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Comment by jewel | Hacker News Reader

A total of 704 petabytes of raw space, which I think is 600 petabytes of usable space.

Looks like backblaze will cross the exabyte mark very soon. They crossed 500 PB in February [1].

Yev, in case you're around, I was curious what your plan was for a potential future shortage of supply of hard drives due to another disaster, political problem, etc. Perhaps just grow far enough ahead of your needs to have a buffer? I imagine you're now at a scale where you can't farm hard drives from costco anymore.

Also what happens to all of those functional, but non-profitable 4TB drives?

[1]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/50...

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Yev from Backblaze here -> of course I'm around :D Good questions! We recycle the drives that get removed from service. As for future shortages, that's one of the reasons we took a small round back in 2012 (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-raises-5-million-wh...). The majority of it was to spend on marketing experiments, but a little portion was to be used for buffer if an event like that ever happened again and hard drive prices spiked 300%. We're a lot larger now and do a pretty good job with forecasting and having rainy day funds, but we've also gotten to the point where we are now a bit less price sensitive, so we'd be able to handle the fluctuation. That said, if everything goes horribly wrong...https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/

You might not be the right person to do anything about this, but I have a bookmarklet for hiding position:fixed elements when I'm trying to read something, and every time I scroll your blog it recreates the obnoxious share bar. Whyyyyyyy?

EDIT: PS- fun story! I enjoyed reading it except for all the social media buttons.

Hahahaha! Social sharing is great! Do not fear the share bar! Seriously though, sorry about that - not sure if we can do anything on our end as that's the way that widget works :( We might be able to add a "print" button so you can just print the post out, would that help?

It's not that I never share things, I'd just rather ctrl-C/ctrl-V than waste a bunch of screen space on every single webpage.

Looks like Firefox's reader view fixes it, I'll just need to get in the habit of using that instead of the Kill Sticky Headers bookmarklet as things catch on and circumvent it... https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/

I can only assume the thought process of whoever writes these social bars is "People are hiding our share buttons instead of clicking them! MAYBE IF WE SHOVE IT IN THEIR FACES REPEATEDLY THEY'LL LIKE THAT BETTER AND WANT TO SHARE!"

Gruber sums up my feelings nicely: https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/medium_dickbars

Heh, "medium dickbars", hell of a title, and I think that's EXACTLY what the social bar manufacturers are thinking. Unfortunately though, they're super useful :-/

> they're super useful

Useful for whom? The user, or website operator?

Snark aside, do the sharebars actually increase user engagement on your site?

The operator of course. They are definitely useful (at least on our end). We've found that making it easy to share the blogs increases the odds that folks actually boink the button and add a personalized message. Plus the share counting works as "social proof" for posts. If you read a blog post that 3 other people have shared you might abandon it before finishing. If 300 people have shared it, you'll likely be more prone to finish searching for why they thought it was so interesting.

That can be gamed though, but we keep ours "natural".

>Gruber sums up my feelings nicely: https://daringfireball.net/2017/06/medium_dickbars

Ironically, that site is perhaps more unreadable than a typical medium page. It uses some hardcoded mobile format (?) that shows tiny text in the middle 20% of my 16:9 screen.

And you can't just double tap the text column to fit it to screen? That's odd, since it doesn't appear to set a maximum-scale or user-scalable=no on the viewport:

    <meta name="viewport" content="width=500, minimum-scale=0.45" />

#worksonmymachine

Looking at 8TB drives on Amazon right now, external USB 3.0 8TB drives are $150 (e.g. STEB8000100). Bare 8TB drives (e.g. ST8000DM004) are $200 and up.

This isn't the same class of drive. Supposedly what's inside the STEB8000100 is a ST8000AS0002 5900 RPM archive drive. But that drive, which you can barely even find anymore, is over $200.

What's up with this pricing?

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