singingcheese

Rebooting an EC2 instance never causes you to lose your data (no matter what type of storage you pick).

EC2 has two types of storage: local disk "ephemeral/instance storage" and network storage "EBS". Digital Ocean only provides local disk. In EC2 you can mix and match, but EBS is the most convenient.

If you do a stop and start on EC2 (very different to picking "reboot"). You will lose what's on local disk because stop/start is basically requested that you be moved to a different physical box. Data stored on EBS is not affected. On Digital Ocean if you "power off" you remain on the same host, but get billed at full rate whereas on EC2 you don't get billed for the time it's stopped. Rebooting on EC2 is the same as rebooting on DO.

If you use EBS for storing everything your data survives even if the hardware your instance is running on breaks. If the hardware breaks on Digital Ocean or on EC2 if you only use ephemeral (local) storage you lose your data. It's the same story on DO as it is on EC2. The only difference is that EC2 gives you the option of storage which can survive the physical box you are on dying (EBS).

A reboot doesn't cause you to lose data on your ephemeral storage. I think you mean "stopping" an instance and then "starting" it again (on another host), not rebooting it.

If you shut down your server you lose the data that was stored on the local drives, no different to DO. If you shut down your droplet on DO you lose the data stored on the local drives (in fact DO now scrubs the disks on shutdown after a recent security screw-up). The only difference is that most folk on AWS use EBS storage (something which DO still doesn't offer) which allows you to have drives which can continue to exist after your server is no more and allows you to attach more storage without getting a bigger server.

It's not rocket science:

instance = virtual server ("droplet" in DO speak)

terminate = shut down

ephemeral store = local disk

An EC2 instance is just a virtual server so anyone who knows Linux, Windows, BSD or even Solaris can "hit the ground running" there too.

The post made the front page on HN a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7016735. DO staff seem to spend quite a bit of time responding to threads on HN in general, so that would be surprising.

apply is the function called when you use brackets and nothing else e.g. val x = myMap("myKey")

> You can have a REPL in a statically typed language too---Haskell has one.

And so does Scala...

> It doesn't take a whole lot of doing to push the Scala collections library into weird and terrifying behaviour

I'm genuinely curious to see examples you've seen in production code. I've used the collections for years coding full-time and haven't encountered anything like that.

> Also happened to be the guy who wrote the most Scala code on the planet

I love the way he assumes that. I think he may be surprised to learn the sheer scale of some production Scala systems which aren't part of the Scala class library or compiler.

Besides, he put together a list of obscure corner cases that no practicing Scala developer actually seems to care about.

It made perfect sense to me, perhaps because I code in Scala for a living (even though I don't use either Akka or Play (yet)). It reminds me of the old comment about how unreadable French is because it looks nothing like English.

Java 8 would make a very poor Scala substitute, and only offers a small subset of what is provided by Scala.