[HN Gopher] Documenting what you're willing to support (and not)
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Documenting what you're willing to support (and not)
Author : zdw
Score : 83 points
Date : 2025-07-12 17:08 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (rachelbythebay.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rachelbythebay.com)
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| > At some point, I realized that if I wrote a wiki page and
| documented the things that we were willing to support, I could
| wait about six months and then it would be like it had always
| been there. Enough people went through the revolving doors of
| that place such that six months' worth of employee turnover was
| sufficient to make it look like a whole other company. All I had
| to do was write it, wait a bit, then start citing it when needed.
|
| Like!
| paol wrote:
| > a giant social network. You know, the one with all of the cat
| pictures
|
| This really doesn't narrow it down.
|
| > and later the whole genocide thing and enabling fascism.
|
| Still not helping.
| leosanchez wrote:
| > genocide thing
|
| I can only think of one social network when I hear that word.
| Are there others?
| tehjoker wrote:
| As of 2023, it's all of them promoting a pro-genocide
| narrative, particularly Twitter these days is promoting
| outright pro-genocide accounts in my feed from people I don't
| follow, but I think the author is referring to the Rohingya
| genocide case in Myanmar.
| stdbrouw wrote:
| See https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-
| faceb...
| zdc1 wrote:
| The funny thing with social networks is they all have both of
| these cohorts, so long as you go down the right rabbit-holes
| and engage with the right content creators
| jraph wrote:
| Rachel worked at Facebook for some time a while ago. She's been
| consistently mentioning the cat pictures to refer to it in her
| blog.
|
| I suppose this way of referring to it is also meant to belittle
| it.
|
| I assume the "the whole genocide thing and enabling fascism"
| part is more a dig than something to narrow down.
| grishka wrote:
| Yeah, might be Twitter, but might as well be Facebook. Though
| I'm leaning towards Twitter
| stingraycharles wrote:
| I interpreted it as the Rohingya / Myanmar genocide and
| Facebook's role in it, and the CambridgeAnalytica scandal
| that (allegedly) enabled Trump to get elected.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Maybe she didn't really want to tell you which one it is :)
| drjasonharrison wrote:
| Rachel Kroll worked at Facebook. Her work history is not
| explicitly listed on her blog, but you can find it:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13400687
|
| https://medium.com/wogrammer/rachel-kroll-7944eeb8c692
|
| https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon16/speaker-or-organi...
| znpy wrote:
| > I used to be on a team that was responsible for the care and
| feeding of a great many Linux boxes which together constituted
| the "web tier" for a giant social network. You know, the one with
| all of the cat pictures... and later the whole genocide thing and
| enabling fascism. Yeah, them.
|
| I love how people are so willing to criticise companies that paid
| their salary but not their willingness to ignore the issues in
| the name of the fat paycheque.
|
| This is clearly a reference to Meta, and in that sense the
| writing has been on the wall for years.
|
| I wonder if the author feels or takes any responsibility in
| directly enabling that genocide and that fascism with their
| direct work.
|
| But hey, a fat paycheque is a fat paycheque.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Maybe she left when it transitioned from cat pictures to
| fascism.
| ivape wrote:
| I would say you were less of a douchebag for taking those gigs
| once upon a time than now days.
| RhysU wrote:
| Also, document what "support" means.
|
| "That's supported" has no universal interpretation beyond
| physically describing a tabletop atop legs.
|
| Absent a clear/consistent definition, people interpret "support"
| in the most favorable way possible from the seats in which they
| sit. Then, all around sadness ensues.
| bombcar wrote:
| This is really important - because "not supported" can range
| from "eh, we don't have to help you if it explodes" (which they
| often DO help with, but it's not official) to "this is
| literally against the license, the law, and the basics of human
| decency to even attempt".
| simonw wrote:
| Related, the concept of the "golden path" advocated by Charity
| Majors: https://charity.wtf/2018/12/02/software-sprawl-the-
| golden-pa...
|
| > 1. Assemble a small council of trusted senior engineers
|
| > 2. Task them with creating a recommended list of default
| components for developers to use when building out new services.
| This will be your Golden Path, the path of convergence (and the
| path of least resistance).
|
| > 3. Tell all your engineers that going forward, the Golden Path
| will be fully supported by the org. Upgrades, patches, security
| fixes; backups, monitoring, build pipeline; deploy tooling,
| artifact versioning, development environment, even tier 1 on call
| support. Pave the path with gold. Nobody HAS to use these
| components ... but if they don't, they're on their own. They will
| have to support it themselves.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| >or maybe it's their executives who are afraid?
|
| I'd say yes. It seems like an unforced error to them to
| broadcast publicly how bad things might be, but that's because
| they want software to be an efficient factory that turns
| computer cycles into money.
| roryirvine wrote:
| You do need to be careful that you don't end up with a "build
| it and they will come" mindset when creating that Golden Path,
| though - it needs to have early and continuous input from
| actual users.
|
| There's a tension between a theoretical Golden Path that leads
| someplace no-one actually wants to go, and simply paving every
| possible "desire line". Managing that is one of the trickiest
| parts of platform engineering.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Step 3 is where I've seen my org completely fall on its face.
|
| Yes, the golden path is "fully supported" yet after a year or
| two the company executive swoop in and say "why are we spending
| so much money on the golden path" and slowly, but surely, the
| support for is whittled away into nothing until the golden path
| is out of date and actively punishing anyone that chose to use
| it.
|
| For example, one of our golden paths was a UX framework built
| on top of standard web tech for the time. The team maintaining
| that framework is no more and it's now very far out of date.
| Adopting it means you are pulling in Angular circa 2016 and
| that you'll be dealing with incompatibilities between that and
| any new web component you want to start using.
| tialaramex wrote:
| You can get screwed over by external (to your org, even more
| globally) requirements
|
| For example I work for a Research University, mostly our
| software procurement is - while not always excellent - pretty
| good stuff. Maybe the supplier isn't as responsive as we'd
| like, maybe the software is buggier, maybe the documentation is
| worse, probably not all three.
|
| However, the Government, responding to the usual anti-immigrant
| sentiment, decided it needs all Universities to check that
| people who are here on a restricted visa to get a degree attend
| classes.
|
| The underlying sentiment is clearly racist, but OK in some
| cases you could imagine that's a real issue, a cheap course
| with foreign students who are registered but actually never
| attending because they're out delivering pizza or whatever. For
| a prestige research University though it doesn't make much
| sense - maybe you graduated top of your class in Taiwan, your
| parents pay an eyewatering sum so you can study here for an EE
| Masters to get that job back home with a team designing CPUs -
| then instead you skip classes to work as a taxi driver? No,
| absurd. But the government legally _requires_ we solve this
| imaginary problem, and the only bidding supplier is garbage. So
| they 're basically requiring us to procure garbage.
|
| Because the supplier knows we're obligated, why should they
| support anything? Why care if it works, or is documented
| properly, or integrates with all the things they've told the
| government it can do? They know they're getting free money
| because of anti-immigrant sentiment, and they can take
| advantage of that until the winds change.
|
| Their attendance tracking stuff _could_ be useful. You can
| legitimately imagine having an early warning, OK, Sarah took a
| week for her mum 's funeral, that's sad, but then she didn't
| attend any lectures at all for the next three weeks, we should
| have somebody go check Sarah is OK, or, well, she's clearly not
| OK, have them figure out what Sarah should do next. Take a year
| pause? Counselling on our dime? Right now, we aren't required
| to track Sarah unless she's on a restricted visa and the
| software is awful (for her, for us, for her teaching staff,
| everything) so we don't track her. So chances are nobody
| notices, especially if her class is big, and then in another
| month's time we find out Sarah was struggling after losing a
| parent, and we find that out because Police have to break her
| door open as she's been dead for long enough that neighbours
| noticed the smell.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Reading this I'm mostly shocked that groups had the power to
| throw boxes onto their outward-facing infrastructure and she had
| to handle that reactively. Like, it's not "requisition a public
| network server" but rather "you just jam it out there and we'll
| either baby it or boot it". That's crazy loose for a major corp.
| NewJazz wrote:
| She mentioned experiments. Facebook is indeed crazy loose with
| how they handle experiments on the site's user base.
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17470161155995...
| Pxtl wrote:
| Move fast and break people, eh?
| busterarm wrote:
| people, governments, political candidates, groups for old
| ladies trading knitting patterns...all of the above!
| yuliyp wrote:
| Think "hardware groups with next generation experimental
| hardware". Facebook runs their own data centers, including
| designing their own servers. How do you verify that the servers
| actually perform well? One natural choice was to put them to
| work as web servers. Given its size, there was a lot of tooling
| there to be able to measure very precisely what the throughput
| of a web server was, so things like "How many of these new
| servers should we order" could be answered, in addition to the
| "does the rack catch fire" questions.
|
| One example of a source of tension that such standards were
| trying to deal with here was in a group trying to run web
| servers on machines with SSDs that were way too small:
| obviously for the bean counter saving a bunch of money on the
| SSDs was nice, but for the team trying to make sure the disk
| can fit all the code and logs on it, it was less nice.
| Pxtl wrote:
| On a certain level I'm kind of impressed how long FB has
| celebrated that kind of hacker ethos, I just wish it wasn't
| for... y'know, evil.
| kazinator wrote:
| You could write a _program_ that will check most of the system
| requirements, and say you must run this program and have it pass.
| fn-mote wrote:
| It helps, but it's important to have a name and a green check
| mark for each result so people understand WHY the magic doesn't
| permit them to use the machine.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| Yep, this is good. On one occasion, I saved myself a huge
| amount of back and forth by writing a dumb "test suite" for a
| software artifact to be shipped to a client; i.e. make sure it
| was compressed as a zipfile; it included an INSTALL.md; it was
| installable via [specific installer program]; it included
| [specific runtime libraries versions]; etc. etc.
|
| Turns out human software engineers are really bad at fulfilling
| even well-specified requirements, so you will always save time
| by automating as much of the conformance testing as possible.
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(page generated 2025-07-16 23:01 UTC)