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Comment by japhib | Hacker News Reader

I actually really dislike this whole post. There’s a really condescending tone lurking just beneath the surface for most of it. It’s also extremely hand-wavy about the problems, their causes, AND possible solutions. Also, so whiny. At this point I don’t care if he even has any good ideas because he’s made me so mad just by his writing style.

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I started with some interest in this post but stopped reading when the author started saying nasty stuff about Bezos's wife. How is she remotely connected to this post? Why try to shame her for her looks or cosmetic choices?

The author is trying to hard to be edgy without being humourous or having the depth of idea that could have saved this.

Author belongs to the special class of people who think sounding like a dick makes them more authoritative. All their posts are like that.

> class of people who think sounding like a dick makes them more authoritative

It's a writing style. Like it or hate it.

Nonetheless, criticisms of writing style are far too cheap and shallow for HN. Be better.

I disagree, I think it's a perfectly reasonable to critique someone's writing, and by extension the author.

You can't be rude and justify it by saying "it's just my management style" or "it's just my personality".

You did not actually prove how exactly launching criticisms of the writing style over the content is not cheap. You can hate and critique the writing style all you want, but focusing on that in your HN comments is in fact the very notion of cheap commentary.

So, would you like to try again? Are you intellectually capable of providing a proper retort?

> and by extension the author.

I love how idiots on HN are justifying blatant ad hominem attacks in their commentary as being perfectly valid.

WTF is HN becoming? Are people really getting this stupid?

If the "writing style" consists of calling a random woman, one who has no connection to the topic at hand, cheap and nasty names - then it's better that such drivel is not even submitted on HN. We are better than this.

Contrarily I love this post. The first point I don't care about because I avoid C whenever possible but I agree with all the rest.

Electron is awful. So are phones. These things don't have to be so.

I don't find it whiney at all.

I do agree it's a little condescending, and that it's got a bit of a rambling flow; from semi-technical to straight bitching, all the way around to political.

And randomly insults Lauren Sánchez’s appearance; seems like a weird thing to throw into an article about software..

Perhaps he's a generation or two older, and doesn't want to go into a lot of technical detail to back up his opinion.

I think his perspective is valuable. He's seen a lot, and he's right that we could do to learn a few things from the past.

I'm probably older than he is, and it seems whiny to me.

What value is an opinion if you can't back it up?

David Hilbert published a list of 23 open problems in mathematics near the turn of the 20th century, and they served to goad the mathematics community into action for the next 75 years at least (some are still unsolved, but most were solved).

Saying "this is a problem that should be solved" might betray a lack of knowledge of an existing solution, but hand-waving such an assertion away and saying "he can't back up his opinion" isn't helpful.

If he's wrong, anyone can show why by demonstrating a correct solution to the problem - and then we'll all learn something.

That person is no David Hilbert.

As multiple comments says, many of the problems he talks about are already solved. And some of them were solved in the past and solutions abandoned.

If you want to learn something, you will be much better off starting from a post which does not ignore existing state of the field.

I'm mostly interested in this post because the contrast he draws between AWS and z/OS deeply resonates with me.

What if someone built an OS to deal with cloud-scale problems at the ground level - in the kernel? This isn't to say the likes of S3 or DynamoDB should be implemented in kernel space (far from it). But the mishmash of services AWS does offer seems to be more about solving cloud-scale problems without implementing an OS, while creating a lot of DevOps jobs and a ton of vendor lock-in.

At this point, AWS reminds me a lot of Windows Server: lots of UI, object-heavy scripting, a huge suite of expensive vendor-specific products, and a sheer inelegance about how the whole thing is built.

I also see a lot of personality similarities between Windows admins in corporate IT of the 2000s and today's AWS DevOps professionals.

Linux finally took down Windows Server because it had superior qualities as a development OS and was cheaper to run on server hardware. It also had a long history of people just building cool stuff on it...

I have no idea what innovation will finally take down AWS, but perhaps mainframe OS's are a promising trail to go down (if infrastructure-as-code could be applied).

AWS does not have to be "lots of UI" and "Windows admins" -- Terraform, CloudFormation, and other infra-as-code solution are totally a thing, and bring modern, UI-less practices to to infrastructure services. If you are in the company which has corporate culture of "let's use AWS todaly like we used Windows 20 years ago" it may seem that the whole world is like that.. but it is not, there are plenty of other companies with different cultures!

Re "OS to deal with cloud-scale problems at the ground level - in the kernel" -- I cannot make sense of that. Why on earth would it matter which OS do services use? For all that I care, Amazon could rewrite DynamoDB using AmigaOS and I would not even notice. It is all the same HTTP calls -- and this is one of the good things about the system. People can use AWS services from windows, linux, mac, mobile, even things like FreeRTOS, using any programming language they like. I guess you can create one more OS which is designed with AWS use in mind, but I doubt it will be a big game changer.

Well that might be an interesting research project, AWS (especially at the beginning) is not the right party to do that. AWS's success was because it was a drop-in replacement for existing linux servers with easier management.

I do agree this is one of the more interesting ideas in the post. But its also the least satisfying because its so vauge. "Imagine AWS but less shitty and more mainfrane like" is beyond vauge.

David hilbert's list is like the opposite of this list. It was a list of pretty fundamental problems with huge implications.

The author of this list specificly states that they are problems that should be easy to work on. That's very different. Most of the ideas are ideas that have been done in the past. Some are just bad ideas, others just didn't catch on, perhaps due to chance or fashion. None of them really have compelling stories behind them.

There's millions of things in the world that could be solved. A list of some subset is boring. The "Why" is the interesting part.

I actually tried doing the native GUI thing, but I gave up when I found out I couldn’t do that without having to reimplement something as simple as an autocomplete dropdown. Yes, the native select has something like it, but it only reacts to typing the first characters, and you can’t style the results.

I guess some would call this a feature, but the customizability of HTML makes for a lot of good things as well.

> You can't style the results

Good.

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