I think the Cloudflare outage came down to a bad SQL query more than calling `.unwrap()` in production code... but a few less-than-ideal circumstances were revealed.
Yes, pretty basic looking mistakes that, from the outside, make many wonder how this got through. Though analyzing the post-mortem makes me think of the MV Dali crashing into the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore: the whole thing started with a single loose wire which set off a cascading failure. CF's situation was similar in a few ways though finding a bad query (and .unwrap() in production code rather than test code) should have been a lot easier to spot.
Have any of the post-mortems addressed if any of the code that led to CloudFlare's outage was generated by AI?
> And CF doesn't have the "...or people will die" safety criticality.
I disagree with that. Just because you can't point to people falling off a bridge into the water doesn't mean that outages of the web at this scale will not lead to fatalities.
OTOH...whether you describe it as regulations, an SLA, or otherwise - "150,000 ton freighter destroys a major bridge and kills people" is a far worse violation of expected behavior than "lots of web sites went down".
I see where people use CF and I actually think that 'lots of websites went down' has the potential these days to in aggregate kill far more people than were killed by the Dali losing control over their helm. The Dali accident could also have been avoided by simply requiring ships with the gross tonnage to do damage to the bridge to have mandatory tugs, and I'm not so sure there is a clean and effective solution for the kind of issues that CF can create.
They're more like 'the shipping industry' than they are like 'a single out of control vessel'. Keep in mind that half of the health care industry or more uses CF to protect their assets.
The webserver was fast but PHP in the days before fast CGI didn't take all that much load to bring the server to its knees. And we didn't have cloud hosting at the time either so dynamic scaling behind a network load balancer wasn't a thing (and running multiple servers behind a reverse proxy was uncommon and expensive).
Based on metrics designed by Lockheed Martin? The Fat Amy[1] can be a good plane and clearly superior for certain tasks but unless Canada plans to be in a hot war where air power is paramount it would make more sense to get the Gripen and save a ton of money.
Interesting to see this topic being discussed on HN; I'm curious if any homeschooling parents here have kids who WANT to learn computer programming. I haven't pushed my kids to do any of the things that I loved doing growing up (or what I do now). If any homeschooled kids are getting into programming was it as a result of playing with something like Scratch or did they dive directly into writing Python or JavaScript?
It hurts me so bad to have to say this (as someone who has been a life-long technologist with higher degrees in CS and CE): Pushing kids towards STEM careers is only going to end in disappointment. Medicine, sure, but engineering and programming? I don't think it's ever coming back to what it was here in the states. We took that golden goose out back and chopped its head clean off.
I am not suggesting pushing in any direction; it was more a realization that one of my kids said they wanted to learn to program I'm not sure what the best first step would be (learning straight C like I did a long time ago probably isn't he best starting point) and I was curious if anyone else had ideas.
I thought you were going to go in a different direction with that: recruiting. In States where home schoolers can play on public school sports teams there are cases where the family gets an apartment and one parent and the kid establishes residency for the purpose of being in a particular school district. A notable case in recent-ish history was someone called Tim Tebow in Jacksonville, FLA. It's not a common thing though, far less of a complaint-magnet than the Catholic schools who "recruit" players from all over a city or even region to come be a starter on their football/basketball team...
Or there could be absolutely no force or coercion involved: the mutual desire for him to work and her to stay home and raise and homeschool could have been how they met in the first place. You're not going to find people wanting that life on Tinder or Hinge or whatever people use for finding one another these days but it's easy if you want that kind of life.
Wait... you homeschool your kids and yet you write "...and [they] are jealous that she does both." No, they are ENVIOUS: one envies what they don't have and are jealous of what they have.
Discuss here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46140004
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