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Comment by massung | Hacker News Reader

Not a prediction of the future, but rather something I've found quite funny over the years: watching so many things keep repeating themselves in a never-ending cycle. My two favorite have been...

1. Compiled (native) vs. interpreted (bytecode/VMs). It's this forever cycle of "performance required" that shifts to "portability required", which lacks performance, and gradually shifts back, and repeat.

2. Local processing vs. dumb terminals and shared computing. The current "dumb terminal" phase being the idea that you can buy a $100 Chromebook and working entirely online.

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I call it the mainframe/desktop cycle.

The 90s was peak desktop. Everything was on the local hard drive.

Now everything is back on the mainframe(cloud) i fully expect it to cycle back to the desktop in some form. (we just won’t call it that)

Something like "Look at this new tech! It allows you to run your own local cloud. We call it 'fog computing' and works even when you're offline"

Edit: OMG! the term exists! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_computing

Maybe services using wasm will pull compute back to the desktop, even though end users won't realize it.

My mid-90's telco experience involved a test deployment of citrix winframe (IIRC) dumb terminals. They worked okay, but not great.

Every tech or bigco job i've had there's at least one mainframe codger doing the Kinge George "You'll be back" number from hamilton. Don't think they anticipated the non-MF cloud. Almost always among the best engineers though in the joint though, IME.

I miss genuine differences in hardware. Happy hour discussions about alpha vs sparc vs intel etc. I'm hopeful that diversity will come back around as a thing.

   I miss genuine differences in hardware. Happy hour discussions about alpha vs sparc vs intel etc. I'm hopeful that diversity will come back around as a thing.

THIS. Right now there are three mainstream choices: Win, Linux, Mac And I'm sorry- no matter how diverse your Linux distro is or even what hardware you're running it on (x86 vs ARM etc), it's still just Linux. And again, sorry- Linux just isn't interesting anymore. Extremely useful for its purpose, but it's commonplace enough to be ho-hum.

Can anyone recommend something quite a bit different that a guy could toy with? Or is this why everyone is having so much fun with 8 bit retrocomputers?

Haiku OS, maybe? It is under active development. https://www.haiku-os.org/

But a key problem with alternative OSes is that if you want to use them as daily drivers, your software choices may be limited or nonexistent. Haiku, for instance, has a WebKit-based browser, but no Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, or Safari.

I'm more interested in exotic or uncommon hardware than software.

A lot of people around me are playing with Plan 9 these days, but I haven’t paused to figure out why yet.

It's hip.

I had such high hopes for Chromebooks, I actually moved so much of my day-to-day onto some digital ocean droplets, scrapped my windows pc and bought a $150 intel-based chromebook.

I thought all I ever really did was VS Code, so I got code-server installed and everything else was mostly online anyway (Office 365, Exchange, Wordpress, etc), but the biggest pain point was the lack of a native terminal and ssh.

Even though VSCode has a great terminal built in, it seemed so wasteful to load into it just to open a terminal window.

After a couple of months, I just switched to MacOS, and still use my code-server install instead of VSCode, and 100% prefer it.

Can’t beat native…yet!

> watching so many things keep repeating themselves in a never-ending cycle

Hacker culture calls this the Wheel of Samsara.

> 2. Local processing vs. dumb terminals and shared computing. The current "dumb terminal" phase being the idea that you can buy a $100 Chromebook and working entirely online.

Joke was on the proponents of this since web-apps bloated to require a damn super computer to run them with acceptable performance, until that YC/PG-backed startup that was posted on here recently came along selling mainframe-hosted-browsers-as-a-service-over-VNC.

Oh yes... IBM 3270 terminals sending fields from the screen back to the mainframe. The first time I came across a simple HTML form I wondered where I'd seen the idea before.

And as you say, there's definitely a cycle between "everything local" and "everything central".

Both of these hits home. Working at Sun in the late 90's, Java was a big thing, and while Sun was clearly way too early in their push for a universal virtual machine that could run anything, at the time people were complaining that Java could never be used for real software because of it not being natively compiled and using a GC.

Well, now everyone are using Javascript and Python, and no one seems to be complaining.

The second point is true as well. No matter where the pendulum is at the moment, there are always going to be people trying to push it in the other direction. Sun was again ahead of the time by pushing the Javastation, which was trying to do what the Chromebooks are doing. Then there was the Sunray of course, which was really cool, but a bit too specialised.

> Well, now everyone are using Javascript and Python, and no one seems to be complaining.

Read more Hacker News and you'll see complaints about both languages.

Read more Hacker News and you will see complaints about anything and everything.

That's just the good old-fashioned dialectic : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic

> Compiled (native) vs. interpreted (bytecode/VMs)

The debate today is mostly AoT vs JIT compilers, I don't see anyone bring up VMs unless they're talking about how slow Python is.

I also don't see anyone bringing up "portability" anymore - compilers support all the architectures people care about, while libraries and APIs are designed to be platform agnostic as far as they can be while developers recognize there is no such thing as portable software (and where portable software is absolutely required, it shall run in the browser).

Tell that to all the electron apps out there. ;)

V8 is a JIT compiler

Another one along that line that I've seen over and over: "smart" hardware vs. "dumb" hardware. Back in the days of analog modems, we had ones that were built on dedicated modem hardware, and the "Winmodems" that were basically just a DAC and an ADC. Or, the smart laser printers with built in PostScript interpreters vs. dumb printers where everything gets done in the driver.

dumb terminal happened, it's called the browser. Most folks live in their browsers and get on by fine with tablets, phones and chromebooks

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