I've worked with a lot of "smart" engineers over my career with whom autoscaling is a completely foreign concept, or a half-baked concept at best. My favorite is devs pushing to migrate to k8s because it "scales" and won't hear a single thing otherwise.
For a static blog you dont need that. My blog made the (near bottom of) HN front page last year. I didn't notice a thing until I looked at the traffic report (using goaccess). Static site generator with the result served from a bottom of the barrel Hetzner VPS, using nginx.
If a blog needs "scaling" of any sort you are doing it wrong.
Look at the techempower benchmarks, even python stuff can handle 40k requests per second involving database lookups, and when things are cachable compiled/JITed languages scale to millions on 2 CPUs. And if you object that those are microbenchmarks, I have seen this in real systems too. E.g. converting a convoluted hairball of python, lambdas and SQS to a Rust service running on 2vCPUs reduced latencies from seconds to milliseconds.
The "If necessary I can add autoscaling later" mindset is what leads to bloated, slow websites.
You don't need autoscaling for a basic blog to handle the traffic of Hacker News. People have had "this page is hosted on <vintage computer>" sites hit the front page that have stayed up.
Americans would rather die than give up their air conditioned bubbles on wheels. I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.
> I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.
I see these all the time here in the Netherlands. Very small cars. Some on the road and even smaller ones people drive on the bike paths. Small motorized vehicles, ebikes and scooters share the paths with regular bikes which works because they have usually at least two lanes, so they are more like tiny roads. Very handy.
Regulation kills the value proposition. You are basically describing a "neighborhood electric vehicle", but US law limits them to 25 mph, and it is not legal to drive them on many arterials, so they are only really useful inside communities which were designed for them.
They really should just open up letting you have a small vehicle everywhere in the country. Sometimes you visit some city or little rural area where they let you drive golf carts or atvs or snow mobiles on the roads, grocery store lots are more full of those instead of bigger vehicles as a result, and the sky doesn't seem to fall down either.
I get it if you live in a dense metro. A car is not worth it in NYC, SF, etc. Other than that it's pretty abnormal for people not to want a car. It's usually some weird anxiety about driving. Not to mention - heaven forbid - you have a family.
They are very popular in china, such as the Wuling ev. In America, they are afraid of them because they are small. They want big cars to have a large crumple area in a crash.
Because most people feel uncomfortable being in the tiny vehicle that sits below the bumber of all the trucks and suvs that surround them. It's one of those things that doesn't work until a large percentage of other people are doing it. Very few want to put themselves in more danger for principled reasons.
And cars started getting bigger because, it was a way to legally classify them as trucks thus saving money for the manufacturer. And then everyone had to follow just to feel safe
And of course this mostly only happened and is far more noticeable in the us than elsewhere when measured in car size and people were convinced to buy the larger cars aka turned SUVs and pick up trucks by marketing. This started to happen in the 2000s
I was recently looking for a new running watch but couldn't for the life of me figure out what Garmin's higher end watches do to justify being over $1000. Like, ok, better battery life... but besides that?
For workout tracking depending on your sport the Garmin is way better- for swimming the lap counter and for hiking the trail maps on Garmin gets more granular and better for tracking. For skiing the altitude tracking and vertical distance is better on the Garmin.
For phone, calendar and work integration the apple watch is better (I have it hooked up to take calls from the watch) so I ultimately went with the apple watch even though my triathlon training tracking was better on the Garmin!
In one social group I am part of, Garmin just became the new trend. Watches have historically been status symbols even more than they are functional. Someone drops a few hundred/thousand/whatever and then brags about the newest new and how they are on it, then others move over to keep up.
People often buy these kinds of discretionary toys with their hearts and do post-hoc rationalization with their minds. You can't figure it out because your heart hasn't brought you there so your brain isn't wasting time creating justifications.
For what it is worth, sometimes these trends die an early death when people realize there is no substance underneath the justification. At least in the Garmin case, most people I know are happy with the purchase, in that it does deliver on certain needs. Since it matches their expectations, they don't have to suffer any cognitive dissonance between the heart-to-brain justification and their lived experience.
Funny, because literally every single apple product page gets posted as "news" to HN and every time I see one I think it's just apple marketing astroturfing. Especially since most of the product updates the last few years seem to fall into the, "BUT SHE'S GOT A NEW HAT" territory.
That was my same thought!
Brands I have never heard of that can't make a call, send messages or add a reminder popping up like they invented sliced bread.
We get it, some people don't want to charge a watch even though they have to regularly charge their phone, headphones, laptop and maybe car. Such a weird flex that a watch lasts an extra few days, who cares?! Charge it while you shower and you're good to go
> Brands I have never heard of that can't make a call, send messages or add a reminder
The fact that these are your top 3 reasons to consider Apple Watch as the only brand to own speaks volumes about why monopolists shouldn't be allowed to keep APIs private indefinitely, the way Apple has with every API the Watch uses. I'm pretty sure every API that smartwatches have access to on iOS were introduced before the Apple Watch was a product. In other words, Apple arrested the progress of all other smartwatches for everyone on the iOS platform in 2015 so that they (and their fans) can smugly tout all these exclusives. (I'd add to your list the 'make my phone beep' feature, which is the main reason my whole family owns Apple Watches.)
I think it's 2 different end-consumers. Apple targets "watch on my arm", garmin targets fitness tracker that happens to do a few watch things (notifications, payments, some limited messaging).
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
I feel like this isn't a thing when it comes to applications. All the decisions you'd make to allow an app to scale sideways are just, like, good design decisions? Even if you never went 1->2 instances. Otherwise every app would just be PostgREST on top of a beefy VM.
I've pushed teams to choose Spanner over using Postgres (when already in the GCP ecosystem). It's not really more expensive when you sit down and do the math, you save untold hours of maintenance over the lifespan of the app, and it actually scales without fuss.
Is it really not more expensive? I haven't operated a large scale Spanner cluster, but the numbers would suggest it's quite a bit more expensive. I suppose it's workload dependent is what you're saying?
I ran some rough numbers a while ago and I found single-region GCP Spanner to be the most cost-effective relational DB option (out of the ones I looked it) if you don't mind that it can't scale to zero (min $65/mo), if synchronous replication for durability is a must and you need serializability. It's more cost effective than any Aurora offering including DSQL (which isn't serializable afaik but even then).
I think one of the maybe less talked about benefits of distributed SQL is support for nearly transparent rolling upgrades of the database with very little impact to a running workload. Spanner is best in class at this.
Major version upgrades, HA, multi-master, sharding and georeplication are all stories that are not as out-of-the box simple as they should be at this point, IMHO. Then you layer on all the ways devs tend to abuse postgres (stored procedures, pubsub systems, re-indexing hot tables, etc) that will need hours and hours of debate + meetings + committees + design reviews + more meetings to settle. When all along the team probably could have just written the data to something like Firestore and been, like, totally fine?
The administration has no power to force anyone to go along with its stupid attempts to change the name. We can, and should, blame both the administration (for trying to rename things it has no right to rename) and Google (for indulging their whims).
I feel like I'm the only person on HN that doesn't have any major (or cliche) problems with GCP, even after using it for a decade at this point. Like it's not perfect and I've hit weird roadblocks along the way but I've dabbled AWS and I currently use Azure at work and those are hilariously bad in their own ways, people just seem to kind of be used to it?
I like GCP as well, having previously used AWS for many years.
The biggest issue is that it's taken Google a long time to figure out what enterprise security is - it's not something what was in their DNA - and the product shows it. They're too focused on weird fancy half-assed "beyond" solutions to properly implement the basics. They dangle clever federated etc. solutions that only work in some circumstances so that you're better off just avoiding them, but the more basic alternatives are limited in their own way because they focus too much on the fancier solutions.
I find GCP's developer experience to be superior to AWS. Maybe it's just me, but I found Cloud Run to be super simple to use compared to ECS/Fargate. The "gcloud" command structure also makes more sense to me.
reply