Scalability irony



  • Right, so, this was on Hacker News today.

    Error establishing database connection

    Apparently they don't use equivalent software on their blog.....



  • Is there a name for the mental illness displayed here, i.e. "the website for a thing is bad, therefore the thing itself is bad?" The most obvious example being Obamacare in the US, but here's another one.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    ... The most obvious example being Obamacare in the US, ...

    This is a different issue -- "I hate this program because I was told to so I'm going to search for examples of problems with it."



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Is there a name for the mental illness displayed here, i.e. "the website for a thing is bad, therefore the thing itself is bad?" The most obvious example being Obamacare in the US, but here's another one.
     

    It's more a misplaced case of doogfooding, I believe.

    I don't think ebay is required or expected to host their tech blog on the same server system they use for the products and users.



  • @dhromed said:

    I don't think ebay is required or expected to host their tech blog on the same server system they use for the products and users.

    Except apparently by DailyWTF posters.

    Another frequent example: "The FBI's (or some other important institution) website was hacked, therefore the FBI is incompetent at their core task." No. That just says the tiny bit of the FBI that maintains the website, maybe 4 guys using off-the-shelf stuffs, is incompetent. At most. And even then some ways of taking down a website, like a big DDOS are practically impossible to defend against by anybody.

    You'd think IT people would be the one group who understands it, but I see the mistake as much in IT as anywhere else.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    Is there a name for the mental illness displayed here, i.e. "the website for a thing is bad, therefore the thing itself is bad?" The most obvious example being Obamacare in the US, but here's another one.

    It's more a misplaced case of doogfooding, I believe.

    I don't think ebay is required or expected to host their tech blog on the same server system they use for the products and users.

    Indeed. I'd go with illiteracy, since that's not what fennec's saying. In fact, just the opposite, which was, why don't they use their apparently useful product to prevent the website about the tech behind the website from sucking? I'd agree that it's probably not as suitable for their blog as for their main business, but it's a good enough fit to earn a chuckle. Isn't this supposed to be some sort of humor site? Why do people go and try to ruin that?

    Obamacare is bad because it is bad (overly complex, relies on the opposite of the incentives it creates and was sold by telling deliberate lies about what it would do). The website failures are just their own badness. At least Oregon can blame Oracle.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    Another frequent example: "The FBI's (or some other important institution) website was hacked, therefore the FBI is incompetent at their core task." No. That just says the tiny bit of the FBI that maintains the website, maybe 4 guys using off-the-shelf stuffs, is incompetent. At most. And even then some ways of taking down a website, like a big DDOS are practically impossible to defend against by anybody.

    Yes, that sort of thing drives me nuts, too. But having a high traffic, highly available web page is one of ebay's core competencies (or at least one that their business relies on).



  • @boomzilla said:

    @dhromed said:
    @blakeyrat said:
    Is there a name for the mental illness displayed here, i.e. "the website for a thing is bad, therefore the thing itself is bad?" The most obvious example being Obamacare in the US, but here's another one.

    It's more a misplaced case of doogfooding, I believe.

    I don't think ebay is required or expected to host their tech blog on the same server system they use for the products and users.

    Indeed. I'd go with illiteracy, since that's not what fennec's saying. In fact, just the opposite, which was, why don't they use their apparently useful product to prevent the website about the tech behind the website from sucking? I'd agree that it's probably not as suitable for their blog as for their main business, but it's a good enough fit to earn a chuckle. Isn't this supposed to be some sort of humor site? Why do people go and try to ruin that?

    Ah. That would be on account of a mental illness named "Blakeyrat", which is a specific type of the illness "know-it-all anti-social jerk". In a non-WTF community, he would have been kicked out and banned months ago. :P



  •  That's what happens when you use an insecure piece of shit like Wordpress.



  • As acting head of the Irony Police for this thread, I can confirm that this is indeed ironic.

    It is a form of situational irony in which an action (to tell readers about scaleable web server management) has a result that is contrary to its intention (the article could not be viewed due to apparent poor scaleability).

    It is also correct that it is apparent that they don't use the equvalent software on their blog, not because their blog was down, but because the rest of ebay remained up while the blog was down.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Is there a name for the mental illness displayed here, i.e. "the website for a thing is bad, therefore the thing itself is bad?" The most obvious example being Obamacare in the US, but here's another one.


    This statement would be relevant if OP had said that Ebay is shit. Instead, he merely pointed out the irony involved in having a website posting about scalability going down due to lack of scalability. This says nothing about whether Ebay's software is good or bad, just that it's an amusing coincidence.

    It's like the Atkins diet guy dying of a heart attack. Or the president of ADT having his house burgled.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Snooder said:

    It's like the Atkins diet guy dying of a heart attack.

    Which didn't happen.

    @Snooder said:

    Or the president of ADT having his house burgled.

    Did this happen?



  • @boomzilla said:

    @Snooder said:
    It's like the Atkins diet guy dying of a heart attack.

    Which didn't happen.

    @Snooder said:

    Or the president of ADT having his house burgled.

    Did this happen?

    A CEO of Segway died accidentally driving his Segway off a cliff.



  • @toon said:

    @boomzilla said:
    @Snooder said:
    It's like the Atkins diet guy dying of a heart attack.

    Which didn't happen.

    @Snooder said:

    Or the president of ADT having his house burgled.

    Did this happen?

    A CEO of Segway died accidentally driving his Segway off a cliff.

    I'm pretty sure that's not ironic.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @blakeyrat said:

    No. That just says the tiny bit of the FBI that maintains the website, maybe 4 guys using off-the-shelf stuffs, is incompetent.
     

    No, that says "The 4 guys who maintain the FBI website know it will be targeted, but only by idiots who think the public facing website of the FBI has shit to do with anything. So these 4 guys kill two birds at once by setting up a solution that is both a public-facing website, and a one-step-above-easy-to-exploit honeypot. When the website does get 'hacked', the honeypot allows the FBI to track down some low-hanging fruit to string up as a warning to the hacker community, and to artificially boost their success rate on the 'war on cyberterrorism'."



  • @Buttembly Coder said:

    @toon said:
    @boomzilla said:
    @Snooder said:
    It's like the Atkins diet guy dying of a heart attack.

    Which didn't happen.

    @Snooder said:

    Or the president of ADT having his house burgled.

    Did this happen?

    A CEO of Segway died accidentally driving his Segway off a cliff.

    I'm pretty sure that's not ironic.

    Not ironic.

    Just funny.

     



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @Buttembly Coder said:

    @toon said:
    @boomzilla said:
    @Snooder said:
    It's like the Atkins diet guy dying of a heart attack.

    Which didn't happen.

    @Snooder said:

    Or the president of ADT having his house burgled.

    Did this happen?

    A CEO of Segway died accidentally driving his Segway off a cliff.

    I'm pretty sure that's not ironic.

    Not ironic.

    Just funny.

     

    We need a word for this type of coincidental situations. How about ruthenic?

     



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @dhromed said:
    I don't think ebay is required or expected to host their tech blog on the same server system they use for the products and users.

    Except apparently by DailyWTF posters.

    Another frequent example: "The FBI's (or some other important institution) website was hacked, therefore the FBI is incompetent at their core task." No. That just says the tiny bit of the FBI that maintains the website, maybe 4 guys using off-the-shelf stuffs, is incompetent. At most. And even then some ways of taking down a website, like a big DDOS are practically impossible to defend against by anybody.

    You'd think IT people would be the one group who understands it, but I see the mistake as much in IT as anywhere else.

    That assumes that IT is competent most of them aren't

     



  • @boomzilla said:

    In fact, just the opposite, which was, why don't they use their apparently useful product to prevent the website about the tech behind the website from sucking?
     

    Because, as I literally said, they're not required to do so, which in turn might be because:

    @boomzilla said:

    I'd agree that it's probably not as suitable for their blog as for their main business,

     

    oh



  • @boomzilla said:

    But having a high traffic, highly available web page is one of ebay's core competencies (or at least one that their business relies on).
     

    That's a more convincing argument.

     


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @dhromed said:

    @boomzilla said:
    ...

    Because, as I literally said,

    I had started my reply before I saw your post. Then I changed it to reply to you, but I didn't update the words enough to make it as clear as I should have that I agreed with you, but wanted to add some emphasis.

    I am also amused at how well climate activists pick snowy days for their winter protests in DC. I think it's a generalized Gore Effect.



  • @boomzilla said:

    I had started my reply before I saw your post. Then I changed it to reply to you, but I didn't update the words enough to make it as clear as I should have that I agreed with you, but wanted to add some emphasis.
     

    A LIKELY STORY

     

    Actually that's very likely.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    No, that says "The 4 guys who maintain the FBI website know it will be targeted, but only by idiots who think the public facing website of the FBI has shit to do with anything. So these 4 guys kill two birds at once by setting up a solution that is both a public-facing website, and a one-step-above-easy-to-exploit honeypot. When the website does get 'hacked', the honeypot allows the FBI to track down some low-hanging fruit to string up as a warning to the hacker community, and to artificially boost their success rate on the 'war on cyberterrorism'."

     

    It's probably not even that sophisticated. I work for a fairly well known military contracting firm and we produce some pretty scary stuff. Our actual engineering team have great development methodologies and take security very seriously.  Unfortunately, the website for our product (not our company, just the product) is managed by the marketing department, who outsource the "back end work" (their term, not mine) to a company (or just a guy in his bedroom, I don't know) somewhere in Eastern Europe. This violates so many policies it's a joke, but it simply falls outside the purview of "real" engineering, because it's unimportant. Our marketing site isn't hosted on any infrastructure even remotely related to our operations, and all it's content is publicly available anyway. Only thing you could do is make us look stupid for a day by defacing the website, which (whilst not ideal for a company who sells "Security" solutions) isn't the end of the world. Not like Sony.

     



  • @blakeyrat said:

    like a big DDOS are practically impossible to defend against by anybody.
    No fake, just yesterday the helldesk was behind and we were asked to take a look at tickets and see if we could close a few out.  There was a ticket "please have the network engineers confirm our firewall will protect us from a DoS or DDoS attack."


  • Considered Harmful

    @mahlerrd said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    like a big DDOS are practically impossible to defend against by anybody.
    No fake, just yesterday the helldesk was behind and we were asked to take a look at tickets and see if we could close a few out.  There was a ticket "please have the network engineers confirm our firewall will protect us from a DoS or DDoS attack."


    Non-distributed is trivial to defend against, distributed is practically impossible.



  • @joe.edwards said:

    distributed is practically impossible.
    Impossible in practice. But theoretically you can setup a dedicated server and an unbreakable connection for every client out there.

    In my experience firewalls are better at producing denials of service than preventing them, anyway!

     


  • Considered Harmful

    @joe.edwards said:

    practically impossible

    @Zecc said:
    Impossible in practice

    That's uh, what I said.



  • @joe.edwards said:

    @joe.edwards said:
    practically impossible

    @Zecc said:
    Impossible in practice

    That's uh, what I said.
    Yes, you did. Unfortunately, "practically" (like "virtually") is so often used as a synonym for "almost" that people often think that's what you mean even when you intend its strict meaning.



  • @joe.edwards said:

    @joe.edwards said:
    practically impossible
    @Zecc said:
    Impossible in practice
    That's uh, what I said.
    Yes. Are you somehow worried that I agreed with you?



  • @Zecc.edwards said:

    @Zecc.edwards said:

    @Zecc.edwards said:
    practically impossible

    @Zecc.edwards said:
    Impossible in practice

    That's uh, what I said.
    Yes. Are you somehow worried that I agreed with you?


    ?



  • @Zecc said:

    @joe.edwards said:

    @joe.edwards said:
    practically impossible
    @Zecc said:
    Impossible in practice
    That's uh, what I said.
    Yes. Are you somehow worried that I agreed with you?

    I would be worried if I agreed with someone here.

     



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @Zecc said:

    @joe.edwards said:
    @joe.edwards said:
    practically impossible

    @Zecc said:
    Impossible in practice

    That's uh, what I said.
    Yes. Are you somehow worried that I agreed with you?

    I would be worried if I agreed with someone here.

    Filed under: What would be the point of that?

    It would certainly be less entertaining, so I'd spend less time reading it and get more work done.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    I would be worried if I agreed with someone here.
    Yes, I agree.


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