I just want to serve 5 terabytes.

What Hacker News said

Recommends nostrademons · 2024-07 · on “Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available”

Ha ha ha. Have you seen the Broccoli Man short? And that was a satire of what Google's infrastructure looked like in 2010 . [this video]

Cites benley · 2021-10 · on “I don’t know how to count that low”

Regarding the phrase "I don't know how to count that low", here's the video where it originated. Frankly I'm astonished this hasn't been shared before, and I hope I don't get in trouble for posting it (it's like 11 years old, surely nobody cares at this point, right?) [this video]

Cites sangnoir · 2021-12 · on “AWS us-east-1 outage”

> At a different (unnamed) FAANG I'm guessing Google, on the basis of the recently published (to the public) "I just want to serve 5TB"[1] video. If it isn't Google, then the broccoli man video is still a cogent reminder that unyielding multi-region rigor comes with costs. 1. [this video]

Cites hansvm · 2022-11 · on “I/O is no longer the bottleneck”

Yeah, when I was there I saw plenty of <1% optimizations saving REDACTED gobs of money, and people were rewarded for it. I don't think it's applicable to most teams though. Imagine a foo/bar/widget app that only serves 20B people (obvious exaggeration to illustrate the point) and is only necessary up to a few hundred times per day. You can handle that sort of traffic on a laptop on my home router and still have enough hootzpah left to stream netflix. I mean, you are Google, and you need to do something better than that [0], but the hardware for your project is going to be negligible compared to other concerns unless you're doing FHE or video transcoding or something extraordinarily expensive

Cites moandcompany · 2023-01 · on “Internal document explains why Google has become slow and bureaucratic”

I am a Xoogler. The source document/presentation ("Coordination Headwinds") and idea are many years old, and from what I recall were not aimed to be critical of the company and its organization, rather to give its employee readers a feeling of solace and understanding for why getting seemingly small things done can feel overly hard and slow… a less humorous, and less SWE-specific version of "Broccoliman" if you will. Refer to the red panda that merely wants to serve 5TB of data. - [this video] - [LINK] I’ll try to continue using the organism-metaphor in my commentary. While the “slime mold” story provides a convenient and charitable explanation of Google's bureaucracy and dysfunctions, another ex

Cites choppaface · 2024-03 · on “Why Google failed to make GPT-3”

There are only so many TPUs available and they're kept at 100% utilization. Google has had complex "marketplaces" around company resources for years: [this video] It's a cultural value, like playing board games.

Cites huseyinkeles · 2024-05 · on “Microsoft CTO: Thoughts on OpenAI (2019)”

This video [0] was from 2010s, and seems like they had similar issues even back then. (never worked at Google) [0] [this video]

Cites hintymad · 2024-07 · on “Fear of over-engineering has killed engineering altogether”

Maybe fear killed engineering. Even in a decently managed company, I can see so many engineering effort gets stalled, compromised, bastardized, or killed. Like your manager asks you to get sign-offs from 10 different orgs. Like you want to do a POC, yet somehow an infra team demanded that you integrate with their system even though your targeted users didn't give a shit. Like you just want to submit a workflow to Temporal Cloud yet a product manager demands that you create an abstraction because he is afraid of X and Y. Like you just want to serve 5TB of data, and you got sucked into this: [this video] . I'm not sure how companies battle this kind of fear. It looks Amazon's Working Backwards, Net