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GCP Incidents

blog.railway.app

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Re: GCP Incidents

#51

Post by BrutalCoding »

ForHackernews wrote: post #46
Hammershaft wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has moved from native app dev to web dev I just feel my productivity and satisfaction has plummeted. The stack (html, js, css, browser functionality) that makes up the web is just not fit for the purpose of rich client applications. The development of the thick leaky abstractions that make up web frameworks have consumed millenia of human man hours, and yet the experience of developing & using the resu…

I hear this over and over, but what is the alternative cross-platform stack for building rich local GUI apps? Qt?

I’d say Flutter, a GUI framework backed by Google and it’s open source.

I’ve recently ported over a popular project called “llama.cpp” to Dart (language behind Flutter) and I’ve recently made YT video’s showing it running natively on macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, iPadOS and next up is Windows.

The official Ubuntu installer is made with Flutter too nowadays. But to be fair, last time I tried QT was somewhere in 2018, it might be a good option too.

Re: GCP Incidents

#52

Post by davidgerard »

HOW TO CHOOSE A CLOUD PROVIDER

* AWS: you will pay to have stuff work properly and you like having customer service

* Azure: you hate yourself, you're running Windows or both

* Google: you're cheap enough that basic functionality is an optional extra

* Oracle: lol

* Hetzner: cheap, good service, the finest pets in the world, no cattle

Re: GCP Incidents

#53

Post by chii »

Animats wrote: post #6

As someone who's into virtual worlds, and a user of Second Life, it's impressive to see how well those systems stay up. There hasn't been a total outage of Second Life in 5-10 years. Once Amazon's networking went down in a way that prevented new logins for a whole day, but existing logins remained. The 3D world, which has a lot of stuff going on even with no users around, continued to work. This is an extremely compl…

> What fails? The associated webcrap.

my suspicion is that the threshold level of a developer capable of doing the type of development that is required of second life (a graphics client, a networked server etc) using their tech stack (presumably something C++) is higher than web.

The inherent crappiness of the web is not due to the tech. It's due to the low barrier of entry.

Re: GCP Incidents

#54

Post by fallingknife »

havkom wrote: post #36
phartenfeller wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The quality of web software is underwhelming I hate where "web scale" has brought us. Because some 0.01% of giants have tremendous scalability problems, every small project needs an overly complicated architecture that consists of layers of services. In the end, nobody understands the monster, and the complexity brings more issues than it solves. But still, this is somehow a standard today. I have a lot of love for…

Yep. If you keep off the “latest trends frameworks” and just keep it as vanilla and simple as possible web development can be productive, scalable and pleasant.

HN does that, and yet has outages and is so non performant that it can't handle when a post gets a couple thousand comments.

Re: GCP Incidents

#55

Post by davedx »

chii wrote: post #53
Animats wrote: post #6

As someone who's into virtual worlds, and a user of Second Life, it's impressive to see how well those systems stay up. There hasn't been a total outage of Second Life in 5-10 years. Once Amazon's networking went down in a way that prevented new logins for a whole day, but existing logins remained. The 3D world, which has a lot of stuff going on even with no users around, continued to work. This is an extremely compl…

> What fails? The associated webcrap. my suspicion is that the threshold level of a developer capable of doing the type of development that is required of second life (a graphics client, a networked server etc) using their tech stack (presumably something C++) is higher than web. The inherent crappiness of the web is not due to the tech. It's due to the low barrier of entry.

Hi, gamedev who moved to webdev here.

Think this example is probably more from budget than dev skills. It’s perfectly possible to build reliable billing webapps, and there are 100k experienced devs who could do it.

Second Life obviously prioritised their core biz and product, which is the right thing to do.

Re: GCP Incidents

#57

Post by biorach »

hermitcrab wrote: post #17

We are a small software company (2 people) and we've also had plenty of issues with Google over the years. Mostly related to Google Adwords. For example: https://successfulsoftware.net/2015/03/04/google-bans-hyperl... https://successfulsoftware.net/2016/12/05/google-cpa-bidding... https://successfulsoftware.net/2020/08/21/google-ads-can-cha... https://successfulsoftware.net/2021/05/04/wtf-google-ads/ If Google have n…

> Google have no interest in providing support

Re: GCP Incidents

#58

Post by chrismorgan »

BrutalCoding wrote: post #51
ForHackernews wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this over and over, but what is the alternative cross-platform stack for building rich local GUI apps? Qt?

I’d say Flutter, a GUI framework backed by Google and it’s open source. I’ve recently ported over a popular project called “llama.cpp” to Dart (language behind Flutter) and I’ve recently made YT video’s showing it running natively on macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, iPadOS and next up is Windows. The official Ubuntu installer is made with Flutter too nowadays. But to be fair, last time I tried QT was somewhere in 2018, it…

But please don’t make web apps with Flutter. It has determinedly taken the pure-canvas route which makes it very unpleasant to use for a significant fraction of users, and all kinds of things just don’t work the right way and can’t. (I’ve written about the problems here on HN quite a few times, search and you’ll find them.)

Re: GCP Incidents

#59

Post by wkat4242 »

gtirloni wrote: post #37
wkat4242 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Holland too. Even if someone sues you maliciously, you still have to pay the state a fee to be heard. Otherwise the judgement will fall to the enemy party by default. You can recuperate this cost from them when you win but you're still out of pocket for your time and the money until you manage to cash it from them which can be hard. And they can keep doing it. The system is very unfairly biased in favour of people…

This is pretty absurd to me. I'm not a lawyer so don't quote me on this, but here in Brazil, it seems the losing side has to pay the winning side's lawyers and other expenses. It's not clear cut how much will be paid and there are different rates but the message seems to be clear: don't sue willy-nilly because there will be consequences, so make sure you have a case.

You can get it back from them, the judge would normally assign all costs to the losing party. However actually getting it can be difficult as the court doesn't bother to help with that.

Re: GCP Incidents

#60

Post by imiric »

hnlmorg wrote: post #32
curtisblaine wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, you probably should expect to be less proficient and satisfied embracing a stack that you weren't using before.

I’m not the GP but have been building websites off and on since the 1994. Back in the 90s it was hacky, but the extent of those hacks were small enough that even hobbyists could memorise those edge cases. Whereas these days there are so many footguns and edge cases that even seasoned professionals find it impossible to memorise everything. The amount of trial and error it takes to build a modern site is immense. With…

> Back in the 90s it was hacky, but the extent of those hacks were small enough that even hobbyists could memorise those edge cases.

You're either misremembering, or have some thick rose-tinted glasses on.

The late 90s were times of the Wild West Web. Every browser had custom behaviour and rendered pages differently. JavaScript and CSS were still new, and it took years for the implementations to be standardized. Websites had "Best viewed in Netscape" or "Built for IE" badges. Java applets, ActiveX, Flash, and a bunch of other technologies surfaced to make early versions of web "apps" actually possible. Even as late as 2005, projects like jQuery were needed to make web development easier.

I'd say that it wasn't until the late aughts, well after "web 2.0", that web development didn't feel hacky. By then, though, the JS ecosystem exploded, and frontend frameworks took off.

So I get the sentiment that modern web development is difficult, bloated and buggy, but the good news is that the web is fully mature now, and there are plenty of projects that make it possible to build simple and robust web sites. Web developers are spoiled with choice, so a hard task is simply selecting the right technologies to use. Unfortunately, sometimes this is out of our hands, or we inherit decade-old codebases that make maintenance a nightmare. But it's never been easier to write plain HTML/CSS/JS that will work across browsers, and deploy it as a static site that works reliably at massive scale. If you need more features, then complexity can creep in, but it is possible to minimize failure points with good engineering.

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