engendered's comments

But this is exactly the sort of storage the linked article is talking about. So your point is that I attacked a "strawman" because I didn't accept the linked article for being something entirely different from what it is?

but the large majority of companies aren't

The majority of mid to large sized companies run entirely on SANs. I'm not sure where you get your information from, but how shoestring upstarts operate has nothing to do with much of the "real world".

This article is about a home-brew SAN, with home-brew SAN qualities and deficiencies.

I "attacked" (aka disagreed with) any broadly-targeted, generalist claims of the linked article (which is in stark contrast with, for example, the Backblaze posts where they build very purpose-suited storage and never try to over-extend their claims), which was quite clearly that people who buy so-called enterprise storage are, to paraphrase the gist of the article, suckers. I noted replication and multipathing because they are the absolute minimum cost of entry for critical storage, and even the linked article references it as a requirement.

The rest of the features were clearly "value adds", given that most enterprise storage features a lot of its value in software. Yes, everyone benefits from automatic tiering. Everyone benefits from thin provisioning, disk-deduplication, and compression. There are a vanishingly small number of users who won't see significant benefits from all of those features.

"All that stuff becomes interesting when and if you need more than two bricks."

? Multipathing is absolutely critical for a single storage unit. Replication is absolutely critical if you have any care at all about uptime, because a single storage unit, even with multipathing and redundant power supplies and "controllers", as appropriate, isn't enough. The rest of them have nothing at all do do with the number of storage units -- thin provisioning gives you fantastic storage control. Compression is obvious. Disk-deduplication...again, the name of the game is minimizing the amount of data you're actually dealing with, because even if have conceptually unlimited storage in your unit(s), that's data you have to move around and replication and backup and...

So you don't attempt to prejudice only in your blog posts, it appears. This is one of the most sadly defensive responses by a blog author I've yet seen on here.

Where, exactly, is the strawman? Please point it out rather than desperately trying to immunize against my completely valid comment in the most frantic of manners.

You posit an idealized notion about building it yourself based upon accomplishing, to this point, apparently very little. It's one thing to cast a theory and pursue it (e.g. "my attempt at building competitive storage on the cheap"), but you're presenting completely unsupported dogma around it, and then bolstering your own decisions by conclusions you actually don't even remotely have. It's the guy who decided to start working at a standing desk and on day one has a laundry list of comments about why anyone who doesn't is wrong and lesser.

This is a fairly typical, of course, and you see it by people who build their own anything ("don't give all your money to big TP -- six quick tips for making your own!"), and we generally only see it in the before stage, as the after stage is more often than not a littered debris field of failures.

I find it rather incredible that you attempt to incite HN guidelines, as if raw gullibility and boosterism was the direction of the critique. You are making broad claims in the linked article that you have absolutely no basis for making, so criticism is well deserved, and a service for anyone who might buy into this notion, making a fool of themselves in their own organization.

This is a baseless, prejudiced claim, contrasting buying with some idealized scenario where your in-house crew can only possibly build better solutions cheaper. That there are no other outcomes.

But they might also cost far more in manpower costs than any premium. They might give you an unreliable solution that costs you your entire business. Such an effort might distract from the core competencies of the organization. Operating that storage might end up dwarfing the up-front cost (it's easy to hire admins knowledgeable of EMC. Quite a different matter when it's your own home-brew solution).

I understand the draw, but the "all upside" claim undermines the entire piece. There are enormous downsides, not least the reliability of your data. Companies like EMC and Nimble -- despite "great" editorial quotes added by some random person on Wikipedia -- base their entire existence on reliably serving your data, and things like multipathing and replication are the absolute minimum cost of entry in the market. Now add automatic tiering, thin provisioning, disk-deduplication and streaming hardware compression, etc, and the value starts to become evident.

EDIT: The moderation through this is an abomination. HN shouldn't be overly critical, but nor should it pander patronizingly to some tripe because the author happened by.

This is the fundamental flaw in virtually all quick-fix lifehack kind of pieces -- they project personal habits and failings generally, and then make broad claims about how to fix their own issues. It is the alcoholic telling you not to keep alcoholic beverages in your house.

I feel absolutely claustrophobic on a laptop with but a single work surface. And it isn't because I need multiple unrelated things fighting for my attention, but instead because I need maximal information for the singular thing I am working on. The flow of using all of the pieces of information is much higher -- for me -- when I don't need to task shift, shroud other pieces of information, and so on.

Docs/requirements/protocol specs on one screen, IDE on the other at the minimum. Realistically I usually like the IDE itself on multiple screens, inspector/project structure/source management on one, text editor on the other. Sometimes I split the text editor across multiple screens.

But that's personal habit. As mentioned I find working on a laptop absolutely crippling, though I have no doubt that there are people for whom it is ideal.

While that was the lead in, the actual story was about Kraft leveraging the markets, including products they can't use, to get a better price on the stuff they can use.

And FWIW, while the human limit for vomitoxin is 1ppm, it's 5ppm for pet food, and 10ppm for livestock feed.

Given that it would literally only have to connect to the wifi and do the API calls when the button is pressed, the power usage would be minuscule.

So there are a lot of metrics that are not ambiguous. Imagine if they told you that you get a "moderate" amount of RAM, and maybe it could be 4.5GB, or maybe it's 9GB.

There would be benefits if Amazon gave SLA style promises for these sorts of instances. When they see that they are falling short, they redistribute loads or add hardware to meet the promise. Otherwise it's generally somewhat meaningless because if you can't plan on it, you can't build a plan around it.

This isn't an example of a bubble. It's an example of a really comically silly investment.

BUT IT ISN'T FUD AT ALL. To make it even more comical, several of those posts are from serious Apple boosters (Philip Elmer-DeWitt might as well wear pom-poms while he writes about Apple). Apple software has had serious quality issues, and it is "FUD" to talk about it?

This is just broken thinking. You, in this conversation, are the problem. This notion that any criticism of Apple (such as the fact that they've let quality seriously decline) becomes "FUD" because there is so much defensiveness about Apple.

Not one of those demonstrate what he is talking about. None of them are attacks on Apple. None posit that Apple is doomed. They're tech articles, appealing to a tech crowd, that note that software quality has wavered, which is something that is utterly indisputable.

The fact that you would even consider such an absurd response really sets the bar for HN today.

However I stick by my observation. The brain trust behind HN moderation, having moved on from their asinine slowbans and hellbans, have gone to something that they think is trickier. Only it's, again, hilariously naive.

Do the moderators of HN have any comprehension of how completely incompetent they are at what they're doing? HN today is the perfect example of a profoundly squandered opportunity, and it literally gets worse by the day. It has gone from must-visit to "meh...everything else is exhausted".

But I get a little bit of delight imagining these -- and I apologize, but it is the only word that fits -- hacks conjecturing up some philosophy that makes them productive and useful, instead of destructive and futile.

That has absolutely nothing to do with what I asked. Apple is an enormous company. They have enormous influence, and their products are used by the majority of Americans, if not world citizens. Is it really notable that there are negative stories? Is it not exactly that sort of tribal mentality that makes one react to such banal noise? I see a stupid story and move on, but some seem to really hang onto it and see it as some grievous injustice.

The other poster is dead on when they say that Marco's words were amplified because he is typically so strongly pro-Apple. But from an outsider that is a problem with Marco's words, not with the perception of them. If indeed you have nothing but praise, you do naturally lose the rational actor perspective.

"This isn't a conspiracy. Anti-Apple reporting gets a lot of page views."

And so does pro-Apple reporting. We all have a confirmation bias though, so if you're sure everyone is against you, it's going to seem like it is. There are thousands (millions?) of news reports published every single day, and some cynical take on watches, or profit margins, or ipads or bendgate or whatever are in strong competition with stories about Apple taking over the living room (new Apple TV coming out soon!), building cars, taking on Google, releasing the next greatest thing, putting the Swiss all out of work, making more profit than the rest of the universe combined, etc.

Hardly.

Many Apple fans still operate as if it is some tiny, vulnerable niche company, and they're a member of the few. Perhaps this is some sort of traumatic stress of those early days, but it manifests in this feeling of great discomfort if your words are used "against" the hive. Arment, significant in this piece, incredibly claimed that it was a nightmare having his entirely valid, indisputable issues with Apple software lately, spoken of by "the others".

This is bizarre behavior. It is absolutely incredible. Apple is one of the largest corporations on the planet. It is an enormous money machine. And people are desperately fearful that their opinions about Apple might get known? Come on.

The whole "magnified and distorted" and "hit piece" noises is just garbage. It has nothing to do with proportionality or reality, it's just this sense that a community is under attack and they need to be defensive, and it's just bizarre.

Is this true? I've been involved in a number of hires over the years where we quite specifically did not want a "10x programmer". We knew the position didn't pay enough, and had enough tiresome, non-novel work (e.g. building data processes for client data. Not big enough or interesting enough to be big data or technically challenging) that we simply wanted, in effect, a marginally competent chair warmer.

From seeing hiring and employment practices, this seems to be absolutely common across the industry.

Similarly there is another comment that opines that every programmer thinks they're a 10x programmer. Now maybe it's because I have a work history in places like financial firms and banks and insurance and telecom, rather than pure software or Google-esque, but this is absolutely untrue. I found that the vast majority of developers were simply careerists.

I think the reason this rubs some people the wrong way is that implementations like this can be the result of the "no premature optimizations!" philosophy and its advocacy. I've encountered this firsthand at a number of organizations, and it apparently was somewhat endemic in the Ruby space.

Make something that works, and benchmark later to find that one magical hog that you can quickly change and then everything is optimal. Only it almost always ends up being a performance death by a thousand (million) cuts, performance and resource malaise so endemic that fixing it almost seems impossible.