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I take the opposite message from that line - out of touch teams working on something so over budget and so overdue, and so bureaucratic, and with such an insane
by ramraj07 6mo ago
I take the opposite message from that line - out of touch teams working on something so over budget and so overdue, and so bureaucratic, and with such an insanely poor history of success, and they talk as if they have cured cancer.
This is the equivalent of Altavista touting how amazing their custom server racks are when Google just starts up on a rack of naked motherboards and eats their lunch and then the world.
Lets at least wait till the capsule comes back safely before touting how much better they are than "DevOps" teams running websites, apparently a comparison that's somehow relevant here to stoke egos.
- danhon 6mo agoYou mean like this? "With limited funds, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin initially deployed this system of inexpensive, interconnected PCs to process many thousands of search requests per second from Google users. This hardware system reflected the Google search algorithm itself, which is based on tolerating multiple computer failures and optimizing around them. This production server was one of about thirty such racks in the first Google data center. Even though many of the installed PCs never worked and were difficult to repair, these racks provided Google with its first large-scale computing system and allowed the company to grow quickly and at minimal cost." https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-a-computer-the-google-way/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-a-computer-the-google...
- 1970-01-01 6mo agoGoogle then had complete regret not doing this with ECC RAM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14206811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14206811
- ramraj07 6mo agoIt got them to where they need to be to then worry about ECC. This is like the dudes who deploy their blog on kubernetes just in case it hits front page of new york times or something.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> then had complete regret not doing this with ECC RAM Yeah, my takeaway is Google made the right choice going with non-ECC RAM so they could scale quickly and validate product-market fit. (This also works from a perspective of social organisation. You want your ECC RAM going where it's most needed. Not every college dropout's Hail Mary.)
- newmana 6mo agoA great version of this and how ex-DEC engineers saved Google and their choice of ECC RAM - inventing MapReduce and BigTable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK0I4f8Rbis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK0I4f8Rbis
- ramraj07 6mo agoThe problem they solved isn't easy. But its not some insane technical breakthrough either. Literally add redundancy, thats the ask. They didnt invent quantum computing to solve the issue did they? Why dunk on sprints?
- vlovich123 6mo agoWow. What a hand wave away of the intrinsic challenge of writing fault tolerant distributed systems. It only seems easy because of decades of research and tools built since Google did it, but by no means was it something you could trivially add to a project as you can today.
- tempest_ 6mo ago> fault tolerant distributed systems I mean there were mainframes which could be described as that. IBM just fixed it in hardware instead of software so its not like it was an unknown field.
- vlovich123 6mo agoEven if that were actually true (it’s not in important ways) Google showed you could do this cheaply in software instead of expensive in hardware. You’re still hand waving away things like inventing a way to make map/reduce fault tolerant and automatic partitioning of data and automatic scheduling which didn’t exist before and made map/reduce accessible - mainframes weren’t doing this. They pioneered how you durably store data on a bunch of commodity hardware through GFS - others were not doing this. And they showed how to do distributed systems at a scale not seen before because the field had bottlenecked on however big you could make a mainframe.
- kukkeliskuu 6mo agoThe biggest innovation from Google regarding hardware was understanding that the dropping memory prices had made it feasible to serve most data directly from memory. Even as memory was more expensive, you could serve requests faster, meaning less server capacity, meaning reduced cost. In addition to serving requests faster.
- simoncion 6mo ago> ...they talk as if they have cured cancer. I'd chalk that up to the author of the article writing for a relatively nontechnical audience and asking for quotes at that level.
- misiek08 6mo agoSo the quote is right somewhat, right? If you are writing to non technical people and you use such high wording.
- simoncion 6mo agoNo, it's not right. When put in context, the quote claims that that manner of speaking is used because the speaker has an unwarranted belief that they've done something absolutely incredible and unprecedented. In actuality, the manner of speaking is being used because the intended audience of the article is likely to have little-to-no knowledge of the technical details of what the speaker is talking about. For example, if the article was aimed at folks who were familiar with the underlying techniques, the last two paragraphs of the "Enforcing Determinism" section would be compressed into [0] Each FCM is time-synced and runs a realtime OS. Failures to meet processing deadlines (or excessive clock drift) reset the FCM. Each FCM uses triply-redundant RAM and NICs. *All* components use ECC RAM. Any failures of these components reset the FCM or other affected component. But you can't assume that a fairly nontechnical audience will understand all that, so your explanation grows long because of all of the basic information it contains. People looking for an excuse to sneer at something will often misinterpret this as the speaker failing to recognize that the basic information they're providing is about things that are basic. [0] I'm assuming that the time being wildly out of sync will indicate FCM failure and trigger a reset. [1] I'm also assuming that a sufficiently-large failure of a network switch results in the reset of that network switch. If the article was intended for a more technical audience, that level of detail might have been included, but it wasn't, so it isn't. [1] If it didn't, why even bother syncing the time? I find it a little hard to believe that the FCMs care about anything other than elapsed time, so all you care about is if they're all ticking at the same rate. I expect the way you detect this is by checking for time sync across the FCMs, correcting minor drift, and resetting FCMs with major drift.
- bluegatty 6mo agoNo, space is just hard. Everything is bespoke. You need 10x cost to get every extra '9' in reliability and manned flight needs a lot of nines. People died on the Apollo missions. It just costs that much.
- arduanika 6mo agoPlease, this is hacker news. Nothing else is hard outside of our generic software jobs, and we could totally solve any other industry in an afternoon.
- geerlingguy 6mo agoI mean I can just replace Dropbox with a shell script.
- bluegatty 6mo agoThat's funny because you could! Dropbox started a shell script :) Funny though I would assume HN people would respect how hard real-time stuff and 'hardened' stuff is.
- zenoprax 6mo agoI think GP is referencing this somewhat [in]famous post/comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863#9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863#9224
- Citizen_Lame 6mo agoHN audience has shifted, there is less technically minded people and more hustlers and farmers from other social media waste spaces. But alas.
- InsideOutSanta 6mo ago"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." No, wait, that was that other site.
- 6mo ago
- HNisCIS 6mo agoWhat would you suggest? Vibe coding a react app that runs on a Mac mini to control trajectory? What happens when that Mac mini gets hit with an SEU or even a SEGR? Guess everyone just dies?
- ramraj07 6mo ago[flagged]
- ToucanLoucan 6mo agoWild shit to be advising other people to be humble whilst talking directly out of your ass about technology you clearly do not understand and engineers you have no respect for. Perhaps self-reflect.
- randomNumber7 6mo agoHow do you know that op doesn't know what he is talking about? I have written code for real time distributed systems in industrial applications. It runs since years 24/7 and there never was a failure in production. I also think nasa is full of shit.
- ToucanLoucan 6mo agoWell for one, if you follow their profile and a few more clicks, you get to their resume, and while it's an impressive one and I'm sure they know a lot of shit I don't, what's notably missing is anything even remotely close to Aerospace, rocketry, guidance systems, positioning, etc. For another, if an engineer has an axe to grind with a public facing project, I would expect them to just grind the thing, not echo a bunch of the same lame and stale talking points every layperson does (bureaucracy bad, government bad, old tech, etc.). I'm not saying NASA in general and Artemis in particular are flawless, I'm just saying if you're going to criticize it, let's hear it. Otherwise you just sound like another contrarian trying to get attention, like a 14 year old boy saying Hitler had some good points.
- 6mo ago
- bfung 6mo agoOne simply does not [“provision” more hardware|(reboot systems)|(redeploy software)] in space.
- therobots927 6mo agoModern software development is a fucking joke. I’m sorry if that offends you. Somehow despite Moore’s law, the industry has figured out how to actually regress on quality.
- misiek08 6mo agoAnd overall performance in terms of visible UX.
- childintime 6mo agoLately it strikes me there's a big gap between the value promised and the value actually delivered, compared to a simple home grown solutions (with a generic tool like a text editor or a spreadsheet, for example). If they'd just show how to fish, we wouldn't be buying, the magic would be gone. In this sense all of the West is full of shit, and it's a requirement. The intent is not to help and make life better for everyone, cooperate, it is to deceive and impoverish those that need our help. Because we pity ourselves, and feed the coward within, that one that never took his first option and chose to do what was asked of him instead. This is what our society deviates us from, in its wish to be the GOAT, and control. It results in the production of lives full of fake achievements, the constant highs which i see muslims actively opt out of. So they must be doing something right.
- randomNumber7 6mo agoWe have a lot more software developers than 50 years ago and intelligence is still normally distributed.
- therobots927 6mo agoWhat’s your point?
- randomNumber7 6mo agoThe average coder in the 1970s was a lot smarter than today. Think about the people who would be interested to start a career in this field at that time.