Programming culture in the late aughts (2022) • Hacker News Board

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#81

Post by rbanffy » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 1:25 PM UTC

willcipriano wrote: post #14

lmm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this weird little bit of classism totally broke my immersion in an article I was otherwise really enjoying. Middle class people overwhelmingly can’t afford housing, but let’s shame them for trying to find at least one kind of affordable luxury in life? A giant car is probably the most harmful-to-others luxury indulgence you could pick (and a significant factor in why people can't afford housing). I'm all for having…

> A giant car is probably the most harmful-to-others luxury indulgence you could pick International travel. People need to get to work, nobody needs to backpack through Europe to "find themselves" (besides perhaps Europeans).

More people, Americans mostly, really should backpack through Europe, not just to find themselves, but to also discover the wonders of universal healthcare and a welfare state.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#82

Post by rbanffy » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 1:27 PM UTC

fifticon wrote: post #40

DanielVZ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an owner of a normal sized car, oversized cars are unnecessarily aggressive towards other people. Both because of the drivers attitude and the design. Some examples: Lights always blind me, they block almost all vision, and have very poor vision themselves.

and chrush any pedestrians they hit.

At least here in Ireland, they’ll stop if you look like you want to cross the street, regardless of there being a crossing or not.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#83

Post by rbanffy » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 1:31 PM UTC

I was a little bothered by the misunderstanding about Moore’s law and the performance wall we hit: clock speeds stopped doubling every 18 months. At that point, the obvious way forward was more cores and more threads.

We still get clock increases (5 GHz was once the exclusive domain of exotic platforms), but memory latency also hit a wall, and that’s why processors add more memory channels along cores.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#84

Post by jghn » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 1:33 PM UTC

varjag wrote: post #33

tdeck wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a freshman CS student in 2010-2011 and we learned multi-threaded programming in our first year.

Sure but you would have learned it in 1995 too.

As a freshman CS student? Granted things were changing rapidly in the 90s, but this wasn't the case my freshman year a couple of years prior. I know that I was aware of the concept of threading by my sophomore or junior year, and by the time I graduated had encountered them first hand. I'm not sure we even covered multitasking (fork() and friends) at all in my freshman year, but of that I'm far less certain.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#85

Post by rbanffy » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 1:33 PM UTC

EamonnMR wrote: post #26

> Logs are structured and passed to a SaaS which will have a custom search syntax that takes tens of seconds to search them poorly, and they'll get lost in the noise of all those components. You'll spend a non-trivial amount of time devising systems for tracing requests through all these components. I feel this one. At a previous gig we had an entire project to try and pick a logging solution, and none on offer let y…

I have to say filebeat bothers me. We already had rsyslogd and it’s a very elegant idea.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#86

Post by jghn » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 1:37 PM UTC

Guthur wrote: post #43

I think IRC was a big part of community knowledge and also such a hot spot for weird inspiration. I can attribute my picking up of Common Lisp and ultimately getting a job in Australia from the UK to an off the cuff comment by someone in IRC.

There were things like IRC and Usenet. But the thing I remember most was books. Lots and lots of books. And doing things like building up a mental model of the indexes for their reference sections so I could look things up quickly. And doing something similar for `man`, being able to recite from memory that I wanted `man 3 foo` instead of `man 5 foo`.

Having direct access to good reference material was was critical, and often that meant hardcopy.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#87

Post by rco8786 » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 2:48 PM UTC

> Oddly, while parallelism didn't turn out to matter much, concurrency did

This is true, but I don't think for the reason the author may think. Basically, parallelism in a single process is hard as hell and nobody can do it reliably. On the other hand, concurrency is easy (mainly due to not sharing memory between threads). Basically we just achieved the parallelism we wanted by utilizing concurrency within individual processes, but the processes themselves are parallelized at the OS/hardware level.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#88

Post by rco8786 » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 2:55 PM UTC

thoughtFrame wrote: post #5

I've only learned of the Good Ol' Days of the 90s from second hand sources, and I was in middle school throughout the aughts, so for me these periods are just a mirage of a better time. In high school I pursued reverse engineering and other stuff, so I could blissfully ignore the newer direction the industry was taking all the way until 2019. But now I'm close to graduating university. Is there any kind of job where…

> just a mirage of a better time

Don't fall into the "good ol' days" trap. There were more than enough problems/challenges/frustrations to go around back then too.

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#89

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 2:57 PM UTC

golergka wrote: post #58

agentultra wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in user space. Electron became de jeur for web developers to build desktop apps. Single threaded memory hogs. Thankfully many DAWs, video editing, CAD, servers and other useful software saw the value in multi-core workloads. It’s a thing… just not for web folks most of the time.

Most serious electron based applications are not single threaded.

Is Teams serious?

https://twitter.com/ernerfeldt/status/1640972391265230848

Re: Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)

#90

Post by mdaverde » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 2:59 PM UTC

marginalia_nu wrote: post #54

divbzero wrote: post #22

12 years ago, even without AWS, you could get a Linode, host an app on its naked IP, and not made to feel too much like you weren't "serious" about hosting your app. These days you almost always need to know a fair bit of Docker and Docker Compose, a lot of people want to Kubernetes, ELBs got replaced by ALBs + NLBs which you gotta manage in VPCs which you gotta manage through Security Groups and your traffic gets ro…

Works better than ever. If anyone ever asks how my search engine, running on consumer hardware and hosted off domestic broadband, how it survives the hacker news front page time and time again without the load times even deteriorating a bit, while many other websites that are ostensibly static in nature tend to keel over? Then the answer is something like this. * nginx * Java * Macroservice architecture * Vertical sc…

Question: how do you reliably deploy? And if it's just scp-ing tarballs, how do you handle dependencies? Do you run & upgrade any third-party processes that rely on having their filesystem or deps?

Struggling with this because even in a small app in a Linode box, I don't mind just cp-ing my bins but there's always other things/versions they need. Thinking of bringing in Ansible to help me out here.

Deploying feels easier in the container, Kubernetes world