Systems Ideas That Sound Good but Almost Never Work – "Let's Just "

hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com

10 points·jnord··6 comments

Previous discussion was 2 days ago. 245 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42559882

I like this discussion.

Out of curiosity, I'm curious what the other guy's take on "live migrate process state". It's something I'm familiar with from an Erlang perspective, but I'm also aware that it's much discussed and not often used, as getting it right is quite an intricate dance.

A little bit of a tangent, but my kids often ask this sort of "why don't we just..." question. As some examples, why don't we just:

...send landfills to the sun to burn up ...use a wind turbine on a car to generate electricity ...ride horses instead of cars ...give everybody free houses/clothes/money

I always try to explain the science while not discouraging creative thought. It's hard, because I want to be sure they grasp the cold, hard truths of physics and economics, but I don't want to pigeonhole them into thinking "there will never be any solution to this problem". I've often thought a well-written "why don't we just" book or website would be engaging for kids and adults.

'Scarcity' is usually the underlying answer to these questions.

Reframing it as a way to reduce the scarcity problem might be helpful?

sure, but absent infinite energy supplies with which much is possible, it falls under the general rubric of "no free lunch," which often in the physical world may fall under the conservation of energy (e.g., perpetual motion machines like wind turbines on cars) or the laws of thermodynamics.

The layman's "no free lunch" is a pretty good heuristic though.

Who is the billion dollar company doing sync? Dropbox? Asking as a guy working on sync.

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