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Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

#41

Post by lidHanteyk »

In engineering: There should be a single global content-addressed namespace for data. The space should be unguessable, rather than enumerable or searchable. The effect would be to end all problems of networked data storage, and also to end copyright. DNS, Bittorrent, IPFS are all fine attempts, but also clear and abject failures. If it's not possible, then we should prove the impossibility.

In theory: Prove that one-way functions don't exist, or explicitly construct one. Similarly, prove that P!=NP, or similarly settle the question.

Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

#42

Post by tomc1985 »

ronyfadel wrote: post #20

Decent nocode, or some sort of nocode holy grail. I want to be able to plug APIs together, process user input, have persistence and identity, without writing so much boilerplate.

Ah, the impossible holy grail of businessmen and marketeers everywhere

Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

#43

Post by AndrewKemendo »

ronyfadel wrote: post #32
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like an antigoal to me. Abstracting away infrastructure just means it will become increasingly centralized as a commodity and less likely/harder to create independent services.

I don’t necessarily agree. Look at n2n or userbase, they’re open source and can be self hosted. Other nocode tools can follow suit, and can be federated. I agree with the other comment that this can have the same effect as the one Excel had during the past decades (there are companies running completely on Excel). At the moment though, the tools feel too limited.

Sure they can be, but the whole ethos behind it is "don't make me think about anything other than the application."

So by default the majority are looking for hosted services, otherwise they'd just build their own stack. For anything other than some organization building a bunch of applications, that same Nocode Dev has no need to ever migrate so long as some major service provider is doing it for them.

Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

#44

Post by mistahenry »

mhh__ wrote: post #36

Ignoring hard problems like memory safety and parallelization (let's say), I think the biggest soft problem that I experience is optimizing the amount of time spent doing work relative to setting up boilerplate - mainly during web programming, i.e. it took me literally a few days to work out how to use code from and deploy node_modules without cheating. Not trivial but maybe automated by some meta-meta-build tool?

Most, if not all tooling, comes with a learning curve. But once you pay it, that initial ramp up time is not required on the next project.

I could start a new project with Spring Boot and Ember.js, provision a Debian box with Postgres and nginx, and deploy all of it within an hour because I know these tools. But I too paid the learning price my first go round.

Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

#46

Post by petters »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #37
petters wrote: post #10

A computer and OS that boots in 100ms. Every user action gives a response in 10ms.

As an example of just how far we are from this, generally the bootloader hasn't even passed off to the OS within the first 100ms.

I think it's really sad, because a system would likely have to be redesigned from scratch to make this happen. So it seems unlikely to happen.

But I'm not an OS expert, maybe it is possible.

Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

#47

Post by Areading314 »

smt88 wrote: post #7

Most major problems now are people problems, not engineering problems. One example: lots of software devs have no training and/or interest in security, and employers have no way to vet that. Another: there is no way for users to trust SaaS security. I have no idea whether (as a random example) Atlassian has a great security culture or a terrible one. We just trust people who seem trustworthy, usually due to their pol…

Much of security is also a people problem, though. You can have all the best encryption/firewalls/etc and still get hacked because your CEO uses their first name as their AWS password.
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