

Impossible Engineering Problems Often Aren't - spiffytech
http://blog.scalyr.com/2014/07/impossible-problems-often-arent/

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DonPellegrino
Be VERY careful with this sort of advice: "Infrequent user actions can lead to
complex server actions."

Malicious users use that knowledge to craft disproportionally powerful DOS
attacks. Your site is as vulnerable as the most CPU-expensive feature.

At the very least, rate limit those features.

~~~
derefr
I guess I read "infrequent" differently: anything a user can do will
inherently be frequent given enough scale. On the other hand, that "export
everything ever to CSV" button in the admin panel? That can take a few CPU
seconds. It won't matter, because only five people even have the ability to
hit that API endpoint, let alone the inclination.

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drblast
If you enjoy reading articles about the rediscovery of indexing large amounts
of read-only data, I'd highly recommend reading this book which is a treasure
trove about this kind of work:

[http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Gigabytes-Compressing-
Multime...](http://www.amazon.com/Managing-Gigabytes-Compressing-Multimedia-
Information/dp/1558605703)

------
jfb
I was sort of disappointed that this wasn't about actually impossible
engineering problems [1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa)

~~~
snewman
(Author here)

I can see that the title comes off as too grandiose out of context. Sorry
about that; I was looking at it from a different angle when I wrote the
article. The idea is that in normal work, you often run into challenges that
seem infeasible. This should be a trigger to look for a way to reframe the
problem, rather than giving up.

~~~
jfb
I wasn't trying to bust your balls, really, just poking a little fun at the
hyperbole. I enjoyed the article for what it was.

