Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

roguelazer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 648 posts

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#271

Post by vinay_ys »

mvanga wrote: post #133

This is one weird comment section. There are people attacking the author for a statement made about CoreOS, and for some hate towards Kubernetes. The key point of the article is not really being addressed here: vested interests from large companies are able to introduce huge complexity into simple, well-designed projects. While the complexity may be good for some end that said vested interest has in mind, they are al…

These open source projects you talk about were developed by profit seeking enterprises for solving complex distributed systems problems at scale.

Because they chose to make them open-source (not out of altruistic motives but out of the same profit seeking perfectly good business motives), these solo developers (who are also profit seeking) can benefit from those projects for free and can afford to build to serve lot more users than they would be able to otherwise.

I don't get the entitled attitude of the author. If he wants a 'simple' system by his standards, he can build one easily enough with the modern tools like golang, node.js and rust.

Btw, the web development tools were never simpler than today to operate a safe and secure production web application to serve any number of users. I'm saying this with about two decades of experience doing the same.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#272

Post by Brian_K_White »

ixtli wrote: post #47

I run k8s in production and I think this is a really bizarre axe to grind that sort of smells like someone who got upset by how steep the kubernetes learning curve is. Which, in a way, is understandable. > 1) Add hundreds of new failure modes to your software In my entirely anecdotal experience, it removes error modes. It turns out that just because k8s offers a feature (it offers many!) doesn't mean you're required…

You define portability as requiring n thousand tight couples instead of one. I define portability as decoupling.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#273

Post by bfb09 »

freshhawk wrote: post #231
bfb09 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if 'advancements' were anything but? How would we know whether we're advancing a nascent engineering discipline in the best way possible? Is public cloud, an optimization for a certain calculus of engineering resources, the optimal form of computing delivery? There's an underlying presumption about computing progress that has weaseled its way into your thinking, and the devil of it is that there are vanishingly…

You seem unfamiliar with the mystical energy force that always ensures the direction of "progress" is always positive for everyone. It's very un-techy to not believe in this, you need to immediately forget enough social science subjects so you can get back to the purity of ignorance.

You jest, but there is an actual argument somewhere in this dumpster fire arguing that philosophy cannot explain the overall direction of technology, as evidenced by a particular software's choice of license and the underlying assumption that technology is "different" from any other human endeavor.

Nebulous philosophical arguments do explain things. Quite readily, actually.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#274

Post by cmrdporcupine »

bfb09 wrote: post #146
mvanga wrote: post #133

This is one weird comment section. There are people attacking the author for a statement made about CoreOS, and for some hate towards Kubernetes. The key point of the article is not really being addressed here: vested interests from large companies are able to introduce huge complexity into simple, well-designed projects. While the complexity may be good for some end that said vested interest has in mind, they are al…

It's a shot across the bow at the Kool-Aid which everyone here has imbibed to some extent. Of course they're going to shoot the messenger. When I clicked this thread I said out loud to my team, "oh, this should be good," and I hadn't even fathomed precisely how predictable the discussion would be. It's so far removed from any consideration that it lands something like explaining to an American that they're a subject…

I think it's pretty drastic to say "everyone here has imbibed" that Kool-Aid; I work in embedded, and am not super familiar with the frameworks he's complaining about, but I found the blog post entertaining nonetheless.

Sometimes I feel like the people who are deep down in this "full stack developer" land should come up for air and look around at the bigger picture. There's a much bigger world of software development out there and actually I think this post was kind of an attempt at that.

The web-facing industry seems to have dug itself down into a very deep rabbit hole of frameworks-on-frameworks-on-buzzwords, in a way it wasn't 10 years ago when I last played in that space.

It looks very weird over there from over here :-)

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#275

Post by ocdtrekkie »

jonfw wrote: post #77
ddevault wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name a single piece of good software from Google.

Gmail, google maps, and google docs are all excellent

I thought each of these were good until I tried something different. I think people moved from legacy things like Windows Live Mail, MapQuest, and Word 2000 to these services, and then never noticed the rest of the world got better outside of Google-land.

Gmail operates what is probably an industry-worst mail client. I have helped people using AOL Mail in 2020, and it is a superior experience. It performs better. FastMail is a paid service, and it's quality matches that: FastMail can run in circles around Gmail every single day.

Google Docs/Sheets is Office without all of the reasons businesses use Word. You can try to patch in some of it's holes with add-ons (I had some experience with a Mail Merge add-on for Gmail/Sheets, and it was fine, I guess, but a paid service from a third party) but with a lot of added jank. Collaborative editing was it's claim to fame, but you can do that just fine in Office 365, with a far more capable app suite.

Google Maps, Drew covered the point pretty well: Google just has the money for more data. It's prohibitively expensive to use that data yourself as a service, and others who have access to less data still manage a comparable and sometimes better product than Maps. Usually while better respecting your privacy.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#276

Post by AdamGibbins »

alpb wrote: post #35

Author is really good at discrediting themselves straight off the bat in one sentence: > for a ~~bullshit~~ unsuccessful project called CoreOS Container Linux that was EOL'd several years ago CoreOS was actually quite successful to me as an outside observer. It had decent paid user base as well as people using it without paying. It has showed people that Chrome OS can be used to build atomically updating host OS with…

Entirely agreed, CoreOS Container Linux was a great project that served its purpose well. Yes it went EOL last month and we just moved to one its successors, Fedora CoreOS, also works well. The authors tone is incredibly off putting.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#277

Post by castillar76 »

freshhawk wrote: post #231
bfb09 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if 'advancements' were anything but? How would we know whether we're advancing a nascent engineering discipline in the best way possible? Is public cloud, an optimization for a certain calculus of engineering resources, the optimal form of computing delivery? There's an underlying presumption about computing progress that has weaseled its way into your thinking, and the devil of it is that there are vanishingly…

You seem unfamiliar with the mystical energy force that always ensures the direction of "progress" is always positive for everyone. It's very un-techy to not believe in this, you need to immediately forget enough social science subjects so you can get back to the purity of ignorance.

James Mickens' 'Technological Manifest Destiny', cited at UseNIX 2018, is a real thing. At the time, listening to it, it was easy to chuckle, but I've since had a lot of sobering conversations with people in which I realized partway through that they really believed these things, and that's frightening.

Technological Manifest Destiny:

1. Technology is value neutral and will therefore automatically lead to great outcomes for everyone.

2. If we delay the rollout of new technology than we would delay the distribution of the inevitably great impacts for everyone.

3. History is generally uninteresting because the past has nothing to teach us right now.

(https://www.zachpfeffer.com/single-post/2018/11/27/Transcrip..., ca. 37 minutes in)

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#278

Post by fooster »

Why on earth did this garbage make the front page? For shame!

The author is a total jerk trashing everything in his path with hyperbole rather than sound logical arguments. Read his rant on protobuf. Why would anyone waste their time tearing down the contributions of others?

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#279

Post by bfb09 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #274
bfb09 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shot across the bow at the Kool-Aid which everyone here has imbibed to some extent. Of course they're going to shoot the messenger. When I clicked this thread I said out loud to my team, "oh, this should be good," and I hadn't even fathomed precisely how predictable the discussion would be. It's so far removed from any consideration that it lands something like explaining to an American that they're a subject…

I think it's pretty drastic to say "everyone here has imbibed" that Kool-Aid; I work in embedded, and am not super familiar with the frameworks he's complaining about, but I found the blog post entertaining nonetheless. Sometimes I feel like the people who are deep down in this "full stack developer" land should come up for air and look around at the bigger picture. There's a much bigger world of software development…

Rest assured that I am firmly in your camp, and I've been tirelessly making the argument to policymakers that Big Web is not the resident innovative force in computing any more, despite the Obama administration's rapid adoption of their ideals and philosophy to salvage Healthcare.gov. In both the legislative and executive branches I have found many, many sympathetic ears who have been burned by ballooning budgets to handle public cloud and all the concerns that came with it, which folks who advocate for cloud-first deployment tend to overlook when addressing people who genuinely don't know (concerns endemic to Big Web operation of cloud actually need explaining when addressing a sector that's never touched it).

There is a watershed coming where Big Web/FAANG will lose this mantle, and DevOps, half-baked Agile because nobody ever bakes it all the way, framework engineering, and a complete fundamental ball-dropping around security and exploitation of user data are rapidly ensuring it.

At some point, Big Web/FAANG and everybody delivering Web services of some kind got the idea that the Web was computing. I think the prototypical version of this thinking led to Rob Pike's observations about systems research in the early oughts. This forum tends to operate with that underlying assumption about the lens to view computing through no fault of anyone in particular, which is why I say that.

Re: Etcd, or, why modern software makes me sad

#280

Post by saagarjha »

mvanga wrote: post #173
tyingq wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, having your opener call out a specific project as bullshit has that effect. Pulling the snark would have resulted in more people getting the main point.

Definitely true. The author could have chosen differently and it would have probably led to more constructive comments. However, I'll also point out that focusing on the snark and ignoring the rest of the article is also a choice made on the part of the commenters. Given a choice, I personally prefer to take the strongest and most charitable interpretation of someones ideas before choosing to criticize them. At least…

That things I write for the web usually go through a "lazy comment" filter where I pull out references that would lead to lazy comments. Things that often get stripped are one reference to a specific example when I'm talking about something general–because invariably the comments will focus on "how I don't get the software" or "how I singled it out" or "how what I wrote isn't even true if you look at this way so my point is now invalid". Either I mention no examples, and have the commenters come up with their own, or I have a few so that I don't get attacked by a specific group of people.
Post reply on HN