Comment by Uehreka 5 days ago
I noticed that Starbucks mobile ordering was down and thought “welp, I guess I’ll order a bagel and coffee on Grubhub”, then GrubHub was down. My next stop was HN to find the common denominator, and y’all did not disappoint.
Just don't use genetically identical hardware:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031639
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32032235
Edit: wow, I can't believe we hadn't put https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031243 in https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights. Fixed now.
I’ve seen this up close twice and I’m surprised it’s only twice. Between March and September one year, 6 people on one team had to get new hard drives in their thinkpads and rebuild their systems. All from the same PO but doled out over the course of a project rampup. That was the first project where the onboarding docs were really really good, since we got a lot of practice in a short period of time.
Long before that, the first raid array anyone set up for my (teams’) usage, arrived from Sun with 2 dead drives out of 10. They RMA’d us 2 more drives and one of those was also DOA. That was a couple years after Sun stopped burning in hardware for cost savings, which maybe wasn’t that much of a savings all things considered.
I got burnt by this bug on freakin' Christmas Eve 2020 ( https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=40766 ). There was some data loss and a lot of lessons learned.
It was on AWS at least (for a while) in 2022.
Yeah looks like they're back on M5.
dang saying it's temporary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031136
$ dig news.ycombinator.com
; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> news.ycombinator.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 54819
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 512
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;news.ycombinator.com. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
news.ycombinator.com. 1 IN A 209.216.230.207
;; Query time: 79 msec
;; SERVER: 100.100.100.100#53(100.100.100.100)
;; WHEN: Wed Oct 29 13:59:29 EDT 2025
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 65
Wow I just left a Starbucks drivethru line because it was just not moving. I guess it was because of this.
Why? Starbucks is not providing a critical service. Spending less money and resources and just accepting the risk that occasionally you won't be able to sell coffee for a few hours is a completely valid decision from both management and engineering pov.
If I were a Starbucks shareholder I wouldn't be happy that my company is throwing away revenue because of the CTO's decision to outsource accountability
Time and time again it's shown that AWS is far more expensive than other solutions, just easier for the Execs to offshore the blame.
It's absolutely batshit that an in-person transaction with cash becomes impossible when the computers are down.
I've seen it multiple times at various stores; only once did I see them taking cash and writing things down (probably to enter into the system later when it came back up).
you wouldn't believe some of the crap enterprise bigco mgmt put in place for disaster recovery.
they think that they are 'eliminating a single point of failure', but in reality, they end up adding multiple, complicated points of mostly failure.
My inner Nelson-from-the-Simpsons wishes I was on your team today, able to flaunt my flask of tea and homemade packed sandwiches. I would tease you by saying 'ha ha!' as your efforts to order coffee with IP packets failed.
I always go everywhere adequately prepared for beverages and food. Thanks to your comment, I have a new reason to do so. Take out coffees are actually far from guaranteed. Payment systems could go down, my bank account could be hacked or maybe the coffee shop could be randomly closed. Heck, I might even have an accident crossing the road. Anything could happen. Hence, my humble flask might not have the top beverage in it but at least it works.
We all design systems with redundancy, backups and whatnot, but few of us apply this thinking to our food and drink. Maybe get a kettle for the office and a backup kettle, in case the first one fails?
Same here for netatmo - ironically I replied to an incident report with netatmo saying all was OK when the whole system was falling over.
However netatmo does need to have a server to store data as you need to consolidate acreoss devices plus you can query gfor a year's data and that won't and can't be held locally.
You know you can talk to your barista and ask for a bagel, right? If you're lucky they still take cash... if you still _have_ cash. :)
Good thing HN is hosted on a couple servers in a basement. Much more reliable than cloud, it seems!