6 ms·
Fuck the cloud (2009)
- downbad_ 7mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10771539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10771539
- tomhow 7mo agoThanks, Macroexpanded, and some others too... Fuck the Cloud (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10771539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10771539 - Dec 2015 (219 comments) Fuck the cloud (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2984083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2984083 - Sept 2011 (2 comments) Fuck the Cloud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=441885 - Jan 2009 (23 comments)
- textfiles 7mo agoClassics never go out of style.
- 440bx 7mo agoAs it appears to be hugged to death, archive link: https://archive.ph/qsdc3 https://archive.ph/qsdc3
- miniman1337 7mo agothe irony
- getnormality 7mo agoSometimes you fuck the cloud, sometimes the cloud fucks you
- selimthegrim 7mo agoNope
- observationist 7mo agoMaybe the old man is on to something.
- j45 7mo agoForgot to put a cache on it probably. :)
- hoppyhoppy2 7mo agoor https://web.archive.org/web/20260414220159/https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1717 https://web.archive.org/web/20260414220159/https://ascii.tex...
- consumer451 7mo agolol, as a VPN user, I get to read nothing. No offense to archive.org, I get it.
- floralhangnail 7mo agoIronically I've been opening up Tor for archive.org lately and it seems to never be on the same blocklist the VPN IPs are on.
- keyle 7mo agoFlared by the cloud.. sic
- josefritzishere 7mo agoResource Limit Is Reached - Hug of death
- FaridIO 7mo agoThe irony.
- EvanAnderson 7mo agoThat's really odd. If I remember correctly Jason Scott has talked in his podcast about how textfiles.com is a co-lo'd self hosted box. I wonder what "resource limit" got hit.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo agoIt really isn’t odd at all.
- textfiles 7mo agoWell, ASCII is a different box than textfiles.com. I suppose I could host the site on that box, but I have a rule with the original textfiles.com that no scripts are being run on it, hence less chance of hacking, etc. Someday I'll figure out the exact right setting for ASCII to not do this when a few thousand people hit it, but honestly, it is very hard to care.
- markus_zhang 7mo agoI think very soon we will read “Fuck AI”.
- echelon 7mo agoNeither would be fucked if they were open source. Or if they had a ton of viable competition.
- operatingthetan 7mo agoIs not most cloud tech based on open-source? Without Linux I feel like we would have seen cloud take off 20 years later than it did.
- johnsmith1840 7mo agoMost cloud features are open source tools with special sauce sprinkeled in. But at the same time these companies heavily fund said OS project so I suppose it's not just pure community based work.
- echelon 7mo agoPlease show me the open source AWS. It's an encrustified open source offering where the original vendors aren't compensated. Where there's lock in, proprietary offering creep, and highway robbery billing.
- operatingthetan 7mo ago>Please show me the open source AWS. I will not, because that is not what I asked. >Is not most cloud tech *based* on open-source?
- echelon 7mo agoNo. It's not. The proprietary pieces are 99% of the offering. It just wouldn't have ever worked without the open source bits.
- furyofantares 7mo agoThe sequel to Kiss the sky Anyway, I love how well GDPR demonstrated this: > Insult, berate and make fun of any company that offers you something like a “sharing” site that makes you push stuff in that you can’t make copies out of or which you can’t export stuff out of. They will burble about technology issues. They are fucking lying. They might go off further about business models. They are fucking stupid.
- rhet0rica 7mo ago[flagged]
- dillydogg 7mo agoCan you more accurately translate this to English for us?
- cyanmagenta 7mo agoAccording to Google Translate: “A man who loves text files and wears a peculiar hat announces a plan to have sex with the weather.” Hope this helps.
- dillydogg 7mo agoKeep hoping!
- ghc 7mo agoIt took me way too long to get that.
- h4kunamata 7mo agoUp to early 2000s, people would go to the internet to have fun, everything was new, it was the mass migration from analog to digital era. 2020s, people are going offline to have fun. Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, people hosting their own documents, movies, music, backups in case things go bad. Even some companies have realised the price of going cloud, some are moving back to on-prem hardware with full control.
- TacticalCoder 7mo ago> Homelab is becoming a thing even for people who never had experience with computer, ... Oh totally. I got my brother, who lives on the other side of the world and who's not a dev/sysadmin, just a poweruser, to install Proxmox and he's now using GPU passthrough to have VMs run different AI models (in either Linux or Windows) for image generation, experimenting, etc. He's also got a NAS with RAID etc. To me a homelab is the 2020's version of having fun with computing: there's something incredibly refreshing in disconnecting my sub-LAN from the Internet and still have music, movies, private pastebin (yup I use this at times between computers for simple stuff I don't want to both scp'ing), private Git repositories, complete backup system (including offline HDDs/SSDs that I rotate into a safe at the bank), etc. A movie projector, a dumb one, is another very cool thing: connected to nothing but a HDMI cable (not that HDMI is the best standard ever but it does the job). And to be sure I can still code and work without having a nanny holding my hand as if I was a toddler, I regularly have coding sessions where I don't use Claude Code (but I also pay for a subscription: these things aren't mutually exclusive). For anyone who wants to have a fun, a used HP Workstation with ECC memory is basically $200 and makes a perfectly fine server at home. Doesn't need to be up 24/7 either: my online service that is up 24/7 is my unbound DNS resolver and I run that one on a Raspberry Pi (for the low power consumption). The rest of my homelab (two Proxmox servers) is basically something I only need when I'm awake/at my desk. So I turn them off at night. You never go full cloud.
- asveikau 7mo agoIt's kind of funny that people are talking about "home labs" as a new thing because I've been running some form of servers on consumer PC hardware in my home since around 1998. For me this was an inseparable part of getting to know Linux and *BSD in that era. I guess I'm just old though.
- ajross 7mo agoCounter-take: this was almost entirely wrong, and the author should be embarassed looking back after 17 years. I mean, it was 2009. How much of your personal data from then is still around on non-archival media you still control? Even among the geek set here, the answer is likely to be "almost none of it". At best it's "backed up" on media you haven't validated. Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured. Like... Dropbox or Backblaze or S3 one of those, you guessed it, CLOUD services. Likewise, do you still have your email from 2009 online in a useful form? Gmail users, many of them in this very thread, still do.
- bee_rider 7mo agoI have all my music from 2009, shuffled from drive to drive. It out-survived my subscriptions to on-demand music streaming services (I do Pandora for discovery but don’t like the feeling of building an Amazon streaming “library” that will actually vanish when I stop paying). I think the drive that held my old home directory might have died, though.
- Terr_ 7mo agoUhhh, me? My home directory has 20-30 years of documents, photos, emails, the email address itself, instant-messaging logs, etc. Even a downloaded zip of every comment I ever made on Reddit. (But not HN, I should look into that.) The primary exception would be Google Photos pictures which were auto-uploaded from my phone that I haven't curated and downloaded yet. I predict I will maintain my custom-domain email address much longer than if I had used Gmail, given the attrition rate of bannings without support. > on non-archival media you still control [...] Or more likely, copied somewhere else to keep it secured. Hold up, is this OR or XOR? It sounds like you're trying to add unreasonable (dis-)qualifiers. TFA isn't saying one must boycott "the cloud" and erase all data, it just advocates that you retain an independent copy. > Dropbox or Backblaze or S3 one of those, you guessed it, CLOUD services. I think that's conflating different use-cases. * Having a regular offsite backup into S3 isn't that different from when the data was rsync'ed to a Linux machine I paid for an account on. Any cloud-ness is a remote implementation detail, not a change in the consumer relationship. * In contrast, "all my photos are in the cloud and my friends and family can collaborate on shared albums" is different, it permanently moves the locus of control.
- uriegas 7mo agoThe idea of offshoring computing is good. However, the cloud developed as a centralized computing platform instead of a distributed one. This has created power dynamics that harm customers. The same happened with social media, and has happened to other industries. I think it would be better for customers if there were many small cloud providers and they could easily switch between them. But even migrating from one cloud provider to another is a huge endeavor these days.
- MobiusHorizons 7mo agoIf you actually mean offshore as in located in a different country or especially a different continent, then that is a terrible idea for latency for many forms of computation. There are acceptable use cases, eg when round trips are infrequent and average latency is already high like batch workloads or some forms of LLM, but even then closer compute is pretty much always a better experience.
- philipnee 7mo agoThe reliability, speed and internet connectivity makes local first more appealing. Honestly - i host my own webpage, file server, and some compute locally.
- MinimalAction 7mo agoI echo similar sentiments. It is high time to choose self-hosting over handing over essentials to the cloud. You don't know when it could be inaccessible due to plethora of reasons. It is just that, every time I looked into setting up a home lab, it feels cost prohibitively expensive.
- h4kunamata 7mo ago>It is just that, every time I looked into setting up a home lab, it feels cost prohibitively expensive. You would say that if you look into my 12U rack right now, only 6 months ago all I had was 2x Dell SFF second hand computer from eBay that might have costed me AUD300. Before that, I had one of those miniPC with two network ports that cost me AUD200. I installed Proxmox in it, then OPNSense (router) and pihole as virtual machine, it ran like that for years Install Proxmox in them and you can run eveything. This is the major misconception regarding homelab, you absolutely don't need expensive gear. A single miniPC + Proxmox is all you need to start, try to have at least 16GB of memory, 256GB NVMe is more than enough to start. Don't let those massive homelab setup you see on the internet tell you that is the only way :)
- observationist 7mo agoWe're teetering on the brink of highly capable software agents that can run on a phone using a local model, that can manage things like basic digital hygiene, operating a self-hosted cloud, with tailscale and other private vpns that can leverage your own home internet service with a well maintained set of firewall rules and level of locked-down access that it's actually practical. An inspired nerd can do it right now, but grandma will be able to do a curated, accessible set of things by the end of the year, and by the end of 2027, the internet and self hosted things are going to be incredibly different. When people can self host plex and anonymously pirate anything, and their local model can do the ethically gray area stuff like ensure everything is done so they don't get caught - cloud services can't compete with that. Cable and netflix and spotify and the rest are going to have to up their game, and not do the stupid lashing out, price gouging, hunting the pirates type of thing or they're just going to burn down faster. We're headed for some really cool, interesting times.
- 7mo ago
- kristianp 7mo agoI've taken to buying the occasional CD and DVD. While I still use spotify more than physical cds, I still have my old CD collection and the sound quality is so refreshing. And soundtracks aren't on Spotify. With movies it's hard to rewatch favourites because they don't stay on the streaming services. Again it's much more satisfying to own them yourself.
- anon7000 7mo agoThe irony of this is hilarious > Resource Limit Is Reached > The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later.
- segmondy 7mo agoSo what? It will be back up.
- LewisVerstappen 7mo ago...and the person just lost the majority of traffic that wouldve went to his site
- VanTheBrand 7mo agoyeah I'm sure Jason is just fine with that.
- textfiles 7mo agoYes, I've taken a long walk and spoken with my team and I'm emotionally fine with the situation.
- LewisVerstappen 6mo agoYes, but you don't represent 99% of people. Which is why your blog post was hilariously wrong.
- i_love_retros 7mo agoOh no! All those ad views they missed out on! Yeah I get the impression that making money from advertising isn't the primary reason that site exists. I know, hard to fathom right?
- sien 7mo agoA copy for people who want to read the article : https://archive.md/Q0DYu https://archive.md/Q0DYu
- purplehat_ 7mo agoI'm surprised people are advocating self-hosting as a viable solution. It takes a lot of knowledge to do sync and backup yourself, most of it implicit knowledge that people here don't realize we have and so for us it seems very easy. There was a comment in another post on the front page about how anyone "remotely technical" can set up a docker container, and I think this is a good example because the mechanics of it are simple (edit a couple text files, run a couple commands), but half the world couldn't tell you what a terminal is and they're focused on other things in life instead of learning how computers work. Cloud succeeded because cloud is easy (at least in the beginning), it's that simple. If we are to solve this problem, we're going to have to make self-hosting easy enough for the average 7-8 year old to do it without struggling. One promising way forward is with local-first E2EE sync and backup. The only good implementation I know of personally is Obsidian Sync, which has a UX that I adore, and hope to see more of in the future. There's other good options too, but none that I'd feel comfortable trusting a seven-year-old to execute correctly first try.
- mikestorrent 7mo ago> If we are to solve this problem, we're going to have to make self-hosting easy enough It used to be easy enough in the 90s, when plenty of folks had their own custom website. You signed up with a hosting company; they provided you with a bunch of different ways to upload files; your website was hosted. Of late, I've decided that the problem is that HTML development halted at what is still a very beta product. HTMX is a reasonable attempt to continue the spirit of HTML; where I'm going with this is that I think HTML should have continued to add enough reasonable features, without needing Javascript or massive amounts of CSS, so that most websites most people wanted to develop would still be straightforward enough to do. HTML stopped before it even had a usable <table> with sorting and filtering defined, so we've spent decades with inferior tables in every web app that all suck compared to what we got used to with even Windows 3.1 apps. HTML finally grew date and colour pickers but it should have had all kinds of rich UI controls and behaviour that would have made it totally unnecessary for people to build all the Javascript middleware that essentially treats the browser as a display canvas and otherwise totally reimplements the GUI from scratch. And we wonder why the beautiful new Macbook Neo is kneecapped by only having 8GB???? It's time for HTML6. My standard will be: everything a restaurant website needs should be basically batteries included, with the exception of an e-commerce backend. It should all be doable in static HTML files with almost no Javascript and really just enough CSS to set artistic theming elements instead of having to do arcane shit just to position things.
- casey2 7mo ago17 years on, no value created, trillions extracted and used for stock buybacks. Destabilizing the economy, raising borrowing costs and making the feds print print print. In the 90s there were 8000+ publicly listed companies doing real business. Now there are ~3600, 10 years from now there will be at most 1000. Gambling and endless consolidation feel good for monkey brains. Governments are supposed to step in, but we have a heckin' Cheeto in the White House.
- Melatonic 7mo agoWe've gone full circle from Mainframes (1980s Cloud) and back again !
- Vektorceraptor 7mo agoI am big fan of internet 1.0 https://speculumx.at/blogpost/vom-archiv-zur-ablenkung https://speculumx.at/blogpost/vom-archiv-zur-ablenkung
- porknbeans00 7mo agoI feel this way about the sandbox in android.
- ekjhgkejhgk 7mo agoLiteraly old man yells at cloud.
- cindyllm 7mo ago[dead]
- sumanep 6mo agoIt doesn´t make sense today, neither in 2009