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I have decided that all solutions to questions of scale fall into one of two general categories. Either you can spend all your money on computers, or you can sp

I have decided that all solutions to questions of scale fall into one of two general categories. Either you can spend all your money on computers, or you can spend all your money on C/C++/Rust/Cython/Fortran/whatever developers. There's one severely under-appreciated factor that favors the first option: computers are commodities that can be acquired very quickly. Almost instantaneously if you're in the cloud. Skilled lower-level programmers are very definitely not commodities, and growing your pool of them can easily take months or years.

jbverschoor 4y ago
Buying hardware won't give you the same performance benefits as a better implementation/architecture. And if the problem is big enough, buying hardware will cause operational problems, so you'll need more people. And most likely you're not gonna wanna spend on people, so you get a bunch of people who won't fix the problem, but buy more hardware.
- marcinzm 4y ago
  >And if the problem is big enough, buying hardware will cause operational problems, so you'll need more people. And most likely you're not gonna wanna spend on people, so you get a bunch of people who won't fix the problem, but buy more hardware. That's why people love the cloud.
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    This is exactly what’s wrong with it.
- mumblemumble 4y ago
  Ayup. And yet, people still regularly choose to go down a path that leads there. Because business decisions are about satisficing, not optimizing. So "I'm 90% sure I will be able to cope with problems of this type but it might cost as much as $10,000,000" is often favored above, "I am 75% sure I might be able to solve problems of this type for no more than $500,000," when the hypothetical downside of not solving it is, "We might go out of business."
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    Just adding hardware / "cloud" to a bad design will not make it snappy. You can go from 10 -> 12, where a better design would get you from that same 10 -> 50
thrwyoilarticle 4y ago
Then you discover - too late to change your mind - that you're throwing hardware at an NP algo
hinkley 4y ago
On the other hand, you can't argue with a computer. That may explain why some of my coworkers seem to behave as if they wish they were computers... It's too difficult to renegotiate with computers, too easy to renegotiate with people. When you don't actually know what you need to do, you need people. When you think you know what you need to do, but you're wrong, then you really need people. Most of us are in the latter category, most of the time.

jbverschoor 4y ago

Buying hardware won't give you the same performance benefits as a better implementation/architecture. And if the problem is big enough, buying hardware will cause operational problems, so you'll need more people. And most likely you're not gonna wanna spend on people, so you get a bunch of people who won't fix the problem, but buy more hardware.

marcinzm 4y ago
>And if the problem is big enough, buying hardware will cause operational problems, so you'll need more people. And most likely you're not gonna wanna spend on people, so you get a bunch of people who won't fix the problem, but buy more hardware. That's why people love the cloud.
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  This is exactly what’s wrong with it.
mumblemumble 4y ago
Ayup. And yet, people still regularly choose to go down a path that leads there. Because business decisions are about satisficing, not optimizing. So "I'm 90% sure I will be able to cope with problems of this type but it might cost as much as $10,000,000" is often favored above, "I am 75% sure I might be able to solve problems of this type for no more than $500,000," when the hypothetical downside of not solving it is, "We might go out of business."
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  Just adding hardware / "cloud" to a bad design will not make it snappy. You can go from 10 -> 12, where a better design would get you from that same 10 -> 50

thrwyoilarticle 4y ago

Then you discover - too late to change your mind - that you're throwing hardware at an NP algo

hinkley 4y ago

On the other hand, you can't argue with a computer. That may explain why some of my coworkers seem to behave as if they wish they were computers... It's too difficult to renegotiate with computers, too easy to renegotiate with people. When you don't actually know what you need to do, you need people. When you think you know what you need to do, but you're wrong, then you really need people. Most of us are in the latter category, most of the time.