No the author is not some homicidal maniac. In interviews he emphasizes that no policy should be made based on his findings. But if policy were made, he would focus on universal healthcare, pre-school, government funded maternal leave, etc to support women.
Why this is even controversial is a mystery to me. Anyone who has had young kids in daycare knows this. If the study had been about the common cold instead of Covid, I doubt so many people would be triggered.
And money and propaganda. Had to keep the schools open so the parents could go to work. And there was a ton of economic force applied into trying to make everyone believe that.
Lol. What an extremely privileged take. Covid isn’t the only problem to solve for. For the vast majority if people, there are way bigger problems than covid. This was true even in march if 20202.
Who gives a shit about covid when you need to work for a living. Who gives a shit about covid when your kids literally depend on schools for healthy meals, safety and learning.
The myopic focus that work from home tech workers have on covid is so utterly detached from reality. The idea that all we should have optimized for is the spread of some respiratory virus. It’s insane. I still cannot believe the amount of privilege it takes to dismiss kids going to school.
> For the vast majority if people, there are way bigger problems than covid.
So the people living paycheck-to-paycheck should just continue business as usual and their families will be the ones dying during the pandemic, because they've got way bigger problems, got it.
1. Given that the vast majority of Covid deaths happened above retirement age, and this was pretty obvious very early on, there's very little weight to this argument.
2. What we did do in response to Covid will instead financially, educationally, and socially cripple those who already were living paycheck-to-paycheck, and make sure they stay that way for a long time.
3. So I assume you are mad at all of the upper-class families, especially those in political power who enacted the school closures, who continued to send their kids to private schools throughout the pandemic, thus furthering the spread of Covid?
> 1. Given that the vast majority of Covid deaths happened above retirement age, and this was pretty obvious very early on, there's very little weight to this argument.
COVID killed 19k people 30-39 which is 6% excess deaths, killed 46k people 40-49 which is 10% excess deaths and 201k people 50-64 which is 11% excess deaths.
The Vietnam war killed 58,000 Americans.
> 3. So I assume you are mad at all of the upper-class families, especially those in political power who enacted the school closures, who continued to send their kids to private schools throughout the pandemic, thus furthering the spread of Covid?
If they were doing that, yes. (And I can't understand how you'd think this would be some kind of 'gotcha' or that I wouldn't consider that actually worse).
The problem is that your account is coming across as a single-purpose flamewar account on a divisive topic. That kind of thing isn't in the intended spirit of the site.
It's fine to express a minority viewpoint but if that's the main thing you're doing, on a single divisive topic, then you aren't using HN as intended.
Can you please stop creating accounts to do this kind of thing? We end up having to ban them because they're not what this site is for. I don't have any problem with your views (I don't even know what they are, actually) but we need users here to use HN in the intended spirit, which is above all curiosity. Hardened battle from fixed positions is the opposite of that.
> So I assume you are mad at all of the upper-class families, especially those in political power who enacted the school closures, who continued to send their kids to private schools throughout the pandemic, thus furthering the spread of Covid?
Once you realize most of the people in favor of those mitigations fall into this bucket… it kinda starts to make sense. There is a reason so many in the laptop class supported this crap. They directly benifited from it.
I’ve run into all sorts of database locking issues and concurrency issues when using a database as a queue. I saw that mistake made a long time ago and I would never do it myself.
Database engines are getting features like SELECT FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED, so what were once serious blockers on this idea may no longer be as much of a problem.
It’s not necessary, but it is a lot less fiddly: you automatically look at only the tasks that someone else isn’t currently working on, and because the lock is held by the database connection you get automatic retries if your worker crashes and drops the connection. You could figure out all of the interactions needed to make this work yourself, but if the database already has support built in you may as well use it (and there’s a straightforward path to migrate if you need more sophistication later).
No? Unless there's some edge case with that statement I don't know about. That statement is basically tailor made for queues so you can select jobs that aren't currently being worked on by other workers.
Inasmuch as you trust your db's locking correctness it eliminates the concurrency issues. You can very naively have n workers pulling jobs from a queue not stepping on each-other.
My first job out of college was a hybrid computer operator /programmer for a company that ran a state lottery. This was the mid 90s.
They had a complete backup site with redundant servers, modems (for point of sales systems) and a redundant staff because the cost of being down was so high.
We never had to use the backup site the entire three years I was there.
And guess how long it takes me to set up an entire data center with Terraform on any of the three major cloud providers? (disclaimer: I work for one of them)?
It’s much less maintenance than my days of maintaining servers myself.
And not to mention half the reason I went to cloud was not that I didn’t want to deal with administering servers, I didn’t want to deal with server administrators.
When I was at the 60 person company where I got my start in “cloud”, I could experiment with different types of databases, scaling, and other technologies just by throwing something together and deleting the entire stack.
I worked for a company that aggregated publicly available health care provider data (ie no PII) for major health care providers. They used our APIs for their own websites and mobile apps.
When we got a new customer (ie large health care provider), our systems automatically scaled.
When a little worldwide pandemic happened in 2020 and our traffic spiked by 100%+, guess how long it took us to provision new servers.
Hint: we didn’t, everything just scaled by itself.
I compare that to the old days when it took us weeks to provision an MySQL server.
Managing infrastructure is doesn’t provide a competitive advantage unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.
> And guess how long it takes me to set up an entire data center with Terraform on any of the three major cloud providers? (disclaimer: I work for one of them)?
And the discussion is how much extra do you pay for it.
> Hint: we didn’t, everything just scaled by itself.
Again it's not free so what's the surprise? Are you surprised that you get water out of your tap? Hint: it just flows!
> I compare that to the old days when it took us weeks to provision an MySQL server.
Sounds like you've burnt in the past is all. So your on-prem is slow does not equal all on-prem is bad?
> Managing infrastructure is doesn’t provide a competitive advantage
How do you know it doesn't? You've only looked at it from your use case and based on it making you happy and saving you time. Nothing to do with the business needs at all.
> How do you know it doesn't? You've only looked at it from your use case
So you didn’t see the rest of the paragraph that you snipped?
“unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.”
> So your on-prem is slow does not equal all on-prem is bad?
How fast can you spin up a dozen VMs? A message bus? A scalable database with read replicas? An entire redundant data center in another region? A few terabytes of storage? A redis cluster? An ElasticSearch cluster? A CDN? A few load balancers?
The procurement process to get an extra server provision in a colo will by definition be slower than my deploying a CloudFormation stack.
> How fast can you spin up a dozen VMs? A message bus? A scalable database with read replicas? An entire redundant data center in another region? A few terabytes of storage? A redis cluster? An ElasticSearch cluster? A CDN? A few load balancers? The procurement process to get an extra server provision in a colo will by definition be slower than my deploying a CloudFormation stack.
Your examples here are just examples of situations where you basically need a cloud solution by definition. If these are your requirements, then yes obviously you should use cloud for it. That said, your points are a bit confusing. It's not an either-or. For situations like you're describing, you use cloud. For situations where you don't need to use cloud, you can consider something else like on-prem or colo or ...
You seem to have a (literally) extremist position where it's all cloud or nothing. It's not.
Well then I'm a little confused. You wrote this earlier which contradicted my post:
> Managing infrastructure is doesn’t provide a competitive advantage unless you’re something like Backblaze, DropBox or another company where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise.
You don't need to be a company "where your entire reason for existing is your infrastructure expertise" in order for managing your own infrastructure to be a competitive advantage. Managing (some of) your own infrastructure can be a competitive advantage even managing infrastructure is not your core competency or even your goal. It is a competitive advantage of the TOC is lower. It sometimes is.
But if you're now saying you agree with my statement, then I guess well we're in agreement.
But, really how often do you need to do that and what % of users really need to?
Also, once on the cloud some business management take so long to "approve" new expenses that in reality it may not really be feasible to do things fast enough for it to be a benefit.
I've quite often seen the need for 5-10 meetings or 2-3 written documents to get approval for 10 new VMs for developers or new servers for backups.
> But, really how often do you need to do that and what % of users really need to?
When testing something or you want to spin up your own isolated environment for yourself or for your team? Very often.
> Also, once on the cloud some business management take so long to "approve" new expenses that in reality it may not really be feasible to do things fast enough for it to be a benefit.
And that’s get back to my other point that when you do a “lift and shift”. If you don’t change your processes both IT and technical, you won’t see any benefit from the cloud and you will end up spending more.
There are so many ways that you can both give developers freedom and still have the necessary guardrails. I’m speaking about AWS because that’s the one I know best (and where I work). But I’m sure there are equivalent services on other providers.
For instance you can have a vending machine type of setup where you allow department heads to set up non prod accounts with organization controlled service control policies. You can use a Service Catalog approach where you surface Terraform or CloudFormation defined products where the users can only provision infrastructure defined by their administrators. But they can do it themselves.
Depending on which level of the organization I’m working with, I try to convince the IT department to give individual departments their own organizational unit to monitor and to embed someone from IT into their team - ie a “DevOps” philosophy.
> And not to mention half the reason I went to cloud was not that I didn’t want to deal with administering servers, I didn’t want to deal with server administrators.
I bet it's true for many. I approximate it from what I see in backend/frontend teams - they don't even deal with eachother, not even system administrators.
Luckily [in the current project] devs don't have access to production and very limited to dev environment in terms of ssh/db endpoints.
At my n-2 job (2017-mid 2018), I was the dev lead when management decided to “move to the cloud”. They hired a bunch of “consultants” who were old school operations people who only knew how to do lift and shifts.
I didn’t know cloud from a whole in the wall. But the internal IT department treated AWS just like they did their Colo. I thought AWS was just a bunch of VMs and I treated it as such for a green field implementation.
I studied for the AWS Solution Architect certification just so I would know what I didn’t know and to be able to come up with some intelligent ideas for phase 2.
I ended up leaving that job and working for a startup. The CTO knew I had only theoretical knowledge of AWS. But I had good system design instincts and he liked my ideas. I was hired as a senior developer. But that rapidly morphed into a cloud architect role. I took advantage of AWS and all of its locked in goodness including moving everything to either Lambda and Fargate (serverless Docker).
I had admin rights to everything until I voluntarily gave myself the same constraints to production that everyone else had when we hired a couple of operation guys.
We scaled without any issues as the company grew and Covid happened - we worked in the healthcare industry.
Now I work for AWS. But I’ve done my share of managing servers since the mid 90s as part of my job. That’s a life I don’t ever want to go back to.
And why would I base my entire application on a framework by a tiny developer?
And honestly, ChatGPT is so well trained on AWS CLIs, Terraform, CloudFormation, the SDKs for Python and Node, I can throw most of my problems at it and it does well.
I’m not saying their work is bad. But every abstraction is leaky and it’s a lot easier to find someone who knows how to use the native SDKs for AWS/Azure/GCP than someone who knows an obscure framework that doesn’t cover everything.
So the top contributors of modern Linux are large corporations. cURL is not a framework
And isn’t that the ultimate in survivorship bias? How many other languages and frameworks would you have left you screwed if you jumped into whole hog in before they had popular uptake?
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion-and-crime-revisite...
No the author is not some homicidal maniac. In interviews he emphasizes that no policy should be made based on his findings. But if policy were made, he would focus on universal healthcare, pre-school, government funded maternal leave, etc to support women.