in the fridge. If i don't have said meat, i have a rifle and a forest with animals for that. And if i don't have any of that, i can always just go to my neighbours and ask whether they have anything to share (or offer the same sort of help, should they be dealing with the same hypothetical situation, instead of me; things would only break down when everyone would be starving). If there are electricity interruptions, i have a few UPSes in place. If the UPSes run out of power, then i have a diesel generator in the cellar (with the appropriate ventilation system in place). If i don't have any diesel, my house has a stove that burns wood and has central heating with radiators, as well as candles or a petroleum lamp, or even a flashlight with a generator for lights. And if HN isn't online, i'll just read a book, since there is a shelf with some lovely literature to be enjoyed, or will simply write something in my diary, as people do. I'm saying this not to discredit the fact that many people choose to live in the larger cities, since there are definitely different advantages to that choice, however at the same time you have to consider the overall trends in society, when you take things as electricity or a stable food supply for granted, which may not always be the case. That said, there are relatively few things that are truly time sensitive, such as having a supply of important life sustaining medication. I wouldn't expect my grocery store to have a 99.99% uptime, nor would i expect that even out of my electricity supply, hence the UPSes and generator, and HN going down wouldn't be the end of the world either. And when we are talking about the greater supply chains that we don't see in our daily lives, honestly there always should be a business continuity plan in place - if your computer system goes down because of Y2K, a solar flare or the data center burning down, then you should be able to keep on trucking with calculators and some paper. Anything less is not all that responsible, if we're really talking about important domains.
lostmsu 5y ago
Philosophical take is useless here. This thinking only works on a primitive society, where life is wrapped around a relatively small group of people. Today we have supply chains that have 20+ components. If they'd have 5% downtime each, the entire chain would only work 35% of time.

KronisLV 5y ago

What I'm implying is that it's interesting to consider an alternative point of view: where certain non-critical (at least to the greater society) systems would be treated as such, instead of paging people at 6 AM because a CRUD is down. Reliability often comes at the expense of making some people's lives much less pleasant (especially in situations of underfunding or not having the corporation back any of your SRE initiatives), or, alternatively, with exponentially increasing costs, since all of the sudden everything needs to be high availability and have redundancy in place. Consider the recent Roblox outage. No one died because of it, yet countless engineers were working around the clock to ensure the profitable operation of the platform. When the Latvian Electronic Tax Declaration system goes down on the first day of the year when you can declare your taxes (basically every year), the ministry representatives shrug their shoulders and essentially say: "Nah, we can't make it cope with the load. Just wait a day." And you know, maybe they can't, but at the same time even so everyone still manages to submit their taxes eventually. Thus, perhaps it's worth it to consider when and where we need the scalability and high availability, e.g. government centralized auth services under Latvija.lv which also went down because of the load and as a consequence people had to wait longer to sign up for COVID vaccines and couldn't use other systems until it was resolved: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/manavakcina-lv-and-apturicovid-lv https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/manavakcina-lv-and-apturico... Then, we should focus on those more important cases. Now, I'm not trying to suggest that the incompetence or dismissive attitudes are (always) okay, instead, I'm merely suggesting that we should consider our priorities and wonder what a more laid back environment would look like. I still recall once sending a hotfix for a prod issue at 3 AM. I wonder what things would look like if instead of worrying whether a certain business process can take place at a certain date, the attitude would have been more like: "We'll just tell everyone to wait a day or two. It's not like our product is time sensitive."

threatofrain 5y ago
You're talking about situations of what is essentially a de jure monopoly on a critical need. People sign up for COVID vaccines and file their taxes to avoid being screwed. In places with competition the customer is the one who decides whether you are screwed. Is downtime from social media or news rather trivial? The business deadliness of downtime is different from the societal deadliness of downtime, but what significance this takes on is up to the customer to say, and the customer develops expectations based on the competition.

asoneth 5y ago

> Civilization progress needs more reliability Not necessarily. Similar to software, each nine costs (in money, pollution, effort, etc) at least an order of magnitude more than the last, and at some point it's more efficient to focus on resilience elsewhere in the system. Wind and solar are great but they're far too irregular to rely on so in places without hydro storage you're often left with either chemical batteries, which would be prohibitively expensive to support the entire grid for a few days, or fossil fuel peaker plants, which will ultimately result in coastal flooding. One alternative has been to use demand response to pay people to cut back and dynamic (wholesale) prices to encourage people to conserve when supplies are low. Perhaps at some point electricity providers could even institute different prices for different levels of service. That is, one would pay $1/kWh for any capacity that requires less than an hour of downtime per year like servers and medical equipment, but $0.01/kWh for excess capacity used for vehicle charging that is irregularly available day-to-day. The "smart grid" and meters necessary to support this kind of thing don't exist, but may in the future, and adapting to this kind of irregularity would allow us to have a much lower-cost electricity grid.