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Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

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Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#401

Post by arinlen »

i_like_waiting wrote: post #393
arinlen wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With 64gb ram we have around $50 month on hetzner yes. A single box on Hetzner is by far not comparable to, say, using a managed service as AWS RDS. It's not even apples to oranges, and more of apples to freshly-squeezed orange juice served by a buttler. Think about it: do you get any form of fault tolerance with your single box?

Thats why I am saying that $50/ month is way off. The price for that would be much higher

> Thats why I am saying that $50/ month is way off. The price for that would be much higher

Ah yes I agree, sorry for not being clearer. I wanted to add on to what you said.

Even though I'm a big fan of Hetzner and a happy customer for years, it's important to know what we're buying and be mindful of what we're not having as a tradeoff.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#402

Post by arinlen »

funcDropShadow wrote: post #399
arinlen wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open source clearly does not mean packaging your own software. The packaging argument was made in the context of complying with software licenses. Responsible companies which perform due diligence on the software they run have to track the provenance of all software that ships as part of their dependency closure. If you want to ensure you're not vulnerable to lawsuits then you can't simply apt-get stuff from a PPA.…

But that should apply to all readily available container images on docker hub as well, right? Conceptually that is not different from some guys PPA.

> But that should apply to all readily available container images on docker hub as well, right?

Yes, and it does indeed apply to all readily available container images.

In fact, it applies to any and all software packages put together by third-parties.

I mean, who in their right mind downloads random stuff from the internet and expects to just drop it in production software which you build your business upon?

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#403

Post by bsenftner »

throwaway98797 wrote: post #85
bsenftner wrote: post #59

The opportunity is to locate experienced software engineers from before this nonsense, and create new, efficient software that runs circles around the new modern complexity. My last employer did this: a facial recognition developer in the enterprise space; where every competitor in the industry has a server stack for their solution, we had a single integrated application replacing the entire competitor stack, and the…

good luck selling something inexpensive to enterprises department heads need a reason for big budgets

Who said the solution is cheap? Our expense to create is exponentially lower in every respect, and our customer's expense to own is significantly lower and less complex. That does not indicate the price of the product is less, in fact the price is a tad higher because of these efficiencies.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#404

Post by taylodl »

quanticle wrote: post #384
taylodl wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one has given you a good explanation for why to move to the cloud? Let me fix that for you! :) I work for a Fortune 200 company who has their own data centers and has for decades. We just completed the construction of two new data centers about four years ago at a cost of $110 million dollars. Those new data centers are now at 70% of their capacity for power requirements . You should take a look at the specs on In…

Go to your favorite cloud console and provision it.Better yet, use a serverless architecture and don't even worry about servers! Your own data center? Right now there's a 4-6 month wait time for new servers and storage equipment, and an 8-12 month wait time for networking equipment. Not exactly agile, is it? Sure, that all works, as long as you have infinite money. My last job was at a company that was heavily invest…

You must have missed the part where I said But here's one thing I can say about applications that we've moved to the cloud: they cost 30% as much to host in the cloud as they do on-premise, and that's not even accounting for the entirety of all the costs I enumerated above!

Every app I've migrated to the cloud so far has resulted in a 70% cost reduction, but I'm also not trying to take my entire application portfolio to the cloud. To wit, we're not planning on abandoning our data centers anytime soon and that's not just because we can't move our applications to the cloud fast enough. At this point in time we recognize there are some applications best kept on-premise - but they're a minority, maybe 20% tops of my application portfolio. That means 80%+ of my application portfolio can be moved to the cloud, makes sense to move to the cloud, and I can save 70% on costs by doing so. That's a fantastic deal!

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#405

Post by horns4lyfe »

tomc1985 wrote: post #199
biorach wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People still do deploy production ready systems using RoR, Django/Python or whatever "sweet spot" framework you want to mention. Some run quite successful businesses. You can't generalise from your experience over the last few months. > Programming used to be about writing code to solve business problems. The shift to DevOps has been a massive productivity drain and most stacks are now incredibly brittle. Some busine…

God I am sick of these apologetics every time someone expresses skepticism. > Get it wrong another way and you end up overwhelmed by traffic, unable to scale in response and forever fighting fires. To nitpick this specifically, over my 12-year career toiling over this stuff there has never been a scenario where this has required a radical rework to solve. Boring-ass B2B shit rarely requires that level of engineering…

Sounds like you’re a bit too emotionally wrapped up in this, there’s no reason to get so mad at other commenters with different experiences. Maybe take a walk. It also seems like your convinced that your experience can be generalized to the entire massive industry, which is a little presumptuous.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#406

Post by philipov »

eric_cc wrote: post #361
philipov wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But all those ideas solve real problems too. All of them, except for blockchain. That one can go die on the trash heap of history.

I'll never understand the bitter hatred toward blockchain at hackernews. Are you guys just mad you knew about bitcoin when it first started but didn't get any? You can't possibly truly believe blockchain solves zero problems can you?

I know blockchain enthusiasts claim that it solves some problems, but in reality it fails to solve them because they are not fundamentally tech problems. You could think of it as a performance art documentary of a group of people learning to recreate the world's financial regulations in a bottle, but the price of admission is a trail of fraud victims. Furthermore, it is wasting the world's energy supplies, and eating up our attempts to move to renewable resources.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#407

Post by rollcat »

thomaslord wrote: post #383
rollcat wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean scalability in terms of performance, but scalability in terms of maintenance effort. It's easy to SCP some files in, but the moment you want atomic deployments, it gets unnecessarily interesting.

PHP is the only language I've set up production environments for, but I can't see any reason why it would be more complicated than other languages. I have a PHP project that handles atomic deployments by pointing the web server at a symlink named "latest". New versions get deployed into their own folder in the "versions" folder, and then the "latest" symlink gets pointed to the new version. Super simple to set up, an…

That's my entire point: the increase in complexity is very non-linear. With Python, Go, or whatever else, you pay a slightly higher upfront price, and you get things like atomic deployments out of the box; that price is however almost immediately amortised by the de-facto requirement to set up HTTPS/ACME, etc.

With PHP it's easier to just get started, but you've already mentioned versions, symlinks, CI, etc - that's the non-linear increase in complexity, you have to add a lot more pieces to get good ROI. With Python or Go you can continue using SCP to deploy for as long as it suits your needs, because no code changes will be picked up until you restart the process. If you need rollbacks, e.g. Go doesn't need symlinks or versioned directories - the entire app is a single executable, so you can just keep copies of these. You pay for what you use, and the returns are more linear and immediate.

If you only have experience deploying PHP, I would sincerely recommend trying other languages/runtimes/frameworks, even if for no other reason than to learn from what the rest of the world is doing. For me, learning to deploy PHP correctly was also a horizon-broadening experience.

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#409

Post by tomc1985 »

biorach wrote: post #400
tomc1985 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't say it, I did. Pot, meet kettle. This "obnoxious jerk" has an axe to grind.

well stop bloody venting on me. jerk

What's with the name calling? Are we five years old? And you call me a jerk?

Re: Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

#410

Post by native_samples »

mattmanser wrote: post #390
native_samples wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it you don't like about GraphQL? It seems to do what it was designed to do pretty well. I take it the issue is more with the pseudo-databases it's used as a front-end for?

Because it's now the 'right' way to do data. Even though it's not 90% of the time.

Huh interesting. I'm not that plugged in to tech fashions, but was looking at GraphQL just the other day. My conclusion was that it didn't fit though, mostly because I wanted something that supported truly ad-hoc querying and mutation. With GraphQL it's really more like an RPC protocol, so you have to figure out your queries ahead of time, there was nothing like SQL's ability to do ad-hoc querying.
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