Live data from Hacker News

We are still early with the cloud

erikbern.com

21–30 of 202 posts

Re: We are still early with the cloud

#22
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you that a cloud 2.0 architecture is needed. I don’t agree with you that you can’t run DOSBox in the cloud. You totally can. In fact, you can containerize a dosbox app and forward the output over websockets or tcp. I have files from 1990s and 2000s as well. I keep backups, as everyone should when dealing with cloud/internet/not-my-machine.

I can run DOSBox in the cloud. What I can't do is run an old version of Google Docs, Salesforce, Notion, or Alexa. I can run old commercial software that I paid for in DOSBox or a VM because I have the software, even if it's just in binary form. I have the software and the environment and I can run it myself. That's the difference. The cloud is far more closed than closed-source commercial software. I can also run th…

i think yu are mixing saas whit cloud you ca run fireckraker functions, and old verion of rocky linux, but is 100 times more complex than pay for the sistems and the cloud provider encourges this propietry tools because of this omthing similar will be dinamo or firbase which are pay as you go saas

Re: We are still early with the cloud

#23
Maybe there is a name for this phenomenon, but it feels like when we add so much productivity via layers of abstraction, even more person-effort gets allocated to the higher levels of abstraction. Because 1. that's where people are most productive / happy / compensated / recognized / safe 2. businesses can confidently project return on investment

How many engineers get to work on a part of the stack that has some room for fundamental breakthroughs or new paradigms? The total number has maybe grown in the last 50 years, but not the proportion?

It's hard to justify an engine swap once there's so much investment riding on the old one, so just not a lot of people are researching how to make that new OS.

That is until a Tesla comes around and shows the market what could be better/faster/cheaper.

Re: We are still early with the cloud

#24
post #5

I read the article and don't think author arguments about cloud are even about cloud. Looks to me he is more after the development tools.

But the cloud can and will be a fundamental part of the new developer tools. Since reading the blog post's mention of Repl.it I went and downloaded their new Iphone app and used https://modal.com to spin up 30-40 containers from a script doing sentiment analysis on ~30k movie reviews: https://twitter.com/jonobelotti_IO/status/158291976221638656... This cost me about 5 cents. Developer environments and workflows built…

> Since reading the blog post's mention of Repl.it I went and downloaded their new Iphone app and used Modal.com to spin up 30-40 containers from a script doing sentiment analysis on ~30k movie reviews:

IPhone processors run billions of cycles every second and are capable of running billions of instructions every second. I'm amazed that we've gone from "Run doom on my toaster", to "I can spin up 30-40(!) containers to analyze 30k reviews".

It's laughable. Doom was written for the IBM PC. This PC had a clock speed of 4.77MHz and 64Kb of RAM. The iPhone 12 runs at 3.1GHz, has 4Gb of RAM and has multiple cores. The phone in our pocket is vastly more capable of any piece of hardware we had 30 years ago, and we give accolades to people that can analyze sentiments (which is just running a bunch of matrix math at the end of the day) in under 1 minute using dozens of insanely powerful machines.

We should be able to analyze 30K sentiments in a minute easily on an iPhone. And we should be able to analyze that data in under a few seconds on a single desktop.

Re: We are still early with the cloud

#25
post #7

It's crazy and destructive that we are still using the unix paradigm in the cloud. In the 70s we have transparent network fileststems, and by the 80s I had a more advanced cloud-native environment at PARC than is available today.* The Lispms were not quite as cloud native as that, but still you could have the impression that you just sat down at a terminal and had immediate window into an underlying "cloud" reality,…

I completely understand what you're saying.

I'm sort of reminded of how the US government is the worst (except for all the rest), when having an absolute ruler should be so MUCH more efficient. Problems would be fixed by fiat.

Or maybe, why does lisp persist with its horrible user-unfriendly syntax?

:)

I guess we will just have to invent it. (and you should do your part by reminding people with examples of old systems that elegantly solved the papercuts of today)

Re: We are still early with the cloud

#26
post #7

It's crazy and destructive that we are still using the unix paradigm in the cloud. In the 70s we have transparent network fileststems, and by the 80s I had a more advanced cloud-native environment at PARC than is available today.* The Lispms were not quite as cloud native as that, but still you could have the impression that you just sat down at a terminal and had immediate window into an underlying "cloud" reality,…

"It's crazy and destructive that we are still using the unix paradigm in the cloud."

  # ssh user@rsync.net "test -f fileThatExists"
  #echo $?
  0
... from my cold, dead hands ...

Re: We are still early with the cloud

#28
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the cloud can and will be a fundamental part of the new developer tools. Since reading the blog post's mention of Repl.it I went and downloaded their new Iphone app and used https://modal.com to spin up 30-40 containers from a script doing sentiment analysis on ~30k movie reviews: https://twitter.com/jonobelotti_IO/status/158291976221638656... This cost me about 5 cents. Developer environments and workflows built…

> Since reading the blog post's mention of Repl.it I went and downloaded their new Iphone app and used Modal.com to spin up 30-40 containers from a script doing sentiment analysis on ~30k movie reviews: IPhone processors run billions of cycles every second and are capable of running billions of instructions every second. I'm amazed that we've gone from "Run doom on my toaster", to "I can spin up 30-40(!) containers t…

I see what you're saying, but also think it misses the point of where this is all going. An IPhone 12 is an enormously powerful computer, but it's not at all one that is accessibly programmable to Repl.it devs. Similarly, it's possible to run 30k sentiment analysis examples in a minute on a IPhone, but actually doing so would take a skilled dev weeks to implement (because it's not designed to do that!).

Our computer systems have got ludicrously more powerful, and software development has in a sense become ludicrously more inefficient, but computing is a wonderful culture of abundance and _easy and fast enough_ almost always wins over _difficult, faster, and efficient_.

Re: We are still early with the cloud

#29
Saying that Spotify is "producer-friendly" must be couched in the context of the times. 100% of $0 is still $0, and at the time most people were just pirating music so you weren't making anything off of recordings. If Spotify wanted to give you literally fractions of a cent instead of $0, you were going to take that. I wouldn't say it was ever really friendly to producers...mostly to consumers and, in order to be friendly to consumers, they had to win over record labels. And I think Spotify made a _lot_ of compromises in order to do that, including taking money that should really be going to producers and paying off the RIAA/labels so they continue to put their catalogs on there.

Source: I was a producer when Spotify started and I still am.

Re: We are still early with the cloud

#30
post #7

It's crazy and destructive that we are still using the unix paradigm in the cloud. In the 70s we have transparent network fileststems, and by the 80s I had a more advanced cloud-native environment at PARC than is available today.* The Lispms were not quite as cloud native as that, but still you could have the impression that you just sat down at a terminal and had immediate window into an underlying "cloud" reality,…

People forget that a good deal of “cloud” logic existed in a form on mainframes as well.
Post reply on HN