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Comment by zackbloom | Hacker News Reader

We (Cloudflare) have largely stopped talking about the 'edge' for some of the reasons cited in the article.

1. No one actually knows where it is or what it means.

2. It conjures images of classical ‘edge compute’ use cases like the self driving cars in the article. Those use cases tend to be exceptionally specialized (or just silly).

3. Edge implies a core or origin exists, and maybe it doesn’t need to.

We would rather imagine a world where we embed the compute directly into the network, putting hundreds or thousands of points of presence within a few ms of everyone on earth. We imaging moving all the compute and storage there, not just some fraction which needs ultra speed. If it is easy to run code close to your users, and it’s affordable, there’s no reason everyone shouldn’t run everything as close to the consumers of the Internet as possible.

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It conjures images of classical ‘edge compute’ use cases like the self driving cars in the article. Those use cases tend to be exceptionally specialized (or just silly).

Yes. You do not do hard real time over the public Internet.

(I've actually had the experience of driving a full-sized vehicle over WiFi. When we built our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle in 2004, we had the test capability of driving it remotely over WiFi, from a control station with a game steering wheel and pedals. Worked fine technically, difficult to drive. 100ms of no signal and the stall timer slammed on the brakes. Self-driving in the "cloud" is not where you want to go.)

There's a project called wifibroadcast (https://befinitiv.wordpress.com/wifibroadcast-analog-like-tr...) that allows to pipe data between two WiFi nodes in monitor mode so there's no need for association.

You can do hard-realtime over the circuit-switched substrate of the public Internet, though. "Two tin-cans and string" (i.e. two modems and the PSTN network) still works surprisingly well for (low-bandwidth) real-time control across vast distances. You can even get a decent hard-realtime SLA (much better than that of wi-fi or cellular data service) when one of the ends is a cell phone on 3G with its headphone jack plugged into a modem.

An interesting reversal of the networking philosophy described in “the Rise of the Stupid Network” http://isen.com/stupid.html

3. Edge implies a core or origin exists, and maybe it doesn’t need to.

Maybe borrow from physics to call it the Egress Horizon.

Would you mind expanding a little. Google has led me to a brand of window maker, and to of course, black hole event horizons but I am not clear on the specific egress horizon.

I can guess what you intended but would be interested in the specifics.

Egress = output; Horizon = the border of control, where packets are "released to the world"

I assumed that egress horizon was some new black hole phenomenon with interesting properties about not needing a core/ central point.

It's a cool phrase though so we should definitely use it

Hah, maybe I should have just taken the simpler road and said it was just a play on "event horizon."

It is interesting to see that as technology advances, predictions of the past become more and more true, though they may not necessarily look like what the predictors originally thought.

In this case, I think of the network is the computer. It's been for a while, but not yet completely, but it's becoming even more so as time passes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage

Slight devil's advocate episteme: what about an even-further generalization? How about: the market is the computer?

Not only is the network essentially imbricated with/in the market, but recognizing the market in the role of the computation also means recognizing the roles of all of the different functional components, not just the mechanical/computational "atoms". Basically, I think that thinking this way lets us treat supply-demand basically as a messaging layer.

That fails the sniff test. Markets are made up of agents that want things. Computers only want what humans say they should want, so computers are simply the agents of humanity.

You can't abstract out supply and demand, at least, not forever. Abstraction is something you do to things so that you don't have to cognitively deal with them, they're predictable.

Humans will act predictably for as long as it makes sense for them to do so. Your business model will eventually fail because nobody will want your product / service anymore. Or they won't want exactly how you're delivering it. Or they'll have decided that X company is more reliable.

Someone has to keep on top of what the people supplying the business with life-sustaining revenue actually want. It can't ever be a machine, unless those machines actually become sentient, which is a completely different discussion. The person can use machines, but they can't actually be a machine.

People spend money, not algorithms. People may delegate to algorithms, but it's always a person in the end.

I think there's some questions to be asked about this, but the main one is this claim:

> Abstraction is something you do to things so that you don't have to cognitively deal with them, they're predictable.

The word "predictable". What does it mean to be predictable? Are periodic trends with micro-variations considered to be predictable? In that sense, might it not be possible to Fourier-decompose some time-series into a sufficiently-"predictable" set of frequencies?

But actually, I'm not even sure if this qualification is needed. If an abstraction is basically just a way to treat a bunch of events as a single idea, then what if the abstraction isn't something telling you how you should act, but instead something telling you how you should react?

Another assumption, I think, is that the market is human, i.e. because there are affective dimensions and bounded rationalities in the economy that make it unpredictable. This is true right now, but is that inherent to the market? You can argue that even an automated agent has "humanity", in the sense that it is essentially imprinted with their creator, but how much longer will this hold? It's asymptotic, but won't there be a threshold at which the humanity of machines made by machines, with many steps removed, becomes negligible?

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/30/ascended-economy/

If any other kind of agent can make market moves, then that agent has to supplant humans at the 'top'.

For example, the pet market is absurdly large. What drives this market? The actual needs of animals? Of course not. It's the wishes of humans that make that market as big as it is.

It doesn't even have to be that humans are smart enough to control the new market-playing agents. It can also be that human desire can so vastly dwarf whatever external agency has a wish to be in the market that the whole industry ends up catering the wishes of the humans.

Right now, human desire drives the market for robots. Can you even imagine a point at which robots could develop enough agency to even come close to supplanting the human desire for more and better robots? When does the tail stop wagging the dog here?

People sometimes forget the sheer scale of human economies. Sure, maybe your pet non-human agent might be able to command a few hundred thousand in market activity. Is it even going to be notable over all the other existing types of non-human agency already on the market, like pets and HFT?

> abstraction isn't something telling you how you should act, but instead something telling you how you should react?

A little bit OT: I don't think acting and reacting are separate things in the real world. We're always only reacting.

Thanks for sharing that view. I have a theory on the same kind of reasoning : marketing combined with instant purchase capabilities (online buying and fast shipping) transformed the mass consumers into testers. Items are built, marketed, discovered, bought, shipped and reviewed faster, which allows "experimentation" with consumers. The mass consumers market is a giant lab, paid by the consumers.

As with any emerging computational platform, there is always going to be confusion. For example, when Cloud Computing first premiered I can't count the number of times I had conversations with C-level executives, IT managers, and even engineers thinking that "The Cloud" solved their problem whereas in reality it didn't. With Edge and Fog Computing, we are very much in this early phase of ambiguity.

At present, the closest capability to computing within the network fabric itself is Fog Computing. Cisco's IOx-enabled line of products (https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/cloud-systems-managem...) pair a high-end router with decent computational capabilities. Other companies, like Nebbiolo Technologies (https://www.nebbiolo.tech/) or Fog Horn (https://www.foghorn.io/) provide Fog platforms that are not as locked to specific hardware.

If you would like more information on how Cloud, Edge, and Fog differ, I'll shamelessly plug our blog post from earlier this year:

http://pratumlabs.com/blog/2018/01/what-is-fog-computing/

Thanks, very interesting article and great explanations based on examples. Very exciting space!

A fully mesh P2P computer cloud would be magical. Everybody is the edge that way :)

Read A Deepness in the Sky for a dystopian/cynical view of this technological advancement.

Ethereum?

https://subutai.io/p2p-cloud-platform.html

We’re building that right now: https://holo.host

Following that link I learned about an ICO and then had some marketing content. Honestly I wanted to learn from the link “how” you were going to change things- maybe technical content?- instead I got this flashback when a bunch of years ago you would see these land pages of gurus selling you books about how they got rich online...

An overview is available in the Green Paper: https://files.holo.host/2018/03/Holo-Green-Paper.pdf

Agree with your points but we do need terms for various type of edge computing in our vocabulary to avoid another nebulous concept. How do you communicate with your peers - network-compute/point-compute?

Conveniently all of your users have 90s era supercomputers in their pants. Shame we're wasting that compute on nonsense.

Mobile devices' compute power is there to serve a massive amount of input/output components and sensors. If we start to usurp this computing margin for our applications, the devices will overheat and break, irritating quite some people probably.

You mean glitter and ads? Because sensors and I/O doesn't require much power; nowhere near as much as is available.

I mean all of it. There isn't a single cycle on my device that's finding truth or beauty. Is there on yours? If so please let me know so I can get that app!

> Conveniently all of your users have 90s era supercomputers in their pants. Shame we're wasting that compute on nonsense.

Supercomputers were designed and built to be used to capacity (otherwise they would be a waste of money). Modern mobile phones and laptops are not.

Valid points, i meet customers with vague definitions of edges and help them understand that in the age of hyper convergence, it is the least of your worries. Better focus on the stack that is going to run on the system.

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