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Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#181

Post by simne »

hsn915 wrote: post #142
erikpukinskis wrote: post #89

There’s still no good way for me to write an open source web application and have its users bear the cost of running it. This is a major regression from open source desktop software, and IMO is the reason open source web applications haven’t taken off more.

You can. If you write it in Go and package it as a single binary. You can't if you write it in a scripting language that requires tons of programs to already exist on the system (a specific version of the language interpreter + a database server + other servers like redis and memcache etc etc etc). This is a problem with programming languages, not with computer systems. Computer systems already allow you to package a…

> If you write it in Go and package it as a single binary. ... > You can't if you write it in a scripting language that requires tons of programs to already exist on the system

You are close, but you are not exactly right.

If consider real case of application, which create some value (I don't mean just money, may be for example community value or scientific), you will need to depend on some libraries or tools.

This is how our civilization works, we don't create all things from scratch every time, but instead, we take ready parts and construct something new from them, possibly adding our new parts.

Some parts could been compiled/linked statically inside your big one file package, some only dynamically.

Scripting languages difference is just that they usually shipped with rich development library, and in many cases it is possible to cut unused parts of these libraries.

For example, Python now shipped even with sqlite database included, sure this is not tiny package, but it is used in many applications.

To be more precise, python for android (p4a), when compiled as helloworld, results in approximately 6mbytes .apk. As I said before, there all python standard library compiled with cython.

Sure, if you will compile helloworld native, will got something within 200k, but if add any library, it will grow, and for real application, 6mb is not to much currently.

If add functionality to p4a helloworld, it grow very slowly, because compiled Python representation is relatively compact.

BTW it could be interesting project, to add to Python/Cython possibility, to create single binary package, so it will not decompressed to fs hierarchy, but read all from those binary as need.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#182

Post by rytill »

hsn915 wrote: post #177
notreallyserio wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the problem they are a part of, and what makes them part of that problem? They don't seem problematic to me.

You can't solve problems of complexity by piling on more and more layers. Layers need to be collapsed

Citation needed.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#183

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

pavlov wrote: post #147
dijit wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a weird take on history and divorced from the reality we live in even now. The first ever web browser written by Tim Berners Lee at CERN on a NeXt computer was a web editor as well. He envisioned that every web user would be a web creator. He is quoted many times as saying this. Today: you can still stand up a web server at your house and forward the ports on your router. Unless you’re behind a carrier grade…

Seems like you agree that there isn’t a simple way to do it. The browser-as-editor didn’t even survive into the next generation of web software — Mosaic already was read-only. And that’s because Berners-Lee’s vision lacked any unified solution to hosting the web creations.

There was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaya_(web_editor)

I've used that until about 2010 for clicking together concepts of pages, to refine them manually, if at all.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#184

Post by jgrahamc »

teddyh wrote: post #56
jgrahamc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If such a thing was possible we'd be the first to roll it out. DDoS is a scourge which is why we made DDoS mitigation unmetered on all plans including free: https://blog.cloudflare.com/unmetered-mitigation/

Allow me to paraphrase your comment: “It’s not possible to solve this problem, except by centralizing all the web through us. Aren’t we generous to not punish our customers when they get hit by this problem?”

I said nothing of the sort.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#185

Post by jgrahamc »

KoftaBob wrote: post #78
jgrahamc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If such a thing was possible we'd be the first to roll it out. DDoS is a scourge which is why we made DDoS mitigation unmetered on all plans including free: https://blog.cloudflare.com/unmetered-mitigation/

I wonder if DDoS could be solved (for static websites at least) by using P2P as a supplementary load balancer. This could be set to only be enabled if load is approaching a certain percent of capacity that the servers/CDN are able to handle. Once reaching that threshold, P2P would kick in, and existing visitors could serve static content to newer visitors using something like the WebRTC + Service Worker + IndexedDB c…

I’ve looked at P2P CDNs over the years and they seem to be solving the wrong problem. At scale bandwidth isn’t a problem it’s recognizing the DDoS and filtering it while letting through legitimate traffic to a dynamic website or API. That’s complex. Not saying it can’t be done in a P2P manner but it’s hard.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#186

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

discardedrefuse wrote: post #170
BlueTemplar wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not ? Free (for instance) went pretty far in this direction 11 years ago (v6) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebox

ISP's can't be trusted with the firmware on their current routers. Do you really want them in charge of your internet facing services in your home?

O RLY? https://floss.freebox.fr/

Edité: Liberté, égalité, cyberité!

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#187

Post by closeparen »

imiric wrote: post #172
closeparen wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Most home connections are asymmetric and lack upload bandwidth. * Most personal devices are battery powered and intermittently operated. * Many are mobile in terms of physical location and logical network (home WiFi, work/school WiFi, cellular). Having a third, highly available, high upload capacity location to stage data between production and consumption wins because it is a genuinely effective solution to proble…

> asymmetric There's no technical reason for this to be the case. ISPs adapted to the needs of the web, not the other way around. > lack upload bandwidth This is relative to each user. The vast majority wouldn't require much upload bandwidth, and there could be technical solutions to address this (caching nodes, data expiration, P2P, etc.). The biggest technical challenges of large web services are because of the sca…

The key functionality of the major tech platforms is to convey data to other people. Almost none of the data we give them is private or proprietary in the sense you’re suggesting. We only give it to them because we want e.g. our friends to have it. Now it is unfortunate that the service provider also gets it in the process, but that’s more an issue of end to end encryption than centralization per se. We can have highly centralized yet end to end encrypted platforms, like WhatsApp and Signal. We can also have highly decentralized platforms which are panopticons, like cryptocurrencies.

One of the main reasons we “hire” the platform companies to convey our data to other people rather than opening TCP sockets to each other directly is precisely async delivery. No one wants to use a social network where we can only see each other’s content if we’re using our laptops at the same time. Just make a phone call at that point.

Now maybe you could ask for federated, open standard queueing mechanisms. But we have one of those! It’s called SMTP, and it’s not really up to the needs of modern social applications. And maybe we could do something about that. But it’s also in the nature of federated open standards that are widely deployed to ossify. The other service that Facebook and Twitter are doing for you besides pub/sub is having the coordination and agency to update their own deployments over time, something that e.g. the set of all relevant email operators does not have.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#188

Post by pbronez »

imiric wrote: post #115
erikpukinskis wrote: post #89

There’s still no good way for me to write an open source web application and have its users bear the cost of running it. This is a major regression from open source desktop software, and IMO is the reason open source web applications haven’t taken off more.

Forget open source—there never was a simple way for users to self-host web ~servers~ applications that gained any traction whatsoever. Opera gave it a go more than a decade ago with Opera Unite, but that went nowhere. Like a sibling comment mentioned, Sandstorm was a push in the right direction, but it also eventually failed. Docker and current container solutions are still way too complicated for the average user. T…

Sandstorm was a beautiful idea. I hope it’s time will come.

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#189

Post by bryan_w »

richardw wrote: post #97
bryan_w wrote: post #61

How can we get the layperson to run a "homeserver" to host all their data locally and have a strong pki infra. 30 years ago, people would've said the same things about routers, so I think it's possible with the right ui/incentives

Why? Honest question. I fully appreciate owning your own data and hosting it somewhere, but no idea why we need to host anywhere but hyper-connected data centers. I’d like to own my social graph, my profile, my permissions for who can contact me and read my data. But no reason for that to execute on my phone or home server. Have service providers do it, compete, scale and specialise. Let me host at home if I want to,…

The main reason for me is identity. Imagine that when you first got an internet connection, it didn't come with an @comcast.net or @att.com email address, but rather as part of the setup of your internet connection, let you register your own domain.

The mx records could point to this homeserver box and you would fetch your messages from there. It would be the norm that your graph, photos, whatever would be stored there and you would have to allow access to share them out with others. That would have lead to a very different internet than today.

But the main thing I'm thinking of is having a physical, secure enclave protected, device that allows all internet users to u2f to their ISP in order to have the option for an "ip permitted from" protocol for registration on websites. Something that can ensure that when grandmas pc gets hacked, it's not used to create 100 Twitter accounts to pump some crypto scam.

Today even if we could get ISPs to setup such a system, people wouldn't use such a system as they are already use to easy sign ups, and companies love their growth metrics

Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?

#190

Post by discardedrefuse »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #186
discardedrefuse wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISP's can't be trusted with the firmware on their current routers. Do you really want them in charge of your internet facing services in your home?

O RLY? https://floss.freebox.fr/ Edité: Liberté, égalité, cyberité!

Yes, really. https://forums.att.com/conversations/att-fiber-equipment/pos...
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