I have.

You could argue the scales are different, but computers are also faster now.

So, argument to credentialism out of the way... What should we do as consumers if a provider that is a defacto monopoly due to network effects stops functioning?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47947719

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jharasym/

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otterley a day ago | parent | next [-]

> You could argue the scales are different, but computers are also faster now.

Scale is everything and a faster computer doesn’t always help. Vertical scaling has limits, and complex distributed systems are complex.

Since you seem to possess a diagnosis and remedy with a reasonable amount of certainty, I’m sure they’d love to hear from you and have you fix all their problems for them. Especially if you can do it while not making the problem worse in any dimension.

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dijit a day ago | parent [-]

The link in my previous comment answers the credentials question in detail- including specific technical post-mortems on horizontally scaled stateful systems. Vertical scaling wasn't the topic.

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otterley a day ago | parent [-]

You’re missing the point: a doctor doesn’t diagnose and practice medicine on a patient he hasn’t thoroughly evaluated himself. This is the sort of wisdom that a staff engineer and CTO is expected to have earned.

	▲	a day ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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Aurornis a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> I have.

I skimmed your profile. Working on the infrastructure for a couple mid-tier video games is a cool accomplishment, but equating this to having solved GitHub level scale rings hollow.

GitHub has a couple orders of magnitude more daily active visitors than the games you worked on had at their peak.

You can make valid criticisms of GitHub without trying to reduce their scale or inflate your credentials to create a false equivalence.

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dijit a day ago | parent | next [-]

"false equivalence" needs an equivalence claim to be false.

I didn't make one. The sentence after "I have" was literally "you could argue the scales are different."

GitHub spent a decade asking the world to host its code with them. They got what they asked for. You don't get to beg everyone to run services for you for ten years and then have "scaling is hard" be the answer. They should be improving, not regressing over time, and they have some of the worlds best engineers and a trillion dollar corporation behind them, they don't need my sympathy.

The original question is still open and nobody's engaging with it.

	▲	Aurornis a day ago \| parent [-]
		> I didn't make one. The sentence after "I have" was literally "you could argue the scales are different." Don't you at least see how it's misleading to respond "I have" in response to a question about scaling GitHub-scale services? Trying to caveat it with "the scales are different" misses the point. The parent commenter was talking about scale.

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cnewey a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm not sure that resorting to personal attacks against the parent commenter for making a legitimate critique is the right, fair, sensible, or mature approach here.

Discarding legitimate criticism based on some self-determined criteria of intellectual superiority isn't a good look. It smacks of elitism and isn't something conducive to a productive and positive community discussion.

It is unhelpful, rude, condescending, and completely fails to address the underlying problem.

	▲	otterley a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The commenter inserted his own personal bona fides (as a proxy for skill, experience, and knowledge) and use them to bolster his conclusion of culpability and incompetence of the GitHub team. If you take that risk, you should expect to be challenged if those skills are not up to par. Put more simply: if you get into the ring, you’d better be prepared to take a punch.
	▲	Aurornis a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not a personal attack to fact check someone's claims. I didn't bring their credentials into the conversation. They did.

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VirusNewbie a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Ok, well, I work on systems quite a bit larger than Github, and I think they have a major reliability issue.

	▲	otterley a day ago \| parent [-]
		That’s not in dispute. The question is whether we should be supportive of the company’s efforts to improve reliability, or whether we should keep punching down. How would you feel if you were in a similar situation and outsiders breathlessly provided uninformed opinions about your problem and questioned your competence? It’s all about the Golden Rule.