5 ms·

if you dig far enough, you can find some dependency of a dependency of dependency that relies on GitHub. Brew/npm/build script/whatever But really, why? Is it

by seiji 11y ago

if you dig far enough, you can find some dependency of a dependency of dependency that relies on GitHub. Brew/npm/build script/whatever But really, why? Is it just institutional laziness on the part of all developers? We had reliable rsync CPAN mirrors in 1995. In the early days of the Internet, companies would mutually host secondary DNS for each other to be more reliable. For some reason, we've forgotten all about reliability and disaster recovery and geographical distribution. Now the collective programmer mindset with regards to global infrastructure seems to be "lol, we're too dumb to make things work, let's just outsource everything to closed source, for-profit companies and hope for the best."

hguant 11y ago
I think a large part of this is that cloud hosting has allowed us to abstract those problems - reliability, disaster recovery, geographical distribution - away, and we don't really think of computers as computers anymore. It's a service or a platform or what have you, and the expectation is that it will always be there. I wouldn't say this is laziness, just a byproduct of changing how we view Internet architecture. We systems to take care of reliability etc because everyone has those problems. Now, those are only things you'll experience if you host your own stuff, or work for one of the big providers. (Broad assertion, I know, but I think it's mostly true)
- seiji 11y ago
  Exactly right, but over the past six years there's been a strong (and accelerating) trend among developers of "lalala we don't want to know how anything works! give us an API and go away." Most developers I've seen reject even learning about networks or DNS or operating systems or databases. Such willful ignorance boggles the mind, but they are praised because their goals are shipping half-broken things as rapidly as possible to flip upwards for those oh-so-tasty acquihire payouts. We even saw this week how overconsumption of convenience APIs can put entire companies in danger when those privately controlled convenience APIs just decide to shut down one day. Convenience of immediacy always seems to trump connivence of long term stability.
  - nemothekid 11y ago
    >Exactly right, but over the past six years there's been a strong (and accelerating) trend among developers of "lalala we don't want to know how anything works! give us an API and go away." I will argue that this trend has always existed. I'm sure you can find an x86/68k/z80 developer complaining that developers are going "lalala we don't want to know how anything works! give us an the C-language and go away."* I'm sure there are developers who couldn't imagine learning C without learning x86, and saw developers learning C without learning x86 as "willful ignorance". Good abstractions will cause developers to simply gloss over how they work.
    - simula67 11y ago
      As programmers, we need to know atleast one level below the abstractions to which we are programming to. For example, if you program in C you need to know a little bit of assembly, how objects are laid out in memory etc. This is how you write fast code and it helps with debugging too. But if you are programming in C and notices that something goes wrong with the hardware, ( for example, an instruction does not do something that it is supposed to do ) you will have to ask for help since it is someone else's work that is faulty. Sounds reasonable ?
      - nickpsecurity 11y ago
        At least one level below. Hmm. That sounds more reasonable than full understanding. See my reply to nemo, though, for an alternative that I think is more reasonable. Basically, heuristics and simplified models.
    - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
      The good reverend Laphroaig preaches: If the 0day in your familiar pastures dwindles, despair not! Rather, bestir yourself to where programmers are led astray from the sacred Assembly, neither understanding what their programming languages compile to, nor asking to see how their data is stored or transmitted in the true bits of the wire. For those who follow their computation through the layers shall gain 0day and pwn, and those who say “we trust in our APIs, in our proofs, and in our memory models and need not burden ourselves with confusing engineering detail that has no scientific value anyhow” shall surely provide an abundance of 0day and pwnage sufficient for all of us.
- Zelmor 11y ago
  One has to keep in mind that there is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer.
  - Pharaoh2 11y ago
    Except that it is not. It redundant array of computers, if one goes down, another takes it place and all the apps running on it are migrated to the new hardware. And if the whole zone goes down, the apps are migrated to a different zone. If the whole region goes down, the apps can be migrated to a different region. The 9s are so high that you don't have to worry about hardware issues anymore, unlike when you are running your own hardware.
    - gregmac 11y ago
      Or it could be literally an old desktop computer sitting in someone's damp basement on a DSL connection. The problem with just saying "the cloud" is you can't tell the difference.
      - Pharaoh2 11y ago
        Generally when people say the cloud, they mean one of the big Public/Private cloud providers, not someone's basement.
    - bkeroack 11y ago
      That's the theory (or the marketing pitch, depending upon perspective). The reality can be rather different[1][2][3]. 1. http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/21/technology/amazon_server_outage/ http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/21/technology/amazon_server_out... 2. http://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-web-services-suffers-outage-takes-down-vine-instagram-others-with-it/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-web-services-suffers-out... 3. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/20/aws_database_outage/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/20/aws_database_outage/
  - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
    https://xkcd.com/908/ https://xkcd.com/908/

by seiji 11y ago

hguant 11y ago

I think a large part of this is that cloud hosting has allowed us to abstract those problems - reliability, disaster recovery, geographical distribution - away, and we don't really think of computers as computers anymore. It's a service or a platform or what have you, and the expectation is that it will always be there. I wouldn't say this is laziness, just a byproduct of changing how we view Internet architecture. We systems to take care of reliability etc because everyone has those problems. Now, those are only things you'll experience if you host your own stuff, or work for one of the big providers. (Broad assertion, I know, but I think it's mostly true)

seiji 11y ago
Exactly right, but over the past six years there's been a strong (and accelerating) trend among developers of "lalala we don't want to know how anything works! give us an API and go away." Most developers I've seen reject even learning about networks or DNS or operating systems or databases. Such willful ignorance boggles the mind, but they are praised because their goals are shipping half-broken things as rapidly as possible to flip upwards for those oh-so-tasty acquihire payouts. We even saw this week how overconsumption of convenience APIs can put entire companies in danger when those privately controlled convenience APIs just decide to shut down one day. Convenience of immediacy always seems to trump connivence of long term stability.
- nemothekid 11y ago
  >Exactly right, but over the past six years there's been a strong (and accelerating) trend among developers of "lalala we don't want to know how anything works! give us an API and go away." I will argue that this trend has always existed. I'm sure you can find an x86/68k/z80 developer complaining that developers are going "lalala we don't want to know how anything works! give us an the C-language and go away."* I'm sure there are developers who couldn't imagine learning C without learning x86, and saw developers learning C without learning x86 as "willful ignorance". Good abstractions will cause developers to simply gloss over how they work.
  - simula67 11y ago
    As programmers, we need to know atleast one level below the abstractions to which we are programming to. For example, if you program in C you need to know a little bit of assembly, how objects are laid out in memory etc. This is how you write fast code and it helps with debugging too. But if you are programming in C and notices that something goes wrong with the hardware, ( for example, an instruction does not do something that it is supposed to do ) you will have to ask for help since it is someone else's work that is faulty. Sounds reasonable ?
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      At least one level below. Hmm. That sounds more reasonable than full understanding. See my reply to nemo, though, for an alternative that I think is more reasonable. Basically, heuristics and simplified models.
  - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
    The good reverend Laphroaig preaches: If the 0day in your familiar pastures dwindles, despair not! Rather, bestir yourself to where programmers are led astray from the sacred Assembly, neither understanding what their programming languages compile to, nor asking to see how their data is stored or transmitted in the true bits of the wire. For those who follow their computation through the layers shall gain 0day and pwn, and those who say “we trust in our APIs, in our proofs, and in our memory models and need not burden ourselves with confusing engineering detail that has no scientific value anyhow” shall surely provide an abundance of 0day and pwnage sufficient for all of us.
Zelmor 11y ago
One has to keep in mind that there is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer.
- Pharaoh2 11y ago
  Except that it is not. It redundant array of computers, if one goes down, another takes it place and all the apps running on it are migrated to the new hardware. And if the whole zone goes down, the apps are migrated to a different zone. If the whole region goes down, the apps can be migrated to a different region. The 9s are so high that you don't have to worry about hardware issues anymore, unlike when you are running your own hardware.
  - gregmac 11y ago
    Or it could be literally an old desktop computer sitting in someone's damp basement on a DSL connection. The problem with just saying "the cloud" is you can't tell the difference.
    - Pharaoh2 11y ago
      Generally when people say the cloud, they mean one of the big Public/Private cloud providers, not someone's basement.
  - bkeroack 11y ago
    That's the theory (or the marketing pitch, depending upon perspective). The reality can be rather different[1][2][3]. 1. http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/21/technology/amazon_server_outage/ http://money.cnn.com/2011/04/21/technology/amazon_server_out... 2. http://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-web-services-suffers-outage-takes-down-vine-instagram-others-with-it/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-web-services-suffers-out... 3. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/20/aws_database_outage/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/20/aws_database_outage/
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  https://xkcd.com/908/ https://xkcd.com/908/