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It's cool precisely because it's useful! Have an expensive computation task? Just dump it onto the cloud instead of running it locally. This is probably the mos
by ajkjk 12y ago
It's cool precisely because it's useful! Have an expensive computation task? Just dump it onto the cloud instead of running it locally. This is probably the most streamlined way to do this that I've ever seen.
- ossreality 12y agoHow are people so naive? I'm always curious what people really are thinking when they see stuff like this and assume it's magical and works for all scale before even trying to imagine how it might conceivably work.
- ajkjk 12y agoRe: the dead comment below me. There's nothing mystical about this. The source code is 4 files, which I read. It sends your function to Lambda, and that's cool, and the syntax is really elegant. Enough that I could totally see throwing something together using this to solve some complex problems without really thinking about it. I don't think this is all the way there, but I really like the idea of programming with APIs like this being as easy to use as language libraries.
- capisce 12y agoIf you have an expensive computation task and you're paying for computing time, do you really want to be using JavaScript for the purpose?
- ajkjk 12y agoProbably not, but this isn't purporting to be the best way to do it. It's just a cool thing you can do in your JS code. Especially nice for spinning something up with zero overhead. Maybe not optimal for production apps. Maybe good if you're constrained on server resources but less so on budget. Maybe good if you're still on the Lambda free tier pricing.
- atonse 12y agoActually, one of their examples was to generate image thumbnails, where they import the ImageMagick native libraries to do the heavy lifting. Essentially, this can help offset the need for managing extra servers for those kinds of tasks.