engendered

It's actually "ironic" in that database systems were built to avoid random IO because it was glacially slow on spinning rust storage. They do everything possible to avoid it, and in actual, empirical metrics running databases on flash the write amplification has been very low, and hardly mirrors the claims throughout this thread.

All major databases will only deal in the 8KB increments (or whatever their block size is, whether larger or smaller, but never as small as originally claimed) though. They don't write less. Indeed, it's worth noting that most (every single major one) database systems actually write to a sequential transaction log (which they do not have to checkpoint every n-bytes), and only on commit do they actually then make a strategy for changing those source pages and extents, unrolling it from the log and checkpointing it, which by default includes coalescing and combining strategies. The idea that databases are randomly writing small bits of data all over the place is simply wrong, but is the entire foundation of almost every comment in this thread.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa337560%28v=sql...

As one example. Oracle, pgsql, mysql, and others do the exact same thing.

They aren't randomly changing an int here and a bool there.

I worked on a financial system where we wrote just absurd amounts of data a day. We ran it on a FusionIO SLC device (with a mirror backup), and churned the data essentially around the clock. After three years the FusionIO little lifespan hadn't even moved.

tldr; people grossly overestimate the "magical" nature of databases.

Is a table and a couple of columns actually difficult? Is this, or has this ever been, a problem for anyone? When did we enter the "post-database" world?

This all makes plenty of sense if you buy the strawman, otherwise it seems like some pretty strong over-reaching.

How is that relevant to your wrong claim about database 128-byte writes? You word that as if you're correcting me.

I don't even know what point you're trying to make anymore, but you're trying to buttress your argument with what can best be described as diversions.

Most people write far less than they think. Databases aren't particularly magical, any more than the web server log file that is written to a line at a time. Yes, people "give a shit" about a "mere" 100GB of writes, because the vast majority of real projects, including at major corporations, write far less than that per day. So are we just talking about dick measuring now?

It rather depends upon the database, no? A 512GB Samsung 850 Pro would last 29 years with 100GB of writes a day in a horrendous, worst case 3x write amplification scenario. Very, very few databases write more than 100GB of data a day, and most are magnitudes less.

You can essentially include the entirety of operations of the bank, and the lifestyle of the people employed by the bank. There are literally millions and millions of people throughout the world who do nothing more than manage and monitor a system that moves numbers around and deals with proxy derivatives like bills and coins.

Not that bitcoin is a panacea -- personally it seems completely untenable -- but if we want to talk waste, the current regime is extraordinarily wasteful.

Generally my experience has been that the inconsistent, incoherent mess develops when people tasked with doing trivial changes try to "fix technical debt" in the process, leaving you partly on the way to a "better" model, at least until the next guy comes along. And then the next guy. Until you have a layer cake of different approaches and technologies and philosophies, degrading to a worse and worse state.

Look, I've been doing this for 20 years. Almost everything I work on tends to be novel code. I'm terrible at estimating, and now refuse to do it at all. But there is a lot of self-serving, well, nonsense that we ply in this field, justifying our failures (and the reality that most developers don't want to learn other people's code, so they just short circuit the whole thing and pretend it's higher ground), and the whole "technical debt" thing is one of the most egregious. Most developers, when asked to do something to existing code, will throw their hands up and declare it the worst code they've ever worked with, and they can't possibly make some trivial change without completely rewriting all of it, etc (usually somehow pulling in whatever the pet technology of the month is...sorry, I can't change the web form without turning it into a single-page app built on io.js and React and...). We all tell each other this on boards that we dominate, not realizing how completely ridiculous and transparent it really is. It's always more fun to build something novel than to just modify things that exist.

Which is why I really think maintenance programmers are a unique and valuable breed for businesses to have. I personally have a weakness that I always need to rebuild things. I'm terrible as a maintenance programmer, so I simply don't do it. But there are some people who are perfectly happy adapting to whatever they are working on, learning its idioms and unique traits, and then competently and quickly making necessary changes without drama and theatrics about how dire of a situation they've been put in.

To abuse the analogies that have been plied, it's being asked to drive somewhere, and first re-building the car into an electric car, then a self-driving car, and then deciding that you want it to be a hyperloop, and then talking about relativity, all while the business just wanted to get from A to B.

If you're asked to add a couple of fields on a CRM form that you've worked on for years, being able to estimate how long changing the storage, data, business and presentation logic should be expected and easy, with high accuracy and very little to no risk. Or maybe you're making yet another minor derivative of a data import task that's slightly different from the hundreds you did before. This is often why businesses demand very specific skillsets, because while I would have no idea how long a Wordpress integration module would take, I would bet that someone who works with it a lot would.

There are a lot of software developers who, when given such a task, will try to make it more challenging by rebuilding everything in the process, then throwing up their hands about the complexity involved. It's understandable why business partners get upset about this.

There is absolutely inventive software development, but we don't make a credible case when we lump it all in together.

To be fair, much of the huffing and puffing "I'm leaving Firefox...Chrome is so much better!" was based upon the same sort of rhetoric. Early on Chrome didn't even have extensions, much less bloated monstrosities like Ad Block Plus and Firebug (don't get me wrong -- they both are fantastic, but most don't realize how incredibly onerous they are). So those people kicked Firefox to the curb and talked about how grand everything was with Chrome. Now that Chrome has an ecosystem, they put themselves in the same situation again.

It absolutely is. "MRA" is a short cut to dismiss an entire spectrum of arguments and perspectives. Just as farcical, but on the opposite side, are people who declare anyone who has a problem with something like, say, "GamerGate", a "SJW".

These are shorthand for idiots. It lets you pretend that you're in a tribe and everything is black and white.

Torch mobs are an atrocity. They were against a gentleman making a lame but benign joke. They are against someone posting some random thought-crime tweet. They are against the people who send the torch mobs in fast pursuit.

And equally to blame are people in positions of power who bend so easily to torch mobs. If you immediately fire someone for something that would be at most a warning, all because a mob demands it, you are the problem, and a coward to boot.

And for all of the nonsense through this thread (again, this seems coordinated), Chrome on Android simply punts you to the Play Store app (despite people manufacturing a fiction to pitch their outrage). And, if you really care, you can set Firefox to desktop mode and happily browse it, even though it makes zero sense to do that.

Talk about much ado about absolutely nothing.

Every platform and browser requires support and attention, and in this case they chose not to support an edge case that really makes no sense, and simply causes usability issues (so how do you install an app from the Play Store in Firefox?). But cue the typical "don't be evil" sorts of comments.

EDIT: Wow, five downvotes within 2 minutes. The Google hate is strong in this case (and is probably a coordinated effort), where an app ignoring Android URL intents is used in a comically irrelevant fashion....don't be evil, hurr durr.

And the decline of HN continues.

The overwhelming majority of people are in a situation where such a practice isn't possible. Jealousy is a very, very strong emotion, and leads to the crab mentality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

You see it in any sort of "someone has a better situation than me" post.

Yeah, I imagine it was for the people affected. Further, saying 60 out of 35,000,000 is utter ignorance (not unexpected): Not only are there not 35,000,000 teenaged girls in Canada, and the actual side-effects unknown (people have been conditioned to be embarrassed by the notion that it could possibly be vaccine related), the "serious benefit" is that it might marginally reduce the rates of treatable cervical cancer....maybe. Serious benefits indeed.

Vaccines are something that need to be black and white

This is profoundly ignorant.

As opposed to mocking and deriding the notion that they have risks? Does that have merit? Because that is the predominate message in any discussion about vaccinations of any sort: There are only upside, no downside, and anyone who has hesitation is just a misinformed creationist.

I pointed out that HPV vaccine because it is exactly where we are headed -- there was shockingly little actual testing, zero long term testing, but it was blanketed across an entire generation. This seems profoundly risky, but since we're in the "question it and you're a nutter" world, one dare not voice such a concern: It might upset people's sense of smug superiority.

You're getting downvoted because you're pointing out that vaccines have risks

No, I'm getting downvoted because HN has become yet another site where people feel very comfortable in this simplified, black and white notions of the world. This is seen in thread after thread, anything complex collapsing down into simple right and wrong, up or down. It is a tragedy, really, but was bound to happen.

But here's the thing -- vaccinations carry risks. Of course they do. They have massive upsides, but they invariably have downsides, bad reactions, and so on, and it is the utter foolishness that so many try to paint it otherwise. The net result is of course a major positive -- if 1% of the population has an adverse reaction, but 10% avoids getting a painful disease, then a win for the whole (even if it sucks if you're the 1%) -- but it is infantile if not ignorant to not only pretend these risks don't exist (which is ridiculously common), but to actually question people's own assessment of their risk profile.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/02/05/hpv-vaccine-ga...

All of those incidents might very well be entirely coincidental. Or maybe they aren't. Such is the nature of massive, widespread immunizations, where the abnormal immune system of one person might be sent spiraling out of control, while another might suffer a critical allergic response.

Despite endless evidence to the contrary, many seem to believe we have a complete understanding of medicine and the human body. In some ways we remain hacks, and more often than not luck upon our algorithms. But this blind march really makes the movie "The Children of Men" seem more like a prophecy than a fiction.

EDIT: -2 within a minute. HN has taken a perilous dump into garbage land -- the classic ignorant back-slapping and sophistry -- as more and more entirely ignorant people get down arrow rights.

But of course everyone knows that such a list would do nothing against a real criminal who would override such functionality. It isn't really clever for anyone to point that out, and it's reacting in advance to a non-law or regulation, but hysterically responding to a company trying to ensure that their customers don't accidentally get in trouble with the law.

Drones are and will increasingly be used for criminal enterprise. Being rational about how that changes things seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do, just as personal backpack helicopters would probably lead to a rapid rise in robberies where someone escapes via their helicopter, necessitating the appropriate change in capture techniques.

Was this submission originally linked to something else? The submission talks about jamming and techniques to shoot down drones. I coincidentally mentioned on here yesterday the business opportunities around anti-drone technology-

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8998369

None of this has anything to do with banning drones. Several comments thus far have fearmongered a worry that the article doesn't even remotely claim.

EDIT: While I know that commenting on moderation is verboten, and seldom beneficial, the moderation in this discussion are embarrassing. Fear-mongering hysterics of the actual worst kind, incapable of discussing actual changes without rhetoric and propaganda. Though now I see this was flagged to the fourth page, unseen by normal rational people.

It is entirely possible that if he simply had transfers to or from known Bitcoin entities, that would have triggered it. Not because he did anything illegal -- Bitcoin isn't currently illegal in most places, and they have zero onus to report anything in that case -- but that the bank is hedging that there will be issues that come up in the future and they don't want the hassle. That they have determined that Bitcoin is going to be a regulation hassle in the future so they simply want to have nothing to do with it. This is in no way money laundering, or suspicion of it, and they needn't report anything -- just tell him to get lost so in a year or two when this becomes a big thing they have limited their exposure.

Most banks have automated systems that flag on certain automated conditions (I know because I built one). Contrary to some of the posts in here, they do not want to flag accounts, and most do the absolutely minimal mandated under AML legislation.

We have no idea why his account was closed, but it is extremely unlikely it was due to suspected money laundering. If they suspect money laundering, they legally must report it (this is the case in the US, Canada, and the UK, at a minimum) to the appropriate government agency, where it will be investigated. They can't simply say "looks like money laundering, go somewhere else".

As always everyone is operating under very incomplete information.

And of course, stealing from delivery drones is going to become a thing.

These missives never simply say "sometimes I feel like an impostor". They invariably mention the whole Dunning-Kruger effect, and invariably claim that this self-doubt is because one has achieved such heights of knowledge that they've gained full awareness of all the things they don't know. It always turns this so-called vulnerability into some sort of heightened awareness.

I'm not "attacking" anyone in any case. I'm pointing out that this is a bit of a trend right now to show ones enlightenment by claiming one's vulnerability.

When they are sincere, sure. But increasingly they are becoming like the thin girl forever talking about how she feels fat (or, I suppose, the not thin girl declaring that anyone thinner is anorexic). The Dunning–Kruger thing is referenced so frequently on here and other technology sites that it is like the attempt at a great equalizer: People aren't better than me, and the only way they can think they are is the Dunning–Kruger effect.

It is some sort of race to the bottom / lowest common denominator equalization thing. I'm not saying that the feeling of inadequacy at times isn't real, but it is becoming a badge and measure of superiority.

e.g. I don't know what I'm doing, but then neither does anyone else but I am stating it so therefore I'm actually better than them and I have impostor syndrome so that actually makes me better at what I do than you, and everyone who says they know what they're doing suffers from the Dunning–Kruger effect, etc.

This has become a bit of a meme -- the whole "I'm better because I claim to be worse" bit.