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It's Cold in the Information Age

natalian.org

61–70 of 126 posts

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#61
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"javascript frontends are the great for programmer fights, but thankfully most of the web doesnt use them" Wait what? Have you like, been on the web at all? How the hell are javascript frontends not used everywhere?!

they do have a lot of usage but barely everywhere. remember most of the web is wordpress.

I believe WordPress, at least the admin interface, is essentially an SPA.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#62

I don't know, #cryptowinter makes me feel warm inside, and for Uber I only wish it happened sooner :). What also warms my spirit is that it seems GDPR had a side-effect in that many other places are now considering implementing similar data protection regulation. So it's not all bad news. That said, I sort of agree with the sentiment. Where's the technological innovation on the web these days? Where are the tools and…

> don't know, #cryptowinter makes me feel warm inside, and for Uber I only wish it happened sooner :)

What did you mean by this?

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#63

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.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#64
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, why are we doing this? In truth because the world of C (I was a C and then C++ programmer 30 years ago) did not enable the production of effective applications cheaply and quickly. Yes - you can write anything, but it took months and months and months. We've traded efficiency for productivity. We have been able to do this because of Moore's law and all its friends. Also, C code is hellish to read and understand (…

> Yes - you can write anything, but it took months and months and months. The C & C++ of 30 years ago, where compile times took days - sure. Nowadays building a whole yocto software stack, basically a full linux distro - from GCC, to the kernel, to glibc, to X11, to Qt takes 6 to 8 hours in a good laptop. In addition, modern language features & the general shift from runtime to compile-time polymorphism, especially i…

This. The one problem is a lack of a solid networking library. Unix sockets/winsock is ancient and terrible with tons of corner cases, Boost ASIO is creaky and "boosted", other useful things like 0mq are good for IPC but not Internet. Qt eats the world and is a pain to integrate. Libevent, libev etc. are not C++ and still pain to integrate. Maybe there is some library that is lesser known but good.

As for time to develop, besides networking, C++ wins, even for hack projects, in comparison with Python even, JS/HTML/CSS w/ framework stack being far slower and making for terrible UX. (I'm not writing about languages I do not use.) Java and C# can be fast too, but it hits the limits when you actually have to calculate things which gets real awkward real fast. The main win is... Tooling. Java tooling is best now since maven and ant are mostly gone legacy, then C++ (I'm counting Qt Creator and Glade, cmake is eh, cmake+something is ok), then finally JS tied with Python. JS fails terribly on debugging and the creaky rarely adaptable UX libs, while Python after all these years still has tooling issues. (Plus performance where it matters.)

Rust is not there yet, maybe soon. Scala is nice though fewer people can use it than new C++.

Honorable mention to specialized tools like R, Faust, Lua, Matlab and Fortran. Note they integrate well with C and C++... Try anything else and you're in for a ride. Even second most supported, C# and Java, go through a C FFI layer.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#65
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, why are we doing this? In truth because the world of C (I was a C and then C++ programmer 30 years ago) did not enable the production of effective applications cheaply and quickly. Yes - you can write anything, but it took months and months and months. We've traded efficiency for productivity. We have been able to do this because of Moore's law and all its friends. Also, C code is hellish to read and understand (…

> Yes - you can write anything, but it took months and months and months. The C & C++ of 30 years ago, where compile times took days - sure. Nowadays building a whole yocto software stack, basically a full linux distro - from GCC, to the kernel, to glibc, to X11, to Qt takes 6 to 8 hours in a good laptop. In addition, modern language features & the general shift from runtime to compile-time polymorphism, especially i…

Pretty sure the comment you're replying to is talking about development time, not compile time. They're claiming it took months longer to develop a similar app in C, not that it took longer to compile. Even if compile times are negligible now for the reasons you state, they still have a point about it taking longer to develop an equivalent app.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#66
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…

The point of the article is that hype of most of these technologies doesn't nearly compare to the hype of 7 years ago. We've had smart phones, AWS, deep learning, promises of AR, crypto, etc. for at least that long, and nearly all of those feel like they're in stagnation compared to how exciting they were then. It's not that they're not getting better, but they're in the transition period where they move from new fro…

Off-topic, but I came here to say that my long-standing fear just came true about the word "crypto"; namely, that I totally misread it in TFA as meaning "cryptography" - which is of course what the term always used to refer to - and honestly forgot that it might refer to "crypto-currency" until reading your comment.

I knew someday that would happen! I made up some story to myself that comments in TFA about "#cryptowinter" and "FUD in the community" might refer to communities losing confidence in cryptography techniques after too many companies getting hacked. Out of touch, I know, to not be aware of that hash-tag. O_o

I really hate that we have another meaning of "crypto" now so that misunderstandings like this can happen often. As programmers, we know how important naming is and how costly it is to create confusing collisions. Cryptography is too important of a concept in tech for us to not have a clean word for it. smh

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#67
post #51

I love myself some pessimism but tech is not slowing, instead its HN being obsessed with things that don't matter. - VR was a niche from the start, a lot of people were doubtful, and the people that weren't know that it 's not going to work and are already moving on. - javascript frontends are great for programmer fights, but thankfully most of the public-facing web doesnt use them, they 're irrelevant to tech's prog…

"javascript frontends are the great for programmer fights, but thankfully most of the web doesnt use them" Wait what? Have you like, been on the web at all? How the hell are javascript frontends not used everywhere?!

Half the workforce in webdev has an average work experience of 5 years or less which leads to self-sustaining generational churn in this area, and a whole industry of bootcamps and fizzbuzz-style questions handed out to employers and webdevs alike. Being hellbent to deliver webapps regardless of fit is no progress, and will hit a wall as customers and regulators demand power efficiency.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#68
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…

None of that directly describes business (or consumer) value. It is mostly a recitation of information technology statistics. If you look at the period of say 1990-2010 there was an absolutely insane ROI on human capital invested into IT. Arguably this level of ROI only happens once or twice in a century. You had young guys in their basements, garages etc. inventing life-changing technology with no investment other t…

The biggest question for me is what we are gonna do as professionals in the coming "long winter."

We have not a single project for a "tech" brand in the pipeline, we are only now learning how do tech projects for complete industry outsiders.

Not so few have some tech expertise, but they are all strangers to ways of the industry. They all have own ideas where tech goes in their business model, and I can't say that all of them are "amateurish" or not thought through, I'd say some outsiders were better at running tech projects than some de-jure "insiders"

I bet that it will be all about ability to get more tech business outside of tech industry for us.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#69
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"javascript frontends are the great for programmer fights, but thankfully most of the web doesnt use them" Wait what? Have you like, been on the web at all? How the hell are javascript frontends not used everywhere?!

they do have a lot of usage but barely everywhere. remember most of the web is wordpress.

Yes, that is true, but most WordPress sites are hosted on a cloud provider.

Re: It's Cold in the Information Age

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Your comment mirrors the article. A bunch of projection, written out. Lots of people do microservices for the wrong reason, with the wrong model. They don't realize this model asks for a lot of initial overhead per process for visibility and early investment into figuring out how these services communicate. For instance, a service that sets off 3-4 layers of HTTP requests is an indicator of a bad microservice archite…

Can you give some directions(links) on good microservice architectures and the right reasons to deploy those?
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