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Comment by longrod | Hacker News Reader

> Fast gigabit internet is cheap and everywhere (5G or mesh wifi)

Right. Most of the world doesn't even have 5G yet. Besides no matter how fast you get with internet, its still internet. There is still latency which makes for a frustrating UX.

I wouldn't want to be fully cloud based even if I had free internet for life. That's a recipe for disaster. The best thing about local stuff is...that it's local. I don't need an internet to access it. That's extremely convenient.

But putting that aside there's still cost of running things live (outside the internet cost). And why would I want to pay extra for something I can easily run on my machine locally? Live is for production code that multiple people will access. Local is good enough for me.

I would even prefer to self host most of the stuff locally on a Raspberry Pi or something instead of a cloud hosting. It's just so reliable.

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I've spent the last couple of years working in domains where users have very limited connectivity. In-fact I lived in one myself[0].

It can be a bit of a mind shift for urban people to internalise that the internet is not always there.

[0] https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/220205.html

It's extremily frustrating how little thought many dev teams give to the idea that users won't always have super fast internet available. It really undercuts the grandiose corporate talk about inclusion and equity when users in rural and poor areas are effectively told to pound sand.

One example that gets me is that Google Maps broke the ability to save points on the map without internet. It had worked fine for years since it could easily be saved locally, but now the regression has been around for a year+ and they clearly don't care. If you live your life in a modern city it's no biggie, but it cripples some of the main functionality for everyone who lives or travels to areas with poor connectivity.

> It's extremily frustrating how little thought many dev teams give to the idea that users won't always have super fast internet available.

We need to fix those places. Not permanently anchor the rest of the world to a decade ago.

I do think that cities should all have high quality internet available but the notion that every inch of the glode should have high speed internet, and software should be developed to that baseline, I totally disagree with.

For one, it's extremely fragile. There's only so much redundency that can be built into this infrastructure and I'd rather not see society completely grind to a halt because internet got knocked out.

Secondly, I don't even want to be connected to high speed internet every second of my life. Some people in tech find this hard to believe, but there are benefits to unplugging at times that many people appreciate.

Lastly, I shudder to think what privacy would look like in this world. Not having any escape from surveillance would lead to a grim society.

> Secondly, I don't even want to be connected to high speed internet every second of my life.

Then don't. Disconnect your device. The rest of us shouldn't do without something because you don't like it.

I don't get this response at all.

I'm in a team developing software for people in areas with rubbish internet. It's a bit above my pay grade to fix infrastructure problems in foreign lands. It's probably more cost effective to let the software deal with it gracefully.

And in my case.. the infrastructure was fine, but a sheep literally chewed through it. Do we ban sheep? Granted he should have been better fence... but the point is shit happens and help out in the country can take weeks to materialize.

It depends, most problems are above your paygrade but we can still state they should be fixed.

But you guys agree anyway: but handling "gracefully" slow speeds you dont anchor the fast and still provide to the slow. The keyword is gracefully.

You cannot simply say "it should be different" and then pretend that reality is what you think it should be.

And yes, we probably should be doing that. But in the meanwhile those places still exist, and will continue to exist for quite some time.

> You cannot simply say "it should be different" and then pretend that reality is what you think it should be.

I was responding to a similar attitude. We can pretend caring about shit internet is important for software makers. Sometimes it is. Usually it isn't. Simply saying "it should be different" and then pretending that it is, is equally silly.

We are firmly in "wishing for a better world" territory. Others wish that other people cater to their shitty connections. I feel that that would anchor us to shitty connections, so I wish for fewer shitty connections.

It's all pipedreams anyway.

recently I've had a week long internet outage, and it's really put in perspective how much I'd like things to be local.

You don't need it until you do.

It is extremely difficult to actually get good internet on short notice, at least in the UK.

Mobile, while technically capable of this, does not fit the bill because their business model depends on locking people into long-term contracts or using it as a marketing platform (I've tried launching a startup that does away with all this, it's impossible).

Right now nobody will sell you a SIM with unlimited data (excluding Three because their "unlimited data" is so oversubscribed that it's unusable) or a large enough data cap no matter how much you are willing to pay. Your only option is to either sign up for a yearly contract (which involves wasting time with support if you ever need to make a change or need to increase your data cap) or use Pay & Go SIMs and top them up regularly which involves using an IVR and listening to minutes of upselling random bullshit - there's no API and the billing is intentionally complex (depositing money isn't enough - you have to use that balance to buy a "bundle" of data, and you can't stack these bundles meaning you need to do this every time it runs out).

BT sell broadband with a mobile fallback if the broadband fails. I'm pretty sure one of the other ISPs offers it too. I've never tried it though.

Vodafone sell unlimited data 5G SIMs, but with a contract. I replaced fibre with one.

You seem to be looking for a no-contract unlimited data plan? Isn’t that just PAYG?

> You seem to be looking for a no-contract unlimited data plan? Isn’t that just PAYG?

Kind of - I did mention PAYG and why it's not ideal and that it feels like you're still fighting the provider. Topping it up is a nightmare and the billing system doesn't allow the scenario of "here's a few hundred bucks, give me internet consistently until this runs out". Instead, you have to fight with it every time your "bundle" expires and you can't stack them in advance even if you deposit enough cash on the account.

EE's biggest bundle on PAYG is 100GB for 30£ which is reasonable from a pricing point of view but unfortunately doesn't last long and forces you to top-up and reset the bundle via the IVR every time it runs out. I want to be able to put 300£ on the account and get 1TB of data in one go so it lasts a couple weeks before I need to top-up again (topping up relies on the IVR which means taking the SIM out of the 4G router and putting it in a phone then sitting though minutes of bullshit upselling).

to further this along, often i code without internet and just have VMs on my laptop. I think assuming internet is everywhere for development is wrong.

I'd go so far as to say that "Internet will always be available" is the new generation of "Works on my dev machine, thus it should work everywhere", which was a (common?) assumption over the last few decades.

Aren't people moving to cloud dev environments to solve the issue of "it works on my machine (using emulators, etc)"?

Sure, but by doing that they move under the above mentioned assumption that (fast) internet is always available to all the users, devs, etc.

AFAIK the last big push to get out of "it works on my machine" was the JVM which has become a bloated, inefficient mess that a vast chunk of the industry uses anyway, because most often it's deemed "good enough" and Java, Kotlin etc. devs are relatively easy to find and/or train compared to "native" development in say C/C++, Rust, etc.

Portable environments =/= online only environments

The bullet point you quoted there sits directly under this heading:

> Make the ultimate developer experience wishlist for the average rich-country developer in 2030

Not the OP, but I'm fairly certain that is the point: Fast gigabit internet cheap and everywhere won't happen by 2030. 5G isn't even everywhere yet, so making it fast and cheap everywhere happening by 2030 is highly unlikely.

Hence the term "wishlist".

I think the move to WFH has accelerated this shift (a worthwhile tradeoff IMO)

Previously when working with a company (small startup or large company) you'd have an office LAN and a few servers, or a corporate VPN which your office network was on, and Openstack, or other 'local' services available.

Now that a large number (the majority?) of devs are working remote, if you want local/internal services you need to get everyone's buggy VPN software configured correctly

If cloud services don't need a VPN to use, why would companies' self-hosted services?

Because they have enough staff to detect and fix vulnerabilities within hours, if necessary. For a company without these resources (and maybe even larger ones), hiding servers from the internet can greatly reduce your attack surface.

because the company's IT people can't manage to keep all those self hosted systems up to date and secure

I work on buses, trains and airplanes, in cafés, Biergarten, parks and hotels with bad wi-fi. There's no fast internet there. Even things loaded from a CDN brought my development speed to a crawl.

If it can't run offline on my machine, I don't use it.

Another aspect is portability. If the only requirement is "some sort of linux box", it's easier to deploy code anywhere, and to share it with anyone.

It also encouraged me to develop websites that work well on bad connections. Small websites that load the important bits early, and that communicate async request states properly.

I very much agree with this and did exactly the same thing not too long ago. I have a few small apps running on my Raspberry Pi. I converted it to run from a flash drive and it has been very, very solid for about a year now.

> cheap and everywhere

Cheapest gigabit I can find around here is $100+/month. Yeah, "cheap".

It's all relative. Small town me is paying $100 USD for 150 megabit.

Can we settle on mine's expensive, yours is crazy expensive?

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