Time to say good bye to localhost? | Hacker News Reader

Time to say good bye to localhost?

koding.com

32 pointssidcool38 comments

A minor rant:

Maybe instead of building some bizarre slideshow thing and including an absolutely ridiculous link-baity title like "goodbye to localhost?"[1], you write up a simple explanation of the point you're trying to get across.

[1]: For crying out fraking loud. Get rid of localhost? Do you have even the most basic understanding of how modern computers function? Yes. Of course. Get rid of localhost. Go ahead and do that and then see if your X server, or just about every other daemon on your machine, keeps running.

edit: I kindof got this slideshow to work (although it feels like it wants to crash my browser. I guess it makes sense that I should have to upgrade my video card to view some pictures over the internet. That is a really advanced function.), and...is this just some web based VIM?

"Take some thing that has existed for 30 years and...uh...the cloud!".

Please.

The guy in the pictures sure is attractive, though. He looks very serious, coding is very serious. Seriously.

I agree with your rant, but modern distributions are using Unix sockets for the X server. For example Fedora uses /tmp/.X11-unix/X0.

Ah, thanks for the info :).

I'll admit I haven't had to mess around with X for...probably 5 years? The last I remember, you'd run an X server on your machine, then your window manager would connect to it on the loopback device.

The point stands, though, that "getting rid of localhost" is incredibly naive.

blhack - co-f here - i'm sure you know what we mean to say is not let's take your computers away :) it's just, let's forget about setting up our localhosts each time we need to clone&run a friggin github project that makes you yum,brew,apt-get,npm,make,easy_install,gem and potentially mess up your environment.. we will give one in the cloud, each time you need one, and you can trash it when u'r done. or keep hacking.. cheers!

That makes sense to me now, but I didn't understand that from 'good bye to localhost'.

Good rant is good.

Sorry. No. Everything that kills my productivity while I am offline is a no-go. Reasons for being offline:

  * I just don't want to (e.g. Distraction free working)
  * I am on a train
  * I am on a plane
  * I am in a foreign country and 3G is far too expensive
  * Mobile internet is still spotty
  * My internet provider has DNS problems (happened last week)
  * Street workers hit my internet cable
  * Other strange circumstances called "life"

Also: Tabs within a page that is displayed in a browser that has tabs that is displayed on a desktop? Well, great. How about a vim split in that bash tab?

Depends what the upside was really. If they could continuously run my test suite in the background at near instant speeds then I'd jump onboard.

If you ever worked at a company that uses a shared server for development, you know that even 20 concurrent developers can bring a sizable machine (not top, but also not bad) down to its knees if they run some sizable framework in dev mode. Code running amok (oops, infinite loop again), test suites running all the time, databases being overloaded by people doing 'some load testing'.

I don't believe that koding will give you an environment that is in any way better than your local stuff (except when they ask the full hosting costs per developer). So the idea that they continuously run your test suite in any way better than a proper setup on your local machine is wishful thinking.

valid points. obviously what we can give for free is not a 4g ram and 8 cores, it's a small instance that runs most of the things- look at it from the bright side, ur program will halt sooner, in case of infinite loop :) and if a company chooses koding to be their dev environment, they are free to provide any amount of ram or cpu per developer, in that case, everything will work as you expect.

No, probably never. Why?

* Work in transit (plane/train/ outside of reach of a network, yes this exists)

* AWS or whatever cloud provider goes down

* Problem with justice or hackers that go into my server and just delete the hell of it

* Responsiveness is always better in local (I am not speaking about performance, responsiveness)

* Not everybody goes in the cloud, even to deploy... I have for dev and prod for my own project a dedicated server which is way faster than anything you can order on Amazon.

On the brightside the best way to do it is to be able to coordinates these two approaches and being able to switch from "In the cloud" to local easily would be a big plus.

But just please stop with these fake "silver bullet" solutions all the time. It does not make your product look cool or attractive to experts, it makes you look like a clown.

I understand your points. I have been thinking about that as well. I never experience any of your points before though and there are a lot of cloud solutions out there (e.g. Dropbox use AWS and I use Dropbox; Google "Online IDE" and you will get what I mean).

But, given your context, I think cloud solution is just not for you, including koding. So, there is no necessity to use harsh words on koding, keep it for yourself. Cheers! =D

PS: thanks for your comment, it gave me some new insights that I never think of before. :)

So does not work in Firefox at all (I mean even the — almost trivial — form does not display, not just the preview), slow as hell to load (even with basically no content), seconds of FOUC for the form (of which all fields but one disappear), and the preview... let's just say it doesn't quite spell out what the product is supposed to be (a cloud/in-browser development and code management thingie with some facebooky wankery on top.

Complete with stuttery transitions and weird styling flashes in Safari.

Got to say, if that's the hook I'm not exactly hopeful.

The preview website works fine and perfect on my MacBook with Firefox though. Try give it some times to load, or is your internet 'fast' enough?

Cheers! =D

I'm hitting the up arrow and nothing is happening? Chrome on Win7.

EDIT: reloaded and it worked. Didn't see the e-mail sign up before, it was just sliver of the top of the slideshow.

I didn't even see the tiny up arrow. I tried scrolling with the mouse wheel and it didn't work, so my immediate reaction is "oh, goody another mystery meat web 2.0 navigation paradigm".

Not a good start to show me your great product when you hide it below the fold and make it difficult to navigate.

It's pretty, but it's too clever. Just show the slideshow carousel. Why hide it?

Also the copy is awkward:

"We're a few developers who think there is a better way to work." => "There's a better way to work." Of course you're a few developers, that's who develops things. Save the first person for the "About Us".

EDIT: and "Isn't it time to say goodbye to localhost?" => "Say goodbye to localhost." Nevermind that the pitch doesn't immediately make sense, it should at least be direct.

> Want a preview? Press ↑ key to activate

Pressed it and nothing happened.

your browser is out-dated? do you use IE?

give the webpage some times to load, and try again.

I tried on my Macbook with Chrome and Firefox, it works perfectly! =)

FF 10 on W7

It actually looks really nice, especially for budding developers, though the thought that I'd be limited to whatever technologies the platform supports would make me wary of actually making the switch. (You get a terminal but what kind of access to the machine do you get?) I could definitely see the advantages for PHP development, where you hardly ever use any external dependencies except for a database anyway.

This only seems appealing to people who:

1. Can't set up a development environment on their local machine for some reason (tablet?).

2. Also aren't smart enough to provision their own server.

3. Don't mind having all of their data 'in the cloud.'

4. Don't mind being at the mercy of a startup for mission critical features.

Along that vein, you wont see koding used for:

1. Anything mission critical.

2. Anything 'hacky,' because the hackers will be developing on their own machines (localhost or not).

3. Anything commercial (by smart companies, at least) because of the risk of code theft.

4. Anything that requires actual security.

What does that leave? I'm not really sure. I see two possible outcomes - koding becomes the pastebin (or github) of virtual machines, or koding becomes the basecamp of the 'DevOps' world. Can either of those things exist and provide a profit? What will the 'killer app' be?

The guy staring at me in all the screenshots really creeps me out. Hopefully that is not a feature of the actual product!

I feel like they broke the web by not supporting normal scrolling. It's 12:30am here, I'm tired...the help text for the arrow key is poor contrast..without your comment and my confusion at the original site, I never would have figured out that they broke scrolling [on purpose].

Agreed, cool feature but they should have also integrated scrolling to advance as well.

Only if looking in the mirror does the same, I suppose :)

I'm sorry about my face guys.

The webpage wouldn't load on Firefox or Chrome, it needs Internet Explorer.

The screenshots of the product look quite nice, it's obvious that they have put a lot of effort in to making it. However as harsh it might sound, i can't consider a service seriously when they fail at the very basic concept of having a landing page that works with the two major browsers. Yea i understand they are in 'beta' but still, we are talking about basic stuff here, they didn't bother to see if there landing page can be viewed by the 75% of the potential users?

Oh and regarding the actual product, sorry but me and localhost are BFFs

Works fine in Chrome for me. Firefox is broken, though, which is pretty lame, I agree.

And how is that better than localhost?

If I wanted to do development on different machines, I'd use git to sync. With the advantage of being able to work when there is no network. And if the HDD crashes, I know that I made backups, I never know when I host my stuff in some "cloud".

1.) You do not need to configure your local environment - everything is there and ready for you to use (e.g. git, PHP, python, ruby, pearl, terminal, code editor). 2.) Git is supported. Thus you can work offline if you also setup Git on your local machine. 3.) "Cloud" = can access from everywhere as long as you have the internet and browser, so you HDD crash? No worries, buy new HDD, access to the internet and you can continue your development straight away because your file is there. 4.) You know where you host your stuffs: koding. Isn't that simple and easy to remember? Cheers! =D

Koding is currently in a private beta, for more info check out their blog: http://blog.koding.com/2012/03/beta-update-new-features-wide...

"Isn't it about time to say goodbye to localhost?" is a terrible hook for what might be an interesting concept. I'm not sure if this will work out as a product on the other hand,

Whatever does that mean?

Do all your development in the cloud? Definitely needs some clarification.

How would this be better than a vagrant box and a github or bitbucket repo?

Any chance that it could hook into my local editor?

Doesn't seem to do anything on my Macbook w/ Chrome.

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