Places nobody's ever heard of like "Ohio" or "Oregon"?
Yeah, I'm not worried about being targeted in an RCA and pointedly asked why I chose a region with way better uptime than `us-tirefire-1`.
What _is_ worth considering is whether your more carefully considered region will perform better during an actual outage where some critical AWS resource goes down in Virginia, taking my region with it anyway.
IIRC, some AWS services are solely deployed on and/or entirely dependent on us-east-1. I don't recall which ones, but I very distinctly remember this coming up once.
The Route53 control plane is in us-east-1, with an optional temporary auto-failover to us-west-2 during outages. The data plane for public zones is globally distributed and highly resilient, with a 100% SLA. It continues to serve DNS records during regular control plane outages in us-east-1, but access to make changes is lost during outages.
CloudFront CDN has a similar setup. The SSL certificate and key have to be hosted in us-east-1 for control plane operations but once deployed, the public data plane is globally or regionally dispersed. There is no auto failover for the cert dependency yet. The SLA is only three 9s. Also depends on Route53.
The elephant in the room for hyperscalers is the potential for rogue employees or a cyber attack on a control plane. Considering the high stakes and economic criticality of these platforms, both are inevitable and both have likely already happened.
I haven't used the McDonalds mobile app in the drive-thru line. Can you clarify the experience? Why would I use the mobile app once I'm already at the drive-thru? For points/payment? Or for ordering as well?
I once ordered ahead using the mobile app at a Starbucks. I got out of my car, only to find the doors locked, as they closed early for some reason. So I had to get BACK in my car, and sit in the drive-thru queue, just to pick up my already-completed drink, which I found infuriating. (actually, what was infuriating was that I really only order at that location to use their restroom, which of course was an option unavailable in the drive-thru for hygenic reasons)
For fairly obvious reasons, most people were unaware this set ever existed. In the 90s (~1993?), my family replaced our old 1970s-era 19" Sony Trinitron with a HUGE new TV, a 35" Toshiba.
At the time, a "big" CRT was a 32". I helped my dad transport the 35" which, from memory, was 150 or 180lbs. It was likely the largest CRT commercially available. (PVM-4300 stragglers aside).
A couple years later (1995-6?), a friend's family bought a 40" Mitsubishi, which I _thought_ was the largest CRT made. But, again, Sony aside, it probably was.
> I helped my dad transport the 35" which, from memory, was 150 or 180lbs. It was likely the largest CRT commercially available
I helped friends move one of these old monsters out of an apartment in MIT's west campus 15 years ago. Don't remember the brand but it seemed even bigger than 35". It was shockingly huge and heavy and they lived on the top floor.
As we were doing this, I was thinking, how come the original owner didn't get a projection TV? They have been available since the 80s, the separate components were easier to manage, and the screens were far bigger.
In addition to the reasons mentioned in the other reply, maybe you actually didn't want anything much bigger. People replacing (say) a 27" CRT might upgrade to the latest fancy 32". They wouldn't have seen the purpose of a 60" projector behemoth. Depth could have been an issue as well. CRTs are deep, but depending on the projector style, it might have been worse.
Projectors (front/rear/enclosed/whatever) could produce a huge image, but they had their own issues.
In a bright room, the contrast was typically lacking.
Even on relatively late versions like the Toshiba 57HX93 (a 57" 16x9 doghouse from ~20 years ago with an integrated scaler and a 1080i input), which I personally spent some time with both in Toshiba form and as $10k Runco-branded units. Things got washed out in a bright room compared to a direct-view CRT.
And viewing angle is an issue, too: Whether front- or rear-projection, one of the tricks to improve brightness (and therefore potential contrast) is to reduce the angle of light transmission from the screen. Depending on the room layout, this can mean that people in seats off to the side might get a substantially darker image than those near the middle. (This applies to all projectors; film, CRT, DLP, LCD, front, rear, whatever -- there can be a lot of non-obvious tech that goes into a projection screen.)
And CRT projectors were fickle. Their color convergence would change based on external magnetic fields (including that produced by the Earth itself), so they needed to be set up properly in-situ. A projection set that was set up properly while facing East would be a different thing when rotated 90 degrees to instead face North: What once was carefully-adjusted to produce 3 overlapping images that summed to be pure white lines would be a weird mix of red, blue, and green lines that only sometimes overlapped.
The CRT tubes themselves were generally quite impressively small for the size of the image that they'd ultimately produce. This meant pushing the phosphor coatings quite hard, which translated into an increased opportunity for permanent image retention ("screen burn") from things like CNN logos and video game scores.
Plus: They'd tend to get blurry over time. Because they were being pushed hard, the CRTs were liquid-cooled using glycol that was supposed to be optically-clear. But stuff would sometimes grow in there. It was never clear whether this was flora or [micro]fauna or something else, but whatever it was liked living in a world filled with hot, brightly-lit glycol. Service shops could correct this by changing the fluid, but that's an expense and inconvenience that direct-view CRTs didn't have.
And they were ungainly things in other ways. Sure, they tended to be lighter (less-massive) because they were full of air instead of leaded glass, but a rear-projection set was generally a big floor-standing thing that still had plenty of gravity. Meanwhile, a front-projection rig ~doubled the chance of someone walking by occluding the view and came with the burden of a hard-to-clean screen (less important these days, but it used to be common for folks to smoke indoors) and its own additional alignment variables (and lens selection, and dust issues, and, and).
So a person could deal with all that, or -- you know -- just get a regular direct-view CRT.
Even today where projectors use friggin' laser beams for illumination and produce enormous, bright images with far fewer issues than I listed above, direct-view tech (like the flat LCD and *LED sets at any big-box) is still much more popular.
(But I do feel your pain. When I was a teenager, my parents came home from shopping one wintry night with a 36" Sony WEGA for me to help unload. Holy hell.)
> Things got washed out in a bright room compared to a direct-view CRT.
You're right about that. A friend's dad was a gearhead and had one of those. It always seemed dim, practically unwatchable during the day and even at night it was flat which made darker films hard to watch.
But it was a mid-80s model and I figured 10 or 20 years later the tech had improved.
I also had a friend whose dad had a big, for the time, rear-projection set in the 80s.
It was in the room with the furniture that we weren't allowed to sit on, and we weren't allowed to think about using that TV. (I mentioned once when we were unsupervised that maybe we could turn it on and watch something, and the color drained out of his face like doing anything like that would surely result in a very painful death. After he calmed down, we went outside and played with bugs or something instead.)
As far as I could tell, the old man (who was much younger than I am at this point) only ever switched it on for watching football on Sunday afternoons. But once or twice I'd wander by and -- with permission, and being careful to touch nothing -- try to watch part of the game.
It was a miserable thing to view. Big, blurry, dim, and just broadly indistinct. I didn't see the attraction compared to the perfectly-good 20" Zenith we had at home at that time that seemed so much more vibrant and useful. But the speakers sure sounded better on the projection set, so I guess there's that.
The tech did improve. The brightness did get a lot better, and so did processing (including using tricks like Velocity Scan Modulation that sought to improve brightness, at the expensive of making geometry an deliberately-dynamic thing instead of an ideally-fixed thing), and the colors improved. Things like line doublers and scalers and higher-resolution electronics to drive the tubes did improve some aspects of the blur that was apparent, even with regular NTSC sources. But those same improvements were also made in direct-view CRTs; after all, they were both the same tech.
So CRT rear-projection was as good as a person could get for a bigger-than-direct-view for a long time, but the fidelity was very seldom particularly awesome on an absolute scale -- at any pricepoint.
Competing rear-projection systems like DLP and LCD began to dwarf it in the market not long after the turn of the century. Despite their hunger for expensive light bulbs (and single-chip DLP's own inherent temporal problems), these new players were often cheaper to produce and sell, came in smaller packages (they could often rest on furniture instead needing their own floor-space), had fewer setup issues, and fared pretty well in brightness and geometry.
CRT rear-projectors then got pushed completely aside as soon as things like plasma displays became cheap-enough, and big LCDs became good-enough -- somewhere between 2006 and 2009, on my timeline.
(CRT did last a bit longer in front-projection form, for people with very serious home theaters [think positively-enormous screen, tiered seating, dedicated space, and some blank checks], but LCD caught up there soon-enough as well.)
Thank you. There are so many TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that they overlap significantly. Maybe the coffee hasn't kicked in yet, but I didn't know what CTA meant in this context. I thought it might be related to PSA (Public Service Announcement), so I searched "CTA announcement" and got Chicago Transit Authority and California Teacher's Association - obviously not helpful.
At the University of Michigan many moons ago CTA stood for Central Tripping Authority, a largely imaginary collective devoted to taking hallucinogens. (Regularly.) There was CTA graffiti all over East Quadrangle dormitory when I lived there. The meaning was well-understood.
No, it isn't just you. I didn't get it either. I never understood why some people use obscure acronyms and assume everyone's going to understand that. It's like complete lack of empathy for the reader.
I was really confused too so I had assumed it was related to something written in the article as I had just opened up the comments
Now that I know CTA means Call to action, its okay but lets be honest that they could have atleast said either CTA (call to action) or just skip the abbreviation itself since I assume a very significant proportion of people were confused so what's exactly the point of an abbreviation like CTA is certainly up to debate and people are definitely debating it so I am waiting for what the overall consensus on the whole thing is :)
I don't think that is necessarily the case. If you use certain words all the time, shortening them makes sense. They might just forget which abbreviations are and aren't common knowledge. You wouldn't get mad if people use PC, CPU, ATM and RAM, right? Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN. (neither would using "HN")
> Even SSD would be fine on HN, but it probably wouldn't be fine outside HN.
The set of people who know the term "solid state drive" is likely a strict subset of the people (mostly tech enthusiasts of some shape) who know "SSD". Same for "USB" and many other terms that have entered the mainstream primarily as an abbreviation.
So the question is not whether to use an abbreviation or spell out the full term as a matter of principle; the question is whether it's the abbreviation or the full term that's more commonly known. I'd argue that way fewer people recognize "CTA" than know the term "call to action". I personally have done some front-end development, and didn't know the abbreviation either.
It stands for "Chicago transit authority". I don't know about you, but search engines have become useless since last year, I'm talking downright unusable.
The Chicago Transit Authority has existed for only about 70 years despite transit in Chicago being around for 125+ years.
Legislation the governor signed last week all but guarantees that it won’t see its hundredth birthday except possibly as a sticker on the side of the busses and trains. Within 5 years the agency will only have the duty to plan routes within the city limits, and maybe do some of the driver hiring.
It's nice for writing to be sufficiently self-contained for the reader to get the basic meaning without research. How does it affect your sense of perspicacity when a sentence forces you to consult a dictionary just to keep up?
I'm still not sure why this is the author's problem. If a piece of writing is too challenging, you are welcome to disengage from it, and not demand more from the author.
A search engine can tell you what some people mean by the acronym. It can't tell you what this particular author meant. It's like asking an LLM where you left your car keys, or asking Google what your spouse wants for dinner.
Arguably CTA isn't exactly an obscure acronym. It's multi-disciplinary - quite common in UI/UX design and marketing; and also decently common in any branched of software engineering that interact with these topics, like... web development.
CTA is very obscure. As a mobile dev I refuse to call CTA as anything other than click or tap to action in which case it should be TPA. Also many folks (esp. PMs confuse CTAs with button clicks). Anyway, CTA in this context didn’t even ring a distant bell either for call or click and I am glad it didn’t.
I think in UI design it usually is intended to refer to the main thing you want/expect a user to do in any given situation, i.e. having multiple CTAs is a bit of an oxymoron while having multiple buttons is not.
Nah, I meant to type TTA but now that I have mistyped TPA I should make that Tap Pour Action - Tap for Action (I am not trying the double meaning here, just to clarify).
I’ve worked with marketer types for over a decade and had them use the initialism “CTA” hundreds of times, understood it, and yet still in this comment I had no idea that they were referencing that term. If this was a UI diagram I’d have had no problem. This seems to me like a case where using an initialism in a different context than it usually appears confuses readers. It would kind of be like saying “I plan to GTM for a few things after work today.” You may recognize that as Go-To-Market if I said “the GTM team” at work, but it is strange outside that context. Outside a marketing or UI context I don’t think people usually initialize “CTA.”
How many industries can prosper by defining what the customer should get and have an endless stream of demand in response?
Isn’t GTM just “business 101”? I really don’t understand how people can use the term and not realize they are screaming “we’re going to do the basics of what we should have been doing all along”.
Imagine if software developers championed a “logic” based approach.
In a B2B company context, the Go-To-Market or GTM team means the whole sales team, plus everybody else who manages customer accounts. Customer Success, etc. as opposed to the product parts of the company.
If said like "let's GTM" it usually means getting on a call. Stands for Go-To-Meeting, the main business videoconference software before Zoom took over.
It's specific to marketing and it's a term I've only seen used when you are trying to sell a product. In my mind, CTA means "the button we are trying to make you click on by any means necessary because we make money when you click on it"
It might not be obscure in an environment that lives on 'social activity', but I can assure you -- and I am saying this as a person, who survives daily barrages of acronyms, CTA is not common.
The one that sticks in my craw is "ofc," especially when it's buried in a wall of text written by someone evidently capable of typing lots of characters in one sitting.
I have deduced that it means "of course," but of course since that expression could of course be sprinkled almost anywhere in a sentence without changing its meaning much, it's of course hard to be sure.
I really don't know why people refuse to look things up. And I don't understand how the parent's comment isn't off-topic and unnecessary and pedantic and mine apparently is. This place is a goddamn cesspool.
They could also write the comment in French, and by the same argument people should need to go out of their way to copy-paste that into google translate.
Thousands of people are going to read this thing. The writer could spare thousands of people spending tens of seconds (totaling days of human life), by simply spending less than a second spelling out the obscure term.
Boy are you going to be surprised when you find out that there is an entire French literary tradition that doesn't concern itself with who does and does not speak the language.
They keep mentioning "innovation". What's innovative about shoveling mindless junk in people's faces 24x7? We've got a lot of these platforms already. Do we need an even MORE mindless one to dethrone TikTok? Is that a win for literally anyone other than investors?
> Is TikTok fundamentally different from HN in some way?
absolutely!
- not ad driven
- not follower / likes driven (yes, there's karma but there's no concept of following people, notifications for likes, etc.)
- not engagement driven
- not algorithmically driven (yes, the home page is, but you can just do /active for example, or /new ; I rarely go the home page)
- there isn't an endless amount of "new content"
- no hosted content (you have to link to something to show it)
- no revenue
The short video platforms are almost exclusively individual-algorithmic garbage-recommending platforms designed for maximum passivity.
A couple major differences here are:
* Not video
* Meant more for commmunity/interactivity
* Not individual algorithmic
So a site like this optimizes for most-user-upvoted content, to try to surface content that is found interesting by people who are presumably somewhat like you. That seems pretty different from a self-serving platform that optimizes for whatever keeps you from blinking.
They covered this a lot on the Accidental Tech Podcast last night.
I just don't get why these companies should be in the business of offering gift cards-- at least, not if they can't be redeemed safely.
I'm sure people would run other kinds of scams with AppleIDs without the existence of gift cards, but gift card redemption scams have gotta be 99% of the reason people create fake accounts. The support burden would evaporate almost overnight if they just exited this stupid market.
> I just don't get why these companies should be in the business of offering gift cards
If they're anything like Starbucks then they get the benefit of utilizing the unredeemed balances as temporary capital for investments. It's an interest free loan at their scale. Plus they get to keep the balance that people forget to redeem.
Some states have laws that gift cards never expire, like California. A lot of companies will just go with the most strict rule, rather than micromanaging state by state. The side effect of this is the company "keeps" the money that isn't spent. It may be earmarked at gift card money, but it will never be spent.
I am terrible at spending gift cards. I have some that are from 2007, 18 years old. Two years ago I decided I should check them all and actually spend them. Of the dozen or so cards (several of them for Apple), only 2 of them had an issue, all the others were still active with the original balance.
One of the issues was easily solved, it was a Visa gift card that had an expiration date... I reached out to the company and they issued a new card with an extended date. The other seemed to be so old that the underlying company was sold and pivoted, and changed systems (I assume multiple times) along the way. What was a card for a local restaurant chain now seemed dedicated to Dick's Sporting Goods... at least that's where the phone number went. I haven't yet tried going to the actual restaurant to see what happens.
This reminded me I did an awful job of actually spending them. I guess I need to try again.
> I just don't get why these companies should be in the business of offering gift cards
I think gift card or not isn't really relevant, fraudulent activity can happen in a lot of ways like iCloud being paid by a stolen credit card, or TV shows being rented with hacked PayPal account.
The real issue is simply that there's no proper support avenue for serious issues that at this point affect your whole life, a family or a whole company. There's also no real avenue for a user to get the authorities to do anything to help with their case.
There's been increased attention on it here when (from memory), it was found that police departments on the other side of the country were handing over data from completely different jurisdictions' cameras, without any kind of warrant or official order, to third parties.
I don't specifically remember it, but I had the manual, and I was a voracious manual reader as a kid. I also remember the carrier landings being the hardest thing in any game I ever played. Felt like about a 1% success rate, and I never quite knew what separated a successful landing from an unsuccessful one that looked identical on approach.
People seem to be more helpful to strangers in smaller communities, where there are fewer other people who could render aid, and where the consequences are perhaps more dire.
In a big city, meh, there's always someone else who could do it.
What is everyone's responsibility is no-one's responsibility. There are psychology experiements that back that up. Google 'the smoky room experiment' and 'bystander effect'.
Yeah, I'm not worried about being targeted in an RCA and pointedly asked why I chose a region with way better uptime than `us-tirefire-1`.
What _is_ worth considering is whether your more carefully considered region will perform better during an actual outage where some critical AWS resource goes down in Virginia, taking my region with it anyway.
reply