Serverless Horrors • Hacker News Board

Re: Serverless Horrors

#501

Post by JJMcJ » Thu, Sep 11, 2025, 2:45 PM UTC

qcnguy wrote: post #91

JJMcJ wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I like VPS setups. You hit the monthly maximum, and it just stops working. I host demos, not running a business, so it's less of an issue to get interrupted. Better an interruption than a $50,000 bill for forgetting to shut off a test database from last Wednesday.

That's not comparable. With a VPS there is no monthly maximum, just a max load on a second by second basis. You can be hit with traffic of which 90% bounces because your server is down, get nowhere near your intended monthly maximum, and then the rest of the month is quiet.

I got VPS and other types of shared hosting mixed up, though I have seen VPS offerings with monthly or daily maximums.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#502

Post by einsteinx2 » Thu, Sep 11, 2025, 4:28 PM UTC

maxbond wrote: post #280

the__alchemist wrote: post #15

"Serverless" is a an Orwellian name for a server-based system!

Bit of a nit pick but this is a pet peeve of mine. Creating a new word for a more specific category is never Orwellian. The project in 1984 was to create a language which was less expressive. They were destroying words describing fine distinctions and replacing them with words that elided those distinctions. Creating a new word to highlight a distinction is the opposite. There's definitely criticisms to be made of th…

They’re clearly referring to “doublethink” which was absolutely part of Newspeak in 1984…

Quote from the book:

“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.”

Serverless being in fact server-based seems like a pretty clear example of this, and so calling it an Orwellian term seems perfectly reasonable.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#503

Post by maxbond » Fri, Sep 12, 2025, 7:16 AM UTC

einsteinx2 wrote: post #502

maxbond wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit of a nit pick but this is a pet peeve of mine. Creating a new word for a more specific category is never Orwellian. The project in 1984 was to create a language which was less expressive. They were destroying words describing fine distinctions and replacing them with words that elided those distinctions. Creating a new word to highlight a distinction is the opposite. There's definitely criticisms to be made of th…

They’re clearly referring to “doublethink” which was absolutely part of Newspeak in 1984… Quote from the book: “The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.” Serverless being…

It's not doublethink any time there's a misnomer. It doesn't require an active effort of cognitive dissonance. It's not a manipulation or a conspiracy. You don't have to get the severance operation to use an FaaS offering.

Serverless eliminates the management of servers; the name is meaningful and directionally aligned with what the thing does, even if it can cause confusion when you first encounter the topic.

That doesn't mean it isn't a bad name. But it is not comparable to the Ministry of Plenty deliberately causing famine. "Famine" and "plenty" are directionally opposed and so require dissonance to maintain. "Serverless" and "abstracting resources provided by servers so that you can focus on application logic rather than managing physical or virtual machines" are not opposed and only require learning the terminology. There's no active, ongoing effort to deliberately maintain cognitive dissonance.

Unless you find yourself in a situation where you have that queasy feeling of being gaslit or having to actively push thoughts out of your head to continue operating under premises you know are false, no, it is not doublethink.