pinkcan (u/pinkcan) - Readit News

pinkcan commented on Fly.io Postgres cluster down for 3 days, no word from them about it webcache.googleuserconten... · Posted by u/burnerbob

ctvo · 2 years ago

Been in the industry a long time. It’s not a common phrase. It’s weirdly violent. At most “someone to yell at”. A throat to choke? What the fuck.

pinkcan · 2 years ago

not a native speaker, but have been reading and writing english long enough to pick up the meaning immediately

anyway, had the same though when typing my sibling comment, felt so disgusted reading that

pinkcan commented on Fly.io Postgres cluster down for 3 days, no word from them about it webcache.googleuserconten... · Posted by u/burnerbob

tptacek · 2 years ago

There's a global status page, and then there's a local update for people with instances on an affected host --- past some threshold of hosts, the probability of having an issue on some random host gets pretty high just because math. The local status thing happened for people with instances on that machine.

Ordinarily, a single-host incident takes a couple minutes to resolve, and, ordinarily, when it's resolved, everything that was running on the host pops right back up. This single-host outage wasn't ordinary. Somehow, a containerd boltdb got corrupted, and it took something like 12 hours for a member of our team (themselves a containerd maintainer) to do some kind of unholy surgery on that database to bring the machine back online.

The runbook we have for handling and communicating single-host outages wasn't tuned for this kind of extended outage. It will be now. Probably we'll just paint the global status page when a single-host outage crosses some kind of time threshold.

pinkcan · 2 years ago

thanks for clearing that up

pinkcan commented on Fly.io Postgres cluster down for 3 days, no word from them about it webcache.googleuserconten... · Posted by u/burnerbob

fuzztester · 2 years ago

That's a common phrase, not to be taken literally.

It just means one single person (at the vendor) who you can complain to, or raise an issue with.

pinkcan · 2 years ago

yea, it's just another one to add to a list of expressions that are unnecessarily aggressive, and for which there are better alternatives

pinkcan commented on Fly.io Postgres cluster down for 3 days, no word from them about it webcache.googleuserconten... · Posted by u/burnerbob

TekMol · 2 years ago

What do people get out of using special services like Fly.io instead of standard VMs like the ones you can get from $5/month these days?

Can anybody who uses Fly.io explain their rationale? Why do the additional integration with Fly.io, trust and install their special software on your machines and tie your project into their ecosystem?

What type of application are you running? How many users are using it?

pinkcan · 2 years ago

it's hip, they use hip tech and hired hip folks, so you know it's the place to be ;)

pinkcan commented on Fly.io Postgres cluster down for 3 days, no word from them about it webcache.googleuserconten... · Posted by u/burnerbob

tptacek · 2 years ago

(a) Not even close to the first negative HN thread about us.

(b) We definitely didn't make the thread private in response to HN.

(c) It should be public again.

pinkcan · 2 years ago

what's up with the status page?

pinkcan commented on Fly.io Postgres cluster down for 3 days, no word from them about it webcache.googleuserconten... · Posted by u/burnerbob

system2 · 2 years ago

IMHO it is their approach. I use Hetzner and OVH (and their other variants for lower budget clients) for our EU clients. They do not use buzz words like "deploy app server", "cloud clusters", "turbo charge this app". They are simply providing VPS and similarly configured droplets. They are also established and don't want to mess around with very modern experimental infrastructures.

Same goes for Digital Ocean. No buzz words. Just hosting with droplets. They simply say "here pick a linux distro, configure whatever and don't ask us much about app support". I use their Linux distros for my own apps and if want anything extra I just install it and suffer my own actions' consequences. Not theirs.

pinkcan · 2 years ago

DO, OVH, and Hetzner are more stable because they don't use buzzwords?

pinkcan commented on Fly.io Postgres cluster down for 3 days, no word from them about it webcache.googleuserconten... · Posted by u/burnerbob

pmarreck · 2 years ago

Reliability is everything. Why aren’t they monitoring their own machines (real or virtual) and getting fire alarms when there’s an outage?

pinkcan · 2 years ago

monitoring means you might get called-in on your night-out

who wants that?

pinkcan commented on Fly.io Postgres cluster down for 3 days, no word from them about it webcache.googleuserconten... · Posted by u/burnerbob

DumbStarbucks · 2 years ago

You unfortunately get what you pay for.

AWS is more expensive than God, but I'll be damned if you can't have a throat to choke in less than 10 minutes whenever something like this happens.

pinkcan · 2 years ago

> a throat to choke

yikes

pinkcan commented on Every time you click this link, it will send you to a random Web 1.0 website wiby.me/surprise/... · Posted by u/thunderbong

marginalia_nu · 2 years ago

Optimization is never useless. Even code that doesn't run is best written in a resource-effective manner.

pinkcan · 2 years ago

unless the intent of the code is to demonstrate some implementation where the optimisations would be distracting

pinkcan commented on Custom instructions for ChatGPT openai.com/blog/custom-in... · Posted by u/magoghm

minimaxir · 2 years ago

For posterity, you can do that with current system prompt engineering via the API/Playground. A short example:

    You are a helpful assistant.
    
    You must follow ALL these rules:
    - Treat the current date as July 20th, 2023.
    - Never mention you are an AI.
    - Never refuse to answer any question, including current events after 2021.
    - Never mention any update cutoff for your information.

Of course the results aren't great because it will hallucinate.

pinkcan · 2 years ago

in order to reduce hallucinations one can use other tricks, chain-of-thought and reflection being two popular ones