tiredofcareer

    - I've been using WP Supercache since it was released
    - [I've been using] Nginx for I think 4 years at this point
    - Basically, I was there
    - I saw the numbers and I know why they wound up looking the way they did
    - I've been running Wordpress blogs since 2004
    - You clearly don't understand what my problem is

How do you respond? "Let's ignore each other." So now I'm left wondering if you genuinely don't know how to scale MySQL, and you've tired yourself of appealing to your own authority in order to prove me wrong. What I'm telling you, is the notion that your blog network creating a workload for MySQL that it is incapable of operating on commodity disk is completely ridiculous, and I'd laugh you out of an interview if I pressed you like this. I think you gave up, but I wasn't saying it, but now that you've gone at me like this, I will. You're basically saying you couldn't make MySQL work with a <50QPS write load (I refuse to believe you're writing more than 50QPS to MySQL) because of some TEXT columns.

I'd have far more respect for you if you'd just say, yeah, I probably could make MySQL keep up with my blog workload, I just didn't put much effort into it and bought SSDs on a provider I don't prefer instead.

(But wait: I don't understand. Username oddly appropriate.)

[1]: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/internal-temporary-ta...

[2]: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/temporary-files.html

Yeah, I spent this entire thread clueless about the issue you're running into, even though you spelled it out a few different times because you think I don't get it. Wordpress falls over under normal site load, film at eleven.

Since you want to switch to condescension, I'm assuming wise sir moved MySQL's tmpdir to a RAM disk and found that unsatisfactory for his mystical, MySQL-breaking SELECT/INSERT workload? Also, I'm far more expensive, and I know that WPEngine is multitenancy Wordpress on Linode in the backend. (That one's free.)

I completely understand how this could be a problem and how switching providers would fix it.

    set beresp.ttl = 30s;

There's also the possibility that you had shitty neighbors.

WP Supercache is a hack anyway, for folks running WP on shared hosts without root. If you have root, there's a plethora of better things for caching, even as ancient as Squid as a reverse. You can get your MySQL traffic down to <1 QPS fairly trivially, no matter what kind of traffic is hitting the frontend.

Don't forget wordpress.com is a huge MU installation, and they've existed since before SSDs became popular. The disk is not your issue here.

wp_supercache, nginx, varnish, etc. Rinse and repeat.

The answer is, very clearly, absolutely not on all accounts. Hacker News does not tolerate dissenting opinion and that should scare you. The continued existence of this community and any contribution is plainly pointless, and while I'd invest a little time demonstrating that to you, I know that nobody will listen, I'll turn light gray, and this community will go back to having a grand old time patting themselves on the back throwing money at a Florida teenager they have never, and will never, meet nor hear about ever again.

One of the (many) problems in our discourse today is that there is no middle. No compromise. Ever. Look at American politics for an example. Even in this discussion here, there was no possible suggestion that I might be a little right, no possible seeking of an understanding, no middle ground. You either think this girl deserves our showering of praise and affection or you suffer the consequences and get grayed to nonexistence.

No, nitrogen. I'm done. You guys can have your polarized, pointless discussion, and I will go back to keeping my opinions to myself. Just like I'm pretty much done with this industry, as well, because it seems like the number of intolerable people that I have to spend nine to five arguing with, over pointless shit like this, continues to multiply until I don't want to listen any more.

I started this account when a good guy, Jesse Noller, had has life threatened by the very people in this industry for daring to intervene in the PyCon situation. I hoped that maybe, just maybe, I could effect some change and get people to see that there is a middle, there is a compromise, there is an opportunity for discussion. When I follow the community, I am rewarded with heaps of karma -- including one comment with dozens of upvotes for saying what HN wants to hear. When I dare speak against the community, as I have here, I am reminded why I keep my distance and why those of us who think rationally consider this community a heaping pile of arrogant shit. You should hear what people outside HN say about it, based on discussions like this. Congratulations, HN. You're now Slashdot. You're now the community that in a single thread compared a teenager that built a bomb in a two-liter bottle to Alfred Nobel and Marie Curie.

In the hours since you left this question for me, I went to see a film and forgot about Hacker News for four hours, and it was four glorious, wonderful hours I intend to repeat. Continuously, for the rest of my days.

So, no, this is not an anti-science campaign by the government, regardless of how really hard we want to believe that she's aspiring to science. These things will blind you and take limbs off if you mishandle them. They have blown up on police officers after being left in an alley because they didn't detonate when kids make them. Then they just leave them for other people to clean up.

Even if you buy the science experiment angle, which she herself went back on, this is a safety issue from the completely reckless way in which she performed a "science experiment", similar to detonating a pipe bomb on school property just to see what happens. Oh, how the narrative would be different if she had built a pipe bomb instead.

Honestly, guys, we have this one wrong. Here's several other cases for your consideration, showing how big this problem is (the reason arrests are picking up is because LEOs are communicating about this, now that kids are starting to do it more):

http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2013/04/grosse_p...

http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/local&id=... (from TODAY)

http://www.ktvb.com/news/crime/Five-more-plastic-bottle-expl...

http://www.kboi2.com/news/local/Police-warn-about-plastic-bo...

http://www.ktvu.com/news/news/bottle-bomb-warning-goes-out-t...

This is a serious problem, not an opportunity to "win another scientist," and the narrative around this case has been disgusting. Reckless behavior and endangering yourself and others intentionally is not the hallmark of a scientist, no matter how much you want the science angle to be true.

> But officers did arrest a group of teenagers at the end of January for making and setting off Drano bombs in an open space off Palmer Drive.

Let me be clear: mishandling one of these devices can blind you and remove limbs, and even if you buy the "I'm doing a science experiment" angle, she's doing it without training or safety considerations. This is a safety issue, not a science-hating issue, and there have been many charged and convicted before this young lady. I hate that we absolutely cannot have an objective conversation about this.

[1]: http://www.ktvu.com/news/news/bottle-bomb-warning-goes-out-t...

Or perhaps I could study the inhalant properties of anthrax powder at my desk at work, because I have no malicious intent and just want 'see what happens'?

There's a difference between science and doing something reckless that could, theoretically, endanger others without scientific safeguards in place. Public commentary on this issue is completely ignoring that.

In another industry where profit is the focus, domain registration, I'm absolutely dying for a $100-$200/year registrar that knows what they're doing and isn't awful to deal with. I will happily pay that premium since my hosting bill far outweighs my domain registration, and handling support tickets expediently and providing features I want are far more important than the bottom line to me. If an extra $10/year from all customers means I get IPv6 glue or a ticket answered inside of 72 hours, please, do it! (This is less relevant now, but was a concern for me in the past.) I'm willing to part cash to be treated better in almost all cases.

> C, C++, Java, C# etc. programmers have been pulling dependencies in their repos for ages.

I'm not making this up: in my career, I have never worked on a project where this is the case, and I've worked for shops that write in three of those languages.

> I certainly prefer to manually update them from time to time than to have builds that work on my machine but fail for other people

That's your choice, and it's a little bit different because I'm assuming "other people" are end users -- those that want to recompile SumatraPDF from source for some bizarre reason -- not developers. Fixing a broken build is a skill that every developer should have, but not an end user. Once I learned how to write software, I never came across a situation as an end user compiling an open-source Unix package that I could not solve myself.

The opinion I'm sharing here is related to developing on a team, not distributing source for end-user consumption. It sounds like you don't develop SumatraPDF with many other people, either. Nothing like merge failures on a huge dependency that I didn't write to ruin a Monday.

Also, wait, SumatraPDF is built with dependencies in the codebase? What if a zero-day is discovered in one of your dependencies while you're on vacation for a month; what do distribution maintainers do? Sigh? Patch in the distribution and get to suffer through a merge when you return?

I'm saying there should be, but not necessarily the same thing. That's my entire point.

I'm also not a fan of the "you have a dissimilar opinion to mine, so obviously you've never used Go properly" attitude in this thread. One way to read your last is that I've never used Go at all, though I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming you meant used Go properly. Either way, I don't get the condescension of assuming I'm unaware of everything you're explaining to me simply because I have an opinion that is different than yours. Especially since half of your comment is repeating things to me that I said earlier.

[0]: http://jacobian.org/writing/when-pypi-goes-down/

Disagree strongly (and hate absolutes like "doing it wrong"). Their metadata, yes, by all means, commit that. There is absolutely no reason, however, to have the source code for a dependency in my tree, Go or not.

Give me a binary I can link against, or at least the temporary source in a .gitignored location, and let's call it a day. When I want to bump to a new version my commit should be a one-line version bump in a metadata file, not the entirety of the upstream changes as a commit. I've seen a sub-1MLoC project take 10 minutes just to clone. Internally! You're telling me you want to add all the LoC and flattened change history of your dependencies in your repo? Egads, no thanks! Where do you draw that line? Do you commit glibc?

There's just no reason to store that history unless you are in the business of actively debugging your dependencies and fixing the problems yourself, rather than identifying the issue and rolling back to a previous version after reporting the problem upstream. I guess it's paying your engineers to fix libopenal versus paying your engineers to work on your product; one's a broken shop, the other isn't. Some people will feel it's one, some the other.

...probably didn't build actual clock himself, he's just cutting a base for it and applying a photograph. So, that's interesting w/r/t the article. (Edit: Oh, someone below me said that already.)

At any rate, thank you for showing me Regretsy. I didn't want to work today, and this is a good start.

Go badly needs two things:

1. A best practice that dictates that you never import from remote repositories in production, long-term code; the feature is fine for one-offs and experimentation, but the article summarizes only one way this style of work can lead you in to a maintenance world of pain. What happens if the repo you're importing from Github is deleted? What do you do for fresh clones? You're going to end up changing the URL anyway. I feel the Go community has kind of glossed over this (and I like Go).

2. An equivalent of CPAN or PyPI, which you could then import from in concert with a tool to manage those dependencies, a la:

    import (
        "cgan/video/graphics/opengl"
    )

Developer A checks out the code clean. Five minutes later, developer B checks out the code clean. In both cases, your "go get" bootstrap script fetches two different commits, because in that five minutes, upstream committed a bug. Developer B cannot build or, worse, can build but has several tests fail for unknown reasons or, even worse, the program no longer functions properly. Developer A has none of those problems. In a world with a CPAN-like, developer B can see that he has 0.9.1 and developer A has 0.9.0, developer B can commit "foo/bar: =0.9.0" to the project's dependency file, then everybody else doesn't suffer the same fate. In the current world, you're either massaging your local fork to keep the new commit out, or any other troublesome, non-scalable approach to this.

Building large software projects against a repository never works. You need tested, versioned, cut releases to build against, not master HEAD. It only takes one bad upstream commit to entirely torpedo your build, and you've now completely removed the ability to qualify a new library version against the rest of your code base. Other people are suggesting "well, maintain your own forks," so you're basically moving merge hell from one place to another. I, personally, have better things to do with my time; I've seen (Java) apps with dozens of dependencies before, and keeping dozens of repositories remotely stable for a team of people will rapidly turn into multiple full-time jobs. Do you want to hire two maintenance monkeys[0] to constantly keep your build green by massaging upstream repositories, or do you want to hire two feature developers? Exactly.

I've started writing a CPAN-like for Go a couple times but I'm always held back by these threads:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/golang-n...

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/golang-n...

The second one highlighting how difficult Go is to package as a language -- my personal opinion is treat Go just like C and distribute binary libraries in libpackage, then the source in libpackage-src. If one message in that thread is true and binaries refuse to compile with different version compilers, I'm troubled about Go long-term.

[0]: I'm not calling all build engineers maintenance monkeys. I'm saying the hypothetical job we just created is a monkey job. I love you, build engineers, you keep me green.

Listening to the kids react in wonderment as he demonstrated wringing a towel out in orbit really drove home that he's reaching, and really reaching, the right audience in a way that NASA has struggled with for decades. He is exceedingly well-educated and is probably aware of declining interest in STEM among younger kids and especially declining interest in space travel as a whole. (I don't have data to back that up, just basic anecdotal experience much like you, but it seems true.)

That accomplishment is even more notable because while Canada has a space agency, most of the world wouldn't consider Canada "spacefaring" in the broad sense (also not a dig at Canada). That a man challenged himself in his career to become an astronaut without a clear path to orbit, then reached a position where he can bring space travel to YouTube, Reddit, schools, and countless young minds in a new generation with the light touch required to "make it stick" is an accomplishment worthy of immense praise. Maybe a Nobel.

EDIT: Holy cow, this got flagged off the front page in the time it took me to get coffee.

Leland Yee is a heavy, outspoken critic of the ESRB and was one of the most vocal politicians during the "Hot Coffee" debacle. Not a fan of video games.

I personally think it's fine.