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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

> Think about how amazing it could be if your web browser could automatically re-design the low-level system instructions 10 stacks down to achieve a higher efficiency in loading web pages.

This sounds great in theory, but in practice, a system that has that much dynamic adaptation has brutally steep performance cliffs and is massively complex. I for one, will be opting out of that giant vertical slice of hell. This is one of the _good_ reasons for having layers: separate failure zones, separate levels of abstraction--true reuse and modularity. Bugs break all that.

And no, given the hallucinations of large models just in the natural language space, I do not want to reason through the mad ravings of a tripping AI to debug a monster pile that happens to make web property X go 10% faster.

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ELI5 what "10 stacks down" means?

I havent heard this phrase before.

I assume that the author means "Framework XYZ in TypeScript running on JS running on V8, which is written in C++, compiled by clang, running on Linux with glibc N, running on VMWare, running on x86, running on the Rapture Cove microarchitecture." I don't know if there are 10 I could name, but stacks are deep.

Yup, that graphics stacks could easily add a few layers for ya! When I was at a gfx card mfr, there were many compatibility and shim layers :)

i’d honestly love a full accounting of those stacks from browser all the way down to transistor. almost feel like we need to record it for posterity in case anything happens to our civilization

OSI alone would give you 7 stacks

True, but when learning OSI in 90s - they were always refered to as 'layers' of the same protocol.

Stacks where completely stand-alone applications connected which were not layers of the same protocol/system.

I think that the simple way is to refer to them as stacks now, but if you were raised on LAYERS - refering to OSI as 'stacks' feels foreign.

It appearsthat as we atomoze / containerize various teck, we now thing of them as 'stacks' rather than layers.

It seems that 'layers' are now 'services' rather.

arent many of the OSI layers effectively collapsed? eg TCP/IP has like 90% market share compared to alternatives and effectively function as a single layer. im not sure about the DNS layer but i think theres a case to be made there too

Related: The OSI Networking Model defines 7 layers (or stacks) to clearly define and separate the duties of each level of the networking. Having clear levels makes troubleshooting and debugging layers.

In practice there's only 4 or 5 layers depending on who you ask.

Thanks - I have always mentally separated 'stacks' from 'layers', specifically in networking.

I imagined stacks as tech1+tech2+techN

I just hadnt heard that phrase before...

30 years deep in ops.

When I read anything about the OSI model it always reminds me of this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26607983

> I have said before that I believe that teaching modern students the OSI model as an approach to networking is a fundamental mistake that makes the concepts less clear rather than more. The major reason for this is simple: the OSI model was prescriptive of a specific network stack designed alongside it, and that network stack is not the one we use today. In fact, the TCP/IP stack we use today was intentionally designed differently from the OSI model for practical reasons.

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