Comment by delinka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by delinka | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic/meta:

"Oh, and it seems that other people wrote a detailed text about this issue in 2008."

Well ... yeah. We've known about this. And yes, we need to keep making people aware. I'm also amused by all the young people and their containers: always doing things in a root shell. I'm waiting for that to implode in a few more years.

My point here is that maybe it's time we started designing some curricula around these things that people keep rediscovering: Why you do indeed want a relational database manager and probably not a 'NoSQL' store; and when you do want a NoSQL store. Multiplexing existing systems with VMs; how your VPS works and why it worked so well on mainframes back in the day. (and oh, btw did you know that you can just pull hardware, including CPUs, right out of the mainframe and it'll keep doing its job?) Dangerous things we've all done at some point and prime (hands-on) examples of the failures that might ensue...

And no, I don't mean (necessarily) to teach in schools. Maybe an online collection. "So you wanna 'do computers' without getting hacked and without re-inventing everything..."

Further from the main topic but related to your sentiment. One of the best ways to deal with this is to have more experienced guys who have faced these difficulties hanging around.

I am a theorist in an experimental laser group, and the group head remarked on a possible counter-intuitive arcing between two separated plates (for the sake of making an electric field) when pumping out the air in a chamber. One would expect that pumping out the air reduces the "stuff" (air) that could support a current between the plates, but due to other physics (longer mean-free path) actually allows a sweet point in which the plates can arc, possibly ruining equipment like power supplies. No one thinks about this until it happens because it's physically counter-intuitive, and its too late...it really is one of those "never happens until it happens" sort of unexpected catastrophes that even if you read it in a book, you'd probably never remember it. He said this is why it's important to have newer grad students work with senior graduate to provide continuity and experience so these mistakes don't reoccur...that, I suppose, the horrific memory of destroying expensive power supplies helps the senior grads remember it better compared to someone reading a list of warning labels in a manual...

I'm assuming if you're a small start-up, you don't have more experienced people unless you hire them. So yeah, something like the C++-faq for general hacking suggestions is fun, if someone reads it.

The corona effect is a real surprise the first time you see it.

> physically counterintuitive

Not entirely sure about that; my first intuition here was "temperature and pressure do pretty similar things to chromodynamic interactions—so if materials become more conductive [or even superconductive] at low temperature, then gas media probably become more conductive [or even superconductive] at low pressures, too."

(don't want to nitpick) Chromodynamic? As in QCD? We certainly are not probing anywhere near those regimes :) Also, conductivity is not the thing to think about, arcing has to do with dielectric breakdown. I guess my loosey-goosey explanation (less stuff to support current, as in less valence electrons to get stripped off to actually make a current from negative to positive plates) confused it a little.

As someone who develops high-performance systems and is continually learning, I think this is a fantastic idea!

Honestly, something that seems desperately needed as that knowledge is currently spread out among hundreds of thousands of blog posts, forums and threads -- diamonds in the rough.

I'm going to try to get something published on gumroad (and open-sourced on github) in this vein, if you're interested let me know and I'll reach out when it's done :)

I made a very similar suggestion, perhaps less well articulated, just a few minutes ago on HN re: instragram v2 going to multi-DC;

When there is a write up of "We just did this super awesome scaling migration to the new hotness!" -- there will be mini-how-to articles in them... or at least more in-depth reasons why and for what problem they were specifically solving.

A how-to-wiki-gist? with "this is how you connect X with Y over ABC service in order to eliminate problem XYZ" would be great and allow for people to contribut to the how-to...

But we've been saying this for 15+ years... :-)

> always doing things in a root shell

Ah yes. The sudo high horse. I knew I'd see you again.

Viva La #

Don't jump to conclusions; my comment says nothing about sudo. There's a time to use the root shell, and a time to sudo; the key is knowing the difference. Dismissing advice because "it's never caused me a problem before" or "you don't know what you're talking about" will cause problems at some point.

If you can elucidate the reasons (plural), you need to be in a root shell, by all means use a root shell. If you're doing because "it's easier" and no other reasons, then you probably need a bit more experience. In any case, always using a root shell is the Wrong Thing To Do.

>Don't jump to conclusions; my comment says nothing about sudo

Yeah sure this has nothing to do with sudo. Right, gotcha.

> If you can elucidate the reasons (plural)

"Reasons" means plural where I come from(denoted by the "s"). There is no reason to repeat yourself. I decline your request for an elaboration. The "don't use a root shell crowd" has clearly won the popularity contest in the same way TSA now has a significant presence at larger US airports.

> If you're doing because "it's easier" and no other reasons, then you probably need a bit more experience.

Don't jump to conclusions. There are few people here who can truthfully claim more experience than I could. Regardless of our experience levels, it bears no weight in the validity of my statement.

> In any case,

Not really.

> always using a root shell is the Wrong Thing To Do.

You are free to hold whatever opinion you wish.

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