musk_micropenis

I guess this goes some way to answering my thought,

> but it makes me wonder if there's a fundamental problem with the design of Mastodon.

I also note the article says,

> During the month of November we averaged 36.86 Mbps in traffic with samples taken every hour

That seems like a large amount of bandwidth to service 30,000 users (who knows what fraction of them are actually active at any given moment). But I guess there's going to be a lot of video and image content. I have tried searching all of their linked blog posts about scaling but can't find any number that might map to requests per second without making huge assumptions.

I would like to understand why Mastodon requires such a huge amount of hardware for mediocre traffic volumes. Not just the lazy "it's Rails" answer - I know Rails is a resource hog, but that doesn't go far enough to explain the extreme requirements here.

As a point of reference, look at what Stack Overflow is run on. As a caveat, SO is probably more read-heavy than Mastodon, but it also serves several orders of magnitude more volume (on a normal day in 2016 they would serve 209,420,973 HTTP requests[0]). They did this on 4 DB servers and 11 web servers. And in fact, it can (and has) worked serving this volume of traffic on only a single server.

With this setup SO was not even close to maxing out their hardware (servers were under 10% load, approximately). SO also listed their server hardware[1] in 2016. I don't know enough about server hardware to assess the difference, but to my eye they look similar on the web tier with similar amounts of memory, similar disk, etc.

I'm not saying Hachyderm is doing anything wrong, but it makes me wonder if there's a fundamental problem with the design of Mastodon. And to be clear I understand that this particular issue was caused by a disk failure, but that they even had this hardware in place running Hachyderm is surprising to me.

[0] https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...

[1] https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/03/29/stack-overflow-the-ha...

No, because a single instance needed to "scale up" at a very small user count.

Before the scaling problems were hit they were hosting in 4 very powerful machines with loads of RAM and all-SSD storage. I don't see any reasonable world in which those machines aren't enough to power 30,000 users.

30,000 users seems like a ludicrously small number of users to hit scaling problems. It sounds like Mastadon has not been designed for scale from the ground up, which is surprising for a project that hopes to be a popular social network.

> farming this tragedy

There's no tragedy here. Let's be absolutely clear - every single person who lost money in this abomination was as greedy as SBF, trying to milk a cryptocurrency ecosystem they never believed in nor understood.

Ugh I wish I hadn't checked. There's very little chance I'll get a raise but my salary has effectively gone backwards, significantly.

Please don't resort to conflating criticism of China (however speculative) with Sinophobia. It lowers the tone of the discussion and imputes a motive onto your peers which isn't warranted. If you have a problem with the facts of the discussion then address them directly.

HN is much more heavily moderated than those websites. Which is a good thing, it's why conversations here tend to be of a higher quality. I don't think the HN style of moderation would scale to places like Reddit even if they wanted it.

Twitter extends beyond USA.

Most laws that restrict content on social media sites are agnostic about where the site is hosted.

All great tips. I would add another bullet point along the lines of,

* Make your software observable. Your feature is not finished until you've verified it is being used as expected. Ideally you should have all of the data you need to know if things are going well without having to wait for customers to email you with complaints. Be careful not to develop a culture of developers throwing code "over the fence", either to QA staff or a release team - developers own their code from IDE to production.

If you don't develop this culture of ownership you end up with longer feedback loops between customer support, QA and dev.

Regardless of what the symbol actually is, it's clear from Kanye's recent interviews that he is pro-Nazi and pro-Hitler and he intended to post a swastika.

That's not true at all. There are many, many cases of people being banned for what I would consider quite mild transphobia. There's was a high profile case this year[0] where a republican Senate candidate was banned for saying,

"Women's sports are for women, not men pretending to be women"

It is not hard to find many more cases and of course the vast majority of banned accounts belong to people with no public profile and you'll never hear about them.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/twitter-suspends-u-s-s...

The entire point of Oh My Zsh is to get a specialty crafted instance of Zsh, so of course it overwrites your.zshrc.

What difference do you think a "higher quality review" would make? Apple is enforcing their strict policy that all purchases from within apps (with some documented exceptions) must use Apple's IAP and cough up the 30%.

This has nothing to do with Apple's kafkaesque review process and everything to do with their policies, which have been increasingly strictly enforced for the last couple of years.

Even if that is enough to identify users, you'd have to show evidence that that information is being handed to advertisers, which is what GP accused them of.

> either you allow Brave to leak your info to advertisers

Can you expand on this? According to the article the ads are privacy-preserving but I'm open to hearing otherwise. There's not a lot of detail in the article.

A lot of angry comments in here, but the post says there's an ad-free paid version,

> Ads will give users the option to use our independent search engine with ads that don’t track them, or to sign up for ad-free paid search

Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is? Or do you expect software companies to work for free? (Presumably not the companies you work for).

> In his memo, which Amazon later posted on its corporate blog, Jassy set the scene for more sweeping dismissals in the remainder of this year and into the next. “Our annual planning process extends into the new year, which means there will be more role reductions as leaders continue to make adjustments,” he wrote. “Those decisions will be shared with impacted employees and organisations early in 2023.”

That's a long time to have a sword dangling over your head. These employees are going to be under tremendous stress for at least a couple of months.

Has that happened on Android?

> If it wasn't such a PITA to move off LastPass,

It's really not. As the quality of their software declined severely starting around 4-5 years ago, I put off moving because I assumed it would be a huge hassle. It turned out to be surprisingly easy. I have since deleted my LastPass account and wouldn't trust that company to mop my floors.

A vast, overwhelming majority of programmers will never implement a concrete string type or compiler optimizations. Can you show me how this kind of theory is practical for a working programmer who does things like batch processing jobs, web applications, embedded software, event-driven distributed systems, etc?

Again, I don't see how this piece of information is useful for a programmer. And if it is, I'll bet it's 10x more useful if expressed in more ordinary language.

Facebook/Meta is an engineering-first organisation. There's no way that is how it went down.

Sorry to hear about the lay-off. I can't stress enough how influential Eric Lippert was on my early career. His work on C# and .NET, but more importantly his openness and engagement with the community played a big part in me continuing on the Microsoft stack.

Just jumping into any random month[1] in his blog archive from my formative years is incredible nostalgia for me. It's not the kind of high-concept "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors" content that will make the front page of HN, but was a great pipeline of information for a junior .NET developer hungry to learn.

[1] https://ericlippert.com/2009/08/

Most of us can go our whole careers without the "insight" that string concatenation is a "monoid". I don't know any languages that would balk at "foo" + "" or [a, b].concat([]). This all seems academic beyond belief.

It hasn't even been added back because it wasn't removed. This diff just shows the removal of a piece of text announcing it will be removed in the future. There's nothing to discuss here.

Many journalists today seem more interested in increasing their Twitter followers than being accountable.

> I think it's a safe assumption that significantly more people order food from local restaurants than they did before DoorDash existed.

Do you have any comprehensive evidence for this? I have very strong doubts.