3 ms·

Literally 1 month ago, I bought a car and did exactly this. What's impractical about spending a little time to read?

vanadium 13y ago
Your approach is wholly impractical on its face, actually. So, let me get this straight: You laid down tens of thousands of dollars on a vehicle that you only post-purchase read the manual of, and you're raising this as some sort of standard people should follow? Honestly, asking the right questions (and test-driving) upfront should be what lands the purchase, and not discovering the folly of purchasing a car with such ass-backwards issues you only discover after the fact when you bother to dig out the manual. You drove it off the lot after you bought it, right? Or did you read the manual in the lot right after signing the papers locking you into the purchase?
- functional_test 13y ago
  Turns out you can read the manual of a vehicle ahead of time. Turns out you can also test drive and do everything else you said, and we don't need to pretend that it's all mutually exclusive. Stop being a pedant -- me listing every bit of due diligence about my car isn't relevant, so let's stay on topic. Honestly, how can people on HN actually be this against reading? Especially things that are really important? Sure, don't read the contest rules for your McDonald's monopoly. But if the data for your livelihood depends on something, there's no excuse for not reading the documentation.
revetkn 13y ago
> What's impractical about spending a little time to read? It's impractical because people live a finite amount of time and this is a terrible use of it
- functional_test 13y ago
  If understanding your production database is a bad use of your time, then I really don't understand your priorities, but I'm glad you're not on my team. You don't need to read every word of everything, but some things are worth it. Do you sign contracts without reading them too since it's a "terrible use of" your time?
  - revetkn 13y ago
    > You don't need to read every word of everything, but some things are worth it. Yes - I am saying in this particular car example, the benefit derived reading the entire manual before purchasing/driving a car is not worth the cost unless your time is worth very little. As others have pointed out, no one is flipping through the manual to check whether the brake pedal actually applies the brakes But it is a good engineering decision to thoroughly read the docs before jumping into a new datastore like Mongo, I agree. Learning there are things like gigantic global locks and unsafe writes are normally enough to make you say, "hey, I probably shouldn't use this to store production data I actually care about"
rdtsc 13y ago
What is impractical is that something like brakes not working is not something you want to find in the manual on page 54. You don't want the car to start without that feature unless you enter a special code, and confirm you know what you are doing. A database that has default configured that ends up corrupting users' data silently is like buying a car with the brakes disabled. Well except that in the car case may brakes disabled won't make the car go faster, but in case of MongoDB I remember fans strutting write benchmarks around comparing it to Postgres, Couch and other database and telling how it is webscale. The reason that design decision was made is shady. That was my initial point.
Zak 13y ago
That's fairly unusual; modern cars have a fairly standardized user experience such that there aren't many ways for a car to do something surprising and dangerous that's covered in the manual. I did experience one once though: I discovered that a vehicle had traction control when the system activated during a skid. The computer and I disagreed about the best way to respond, and the surprise did make the situation more dangerous than it could have been. In both vehicles and databases, the situations in which the product might do something unexpected and dangerous should be clearly documented in their own section of the manual. Databases should say "here are the things that could lead to data corruption or loss". Vehicles should say "here are the situations where the vehicle might disregard or override the driver's control inputs".
- grmarcil 13y ago
  I'm curious about your desired response during the skid and what the traction control system did differently. Would you mind expanding on that if you remember it clearly?
  - Zak 13y ago
    Sure. The vehicle involved was rear wheel drive and, as loaded probably had a rear-biased mass distribution. It began to oversteer in a corner on a patch of ice. Standard protocol for these situations is to apply a moderate amount of throttle to shift weight to the rear and increase traction there while reducing or reversing steering input. The traction control system counteracted my attempt to increase power, requiring vastly more reverse steering input and interfering with my ability to position the vehicle on the road. I suspect some people will believe the results wouldn't have been what I expected without the traction control. I can't prove they would have been, but I did grow up and learn to drive in Alaska. Based on my experience, I think I would have done better than the computer did. Here's somebody describing the basic idea involved while discussing the joys of mildly irresponsible driving on cloverleafs: http://www.scottgood.com/jsg/blog.nsf/d6plinks/SGOD-66RJ2Y http://www.scottgood.com/jsg/blog.nsf/d6plinks/SGOD-66RJ2Y

Your approach is wholly impractical on its face, actually. So, let me get this straight: You laid down tens of thousands of dollars on a vehicle that you only post-purchase read the manual of, and you're raising this as some sort of standard people should follow? Honestly, asking the right questions (and test-driving) upfront should be what lands the purchase, and not discovering the folly of purchasing a car with such ass-backwards issues you only discover after the fact when you bother to dig out the manual. You drove it off the lot after you bought it, right? Or did you read the manual in the lot right after signing the papers locking you into the purchase?

functional_test 13y ago
Turns out you can read the manual of a vehicle ahead of time. Turns out you can also test drive and do everything else you said, and we don't need to pretend that it's all mutually exclusive. Stop being a pedant -- me listing every bit of due diligence about my car isn't relevant, so let's stay on topic. Honestly, how can people on HN actually be this against reading? Especially things that are really important? Sure, don't read the contest rules for your McDonald's monopoly. But if the data for your livelihood depends on something, there's no excuse for not reading the documentation.

revetkn 13y ago

> What's impractical about spending a little time to read? It's impractical because people live a finite amount of time and this is a terrible use of it

functional_test 13y ago
If understanding your production database is a bad use of your time, then I really don't understand your priorities, but I'm glad you're not on my team. You don't need to read every word of everything, but some things are worth it. Do you sign contracts without reading them too since it's a "terrible use of" your time?
- revetkn 13y ago
  > You don't need to read every word of everything, but some things are worth it. Yes - I am saying in this particular car example, the benefit derived reading the entire manual before purchasing/driving a car is not worth the cost unless your time is worth very little. As others have pointed out, no one is flipping through the manual to check whether the brake pedal actually applies the brakes But it is a good engineering decision to thoroughly read the docs before jumping into a new datastore like Mongo, I agree. Learning there are things like gigantic global locks and unsafe writes are normally enough to make you say, "hey, I probably shouldn't use this to store production data I actually care about"

rdtsc 13y ago

What is impractical is that something like brakes not working is not something you want to find in the manual on page 54. You don't want the car to start without that feature unless you enter a special code, and confirm you know what you are doing. A database that has default configured that ends up corrupting users' data silently is like buying a car with the brakes disabled. Well except that in the car case may brakes disabled won't make the car go faster, but in case of MongoDB I remember fans strutting write benchmarks around comparing it to Postgres, Couch and other database and telling how it is webscale. The reason that design decision was made is shady. That was my initial point.

Zak 13y ago

That's fairly unusual; modern cars have a fairly standardized user experience such that there aren't many ways for a car to do something surprising and dangerous that's covered in the manual. I did experience one once though: I discovered that a vehicle had traction control when the system activated during a skid. The computer and I disagreed about the best way to respond, and the surprise did make the situation more dangerous than it could have been. In both vehicles and databases, the situations in which the product might do something unexpected and dangerous should be clearly documented in their own section of the manual. Databases should say "here are the things that could lead to data corruption or loss". Vehicles should say "here are the situations where the vehicle might disregard or override the driver's control inputs".

grmarcil 13y ago
I'm curious about your desired response during the skid and what the traction control system did differently. Would you mind expanding on that if you remember it clearly?
- Zak 13y ago
  Sure. The vehicle involved was rear wheel drive and, as loaded probably had a rear-biased mass distribution. It began to oversteer in a corner on a patch of ice. Standard protocol for these situations is to apply a moderate amount of throttle to shift weight to the rear and increase traction there while reducing or reversing steering input. The traction control system counteracted my attempt to increase power, requiring vastly more reverse steering input and interfering with my ability to position the vehicle on the road. I suspect some people will believe the results wouldn't have been what I expected without the traction control. I can't prove they would have been, but I did grow up and learn to drive in Alaska. Based on my experience, I think I would have done better than the computer did. Here's somebody describing the basic idea involved while discussing the joys of mildly irresponsible driving on cloverleafs: http://www.scottgood.com/jsg/blog.nsf/d6plinks/SGOD-66RJ2Y http://www.scottgood.com/jsg/blog.nsf/d6plinks/SGOD-66RJ2Y