This is a great way of thinking about it. Same goes for "unlimited" plans: the more I use, the lower their profit margins. I'd rather agree on terms and pay for what I use.
I got the offer and really considered it as well! It was the fear of an acquisition that convinced me not to take the offer. I was a TextDrive customer before they were acquired by Joyent, I was a LastPass customer before they were acquired by LogMeIn, and it was CrashPlan's cancellation of CrashPlan for Home that drove me to find rsync.net.
None of those other companies are rsync.net, so it's not really fair of me to consider them when making this decision -- but it made me think it's safer to just pay you guys regularly for a good service. Worst case, I spend a little more over the life of my account, but that money is going to a company I really like, so it's not much of a downside.
> We believe that the risk of "logical failure" of an SSD is higher than the risk of physical failure. This means that some pattern of usage or strange edge-case causes the SSD to die instead of a physical failure. If we are correct, and if we mirror an SSD, then it is possible the two (or three, or four) SSDs will experience identical lifetime usage patterns. To put it simply, it is possible they could all just fail at exactly the same time. The way we mitigate that risk is by building mirrors of SSDs out of similarly spec'd and sized but not identical parts.
This makes sense to me (and is a good example of looking at more abstract failure domains in addition to the basic ones we all know and love) -- I'm curious if there's data to support this. rsync.net is in a good position to possibly collect that data.
Why is it even possible to “charge [someone] as an adult”. If you have the concept of “adult” and “child”, and a line in between them, how can the crime dictate someone’s mental maturity?
(Of course the answer is, I’m sure, is selective enforcement. So they can lock up black kids and let white kids off the hook.)
I'm this is true to some extent, but (as much as I'd love to wholeheartedly agree with you), the reason I don't consider this likely is this: the main reason I have this opinion of HN is because of one 3-month period in 2009, where I was off the grid (bought a car in Europe, drove around, drank lots of booze, smoked some mushrooms, &c). I assure you I didn't learn about computers during that time. When I left in June, I thought HN was full of insightful articles and comments; when I returned in September, I thought it was markedly worse. I think HN had its Eternal September then, and it's been steadily downhill since then.
(Um, yes, I was keeping track of replies, and logged back in to post this. Mea culpa.)
So this is what HN has degenerated to? I'm sorry, but I remember eagerly reading the front page, learning things from interesting articles, and -- more importantly -- reading well-written commentary from people far more accomplished than I. I lurked, because I couldn't contribute at the level that most of the regular commentors could, but I learned a great deal.
HN has retained its preoccupation with not being reddit (which is noble), but has not retained the quality to justify it.
Great communities are transient, and HN is probably what taught me that. I have nothing but respect for pg, and for the community that once populated HN.
Depends on how much you care about latency, right?
The easy solution is just, y'know, write the log to a file and scp it back to some central place every so often. But then you have to either (a) keep track of how much of a file you've copied, which is a pain; or (b) only grab files that you're no longer actively writing to (as determined by naming scheme or something), but that introduces some latency, depending on how often you rotate.
The fact that he could give up without consequence when his family member got ill is significant. If he was actually poor, caring for his family member could have put him back at square one again.
Once you have money, you have a lot more to lose, and become more conservative. Broke college students will throw their weight around as much as they can, but once they're rich, they're afraid (consciously or not) of losing it.
That's my impression, anyway. (Based on my own experiences, graduating and beginning to earn lots of money. I've had to fight the urge to become quite conservative.)