Smartphones are the worst invention of mankind.
Mine is smartphones killed the “old internet”.
Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
51–60 of 100 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#52You should start with a single monolithic application on a single server that you scale vertically as much as possible before even thinking of scaling horizontally. Most apps won’t ever need architecture more complex than this.
I like this - have started to think more this way, but I'd almost always deploy three boxes instead of one. I like the flexibility of having something that can auto-failover should an az or instance die or disk die. That being said, I've seen VMs with multiple years of uptime on various clouds, so ymmv.
Yeah redundancy and HA are good practices. My point in spirit is more that we usually don’t need 90% of the complexity.
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#53PHP + MySQL is all you really need
(Modern web stacks are 99% bloat and impediment to human progress.)
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#54Declarative programming is terrible.
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#55You should start with a single monolithic application on a single server that you scale vertically as much as possible before even thinking of scaling horizontally. Most apps won’t ever need architecture more complex than this.
One thing to remember is that SOA solves two problems: one of organizational scalability, and another of product scalability (with the usual caveat of "if done well"). Monoliths and traditional databases can take a beating before you need something else. It's trickier for rapid growth organizations where you are trying to take on many new members, but there are other solutions there too. I'd also note that traditiona…
> organizational scalability
I’m also of the opinion that most engineering/product orgs are extremely bloated and could move much faster with higher quality if they were cut 50-90%.
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#56PHP + MySQL is all you really need (Modern web stacks are 99% bloat and impediment to human progress.)
I agree with the spirit of this. Though I’d go with Rails/Sqlite :)
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#57HTML, and retained-mode GUIs and DOMs generally, is all you need. Anything more complex is over-engineering. JavaScript was, broadly speaking, a mistake. 90% of what we need computers to do is do some I/O and put text, colored rectangles, and JPEGs/WEBMs on a screen, and that shouldn't be that complicated. A lot of good things about way we wrote websites and native applications back in the early 2000's were babies th…
This site (and its popularity) are great examples of this. I very much agree.
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#58Smartphones are the worst invention of mankind.
Agreed. Smartphone: Left jab, Social Media: Right upper cut. Deadly combo.
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#59The actual forms of computing devices have gotten worse and more boring over time. Everything is just a flat slab these days. There seems to be little interest in experimenting with the sculptural design of phones or laptops. A few decades ago, this wasn’t the case. This is especially relevant with touch screens, which I wish weren’t so omnipresent. I really don’t want to use a touch screen in a car, for example…
In the mainstream market, absolutely, but the hardware keyboard niche has been absolutely thriving as of late. I just bought a chocopad keyboard to make a gift for a friend.
Re: Ask HN: What's a strong tech opinion you have that few agree with you on?
#60The future of gaming is streaming, and home PC gaming hardware will eventually go the way of DVD players. GeForce Now is succeeding where OnLive and Stadia failed (20+ million users now, apparently). Offloading rendering to the cloud means much improved thermals, graphics, and battery life -- especially for laptop users and Mac owners. Apple Silicon is cool, but it's not going to beat a 4080 for pure graphics perform…
You are assuming ubiquitous fast and low latency internet connection,which does not exist
There doesn't need to be fast and low latency on every last square inch of the Earth for it to be a successful product, it just needs to be ubiquitous enough to be worth it most of the time to enough people. The gamers I know aren't also avid travellers, so if there's gigabit at the primary and secondary and tertiary residence, that covers enough to be worth it to most.