Hell, the current infrastructure is the States is still a problem. I don’t even want to think about the next version!
Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
141–150 of 230 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
#142There’s still no good way for me to write an open source web application and have its users bear the cost of running it. This is a major regression from open source desktop software, and IMO is the reason open source web applications haven’t taken off more.
You can.
If you write it in Go and package it as a single binary.
You can't if you write it in a scripting language that requires tons of programs to already exist on the system (a specific version of the language interpreter + a database server + other servers like redis and memcache etc etc etc).
This is a problem with programming languages, not with computer systems.
Computer systems already allow you to package and ship programs as self-contained units. That's their default mode of operation.
The prolifiration of scripting languages that require an entire environment to be configured before it can a program is something that programmers have done to themselves.
Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
#143There’s still no good way for me to write an open source web application and have its users bear the cost of running it. This is a major regression from open source desktop software, and IMO is the reason open source web applications haven’t taken off more.
This is unfortunate because a couple of attempts get _so close_. You've got public docker repositories, terraform, aws service catalog (or cloudformation), all of which could fill this gap directly or via their own services if they had a slightly more beginner-accessible workflow...
How do any of these things help?
"docker repositories, terraform, aws service catalog (or cloudformation)"
These are all part of the problem, and can never be the solution.
Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Honest question. I fully appreciate owning your own data and hosting it somewhere, but no idea why we need to host anywhere but hyper-connected data centers. I’d like to own my social graph, my profile, my permissions for who can contact me and read my data. But no reason for that to execute on my phone or home server. Have service providers do it, compete, scale and specialise. Let me host at home if I want to,…
Because it's my data. I should decide who can access it, when and on what terms. Relying on someone else to do it for me is an unnecessary middle man that exists for the only reason web developers haven't made a good technical solution that would be simple, secure and reliable enough for everyone to use. For goodness sake, we've had to come up with laws for how companies can use our data instead of solid technical so…
* Most home connections are asymmetric and lack upload bandwidth.
* Most personal devices are battery powered and intermittently operated.
* Many are mobile in terms of physical location and logical network (home WiFi, work/school WiFi, cellular).
Having a third, highly available, high upload capacity location to stage data between production and consumption wins because it is a genuinely effective solution to problems inherent in sharing data between end users.
Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
#145Low carbon footprint datacenters, but it requires better software performance. Law of Wirth explains that. Ability to do SDR for wireless networks with smarphones. 5G is not a good solution. Better security for routers, and generally better software security regulations, which are almost non existent right now. If cars have security regulations, software should, too.
> Low carbon footprint datacenters My gut tells me it's fairly low per person served, and it'll only improve over time as more renewable electric sources come online.
you should not listen to your gut all the time
Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
#146How can we get the layperson to run a "homeserver" to host all their data locally and have a strong pki infra. 30 years ago, people would've said the same things about routers, so I think it's possible with the right ui/incentives
What about Helm? https://thehelm.com/
I want to like Helm (mine is temporarily in storage), but there doesn't seem to be any way to run the rest of Nextcloud on it.
It's great that you don't have to start rolling your own cloud, but it would be a better offering for me if you could decide to tinker with it.
Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forget open source—there never was a simple way for users to self-host web ~servers~ applications that gained any traction whatsoever. Opera gave it a go more than a decade ago with Opera Unite, but that went nowhere. Like a sibling comment mentioned, Sandstorm was a push in the right direction, but it also eventually failed. Docker and current container solutions are still way too complicated for the average user. T…
This is a weird take on history and divorced from the reality we live in even now. The first ever web browser written by Tim Berners Lee at CERN on a NeXt computer was a web editor as well. He envisioned that every web user would be a web creator. He is quoted many times as saying this. Today: you can still stand up a web server at your house and forward the ports on your router. Unless you’re behind a carrier grade…
Seems like you agree that there isn’t a simple way to do it.
The browser-as-editor didn’t even survive into the next generation of web software — Mosaic already was read-only. And that’s because Berners-Lee’s vision lacked any unified solution to hosting the web creations.
Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
#148There’s still no good way for me to write an open source web application and have its users bear the cost of running it. This is a major regression from open source desktop software, and IMO is the reason open source web applications haven’t taken off more.
There is probably room for a consumer appliance (like a souped-up NAS) that puts a facia and marketplace around Docker, letting end-users run self hosted apps. I know QNAP (at least) tried something similar to this, but it seemed to be fairly constricted.
Or to take it further, the same thing running in the cloud, but costs could pretty easily blow out of proportion with end-users not being fully aware of the costs of their actions.
Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of my big realization of 2021 is that this is exactly what blockchains can provide. You can have permanent hosting of your website on Arweave[1] and interactions with the website could save your state on Ethereum or similar. You pay once to host the website, and then it's free to browse and users pay whenever they want to change the state (e.g. post something on your website). Ethereum is like this big world comp…
How large is ETH overhead? I expect it to be atrociously massive.
It's massive right now, yes. Especially because of proof of work. It will get better, but I don't think we can expect it to be as good as everybody hosting their own services in the cloud. That is a big disadvantage of Ethereum, but I still think it is pretty interesting that it essentially handles devops for you forever.
Re: Ask HN: What are the next internet infra problems?
#150I think solving the "last mile" problem in the US is our greatest problem, especially in rural areas. Too many state and local governments have been paid off by lobbyists to pass laws to block any competition from offering cheaper and better options. Too many people are stuck with slow, expensive, and unreliable cable and/or DSL ISPs. Some have no choice whatsoever. Some others get to choose only from two equally awf…
What I don't quite understand is how these rural areas got electricity. If it's so expensive to run something to a rural area, who ate the cost of providing grid access? Or is cable/fiber just significantly more expensive per mile compared to electricity?
No, fiber is actually significantly cheaper.