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Comment by scarface_74

6 months ago

Wait until a conversation about “serverless” comes up and someone says there is no such thing because there are servers somewhere as if everyone - especially on HN -doesn’t already know that.

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scarface_74

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Tijdreiziger  6 months ago

Why would everyone know that? Not everyone has experience in sysops, especially not beginners.

E.g. when I first started learning webdev, I didn’t think about ‘servers’. I just knew that if I uploaded my HTML/PHP files to my shared web host, then they appeared online.

It was only much later that I realized that shared webhosting is ‘just’ an abstraction over Linux/Apache (after all, I first had to learn about those topics).

  • scarface_74  6 months ago

    I am saying that most people who come on HN and say “there is no such thing as serverless and there are servers somewhere” think they are sounding smart when they are adding nothing to the conversation.

    I’m sure you knew that your code was running on computers somewhere even when you first started and wasn’t running in a literal “cloud”.

    It’s about as tiring as people on HN who know just a little about LLMs thinking they are sounding smart when they say they are just advanced autocomplete. Both responses are just as unproductive

    • Tijdreiziger  6 months ago

      > I’m sure you knew that your code was running on computers somewhere even when you first started and wasn’t running in a literal “cloud”.

      Meh, I just knew that the browser would display HTML if I wrote it, and that uploading the HTML files made them available on my domain. I didn’t really think about where the files went, specifically.

      Try asking an average high school kid how cloud storage works. I doubt you’ll get any further than ‘I make files on my Google Docs and then they are saved there’. This is one step short of ‘well, the files must be on some system in some data center’.

      I really disagree that “people who come on HN and say “there is no such thing as serverless and there are servers somewhere” think they are sounding smart when they are adding nothing to the conversation.” On the contrary, it’s an invitation to beginning coders to think about what the ‘serverless’ abstraction actually means.

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  • godelski  6 months ago

    I think they fumbled with wording but I interpreted them as meaning "audience of HN" and it seems they confirmed.

    We always are speaking to our audience, right? This is also what makes more general/open discussions difficult (e.g. talking on Twitter/Facebook/etc). That there are many ways to interpret anything depending on prior knowledge, cultural biases, etc. But I think it is fair that on HN we can make an assumption that people here are tech savvy and knowledgeable. We'll definitely overstep and understep at times, but shouldn't we also cultivate a culture where it is okay to ask and okay to apologize for making too much of an assumption?

    I mean at the end of the day we got to make some assumptions, right? If we assume zero operating knowledge then comments are going to get pretty massive and frankly, not be good at communicating with a niche even if better at communicating with a general audience. But should HN be a place for general people? I think no. I think it should be a place for people interested in computers and programming.