me: "I've read in your essays that you (and yahoo) chose to store all your information in files rather than a database. I am curious if you would make the same decision now that excellent oss databases are available (mysql, postgresql, etc)."
PG: "I'd do the same thing. It was a huge win to use alists (a lisp construct) and just write them to files. Then if anything went wrong, or data formats changed, I could just munge the raw files. Nothing was wired in."
Thank you for answering. At the same time however, I'm not really sure what to think about that. On the one hand future proof is a massive win. On the other no rollbacks seems like a risky way to operate. I hope he keeps regular backups of the data files.
Well of course. I don't really care about the Karma. If I got spammed to death I'd just make a new account. I was just wondering because it seems like an odd design decision. I wanted to know the rationale behind it.
No, I mean the spammer/cracker megadownvoting you into oblivion.
(And if you come to any other conclusion as to what's behind this after seeing that, I'd love to hear it.)
EDIT: Well, like another poster stated, they could have been linking a whole bunch of spam links with attractive titles to exploit the HN link glitch to garner the dude the 900+ downvotes. But I'm not sure you can get 900 clicks that way...
Yeah, seeing Polls submitted under various accounts and at least one person losing karma points makes me wonder if that's likely too. If it's done, we'd be able to appeal because it wasn't done for legitimate cause by those with the power at HN.
Notice his karma is lower than his highest ranked post right now. In a now deleted post he claims he lost 900+ karma overnight.
Be warned guys. If you post here the chances of you getting hellbanned are non-zero.
EDIT: And if anything like that happens on a mass-scale and PG doesn't have a transaction rollback in the wings...