It's Cold in the Information Age • Hacker News Board

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#121

Post by theamk » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 1:38 AM UTC

scottlocklin wrote: post #100

oxfordmale wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"AWS isn't critical either, its bubbled because of easy startup money and lazyness. will be a good thing to see it fade away" Wait what ? Have you, been on the web at all ? Ten thousands of websites are hosted, or partially hosted on AWS

>Ten thousands of websites are hosted, or partially hosted on AWS Who cares? There is no reason for it to exist, and it's continued existence is arguably what OP said; that and the abject laziness of CFO types.

Sure there is -- I use it for my personal projects (so no CFO's), for example for email sending and object storage.

Sure, your own server is fine when you have unlimited time; but once you want to save time (CFO: to pay less salary; personal: to have more time in life for other things), AWS makes a great deal of sense.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#122

Post by omarchowdhury » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 1:40 AM UTC

buboard wrote: post #89

jhanschoo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's hard to take this comment seriously... > javascript frontends are the great for programmer fights, but thankfully most of the web doesnt use them By frequency of retrieval, JS frameworks are the majority of websites served. > kubernetes is relevant to like 100 people on earth Even if it's not k8s, most companies benefit from a container orchestration system. > crypto is entering the plateau of productivity crypt…

> the same services and assurances that banks Cryptocurrency is meant to replace currencies and central banks, not banks (retail). Banks are institutions built on top of currencies (there are a lot of companies doing that with cryptos btw).

It's not meant to replace. It's meant to provide an alternative to.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#123

Post by theamk » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 1:50 AM UTC

trabant00 wrote: post #21

pbourke wrote: post #9

I really don’t get articles like this. You can rent a fleet of computers for an hour for a few dollars. Your cellular phone is more powerful than the time-sharing systems of 25 years ago. There is pervasive wireless broadband internet available in much of the world. Single computers can be bought with dozens of cores and a lake of RAM. You can look up nearly any piece of human knowledge in a few seconds. The labor of…

> You can rent a fleet of computers for an hour for a few dollars. On which you deploy an web app that has 30 working components written in 10 different languages that is able to do a fraction of the work a single vertically scaled server that runs 3 C written components. And has less than two 9 uptime. No one person can grasp it mentally. Is statically linked and must be updated piece by piece, unable to use the dis…

Don't work in such place then? Seriously, there are always good and bad places.

In fact, when you said "two nines" -- this is like 15 minutes of downtime per day -- I immediately thought about one of my jobs (long time ago) which involved website running on Windows Server, using a mix of ASP and DLL files. It would routinely go down for tens of minutes each deployment because someone would update the DLLs in the wrong order.

There was also using PHP with Apache. As a sysadmin, remember all those times when you had to hunt all the Apache-spawned processes and kill them by hand, so you can finally apply new configuration? Or when an .so file update made an app server not start, but that darned start-stop-daemon was silently eating both exit code and error message?

It got much better in the sysadmin world -- it is now easy to do the sane things, and all that containerization means that if programmers do provide something insane, it is trivial to clean up the mess.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#124

Post by peteforde » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 5:07 AM UTC

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #63

peteforde wrote: post #27

To quote David Mitchell (the comedian, not the author) it would be tempting to take this kind of thing seriously if it wasn't for a damnable sense of perspective. Some thoughts: 1. Much like how the entire centrist media machine feeds off the insanity of the current US administration, somehow this article is at the top of HN. We put it there. (Well, 42 of you did, as of the time I wrote this.) 2. Perhaps the best-kep…

Remove China from the numbers and Pinker and Goslings points pretty much disappear. Both aren’t a secret, they are well known and criticized a lot for their use and abuse of numbers.

Except, wait... tell us why we'd remove China (or any other part of the world that seems less important to you) again?

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#125

Post by Ayesh » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 6:48 AM UTC

About the leave of Uber. Grab is a terrible app compared to Grab compared to the UI, UX, and overall drivers attitude (personal opinion of course).

However for Indonesia, services like GoJek and Traveloka are picking up. I'm currently in Indonesia and GoJek has grown into a service that you can bail a ride to full market place with payments, vouchers, and rewards integrated into several consumer services such as package delivery, movie ticketing, Massages, make-up services, etc. They continue to offer even more and better services and gained a lot of attention die to Uber's leave.

In Georgia, for example, a relatively unheard of country, has a huge startup boom with many ride sharing apps, mobile money solutions, and the city Batumi is full of online casino kiosks.

It's probably a cold age in information age elsewhere, but certainly not din developing countries.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#126

Post by antidesitter » Tue, Jun 11, 2019, 7:50 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #71

antidesitter wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> don't know, #cryptowinter makes me feel warm inside, and for Uber I only wish it happened sooner :) What did you mean by this?

I mean that I consider cryptocurrency scene to be net social negative (a nasty breed of fraud, gambling and MLM) and cryptocurrencies themselves a technology that's an environmental disaster and which should have never left the research stage. As for Uber, their only innovation so far was showing the sheer scale at which you can make an inherently unsustainable business built on anticompetitive subsidizing and illega…

> I mean that I consider cryptocurrency scene to be net social negative

This sounds like nonsense. Cryptocurrencies allow people to perform secure financial transactions without relying on central banking systems, and to use the blockchain for things like decentralized time-stamping, automated escrow, prediction markets, online voting, and other services. There’s a huge amount of social value to these innovations.

> an environmental disaster

What specifically are you referring to?

> should have never left the research stage

I’m glad it did. In addition to their utility as decentralized mediums of exchange, they have inspired a lot of research in the fields of game theory and cryptography, including work on voting protocols, mechanism design, and secure multiparty computation. I think the world is much better off with this newfound knowledge, though you seem to think otherwise.

> As for Uber, their only innovation so far

Their innovation was revolutionizing ridesharing and ride-hailing. In 2015, and in the United States alone, they created $6.8 billion of consumer surplus [1], a surplus which has only increased since then. Over 95 million people use it on a monthly basis [2], with 14 million trips completed each day [3]. It is popular with the public, especially the young [4]. There is huge demand for services like Uber and Lyft to become more widely available. See for example [5].

You clearly have an axe to grind and it’s clouding your ability to evaluate things objectively.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w22627

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/833743/us-users-ride-sha...

[3] https://www.uber.com/en-CA/newsroom/company-info/

[4] https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/canadian-millennial...

[5] https://globalnews.ca/news/4895650/bc-ridesharing-poll/