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Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
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Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#2You should start with a single monolithic application on a single server that you scale vertically as much as possible before even thinking of scaling horizontally. Most apps won’t ever need architecture more complex than this.
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#3Clouds are a scam and are designed for:
- fools who can't do simple math or read fine print ("have no idea how much 20 $2 per hour instances pumping data at 10 mbit/second add up in a month, and OMG that data is not free when i already pay for the instance?!". And besides they give me a whopping $100,000 credit - that will last eternity!")
- corporate tricksters ("if we don't invest into our hardware and buy AWS instead, our next quarter bottom line will look GREAT and i get a nice bonus, and by the time truth transpires, i will jump the boat to the next shop i do the same trick with")
- people with breaks in basic logic and total lack of foresight ("i can't afford buying all the hardware for my small pet startup, and will make do with just $200 a month in AWS, and i don't realise it will only work for as long as my startup is not successful and has no users - and when it's no longer the case, i will be vendor-locked with tech solutions based on AWS and petabytes of data which is $0.05 per GB to download, locked up there, and will bleed money for years").
They should be avoided at all costs except for development purposes, and if you don't know how to or can't afford to do something without clouds, you just don't know how to do it or can't afford it.
In Europe, none of my clients use clouds. They have dedicated setups with reputable providers that work a lot better than cloud-based ones and cost pennies. Also, i realise that my custom software development biz doesn't really work with EU clients, i barely make a profit with them and they get to be real pain. Probably suggests that educational level of Europe is a lot higher.
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#4[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#5I have two, at least.
1. Personal names are not generic strings, any more than Dates are numbers or Money is a floating point value. Name, as in a person's given and family name, or whatever, should be a type in every standard library, with behaviors appropriate for the semantics of a Name, language, and country. Yes there are lots of conflicting international differences. We've managed to handle languages and calendars of significant complexity, we can do so sufficiently well for the things we use to identify ourselves.
2. "AI" is a marketing term for a kind of automation technology able to use pattern matching to reproduce plausible new versions of the data used to train the model's algorithms. It couches this automation as especially powerful or magical as a way to draw a smokescreen around the real problems and limitations of the technology.
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#6Heh. This thread is like an invitation to get downvoted.
I'll bite: Using const for all variables in JavaScript is moronic. It's a trend that should have been killed with prejudice in the crib. If you want type safety, use another language. Use let for variables and const for actual constants. Words have meanings. The const statement wasn't created so developers could litter their code with it to show how cool they are.
Imagine you're learning JavaScript at young age: "Here are three ways to declare variables - var, let and const - but you should only use the most confusing one that doesn't actually make verbal sense for general use, nor do what you'd think it would do based on its description. Use it anyways. Because reasons."
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#7You should start with a single monolithic application on a single server that you scale vertically as much as possible before even thinking of scaling horizontally. Most apps won’t ever need architecture more complex than this.
I like this - have started to think more this way, but I'd almost always deploy three boxes instead of one. I like the flexibility of having something that can auto-failover should an az or instance die or disk die.
That being said, I've seen VMs with multiple years of uptime on various clouds, so ymmv.
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#8The future of gaming is streaming, and home PC gaming hardware will eventually go the way of DVD players. GeForce Now is succeeding where OnLive and Stadia failed (20+ million users now, apparently). Offloading rendering to the cloud means much improved thermals, graphics, and battery life -- especially for laptop users and Mac owners. Apple Silicon is cool, but it's not going to beat a 4080 for pure graphics performance. And that's just computers... GFN can also stream to tablets, phones, TVs, and anything else with a screen and an internet connection.
It makes more sense for Nvidia to put GPUs in data centers with good cooling, shared between multiple gamers and idle workloads (AI, etc.), instead of having them sit in expensive but unused home desktops most of the day
Nvidia is the only one who has a real shot at this because they're the only ones who can directly allocate GPUs to cloud gaming (unless what's left of AMD wants to get in on the action too). And they're the only ones that Steam specifically partners with for its Cloud Play beta: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloudgaming
Stadia failed not because of the technology, but because Google mismanaged it and never understood PC gaming cultures. Nvidia and Steam do, and it's a much, much better product for it.
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#9Making proper use of functional (stateless) paradigm in non-functional languages embodies a bunch of other good practices (testability, isolation, dependency inversion...).
Refactoring can always be done with a running (no-downtime) system at no extra cost (time or money) compared to rewriting or downtime-requiring approach.
You can always deliver user value and "paying up technical debt" can and should be done as part of regular work (corrollary from above: at no extra cost).
We'll never do away with physical keyboards for inputting text (yet I only have one mechanical keyboard I don't even use regularly :).
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#10I'd almost always rather build something than use a 3rd party service.
I understand it, I run it, and I don't have to deal with 3rd party's changes, performance problems, or downtime. Also, less bugs related to data consistency.