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Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?

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Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?

#171

Post by nip »

hayst4ck wrote: post #120
hammyhavoc wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, killing human beings en masse can never be a good thing. Have some compassion. Countless Russians are being conscripted to fight a war they don't want to. These are all children of someone . That things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce can happen speaks volumes about this. The wars are between countries, not their people. Don't lose your humanity.

Here is a game, the greatest game, imho. I think you will like it and I think you will enjoy the outcome, the outcome doesn't directly agree with me and the game talks about the Christmas truce. https://ncase.me/trust/ War itself is not evil. When someone owns a slave, there is already violence encoded in that relationship. The slave owner is already at war with the slave. When the slave fights back, that is just. Th…

Very well said, thank you for writing that.

Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?

#172

Post by ashrafulla »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #36
ghaff wrote: post #7

One of the questions I've been asking is we've basically had physical servers -> VM -> cloud -> container orchestration on about a decade long cadence. So what's next--especially considering you can argue a lot of the low-level architectural things haven't really changed during that period. But, then, perhaps architectural details don't matter a lot at this point relative to things like AI/ML. Even WASM is mostly in…

The trendy (meaning both that it is hyped and that it follows the trajectory of the trend you identified) answer is serverless/scale-to-zero (Lambda, Cloud Run, etc.). That said, Lambda has been out for a while and seems to have avoided taking over the world. Generic vCPU-hours are so cheap now though that it isn't compelling from a a cost perspective (serverless will either cost you more at the high end of the scale…

This is a fantastic take (seriously, no sarcasm here). I'll add that serverless platforms have not actually shown the ability to scale _efficiently_. It feels like every software architect has been talking about the 2023 March post^ from Amazon Prime Video on migrating from serverless to serverful. That is a direct response to the inability of serverless to scale because under the hood it is serverful but limited. Besides AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Run others have tried OpenFaaS and Cloudflare Workers. I think only Cloudflare Workers have "scaled" but that's because it's limited scale for each service at the edge with lots of edge devices.

I do not know if this is solvable: a permanent service with light autoscaling handles even inconsistent load so well and reduces operational complexity so much that I don't know if serverless will be anything more than toys. It is no coincidence that AWS Lambda's first language was a frontend language* (Node.js). Those use cases have low to moderate scale (because after that you split frontend and backend).

^Amazon Prime Video post: https://www.primevideotech.com/video-streaming/scaling-up-th.... *First mention of AWS Lambda languages in AWS Compute Blog only mentioned nodejs: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/container-reuse-in-lamb...

Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?

#173

Post by ashrafulla »

cranberryturkey wrote: post #147
mamcx wrote: post #75

New databases. Is probably the most "under the radar" of all. Is interesting how little attention you get from people about this stuff (when talking about implementation or internals). Is like, literally, only make a splash AFTER at-minimun you have something competitive with a major stablished product. But you get more "views" talking about compilers than talking about DBs! (except when talking about compilers that…

surrealdb is amazing.

Do you have any insight into comparing SurrealDB (https://surrealdb.com/docs/introduction/start) to DuckDB (https://shell.duckdb.org/)? I haven't done that comparison yet, I might now based on your recommendation. I saw DuckDB at Data Day Texas 2023 and their demo was intriguing. That's even for our use case which was not very SQL-y.

Re: Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?

#174

Post by matus_congrady »

ashrafulla wrote: post #172
ElevenLathe wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trendy (meaning both that it is hyped and that it follows the trajectory of the trend you identified) answer is serverless/scale-to-zero (Lambda, Cloud Run, etc.). That said, Lambda has been out for a while and seems to have avoided taking over the world. Generic vCPU-hours are so cheap now though that it isn't compelling from a a cost perspective (serverless will either cost you more at the high end of the scale…

This is a fantastic take (seriously, no sarcasm here). I'll add that serverless platforms have not actually shown the ability to scale _efficiently_. It feels like every software architect has been talking about the 2023 March post^ from Amazon Prime Video on migrating from serverless to serverful. That is a direct response to the inability of serverless to scale because under the hood it is serverful but limited. Be…

I agree with some of the points you've mentioned, but I also think that there definitely are great use-cases for AWS Lambda, and that they are (especially when using a good deployment tool) a great option for many different types of applications.

The biggest problem is that the computing model, or the architecture that is commonly required for this sort of apps (event-driven and asynchronous) is hard to develop, manage and reason about (especially with the async-lambda integrations that by default retry their work if they fail). This means that you need to think about them and architect them in a way that makes them idempotent.

If you configure everything properly, event-driven, AWS Lambda-based apps can be extremely useful. I just don't believe that the complexity required to add them to your application is worth the complexity that needs to be added to your app to make it all work.

What I wanted to say is that Lambda functions have their use-cases, and that if used reasonably, they can heavily simplify the application that they are used within.

Our product (https://stacktape.com, disclosure: Im a founder), makes it easy to deploy both container-based (ECS Fargate and ECS EC2) apps, and lambda functions, with almost no changes in the configuration). This allows our users to always choose the right technology/computing model for the use-case they are working on.

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