Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

UsesThis: Rob Pike

rob.pike.usesthis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 192 posts

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#41

Post by p9idf »

cokernel_hacker wrote: post #31
codewright wrote: post #25

A surprisingly ideological interview. Combined with my run-ins with the go-nuts, I have to imagine there's some sort of general cultural coding cohort I've not fully understood yet. This intersection between an obsession with minimalism of a particular sort and dispossession is unknown to me. Seems common to the Go programmers I talk to.

My general take from observing their culture is dogmatic vs pragmatic. plan9 and go are dogmatic, they exist because the status quo is bad and something must be done . This is not to say their ideas are bad! Some of them are great but many of the great ones are brought into the mainstream thru unix (procfs, utf-8) and C (unnamed substructures) :) I just wished they focused on making the mainstream better instead of t…

>[Plan 9 exists] because the status quo is bad and something must be done.

That's a strange way to describe research and experimentation (though not strictly incorrect).

>I just wished they focused on making the mainstream better

Plan 9 predates all of today's mainstream operating systems.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#42

Post by meaty »

At the risk of causing a flamewar, it sounds like he wants Microsoft surface. It has all of those attributes when backed by SkyDrive apart from the fact you can't roll it up.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#43

Post by rojoca »

AngryParsley wrote: post #35
andrewflnr wrote: post #21

I can't get behind the idea of every computer I interact with being a dumb terminal. I don't want to assume I'll always have a connection to the mother machine. Even in some ideal world where I always have a high speed connection that never fails, can you guarantee that the server itself won't go down? Not really. I would like to see a nice balance: I basically work locally, and anything I do is synced ASAP to "the c…

I agree. In addition to the concerns you brought up, I see other issues with Pike's proposal. If computers are infrastructure, I'm forced to deal with whatever computers others have. This is a problem, because most people don't use computers as much as me and aren't willing to spend as much on them. I'd rather carry a maxed-out 11" Air everywhere than put up with my friends' and relatives' computers. (In fact, I do t…

Don't forget that this is Pike's ideal setup. Presumably in this "ideal" the security issues no longer exist and my "setup" is available at any interface I interact with - instantly.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#44

Post by Evbn »

pilif wrote: post #27
simonsarris wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Google has moved into that space! The general populace just didn't care too much.[1] Chromebooks do exactly what he's describing right off the bat. Every Chromebook you own dies in a fire? Unbox a new one, boot up, everything is identical. -------------------- [1] I think part of the reason for this is that just as nobody wants to think about things like death, NOBODY wants to think about data loss and prevention…

> Every Chromebook you own dies in a fire? Unbox a new one, boot up, everything is identical. unless of course some algorithm at Google decided that you are a bot and/or spammer. At that point, all your Chromebooks are useless and all your data is gone without any way for you to get it back. See the Amazon Kindle post from a cole of days ago. Don't get me wrong. In general I love the idea of having my data somewhere…

It is really a shame, bordering on suspicious, that Google Takeout doesn't include any approximately realtime sync APIs for maintaining an off-cloud copy of your life. Even at Microsoft's worst proprietary height, they could never delete your data.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#45

Post by Evbn »

zvrba wrote: post #29
n8agrin wrote: post #3

I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. I'm always shocked that this hasn't happened faster. I've expected Dropbox, Amazon, Google…

I haven't yet seen a product that emulates a disk over the network with acceptable latency over anything other than LAN. Until this happens, networked storage (except backup) is a no-go for me.

For video editing, sure. But for text editing, the web woks.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#46

Post by Evbn »

Uhhrrr wrote: post #12
batgaijin wrote: post #8

I always wonder, how do people like this justify their level of trust for cloud providers and the government? It's as if a majority of the hardcore hackers have gone "Fuck it, I'm being watched anyway, they might as well be backing up my stuff as well." Are we past the point of it being a topic of debate except by people like me who have the illusion of choice?

Well, he does work for a cloud provider. Also, he might just have a lot of faith in encryption (although he doesn't mention it).

Encryption? In the cloud? Only if you deploy your own app stack.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#47

Post by buster »

n8agrin wrote: post #3

I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. I'm always shocked that this hasn't happened faster. I've expected Dropbox, Amazon, Google…

I suppose Dropbox is just a poor replacement for the completely "on the network" world that Rob Pike imagines. It's merely more then a convenient backup solution with some nifty tooling around.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#48

Post by nnq »

The whole "everything in the cloud", "let someone else worry about storage" view, at least the way he promotes them, are more like VCS than let's say Git (or pick another DVCS)... you have a conceptual "central" point of failure, even if this "point" is a network of servers distributed around the world.

I want STORAGE ON EVERY DEVICE (not volatile!), and and automatic system to sync it with all my other devices, WITHOUT NEEDING THE CLOUD, just set up and ad-hoc mesh network and sync everyth (yeah, there's gonna be smth like "merges" for OS settings and music collection changes but I can do with that). The "cloud" should be just infrastructure, nothing else added, and I shouldn't be distrupted when my connection to it fails... "Always connected"? No, no, no, I'll always want to be able to work offline and be able to sync/merge/push/pull even my OS, its settings and software (and be able to "branch" my and keep multiple versions of software and all that).

DVCS should be the models for how to do everything in the cloud, with simpler interfaces for different level of user needs/competency.

Rob Pike's ideal of "homogeneity" in computing really misses the distinction between distributed and central syncing, the security and reliability implications etc. ...and large local storage capacity and "enough" computing power on all devices is needed for this. I'd rather be "part of the mesh" than "connected to the cloud mesh", because I think the distinctions are important and they require different things from "client devices" (all devices should be "clients"! no servers "in the cloud" for me please!)

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#49

Post by keithpeter »

epaga wrote: post #23

Slight critique here - I feel like he's using this to push an agenda rather than just telling us in detail what tools and software he uses to get his job done. He mentions a few things but in far less detail than anyone else I've read on usesthis. Instead he gives paragraph after paragraph of "world view" about moving things to the cloud...interesting, yes, but not what I'm after when I read usesthis posts... :-/

I imagine that Dr Pike spends most of the working day in the text editor that he wrote. He stated that he adds as little as possible to a stock Mac OS X install so that he can change the computer he uses easily.

The worldview bit was interesting because Dr Pike regards the way we access computing power as important and that the modes of access we have available may influence our lives. I think that he is right, but I prefer to have control of my stuff, so I tend towards synchronised local storage.

Re: UsesThis: Rob Pike

#50

Post by mbreese »

mturmon wrote: post #6

He plants a couple of nice flags: "This is 2012 and we're still stitching together little microcomputers with HTTPS and ssh and calling it revolutionary." and "In summary, it used to be that phones worked without you having to carry them around, but computers only worked if you did carry one around with you. The solution to this inconsistency was to break the way phones worked rather than fix the way computers work."

But, in defense of local storage, if you wanted to use someone else's phone, you had to remember the phone number of who you were calling. This may or may not have been a problem. My mom always carried around a address book with everyone's contact info. Sure, she could call anyone from any phone, but she still needed some local storage with her.
Post reply on HN