Every tech downturn has a silver lining | Hacker News Reader

Every tech downturn has a silver lining

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78 pointsspatters58 comments

> My bet is always-on broadband. Virtual worlds, digital entertainment, gaming …. None of it would be possible without broadband. Today, we have about 100-250 Mbps in most modern homes. In some places, you can get a gigabit per second. Now imagine what we could do if, in ten years, we all have 10 gigabits per second in our homes, and we have in-home networks that are fast and fat.

Hmm. Kind of an interesting take. I predict the opposite. I think we have hit the diminishing returns on bandwidth. People don't even know what to do with residential internet in the 100mbps. We can stream HD video (both up and down)...what else is there. If there are no applications straining at bandwidth limits now, im not sure improving them will make new products. If anything i think the best gains are going to be in latency and in mobile bandwidth. Cheap high speed, no data cap, internet for cell phones would be pretty great. But still i'd consider that incremental. I think its unlikely the next big technology enabler will be the same as the last one.

> In 2001, we imagined a 100 Mbps future — and we got Google, a nearly trillion-dollar company.

Google was founded in 1998, and that was still the dial-up era. At the time, I was probably thinking a 1mbps future sounded pretty grand and couldn't imagine 100mbps. Heck my internet right now isn't even that fast.

I'd settle for IP-based video conferencing that actually works, 100% of the time. As far as I can tell the major issues with that now are more from WiFi - Bufferbloat is particularly bad there and interference causes small dropouts (run a ping to a local router in the background for a while, and you'll probably see jitter eventually).

It's pretty noticeable here in New Zealand where most people are now on fiber connections with easily enough bandwidth and low latency - but video calling is still way harder than it should be.

Are you talking about video chat within NZ or with rest of world? I imagine there's a fixed amount of latency with calling anyone in NZ due to speed of light...

As the crow flies, it takes light 66ms to get from one point on earth to a point on the opposite side.

Pretty sure the limiting factor is not the speed of light. It's the fact that (currently) these packets on not traveling in a straight line, and there is a lot of switching happening between A and B.

There is plenty of room for improvement in this area.

> IP-based video conferencing that actually works, 100% of the time.

This is oxymoron. Our packet-switched infra simply cannot fulfill such promise.

That's a bit pedantic - the poster would cleary be happy with something that worked 99.9% of the time, and there is no technical reason why our packet switched network can't suppot that in theory

For all the net-neutrality proponents: isn't this an argument against net neutrality? If ISPs could discriminate depending on traffic and apply better QoS priorities to sensitive content like video calls, reprioritizing downloads and p2p applications, we could have video conferencing that works, 99.9% of the time.

No. The FCC's 2015 open internet order had an exemption for "reasonable network management":

>A network management practice is a practice that has a primarily technical network management justification, but does not include other business practices. A network management practice is reasonable if it is primarily used for and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management purpose, taking into account the particular network architecture and technology of the broadband Internet access service.

Net neutrality has always been about leveling the playing field, not about preventing network operators from improving service for users. So, for example: QoS rules to make real-time communication work better in general? Great! QoS rules to prioritize Zoom over other real-time comms because the ISP has a deal with them? Nope.

Yet there's not one implementation that does work? I am not an expert on this, but I don't think current Internet-based solutions can compete with telephone/cellphone voice call on reliability, not without some drastic infrastructural change.

I thought a lot of phone calls were actually routed over the internet?

"640K ought to be enough for anyone" said by someone, possibly.

If we have 10GB networks, applications will be found to make use of it. Possibly (hopefully) applications that we haven't yet even imagined.

But the point is that applications haven’t even found a use for 100mbps to the home. I have 1gbps to mine and about the only time it’s been useful is when a friend wants to play a game I have on steam but not locally.

4K TV (from Netflix) recommends 25Mbps for each stream. I know that this isn't 100Mbps but Netflix supports streaming to 4 devices at once (with the premium account). You also have to allow for other simultaneous usages (your kids playing games while you are streaming video, etc.).

This doesn't answer the question of what 10Gbps would be used for, but there are at least some applications today that use a significant portion of 100Mbps bandwidth. This is just speculation on my part, but history suggests that once 10Gbps is available inventive people will find a use for that bandwidth.

The counterpoint to this is that once you've got enough bandwidth (and low latency) to stream an interactive session with negligible quality issues, you can move anything that requires more bandwidth offsite ('the cloud') and just stream the audio/video output.

As things stand though, it's as kortilla says: we don't even have any such bandwidth-intensive applications in the home. 4k video streaming is the most bandwidth-intensive problem we have. 10gbps may improve download rates for large archives, like modern games or perhaps major OS updates, but that doesn't strike me as a very compelling selling-point. It's a relatively rare occurrence, and reducing the download time by an hour (say) isn't worth reworking your Internet infrastructure. Even here, there's no gain if the Internet connection speed exceeds the write-speed of your storage hardware.

edit It's not quite the same, but I think 5G faces a similar problem. What's the point? 4G is more than enough to stream video. The biggest issue with 4G isn't the bandwidth, or the latency, but the coverage, and I don't think 5G is going to help there. (There are still parts of central London without reliable 4G coverage.)

There could be some semantic issues here. It would seem that a non-trivial number of people have a connection where the actual speed differs a decent amount from the stated/expected. This has certainly been my case after living in L.A. and Chicago.

Perhaps the previous commenter perceives a 10gbps connection as the speed of an actual, say, 5gbps connection.

I don't see your point here. For the purposes of our conversation, 5gbps and 10gbps are just the same; they're far in excess of 25mbps. Dishonest ISPs are another topic entirely.

I don't want to belabor this, but you are saying "all applications that I can think of can be implemented using existing bandwidth". I am saying that clever people will invent new applications, ones that no one has thought of yet (or that no one thinks is practical), once the bandwidth is available.

But the bandwidth is available and it’s not being utilized.

Anyone who thinks this hasn't had to deal with a 100mbps connection before. It's not about a single user consuming all the capacity – though that's definitely a factor as well – but allowing simultaneous use of multiple demanding applications by more than one person.

3D video at 4K+ requires a good chunk of 100mbps.

Streaming Games? Streaming VR and AR content? Lower latencies will allow more seamless video conferences. Right now our interface planes are still very 2D, which still has a steep learning curve compared to our 3D world.

Sure, but latency and bandwidth are different things. Reducing latency by a few orders of magnitudes would open up tons of applications (not sure i agree that video conf is one of them, dont think latency of internet is the main issue there) but i don't think we are likely to see much beyond incremental improvements (light only travels so fast)

More bandwidth == less switching == lower latency.

Also light can travel from point A to the diametrically opposite point on the surface of earth in 66ms.

Currently it takes 227ms to ping New York from Tokyo[1]. As light travels, those two cities are only 36ms away from each other. Seems like there is plenty of room for improvement, even given the speed of light.

[1] https://wondernetwork.com/pings

That's within 1 (base 10) order of magnitude of the theoretical max (which seems like it would be very hatd to get close to). Sure there is room for incremental improvements, but we're not going to be making order of magnitude improvements.

We already have the actual information traveling at the max speed, the delta is purely the cost of indirect routes and switching. It seems very reasonable to assume we could get much closer to the theoretical max.

Also this is obviously only a max speed if we never figure out superluminal communication, which... [fingers crossed]

VR may require higher bandwidth too, in order to stream at 90-120 frames per second.

I think we'll always find ways to use up the available bandwidth, even as it expands to new highs – but the real limiter has been how inconsistent high-speed deployments are, so it's difficult to reliably use them today.

I have a 1.5 Gbps synchronous connection here in Canada, but a few blocks away the max is 100mbps; we're not optimizing/building for fast connections because they're not widely deployed, not because we can't find ways to use them. Being able to play Stadia at ultra-low latency in 4K HDR is magic and shows a connection like this' value.

Making telco networks a public utility would help in this regard, especially if they have an actual goal of connecting everyone equally. In New Zealand, where I grew up, we broke up the telco and made fiber connectivity a public utility (chorus.co.nz) with a mandate to install fiber for free, anywhere in the country, which all ISPs can leverage. It not only increased competition, but it's helping create consistency, and will allow developers/content creators to dream up apps that can consume that type of bandwidth, because there's enough ultra-fast connections to actually make it worth bothering with.

I was pretty happy with my 5mbps DSL in 98. Cable was significantly faster then too. To say nothing of the resnet. Calling that the dialup era isn’t exactly wrong, but early adopters were well past dialing into aol, compuserve, or prodigy by then.

> latency

I think this is where we need to go.

so many experiences will become transparent with decent latency.

Not just usable, transparent.

It's like typing at the command line. If delays are less than 0.1s then a program is "interactive" and doesn't disrupt your thought process. Once you start noticing the delay you get poor results.

Bandwidth doesn’t make up for the lack of good AR/VR equipment to make use of it.

In 2005, 10 Mbps was already the norm, and in 2010, we had 100 Mbps up and down.

This is quite a galling discussion :) I get ~2.5mbs. I live in a village about 30 miles from the second biggest city in the uk.

I've really noticed how ordinary websites have become sluggish over the past few years. To their credit, Netflix is ok as long as nobody else in the house is doing anything online.

I'm thinking I'll have to start some kind of local action group to get BT to take notice and install fibre.

Even wifi can be made way faster, why don't you start a community WISP? Small nonprofit WISPs basically formed the market in the Czech Republic, which is why I had these speeds.

Related: http://www.paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html "Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy"

Really appropriate timing for this thanks!

> Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield might be a household name today, but in 2001

'Kay. Maybe in your household.

Is this really a tech downturn? Yes, some companies are laying people off, with gig-economy things particularly hard hit, but the entire economy is a mess right now. It doesn't seem like tech is relatively more affected than other industries.

I do agree with the general premise that a bubble bursting is like a forest fire clearing away all the bullshit (along with many people's livlihood), and the current tech industry has a lot of BS ripe for being cleared away.

> Is this really a tech downturn? Yes, some companies are laying people off, with gig-economy things particularly hard hit, but the entire economy is a mess right now. It doesn't seem like tech is relatively more affected than other industries.

If anything, tech seems more insulated. Where I am (Calgary), software engineering job postings seem to have grown. Granted, many of them are not that great jobs for companies that are mostly desperate to get back up and running, but work is there which is more than can be said for other fields.

http://blog.indeed.com/2020/04/30/labor-market-spotlight-job... software is doing better than average.

>'Kay. Maybe in your household.

I've used slack everyday for years and I have no idea who the founders are. I'll probably forget Stewart's name by tomorrow morning.

Would be better worded as "Slack, co-founded by Stewart Butterfield, might be a household name today, but in 2001[...]"

Slack is certainly more well known than its founder, but neither are household names unless you live in silicon valley.

As an example, have you ever watched a movie where someone uses slack? I haven't. Have you ever seen a movie where someone uses google (or some rebranded website that's obviously a google stand-in)? Of course you have. That's what a household name is.

Edit: also if it was rephrased that way the rest of the paragraph wouldn't make sense because they're discussing slack's founder well known-ness, not slack.

I worked on the Danish government electronic invoicing project, and lots of people at the time I hung out with, being government people, knew what it was.

About a decade later I worked on the JavaScript implementation of NemID, NemID being a security thing in Denmark that basically every citizen has to use.

A coworker said to me (paraphrasing): "It's great to work on NemID, because everyone knows what it is, so it's easy to explain at family dinners" which is true. very true, everyone knows in Denmark what it is.

To which I thoughtlessly replied "Oh yes, it was the same when I worked on eFaktura", his face got the momentarily shocked and dismayed expression people get when they realize they are talking to a crazy person or an idiot.

About 5 minutes later I thought to myself "what the hell are you thinking, nobody knows what eFaktura is, fool"

I think the household name status of Slack or the guy who co-founded it is sort of like the household name status of eFaktura in Denmark.

I think, for the sake of this article, you could consider Slack a household name. It doesn't mean everyone has heard of it, it just means "well-known". It's a publicly traded company, and I'd say the average person (especially in America) likely knows what it is.

I guess I don't really watch many movies that delve into 21st-century office communication, but I imagine if I did their chat app would be modeled after Slack.

Overall, though, this is a minor point compared to the rest of the article.

The average person definitely doesn't know. I've met wealthy people in their 20s in LA who don't know who Elon Musk is. Attention is hyper fractionalized.

People know who Jeff Bezos is, people don't know Tim Cook.

No one around me knows who Bezos is, but everyone knows Musk - the guy with the Teslas and rockets is kinda hard to forget, but Amazon doesn't even have a localized website here...

I think the average white collar worker at a company with a trendy software stack knows what slack is, but that’s like 5% of the population. The average American definitely does not know what Slack is.

I think more of the population might know what Church of the Subgenius Slack is than Slack the application.

Lol, the average person most definitely doesn’t know Slack - that’s pretty funny that you’d even think that. That’s like saying the average person knows C++ or react.js or Tensorflow. Slack ain’t no Excel...

All this tells us is that no executive producer has a significant stake in slack.

you are being very pedantic

Not really.

why

> My bet is always-on broadband. Virtual worlds, digital entertainment, gaming …. None of it would be possible without broadband. Today, we have about 100-250 Mbps in most modern homes.

I’m literally sat in a bank right now opening a bank account for my new ISP company [1], so this is nice to hear!

I’m hoping to deliver speeds of around 100Mbit to the rather rural area of Portugal I live in.

[1]: https://gardunha.net

Yes, the downturn may result in new technology and ideas, but almost all of them would have been possible without the pandemic. This article seems to be speculating a bit to find positives. Many of us are privileged to not be as worried about finances, but for the vast majority of Americans this is nothing like a snowday, as the author puts it. Some times are simply not as good as others, and that's okay.

After scrolling about 200vh or so for no good reason.

>I remember feeling under a pall of gloom, going about with a dark cloud over my soul and tears in my eyes.

A little bit melodramatic, but okay.

>The disparity between America’s haves and have-nots has been laid bare. The inefficiency of our legislators has made us the laughing stock of the planet (so much so that an opinion writer at the Irish Times even felt pity for America).

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, even The Irish Times.

>Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield might be a household name today

Other comments covered this nonsense.

>To be clear, those being laid off are previously pampered full-time employees and not the gig workers who are treated as disposables by these big companies.

> Yes, the future is unknown and it is worrying, but pause for a minute and think about what the future of work looks like: less peer pressure and office politics, less need to run around looking pretty or showing up to show you’re there no need to chase crazy trends and shiny objects, and a lot less emphasis on working just to make sure people see you working.

The latter statement can only apply to the former if the "You" is a "pampered full-time employee". Because I doubt the "gig workers" have seen what office politics look like.

So then, what's the point of this statement?

Rest of the article tries to imagine a future that ignores evolutionary biology, the need for people to connect through more than just a virtual presence, and proclaims we live in the past.

Lastly the "have and have nots" bullshit tirade is nicely wrapped up by the author mentioning they're an angel investor for Slack.

Oh, the author is an angel investor in slack! I guess that explains the household name thing. I was originally just assuming some extreme version of living in the silicon valley filter bubble.

Are we actually in the midst of a tech downturn though? I mean tech valuation are back to what they were pre corona pretty much. Did VC money completely dry up?

IBM has laid people off. Some companies like Uber, Lyft and Airbnb laid off a lot of tech people (even if the extent of their status as "tech" companies is questionable).

Some governments are pledging support to startups, which is indicative of some trouble: https://sifted.eu/articles/startups-government-support/

Anecdotally, I'm also hearing that startups are having a hard time finding funding, which isn't surprising in the current cautious financial climate.

Yes, I hear the anecdotes as well. I guess a lot depends on what happens in the fall/winter corona-wise. If it declines and doesn't come back you could make the case for a relatively quick recovery.

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