Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

This was obviously temporary but is actually cool for showing how powerful modern machines actually are. People routinely underestimate the load that can be handled by one box properly configured and running efficient code.

I’ve found that modern developers almost always overestimate the amount of physical hardware needed to run things. I’m not sure why.

View on HN

I was once interviewed by Lyft and I told them that a 64 GB Mac Book Pro is sufficient to run the core business.

The interviewer didn't believe me.

I did the calculations in front of him.

This was the time, I just learned Rust.

I did the full analysis and showed him that QPS is great.

Of course, my design didn't include 500 microservices, 50 deployments of Hadoop, Kafka, Elastic, Mongo DB, and 500 slightly different dashboards that different teams in Lyft probably use. Most modern tooling in ZIRP phenomenen.

Someone's Hadoop experience - https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-...

How do you define "core business"? Any laptop os would crumple purely by running out of resource handles on the connections, even without doing work. I've run into file descriptor / handle size limits on small clusters before, I can't imagine trying to deal with 1m+ concurrent tcp connections.

MacOs is a terrible server OS, unless you want to YOLO lack of synflood protections. That said, if 64GB macbookpro means 64GB of ram, that's enough for a lot more than 1M file descriptors. I'd still tend to pick other hardware; I don't see the sense in buying Apple hardware to run a different OS; especially as they move farther away from mainstream hardware.

The Mac Studio running Linux seems like it'd actually make a pretty decent server. Not the most cost-effective option but not terrible when you also factor in power consumption.

Apple should really license the M architecture for servers. They could even have someone else manufacture and deal with delivering it. They're leaving free money on the table. I don't think it would cannibalize their Mac sales at all.

"core bussiness" is finding and dispatcching drivers including payments. Everything in-app.

> I can't imagine trying to deal with 1m+ concurrent tcp connections. 2 million connections on a BSD mchine is doable though not trivial and that too even in 2012. https://blog.whatsapp.com/1-million-is-so-2011

And did you get the job?

I did. I rejected them as I didn't believe in the future of taxi-app industry.

You'd think that with all the advances in hardware, computers would get faster. No, this modern computer takes 20x longer to open the calculator then windows NT

...but, WiFi?

Don't worry, they moved it to the opposite side of the kitchen from the microwave, so no connectivity problems.

This a reference to the weird signal from outer space that turned out to be a microwave?

This is a reference to the fact that the 2.4GHz Wi-Fi signal is in the same frequency emitted by the kitchen microwave oven.

Microwave means 0.3 to 300 GHz.

Oh, I was thinking about this, then https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-ov...

You should probably also keep your very expensive and sensitive space equipment at a safe distance from any microwave too, what I was trying to say I guess

That part I agree is a bad idea. At least plug a USB Ethernet card into it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com