Turn And Face The Strange • Hacker News Board

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#41

Post by rdtsc » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 10:30 PM UTC

subarctic wrote: post #2

Saw this on my RSS feed and was surprised to see it hasn't been discussed yet on HN - fly.io used to be on the front page pretty regularly with some pretty big comment threads, but I had to go back over a year to find anything from them with more than a handful of comments. I guess they've become less relevant on here since they stopped allowing new users to host apps for free?

> fly.io used to be on the front page pretty regularly with some pretty big comment threads

But that doesn't mean they are not doing stuff. It's just HN doing HN things. At the moment we're into "AI is eating the world alive" and other topics are in the background.

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#42

Post by throw03172019 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 10:31 PM UTC

conradfr wrote: post #22

> because your laptop stops running when you close the lid. There's a world outside Apple.

Thanks to clamshell mode, mine doesn’t stop running

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#43

Post by danielvf » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 10:32 PM UTC

Sprites are a beautiful place to make an abstraction.

But I have never used a buggier infrastructure product in 30 years of development than when I tried sprites. Data loss left and right, sprites going into unconnectable zombie mode. Couldn't use even load snapshots because half the system seemed to think the sprite was fine, and half seemed to think it was dead. I gave up after two weeks of losing stuff over lunch or overnight or in the middle of working. I vividly remember scrolling through my terminal history, copy/pasting out work I could find to save from a dead sprite. I would guess that half or more of the sprites I launched had some kind of problem.

Hope they get things stable. The concept is great.

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#44

Post by ragall » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 10:34 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #23

wackget wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Opinions on LLMs aside, the CEO writing an article like that makes me think fly.io is a deeply unserious company.

The CEO didn't write that article. I did. I was going to run it on my personal blog, and he asked me to run it there. Be mad at him for the right reason.

[flagged]

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#45

Post by tptacek » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 10:34 PM UTC

ragall wrote: post #44

tptacek wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CEO didn't write that article. I did. I was going to run it on my personal blog, and he asked me to run it there. Be mad at him for the right reason.

[flagged]

I am, as I'm fond of pointing out, very comfortable with who does and doesn't take me seriously.

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#46

Post by wavemode » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 10:38 PM UTC

> We’re launching a new iteration of Sprites, and focusing the company on them and the problem they solve. And I’m tagging in Scott Johnston as CEO.

Hard for me to see this as anything other than fly.io committing suicide. AI sandboxes are a crowded product space, basically a complete commodity at this point, and the new CEO will likely focus on profit to the detriment of creative vision.

Happy to be proven wrong though.

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#47

Post by defrost » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 10:38 PM UTC

pizzafeelsright wrote: post #14

Well, fuck. ... we raised a fuckload of money and didn’t need more. And if we fail, we fail with our full asses. I have seen this language from other companies to which I say "no". Being professional means being able to do good work, being polite, without lying, cheating, or stealing. I do not want them to fail yet I would never use them despite liking their product. A few other companies behave the same way.

Have they done bad work, lied, cheated, or stolen something?

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#48

Post by ozarkerD » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 10:38 PM UTC

seemaze wrote: post #39

conradfr wrote: post #22

> because your laptop stops running when you close the lid. There's a world outside Apple.

Macs let you disable suspend just like (or possibly better) than any other operating system. The point being made is that it's the wrong tool for the job, precisely because of the user desired compromises made to create a great mobile computer.

Probably not great for the battery to be running all the time

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#49

Post by dijksterhuis » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 10:40 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #36

dijksterhuis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Honestly, the biggest problem with that article was the title. Pretty sure the content of a company's blog post being overtly arrogant, abrasive, dismissive and generally dickish was also a problem. > Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer pla…

[flagged]

do you remember writing this? https://fly.io/blog/carving-the-scheduler-out-of-our-orchest...

this was amazing post. i enjoyed reading it, it was relevant to some work stuff i was battling with. the linked articles at the end were amazing too. i had tonnes of respect for fly.io and yourself because of these posts. technically informative, clear, engaging. great stuff.

the llm post? complete polar opposite.

> I would like to take this moment to apologize to you, personally, for not giving a shit about "AGI". I wish I could tell you I've come to see the error of my ways, but I continue not to care about it.

thanks for the snark, and kinda proving my previous point about the tone of the article that was supposed to be a personal blog post and then ended up on a company blog https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052217

Re: Turn And Face The Strange

#50

Post by thenewguy077 » Sat, Jul 25, 2026, 10:42 PM UTC

Whenever I start to use fly.io they have outages all the time. And also I think they are a bit pricey too. I stopped using them, they have unreliable infra.