Elon Musk lives here, in Southern California, where the population is incredibly sprawled. Public transportation is almost useless here. Buses run late and are somewhat dangerous, trains do not cover much if any of the three counties, and most people drive cars.
Problem is, the only trains here in Southern California go in the L.A. → San Diego direction. I would love if the 91 had a railway running in parallel, but unfortunately that doesn't seem likely.
“You're weak on logic, that's the trouble with you. You're like the guy in the story who was caught in a sudden shower and Who ran to a grove of trees and got under one. He wasn't worried, you see, because he figured when one tree got wet through, he would just get under another one."
One of my all time favorites. Though it took me a while to remember the source of the quote. I thought it had been used in the context of global warming so google didn’t turn up much. Then I remembered it’s actually from a story about universal cooling.
That's incorrect. RAID is a system build on top of hard drives for redundancy. Redundancy (for this use of the word) is simply duplication across multiple hard-drives, which doesn't require a system at all.
Really, this is a very simplistic view of long term storage.
A RAID is not magically more reliable than a single drive, it needs a bunch of infrastructure and it needs to be duplicated to some other location far away enough to ensure that a single catastrophe such as a fire does not destroy your entire raid.
You are missing the wood for the trees: hard drives and raid devices are storage mechanisms that fall far short of the boundary conditions set to keep something permanently, at worst you will store your data for a couple of hour like that and in ideal conditions maybe for a couple of years, but on a scale of decades or centuries they are useless as a complete solution, though they could be part of such a solution.
I wonder how terrifying it would be to get a notification every time a single underlying storage device on something like Dropbox or S3 failed. We all know there is some kind of redundant system but how often does your data get moved around because of failures?
You could be made to feel better if the alert only came when it concerned your data. But even then, and going by the NAS sitting under my desk you could be months without any activity and then suddenly two drives fail in two weeks. It's a nice little random data generator.
Past a certain point it would be just a part of the job. As long as you have hot spares, you'd just go around replacing failed drives every day or whenever.
It's not clear how much better than they are than regular media since there haven't been many tests. There are two that I'm aware of, one by the French Archives (who've done this a few times it so happens) and one by the US DoD.
The French found that M-DISC didn't perform much better than regular DVDs and that a weird kind of glass DVD beat everything else hands down.
The Americans found no errors at all in their tests of M-DISC while all other disks encountered them.
I suspect the important differences were:
- The Americans' tested the discs after light exposure, the French did not. It may be that the light caused the regular DVDs to fail but not the M-DISC.
- The French tests were far longer (1000h) than the Americans' (24h). It may be that M-DISC can't survive the adverse conditions past a certain point that the Americans didn't reach.
Also as far as I'm aware, there are no tests of the Blu-Ray variant of M-DISC.
Personally, given the cost of M-DISC, I'd buy a few cheap terrible Blu-Rays instead and just make sure they're not exposed to too much light.
What about that doesn’t make sense to you? Almost all species do that — humans included. Literally: Some families in New York City have been in the same burrough since their ancestor’s arrived from Europe. This can go for anywhere on Earth — a girl I once dated could trace her liniage back hundreds of years, mostly in a small town in Australia for centuries after her ancestor was taken there during British colonization.
>> mostly in a small town in Australia for centuries after her ancestor was taken there during British colonization.
Not that many centuries. Australia was colonized very recently. Go to placed like the middle east or china and families may have been in the same area for thousands of years.
I think you probably find some degree of that in Europe too until quite recently, notwithstanding some famous major wars and territorial shifts...
It's an anecdote, but I was pretty impressed when my uncle recently signed up for one of those ancestry tests, and it correctly pinpointed exactly the region that his grandfather (my great-grandfather) had come from in the late 19th century. I'm certainly no expert in the genetics but it boggles my mind a bit that it's detectable that his recent lineage didn't stray much from that small area of Europe until it went to the States. I share 50% of my ancestry with him, the other 50% is from other parts of Europe, my wife is from another part with its complicated story, and we have kids... After 3 generations I don't think any one particular country should be particularly recognizable (though I'll admit, I may be over-simplifying or misunderstanding how it works). Yet my uncle's DNA test pinpointed a small place in Europe with only a few hundred thousand people, and did so correctly.
Be very careful of those tests. Look at who is running them, often a particular church. Many have questioned their methodology. Not of the testing per se, but in how they selected their sample "representative" populations. They didn't do the science to determine whether a sample person was really representative, beyond some questionnaires. And their sampling was based on a particular world view, one that locked populations down circa 150 years ago into modern national boundaries and ignoring previous migrations.
Y'know, after a decade on Internet forums, I've found saying "I know I'm going to get downvoted, but—" usually leads to downvotes, while simply stating your position gets judged on actual merit rather than self pity.
I would actually speculate that it's the opposite. Though not exactly the same, 2 of my 3 most upvoted comments on reddit (465 and 510 votes) contain edits where I ask about why I'm getting downvoted. As soon as I added that question in, the voting seemed to switch directions. It's like people took a second more to think about the comment rather than just acting on emotion. I think that's why the saying has survived and you see it so often. Obviously this is just anecdotal, but I think there's some neat psychology happening when someone brings up upvotes/downvotes. It'd be interesting to do an analysis to see how those words effect a comment's score.
Edit: Just realized that the parent of the comment I'm replying to is the top comment on this post, so that's another piece of anecdotal evidence.
For what you've described, I agree: if you write a post, get downvotes, and then add an edit wondering about the downvotes because you're genuine about your position and are looking to engage, people tend to start engaging in kind and upvote you at least to neutral.
But I think the parent is talking about the habit of many who are about to post a counter-groupthink or controversial opinion to lead off with "I know I'm going to get downvoted for this, but...". My feeling there is that people generally view that as a sort of flippant disregard/dismissal of the community moderation process, so it basically _invites_ downvotes.
Just for comparison, $19 billion is what the first operational fusion power reactor is budgeted to cost. Instead of Whatsapp, the world could have fusion power. Tell me that makes sense.
> Instead of Whatsapp, the world could have fusion power.
I'm sure if HN could combine savings from annual budget the $5 lattes and $2,000+ annual refreshes of the Shinybook Pro, we'd be halfway there. But hey, maybe the value provided in an affordable SMS replacement to a billion people isn't all that, right? It's just a replaceable app, why don't they get iPhones and use iMessage. /s
HN can be hilariously condescending - "I don't use this, it doesn't impact me, I don't understand it - therefore it can't be worth much".
> Tell me that makes sense.
WhatsApp provides massive value to its users, especially when they supported feature phones. What's the human value of a poor rural farmer sending a message to their child in the next city over "Your mom isn't feeling well, please send money for a clinic visit"? I bet it is more than the $1/year WhatsApp originally charged. Communication is a force-multiplier - someone smarter than me has probably already calculated the value WhatsApp has added to the world by merely existing.
I'm not a Facebook fan- I hate that Facebook changed the monetization model and are dropping WhatsApp support for feature phones in pursuit of features. However, Facebook paid $19 billion because WhatsApp was potentially an existential threat to Fb. Why don't you and a small team develop a fusion reactor and see how much GE/Saudi Aramco will pay - I bet it would be north of $19 billion.
First it starts by claiming that I don't understand, use, or appreciate messaging in general. This is of course without any background or support, and is simply an ad hominem. I have a more extensive background in messaging than most people in tech. There is no condescension in making a value judgement of yet another messaging application vs a fundamental energy source technology.
Next you make some statements in support of value for WA. Regardless of the value of messaging in general, WA is is simply yet another app in a very crowded market. Its purchase was clearly anti-competitive, rather than innovative, and as such can not be justified based on function.
Last you hurl some weird non-sequitur that implies my judgement is incorrect because I'm not a fusion researcher/implementor working on disrupting the world energy market, combined with some kind of conspiracy theory about Saudi Aramco? That's just plain specious. One can clearly judge the value of working fusion energy without being a physicist.
So please, re-read the posting guidelines and reconsider how you address others and their arguments. Thank you.
> There is no condescension in making a value judgement of yet another messaging application vs a fundamental energy source technology.
This is the root of our disconnect - I strongly disagree with your assertion that WhatsApp was merely "yet another messaging application". If it were, why aren't Slack and the rest of them being snapped up for $19 billion?
You have an extensive background in messaging tech - I have a more extensive background than most in the 3rd world. I witnessed the phenomenon that was WhatsApp firsthand. What other messenger supported feature phones (think Nokia S40 and S60)? This probably doesn't matter in your world, and probably gives you a blindspot that causes you to not see the value that is readily apparent to me.
Our disconnect may boil down to this: in my view, WhatsApp's features are, in hindsight, obvious, simple, and easy to implement by any competitor. The advantage (and value) in WA is in the already grown network, the familiar marketplace network effect growing out of that.
Facebook acquired WA for the network of users, not the messaging features. It could easily and more cheaply have fielded an identical app with the same or superior features. It didn't, though, because it wanted to not leave a competitor in the marketplace.
Thus the judgement that it was $19B of mis-allocated capital from a larger viewpoint. We apparently disagree on this point.
On the other hand, working fusion power technology would be hugely consequential for most of the human race, especially in places like Africa that are so energy-needy at this point in their development.
I completely agree with your first 2 paragraphs. I am furious with Fb dropping support for basic phones - and this is making WA "yet another messaging app" in pursuit of crowding out Snapchat.
> Thus the judgement that it was $19B of mis-allocated capital from a larger viewpoint. We apparently disagree on this point.
I almost agree, only I believe there's more nuance to this. Fb was never going to invest $19B in fusion power, so to say it was mis-allocated feels wrong. The only reason it spent so much was that WhatsApp was a potential existential threat to Fb. This was the point I was attempting to put across, abeit poorly - that a scrappy company that manages to achieve fusion would be an existential threat to energy companies and would be worth billions for that reason alone.
Just as a side note, that's such a weird thing to compare against... What intuition does the average reader have about the price of container ships? If anything, I learnt that container ships are less costly than I would have guessed...
It’s probably a misunderstanding of common media units of measure. If an Olympic swimming pool or an Empire State Building are a valid unit of measure, why not a container ship?
Those are probably weird too, but most people have some idea of how tall tall buildings are (even if they haven't been to NYC), and likewise have probably been to a pool.
