This is coming from someone who likes Elixir. Not much for its distributed systems features, but mostly because of the language design. I keep hearing everyone talk about how Erlang/Elixir gives everything out of the box and you don't need to worry about Queues, RPC or whatever... But in reality, people don't really recommend using Distributed Erlang that much, on most Elixir gigs I worked, they didn't use Distributed Elixir at all, just plain old Kubernetes, Kafka, Redis and GRPC.
> I keep hearing everyone talk about how Erlang/Elixir gives everything out of the box and you don't need to worry about Queues, RPC or whatever...
Many companies are using Distributed Erlang but not the way you described: they are using it to exchange messages between nodes running the same version of the software. Imagine that you are building a web application, you can directly exchange live messages between nodes without Redis/RabbitMQ [1]. If you are deploying a machine learning model, you can route requests through multiple nodes and GPUs without additional deps [2]. If you want to see which users are connected to your app, you can exchange this information directly between nodes [3].
In other words, there is a subset of distributed problems that Distributed Erlang solves very well out of the box: homogeneous systems working on ephemeral data. And some of the scenarios above are very common.
If you need to communicate between different systems or you need to persist data, then I 100% agree with you, I would not use Distributed Erlang (at best it would be one part of the solution). I think this distinction gets lost in many conversations and sometimes it leads to false dichotomies: "why Erlang when I have k8s/grpc/redis?" while in practice there is not a lot of overlap. I have written about Erlang/Elixir vs Redis [4] and vs k8s [5] for those interested.
> In other words, there is a subset of distributed problems that Distributed Erlang solves very well out of the box: homogeneous systems working on ephemeral data. And some of the scenarios above are very common.
Speaking of which, I'm looking forward to using Broadway [1] in a new project here in my company. Here, people are using an enterprise integration engine specialized in the healthcare space [2], with built-in single-branch version control and all actions going through the UI.
As I come from a background of several years with Ruby on Rails, I really hope to convince people to use this great library/framework your company created, since RoR is severely lacking when handling heavy concurrency like when gluing multiple APIs in complex workflows. Software engineers are going to love it, but integration analysts are used to IDEs with GUIs, so we'll need to create a pretty admin dashboard to convince them to switch.
Well, in big orgs, that adopt Elixir/Erlang, along with other technologies with poor concurrency stories, those other ecosystems still need Kubernetes, Kafka, Redis and GRPC, to get by. elixir isn't going to make ruby or python apps magically concurrent. So that make sense.
However, in orgs that are primarily Elixir shops, I don't see a lot of Kafka or gRPC. (Redis is just useful, its more than just a queue and K8s and Elixir/Erlang compliment each other, btw.)
>those other ecosystems still need Kubernetes, Kafka, Redis and GRPC, to get by
And what makes Elixir not need Kafka, Redis or GRPC?
Instead of Redis, you could use ETS for caching. But once you have 2+ instances of your app, you will need to have a centralized caching mechanism, otherwise, each instance will have its own ETS with its own memory, not sharing anything. Unless you decide to use Distributed Erlang and connect all the nodes of your application, which comes with a lot of trouble. Much easier to just use Redis.
And lets say you have multiple teams, each team has its own service(built with Elixir), and you need to have some async communication between those services. What native Elixir solution would you use instead of Kafka?
Same for GRPC. What's the alternative? Connecting all the nodes and using Erlang message-passing?
Where kafka comes in though is no-code db following. These are super handy when you want to be informed of changes to a table, but don't know which "micro-service" is changing the data. KafkaConnect is very handy.
Though I will concede, it's a bit of a bazooka for a mosquito, sort of thing.
single node though, so you have to add distribution in some manner. For some situations, whether its the "right" way or not, redis ends up being an easier way to go.
ETA:
As another couple of comments pointed out, ETS also dies with the node so you've got to handle that also when rolling it.
well my startup uses distributed elixir. we use it horde to distribute certain long lived processes accross our cluster. that does not exclusive to kuernetes. we user kubernetes to manage and handle vm crashes (its only happened twice ever) as well as porvide consistent network toplogy between the nodes.
that said, having the ability to send messages between machines without having to bring in an external dependency like redis is AWESOME from a maintenance perspective. one less thing to worry about and the system just works. our uptime has been pretty amazing given our small team.
our payment processor requires a persistent connection to their server for each of our clients. we use horde to make sure there's only one process responsible for each paying user accross our cluster.
Sasa Juric makes this point in 'Elixir In Action' and some of his talks, where in other languages you need to pull in these other technologies near the start, whereas in Elixir you can use the built-in primitives until you start running into scaling problems.
You could certainly get away without some of the other stuff but, as another comment has mentioned, it requires some infra know-how. Like, you can't "just" use ETS as a Redis replacement without setting it up in a way that its data won't get blown away during a blue-green deploy.
There may or may not be “good” rationale. Could just be that most people using elixir are coming from other languages/ecosystems where all of that is normal.
Also in my experience, most of the time, the infrastructure team doesn’t know anything about elixir.
Cargo culting happens regardless of language. It's true that fully meshed distribution won't fly for Google or Amazon scale. But 99% of companies will never get to that scale, despite what they'd like to believe. Fully meshed distribution works just fine for many use cases.
> It's true that fully meshed distribution won't fly for Google or Amazon scale.
I'm not sure I agree at product level: WhatsApp seems to be scaling rather well. I can't say if their use of Erlang is "fully meshed distribution" or not, but it seems to be flying just fine as the world's number 1 messaging platform.
I'm not the same person you asked, but I find Clojure to be as easy to read as Scheme, but harder to write, since I need to remember what punctuation to use where.
I don't know, it makes sense to use different data structures for different purposes. (), [], {} are all different data structures (lists, vectors and maps) that are useful in different situations, so makes sense to have shorthands for them.
Maybe. What bothers me about this idea is that it doesn't scale: As soon as you need a fourth bracket type you're hosed, because there are no more on the keyboard.
With Common Lisp, you can define [ and { if you want to, but it's more common to use a reader macro character in front of an opening paren or a function name after it if you want different data structures. Those approaches scale.
> I just wish there was a way to get the powerful to understand that it's not a one way relationship
I guarantee you, they do understand that. This is not a matter of changing individuals by teaching them and "getting them to understand". The system as a whole must be changed. The mechanisms that allow those people to exist in the first place must be destroyed.
FTEs rely on executives on the current system, but it doesn't have to be that way. The opposite is not true, tho. There are no executives without workers.
As Abraham Lincoln once said:
“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
That's valid, but saying that a product a few developers created for FREE, and made open source so anyone could copy and change is the "wrong thing to copy" is just disrespectful.
It would be disrespectful if thats all they said, but including "it would be nice.." and "...imho" changes it to politely giving their opinion on a third party forum. If it were a show hn, or the projects own forum I might agree with you, but this is the appropriate place to give armchair opinions.
One of the problems of Jira is that it allows you to make any workflow for its issues.
Bugzilla had a "this is how it's done, and that it is" attitude to bug tracking workflow - it wasn't configureable. As such, it couldn't be perverted into a dozen gates with different approvals needed for each gated step.
It's really easy to copy Bugzilla's structure into Jira. It is very difficult to keep management from changing it into something else in Jira.
Rust is hard/simple. The rules aren't complex. The constructs aren't complex. But it's hard to write because the rules are very restrictive.
Rust is also much easier to read than write (for a reader who understands the rules).
It's optimising for exactly the things you want in systems programming:
Easier to read than the write.
Simple rules that are easy to understand but hard to follow, and that produce simple programs.
Compare that to C which is easy/complex. It's much easier to write than to read. It's easy to learn and write but produces code that's very complex. The rules are all by convention instead of part of the type system.
That's pretty out of context. Before that, they say this:
> The rules aren't complex. The constructs aren't complex.
So yes, once you understand it, you understand it, but they also specifically said it's not hard to get to the point of understanding it. If we're going to assume that any out-of-context quote is equivalent to the entirety of the content, I'll just cite you on this one:
Its pretty easy to learn the rules. Once you've done that you can watch a game and know roughly what is happening. But its still a hard game to master.
> Maybe the answer for more secure kernel code is C with better security analysis tools?
Perhaps like a way of expressing the constraints of a program and automatically checking if portions of a program satisfy those constraints. Aka a type checker.
Type checkers are not enough and there are many constraints they can not check.
>C is not simple. It is small.
C is complex because of undefined/unspecified/implementation defined behaviour. Any language which is used on as wide of a range of platforms will have those issues.
> the relatively simple nature of C is what makes it suitable for large scale kernel development
the relatively simple nature of any language would make it suitable for ANY large scale development
I dont know why you attribute this to kernel development specifically. When you think about kernel development, the uniqe requirement is never "being simple". I would think it has something to do with being closer to bare metal and can do low level instructions performantly.
Hard to learn does not necessarily equate to hard to read. You don't need to learn to work with Rust's borrow checker to understand a bit of code, but figuring out how to change it might take longer.
"Windows NT is written in C and C++, with a very small amount written in assembly language. C is mostly used for the kernel code while C++ is mostly used for user-mode code. Assembly language is avoided where possible because it would impede portability."
> wil was primarily developed by the Windows shell team for writing usermode code, but the NDIS and Bluetooth teams have contributed some small kernel-specific features. Here's a few examples of how you can use wil in your kernel driver:
I'm not saying North Korea is a paradise or anything, but the country is technically still at war with the South Korea, which is heavily backed by the US. I wonder how much can be trusted from a NY Times(a US media company) article written by the "Seoul bureau chief for The New York Times".
It’s also a country where the people are indoctrinated to believe their great leader is born under a double rainbow and descended straight from heaven, didn’t defecate ever, learnt to walk aged 3 weeks (yup) and to speak 5 weeks later at 8 weeks (yup), wrote 1500 books over 3 years, along with 6 operas (the bestest in the history of music, no less), and scored a 38 under par with 11 holes in one on the one and only North Korea golf course the first time he ever picked up a golf club before retiring from the sport for ever.
Oh and also if your family is deemed a dissident, the next 3–4 generations (including unborn children) will be imprisoned and raised in prison labor camps where children get killed by bashing their skulls open for stealing one (yes a single) grain of rice.
Not a paradise indeed. I’m not convinced the sanctions have much to do with any of the above though.
The media has a propensity to basically report anything people say about North Korea, no matter how ridiculous [1]. For example back in 2014 a bunch of news sources reported that Kim Jong Un fed his uncle to a pack of dogs, the only source for the story was a random blog that turned out to be a Chinese satirist but the media ran with it because it fit the narrative of "the crazy hermit kingdom". In fact even golf story you cited here is completely invented [3]. There are a lot of problems with North Korea, but at the same time there is a lot of misinformation being willfully spread by the media.
> It’s also a country where the people are indoctrinated to believe their great leader is born under a double rainbow and descended straight from heaven
Doesn't sound too much different from countries where the people are indoctrinated to believe their leader was born from a virgin, doesn't it? You'll say the difference is 2000 years into the history, so, we just need to give NK ~1925 more years.
The situation is drastically different. When considering your example, the source isn’t the leader himself nor are you imprisoned or killed for going against the narrative surrounding the leader.
Not a day goes past where I don’t see someone try to minimize commie atrocities…
I'm sure you learned all that from other US/South Korean articles like this one, right?
I watched a documentary about North Korean defectors that wanted to go back to North Korea, one of the many reasons was to be with their families. They never mentioned their family were imprisioned. And it wouldn't make much sense to want to go back if their family was imprisioned.
Again, I'm no North Korean supporter or whatever, I just think there is a LOT of propaganda and misinformation about NK, and I think we should take everything with a grain of salt... Unless you think the US is a saint and would never lie about enemy countries.
And about the sanctions, I dind't mention any sanctions, you are just assuming that I support X or Y, when I never said such thing.
The reason why we learn about North Korea almost exclusively from the Western sources is because it's a totalitarian dictatorship that suppresses information. You can check out their media online and see for yourself that it's full of propaganda.
We don't get tourists from North Korea because they aren't allowed to leave the country. We don't talk with North Korean people on the internet, because their access to the internet is tightly controlled.
There's no grand western conspiracy to suppress information about NK. It's North Korea itself that does that.
I know that on HN many consider blind contrarianism to be synonymous with rationalism, but seriously...
Unless you think the US is a saint and would never lie about enemy countries.
You seem to think the USA is just a monolith, and as such can be modeled as what the face of our government says. This is silly.
While it's true that business and especially the media is "in bed with" our government quite a lot of the time, it remains true that all have distinct interests.
I'm not the most educated in this area, however this episode of darknet diaries (which seems to be well researched of the many I have listened to) paints a similar picture to OP https://open.spotify.com/episode/0DsGyzP9fYQ9LM6YiT5NS7?si=L... and includes interviews from several defectors.
It seems disingenuous to try and brush off the well documented brutality that is the way of life in North Korea, as being something made up by US / South Korea..
I'm not the one insinuating that North Koreans are indoctrinated into thinking the great leader has magic powers. You should be the ones to present the sources to such bizarre claims.
Jesus, the guy is saying people are indoctrinated into thinking the great leader "didn’t defecate ever". Do you really think North Koreans are that stupid and have zero biology knowledge? Or maybe, uh, this is just fake? Pure propaganda? Are you really that dumb to believe something like that?
Yoyre like someone who thinks gravity doesn’t exist. Literally everyone knows this, they’re not stupid, they’re lied to their entire lives. There are tons of defectors who will back this up and you can’t talk to anyone in North Korea outside of carefully guided tours set up by the state
I suspect that it's not that they really believe Kim has never pooped, but that doesn't mean that North Koreans don't tell each other these stories. I think it might be closer to "Chuck Norris Facts" that we tell ourselves. Obviously nobody believes any of those things about Chuck Norris, but we continue to do so, and in so doing confer to Norris some degree of reverence.
Or maybe even more mundanely, it's like Santa Claus. Adults don't believe that he lives at the north pole with flying reindeer. But we continue to teach children that he does - not because it's literally true, but because we seem to feel that having children believe this somehow makes our culture better.
I imagine that similarly, Kim is getting this reverence - but since it's channeled into a framework of him being their supreme leader, it reinforces his hold on the nation.
News about North Korea should be taken with a very large grain of slat given the medias history of reporting fake news about them [1][2][3][4] (note: I am definitely not pro-North Korea and this story is obviously very bad, but I think people should be a little more skeptical about North Korea news)
This article could have come straight from a fiction book. There is no evidence for anything that is being presented. It might be true, it might not be.
I'm not arguing they are lying or not, I'm just saying that we shouldn't blindly believe it.
But watching this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkUMZS-ZegM made me a little bit skeptical about those defector stories. It's a very good watch, and I guess it doesn't hurt to hear a different perspective.
I think understand where you're coming from - people can tell whatever they want, and the media definitely loves to run stories like this. These stories are both popular and the diplomatic risk is also low. And we also have the accounts of Yeonmi Park.
On the other hand, there's no reason to doubt the story too much. NyT's stories are generally highly factual, even though their primary bias is left-center. And we know that NK is a hellhole, not just from defectors, as the "Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul" video states, but from a myriad of other, independent sources.
The NYT regularly lies for US intelligence agencies. Or just publishes garbage from them as truth without verifying. There is every reason to doubt this story.
Absolutely. I would definitely not like to live or even visit there. I just think that every story has 2 sides, and we don't hear the other side very often.
I absolutely despise this "every story has two sides" quip. No, every story doesn't have two sides. Yes, every story has multiple versions full of complete bullshit, but when we talk about a "side" we mean a reputable reliable side, and it is not the case that every story has two equally debatable and reputable sides. Sometimes a spade is a spade.
Reputable, reliable (tm) American sources also led to a million deaths in Iraq based on what turned out to be false premises. Yet your very own logic would've called "a spade a spade" and would've meant actually believing Iraq had usable WMDs because I mean, that's just the hard truth! Every reliable source on your side said so! Who would even believe Iraqi/arabic media that shouted for a year that Iraq didn't have them, over prestigious and western institutions like the NYT!
I have absolutely no doubt that North Korea is hell in earth, but there is a very very very good reason to say that every story has two sides. But maybe you just haven't experienced being the victim of "the reputable side" lying without any consequences. As a Muslim that grew up during the war on terror, I can't really say the same.
To be fair, it’s important to point out that the Bush administration politicized the intelligence apparatus. Specifically, Darth Cheney pressured the CIA into supporting his pet theories.
I bitterly told people before the second war with Iraq that there were no WMDs. Any well read, educated, intelligent person should have been able to confidently say the same.
There is no reason to say "every story has two sides." Some may, and you can call that out, but no, not every story has two sides.
For example, a report about a new science result, the science is "one side." The "other side" is not the crystal healing quack that believes in magic. Two, you have video evidence of something along with multiple eye-witnesses. That is one side. The other side is not "oh but maybe all the witnesses are really part of a huge conspiracy and the video is fake!"
Some claims are not strong, and if a specific claim is not strong then you can explain why. But you cannot just flippantly say every story has two sides, that's bullshit. You need to say why a particular claim should be doubted.
When people say that every story has two sides, it means that you as an observer might not know the full truth. Not that the full truth does not exist. Again, I gave a pretty good example of a story that was pretty solid "truth" but turned out to be a complete lie. Without taking a step back and wondering if there was more to the story than the obvious(tm) truth, you are completely vulnerable to believing bullshit as long as it's credible bullshit
Again, the saying means that we as mere observers of huge, complicated geopolitical moves cannot know the full context and are vulnerable to propaganda. Yes even from the good(your) side. No conspiracy is required for that.
There are multiple links in this thread showing how the media lied multiple times in the past, a whole documentary interviewing defectors who want to go back and telling how the South Korean Intelligence Service coerce and pay people to speak against the NK regime, but you probably didn't bother to open a single link and read about it.
You talk about science, yet, every anti-NK article sent in this thread are extremely poorly written and lack evidence to their claims. How is that "science"? Unless you are claiming that "science is when it matches my beliefs".
I see where you are coming from, and I'm not saying that North Korean media or propaganda is reliable or the absolute truth. But does that mean the US "side" is reliable? Is the US really on the "right side" of the history of the world?
For exemple, did you know the US launched 3 bombs for every person in Laos? There are VILLAGES in Laos built with unexploded bomb left overs from the Vietnam War.
Did you know that there are children being born with life threatening health problems in Vietnam due to the amount of orange gas the US dropped there 40 years ago?
And quoting from a recent speech from Trump this year: "How about we are buying oil from Venezuela? When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse, we would have taken it up, would have gotten all that oil, it would have been right next door"
Is this the reliable country we should blindly believe? Are they really insterested in telling us the truth or are they just saying/doing whatever is needed to protect their interests?
Sorry, I'm not following. Could you rephrase your question? Are you asking me if I believe North Koreans should have the right to travel freely? If so, yes, I do believe that.
but in this case what would they lie about? i don't think anyone would deny existence of defectors or how hard it is for them to move around.
It's more like a poor quality article though, they start off by claiming massive new difficulties for these people in the last couple of years but don't tell you anything about why that happened. Mass surveillance and greedy traffickers who ended up stealing the money and ratting everyone out existed years ago as well, so they didn't really add any new information here, or at least didn't explain it very well.
