The author starts with 8 paragraphs on gold, and the word gold is mentioned 33 times throughout the article, spread about evenly throughout. By no means did the author "move on" from talking about gold, let alone "quickly".
Really? HN has been a mini-Reddit for quite some time now. Frequently just a bunch of low quality, unfunny and recycled one-liners hoping to grab a few precious internet points.
I don’t agree with that at all. While I do think HN discussion has become generally more negative I still almost always find interesting or useful stuff in comments. I think they’re a valuable way to check the pulse of the tech community.
It excels in only one area: scaling. You can "scale down to zero" (to the point where if there is no usage, you theoretically are not paying for stand-by hardware). You also do not have to -- theoretically -- worry about scaling rules and about provisioning more hardware when your service needs more workers to handle demand.
However, everywhere else it is a shit-show. Not being able to do anything resembling local testing & debugging requires you either: keep the architecture very simple (why use serverless in that case?), try and spin up one of the numerous half-baked virtualization solutions, or spend more time writing, testing, and maintaining scaffolding/mocking/whatever to interface between all your "add-ons" (e.g. SQS, S3, etc.). Your only way to track message flow is with extensive and expressive logging.
Deployment is a pain. What should be a sub 30second operation is routinely 5mins for even the smallest packages (AWS deployment tools are stupid inefficient) -- annoyingly breaking any sort of flow every time you have to deploy to test things you cannot test locally. Now imagine that being your working loop every day -- utter madness if you want to keep any sort of velocity or morale.
The ecosystem is not mature. I still have packaging utilities (built and maintained by a mag7) that fail silently causing production outages. The other tooling is also half-baked and a pain in the ass to use (much less learn the edge cases around). Serverless (the framework) is a shitty replacement for Terraform. The lack of a language server to understand whether or not my YAML IaC will actually do what I want it to do without dry-running is tedious.
Containers are wasteful, half-baked, and unperformant.
My workloads have always been either CPU or I/O heavy. No I do not need 2GB of RAM and a single (unknown spec) vCPU. I need at most a 100MB of RAM for my JVM/CLR and a fast-enough CPU. But the only way to provision a faster/less gimped CPU is to "bump the tier" of the lambda by provisioning more memory. Ergo you pay for memory you do not use nor need, simply so your lambda doesn't time out in its maximum 15min container lifespan, on heavy workloads.
The file handle limits are also something asinine, like 128 open handles per lambda with no way to modify. So I cannot open more than ~128 network sockets when I need to fan out compute to get past kneecapped container resources.
Cold-starts: it's been beaten to death. But if you're running a language with a bytecode interpreter your options are to either provision concurrency (i.e. force a container to always be warm/spun-up, and incurring all those costs, which would have been unarguably cheaper with a server, even an EC2) or modify your source and ahead-of-time compile everything you can. Otherwise, you will not get sub 300ms cold invocations (a sever in the most optimal location would get you sub 10ms latencies).
If you have long-running workloads or are trying to squeeze the most performance out of your backend: serverless is not going to cut it. This is ignoring all the inter-infrastructure communication that add even more latency.
N.B. this is for moderately complex web apps built on AWS, it may not be wholly representative of the landscape.
And apologies for the harsh language, but the entire "serverless" hype has given me plenty of scar tissue -- especially in a "move fast, now!" startup landscape.
Thanks for the reply. It was a good read. And I can agree on the points from experience.
One suggestion/correction: "Your only way to track message flow is with extensive and expressive logging.", you can do distributed tracing. It not a silver bullet, nor does it replace a proper debugger, but it's better than following logs. You can use a number of distributed tracing SaaS's, but you still have to do at least some manual instrumentation in your code to add additional info.
> But the author can't be serious about no one knowing who Prabhakar Raghavan is. He is, for instance, the co-author of the definitive text on randomized algorithms [Motwani and Raghavan]. He has also been a well-respected database researcher for many years.
Surely YOU can't be serious. The author was very clearly comparing this guy to much more famous and heavily derided figures like Musk, Zuckerberg, etc. I don't think co-authoring a text on randomized algorithms gets you the same notoriety as being the head of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter...
Heh, well, I'm speaking as somebody who was fairly obsessed with making Rube Goldberg domino chains as a kid, spending hours at a time covering a large oak trestle table with precarious stacks of wooden blocks, rulers, tape cases, strings, marbles and so on -- and then knocking them all down. (This was long before YouTube, so I don't have any documentation of any of this.)
I would really have appreciated an "Undo" button for rewinding entropy and running those things over again, especially when they went disappointingly wrong halfway through...!
915 square feet is still enough for some solar cells, a bio digester, an aquaponics setup with vegetable garden, a cabinet full of quail, a cot, a rocket stove, and a small shed.
And no philosophy worth anything would put any of the things you listed on the path to happiness. In fact, generally speaking, they are the opposite.
An infinite supply of anything to satisfy all of your desires does not lead to a fulfilling life -- just one with enough distractions to get you through the next day.
Are you seriously telling me that a sport that allows elbow and knee strikes to the head has become more dangerous because they reduced the weight of the gloves? Have you thought about this for a second?
And the mention of your "untrained" friend being unable to enjoy a traditional Muay Thai fight the way _you_ can just reeks of some kind of odd elitism. My guess is you saw a topic about fighting on HN and couldn't wait to tell us all that you trained.
> And the mention of your "untrained" friend being unable to enjoy a traditional Muay Thai fight the way _you_ can just reeks of some kind of odd elitism.
It's a pretty common thing. Sometimes highly technical music doesn't have that appealing an aesthetic to the average person, but to other musicians it's very impressive because of how hard it is to play, or how unusual it is on a theoretical level. There's lots of stuff in life that's like that. Isn't the appeal of most spectator sports partly buoyed by memories people have of playing those sports as kids or young adults?
I don't think it's hard to believe at all, nor elitist. Everyone has things they'll notice more details about because they have experience with them.
Punches didn’t score as high in older Muay Thai, whereas they score equally under One rules. So you didn’t see as much straight hand striking in golden age fights. They certainly used them, but they didn’t count towards your points as much.
With 4oz gloves you don’t have as much to work with in your guard, so punches can slip through a lot easier. On the other hand they protect the hand less, so some fighters are more apprehensive throwing with them on. The small gloves definitely feel like they leave a lot more repeated damage to the face, whereas a clean headkick is probably going to result in a KO. Obviously neither are great if we’re talking about concussions!
I can only speak from my own experience, but I never enjoyed watching fights until I started training. Once I started training and began understanding the rule set, I started seeing what was going on. I don’t think that’s controversial, when you have experience in something your eyes are a little more open. Watching and training is for everyone though! Nothing elite about it all, just a lot of showing up and putting in the work. It’s definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done physically.
I assume they meant “propagation speed that is substantially slower than light in a vacuum” since that is less than 50ms between any two points on earth.
Drilling oil no reason other than to give people jobs seems more virtuous than greedy
Are you under the impression that Exxon was formed and is run by a bunch of people thinking, "How can we employ lots and lots of people?" And not by people thinking, "How can we make money?"
So what you're saying is that Exxon isn't greedy at all, only dutifully suppling oil to those who are actually greedy – those who are willing to kill just for a taste.
Got it. I figured that's what was actually happening. It was strange that the original comment thought that Exxon was greedily drilling oil and sticking it in tanks to sit forevermore.
