[HN Gopher] Weathering Software Winter (2022)
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Weathering Software Winter (2022)
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 126 points
Date : 2025-08-12 03:05 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (100r.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (100r.co)
| gnabgib wrote:
| (2022) Discussion in 2023 (123 points, 28 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34219654
| Animats wrote:
| Right. From the title, I thought it was going to be about
| programmer survival in the age of LLMs.
| kookamamie wrote:
| It is still unclear to me what the author wants to build. The
| story is cool to the level hippies-on-a-boat can be, but I'm
| unsure of its message, apart from software requiring internet can
| be tricky while at seas.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Yeah. I'm skeptical that software made for 2 people on a boat
| in international waters is going to generalize to people living
| on land under the ongoing American situation
|
| It's good for them, but the only person I know who owns a boat
| is richer than me, and I'm already richer than basically all my
| friends
| poink wrote:
| I agree with your first paragraph, but there are lots of
| basically-broke people who live on boats
|
| Old sailboats can be had for practically (and in many cases
| actually) nothing. If you're reasonably handy and willing to
| learn you can do all the maintenance they require yourself
|
| Boats can be some of the cheapest housing there is, even more
| so if you want to live somewhere picturesque
|
| (There are, of course, significant downsides)
| b_e_n_t_o_n wrote:
| I've met people who live on boats, they work odd jobs to buy
| scrap parts to fix their boats themselves and eat mostly fish
| that they catch. Just like travelling in general, you can
| basically do it on nothing if you wish.
| ioseph wrote:
| I'm sorry but no this is fantasy, unless you plan on
| everything failing in under decade to actually look after
| your boat takes money. Even salvaging a boat that's sunk
| can be very expensive.
|
| For example, a through-hull needs replacing. Sure you could
| find a secondhand one that fits, but you still need to have
| it hauled out to replace.
| strken wrote:
| I have only very brief experience from once owning half
| of a 15 foot fibreglass runabout fixer-upper, but if
| you've got a 30 foot yacht then can't you just stick it
| on a trailer yourself? I feel like you're imagining a
| much bigger craft.
| hansvm wrote:
| On top of that, dry docks are a common free amenity in
| boating/fishing towns, just using the tide to do your
| dirty work.
| cess11 wrote:
| They thoroughly document their lives, you could just go check
| whether this skepticism is warranted.
| lmm wrote:
| Very often people doing this kind of thing neglect to
| mention a significant safety net (e.g. parental wealth)
| that radically changes the kind of things you can do even
| when you never touch it.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| It's fair to question the funding sources of lodgings in
| a pragmatic way, and doubly so when one lives on a boat.
|
| In the case of 100R, they seem to have had a lot of help
| from Patreon folks (per Wikipedia), though I don't know
| if this was their sole source of income or funding for
| their lifestyle. It's interesting that folks can live
| like this and share it with the world, and I don't think
| that these particular folks have any ulterior motives,
| and I have not heard anything bad about them. They seem
| like they're fairly aboveboard (pun intended).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Rabbits
| cess11 wrote:
| "To buy Pino Devine & I each got a 10,000$ bank loan. We
| had savings, but didn't want to be left with an empty
| account after the purchase."
|
| https://100r.co/site/buying_a_sailboat.html#bankloan
|
| If you go read their logs you'll find that they come
| across as people that aren't aware of such a "significant
| safety net" if there is one so even if it exists it is
| unlikely to have had a relevant influence on their work.
|
| They've been excruciatingly open about their experiences
| and what they've learned along the way, including
| pecuniary matters.
| lmm wrote:
| > If you go read their logs you'll find that they come
| across as people that aren't aware of such a "significant
| safety net" if there is one so even if it exists it is
| unlikely to have had a relevant influence on their work.
|
| On the contrary, they read exactly like people in that
| situation to me. How many people like that do you have
| experience with?
| cess11 wrote:
| Yes, I have, and they were not as meticulously frugal as
| the 100r couple have been. When they've described having
| contact with family it's been things like this:
|
| "We got a message from Iridium saying our account was
| about to be suspended. We think we may have used up all
| our data. We can't check the weather, but SMS still work
| and we're trying to get in contact with them to append
| more minutes. Devine's dad is also helping us with it.
| What a shit show. We should have purchased more, but
| also, I don't know how it is possible that we went
| through it all. We did have some issues with the device,
| with it stalling during some internet calls... maybe this
| ate up extra minutes. Either way, this situation is shit,
| as we don't know what's going on out there and we can't
| broadcast our position."
|
| "We received a message from Devine's dad, saying that
| he'd contacted the customer service at Iridium and that
| we had indeed, run out of data. Our plan was topped up,
| and we're able to update our position on the live map,
| check emails and to check the weather -- finally!"
|
| It's been much more common that they've made friends at
| sea and earned knowledge and help that way, besides the
| business they do.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| The vast majority of people living on boats are very, very
| broke. You can buy an old sailboat for about the price of a
| second-hand car, fix it up yourself, set sail, and now you
| don't pay rent/mortgage/utilities...
|
| (source: I grew up on such a sailboat, and we were broke as
| shit)
| donkeybeer wrote:
| These people seem to treat it as hipster bs art and not a
| means to actually get work done. For real work I'd say the
| solution is still the same, use tech that doesn't change
| every week and avoid needing internet for installation such
| as a package repo we know won't exist a few years later.
| jonahx wrote:
| > but I'm unsure of its message
|
| My takeaway:
|
| Modern software stacks are usually cloud-dependent, and much
| bigger and more complex than they need to be, especially for
| offline, low-bandwidth, or low computing power use cases.
|
| Small, simple, useful software can be written for these use
| cases and has ownership and longevity benefits.
|
| Not a groundbreaking message, but a true one. And brought home
| by their interesting cirumstances.
| cess11 wrote:
| They're building games, interactive fiction and music software,
| for example. Famously they've invented a rather portable
| platform for software development that is more like a Commodore
| 64 or Amiga than MICROS~1 Visual Studio.
| mfro wrote:
| s/want/have built: https://100r.co/site/uxn.html
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| >When your connection to the internet fails and that the software
| locks up, that skill that you thought was yours was actually
| entirely owned by someone, and can be taken away.
|
| There's a middle ground between locally installed software that
| fails as soon as you don't have an internet connection for the
| phone home, and locally installed software that can be used
| totally unplugged. You can stick a countdown timer within the
| software that allows 7, 30, 90 etc days of consecutive offline
| interactivity before the user needs to phone home again. Heck, if
| you really wanted to, you could sell copies or subscriptions to
| that software at varying price points depending on how many days
| the user expects to need - if it's a feature people want, it's a
| feature you can price in.
|
| Why isn't this model more common? Mm, plenty of reasons. You need
| to implement pretty sophisticated techniques under the hood to
| deter software crackers, for one, which aren't required when you
| make an API call every sixty seconds to an Azure Function. For
| two the modal human mind really hates middle grounds of this
| sort. I actually suspect that some "online-only" local software
| implements something like this under the hood, and just doesn't
| advertise it, or perhaps gates it being being an enterprise
| feature. (I have unfortunately learned firsthand that advertising
| my software as "works up to 30 days off-grid" gets considerably
| more ire than "ah, sorry, it does require an internet connection,
| everything's in the cloud these days, you know how it is".)
|
| But probably the most common reason is simply that most people
| don't need it! Most regular people aren't using software at all
| when they go off grid.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I have a deep hatred for software with x days offline
| capability. It's _not fun_ to discover something won 't work
| because someone else had a bad model of what's "reasonable"
| when you're doing field work in rural Mongolia or wherever.
| It's happened to me twice. Once I was lucky enough to
| accidentally discover this before leaving (PDF reader), and
| once while already in the field (drone software).
|
| Now I'm a lot more diligent about FOSS for anything important.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Tell me more, if you're able. What happened?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Not much more to say. Back when I was actively doing field
| work as an archaeologist, I'd go out to the middle of
| nowhere for months. There was lots of software needed and
| some of it had those kinds of license checks. You
| anticipate and prepare for computer failure in fieldwork,
| but it's still irritating when the failure is caused by a
| person instead of the environment.
| linehedonist wrote:
| I don't think such a middle ground is really realistic. There
| are plenty of apps that are just thin wrappers around their
| backend calls and are no more capable of working offline than I
| am of going without food or water. But if a program is capable
| of being fully functional offline for 30 days, then what does
| it really need to call home for, other than as a confirmation
| of payment?
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Well, you're right it isn't realistic, that's why everything
| is a SaaS nowadays. That's what the second order effects of
| this kind of expectation generates.
|
| >Other than as confirmation of payment
|
| This is the wrong way around, imo. Confirmation of payment is
| like the #1 problem a business has to solve. If the business
| can't reliably turn a profit by running their software on
| your machine, then they will run it on their own machines, no
| matter how much it degrades the user experience. The end
| result is a hollowed out market for anything local and not
| offered totally for free, which sadly and ironically excludes
| a great deal of valuable software.
| Uptrenda wrote:
| Such a rambling mess of an article (no offense.) Author just
| blabbered on about obscure-nothingness and nothing cohesive ever
| appeared. I suggest putting together one single philosophy and
| posting it. We don't need to see every piece of obscure info that
| made you believe something. It's confusing as all hell to read.
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| Not everything needs to be told in a YouTube short. Fwiw I
| thought it was well told and illuminating.
| yard2010 wrote:
| This couple IS the philosophy. Sailing and making stuff as no
| one even dares. I recommend reading more stuff from them. They
| probably know something that we don't.
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| > I suggest putting together one single philosophy and posting
| it.
|
| It's right there, linked to from TFA's first paragraph:
|
| https://100r.co/site/philosophy.html
| hedari wrote:
| Amazing read that resonated with me deeply.
|
| It's not about the boat or the cloud. Yes, they are self-imposed
| restrictions, but not the actual point the author is trying to
| make. The message I got from the text was that all these modern
| systems we use hurt the preservability of software. The text was
| about the author's journey in finding a solution for preserving
| their software for generations to come. A solution that if
| everything is lost, the runtime can be recreated easily so that
| the actual software can be run again.
|
| This is something that I have been thinking about myself a lot
| and it was interesting to see that the thought-process has been
| similar with LISP, Oberon, Smalltalk, Forth etc.
|
| It's like a carpenter creating his own tools before building a
| dining room table.
| dexwiz wrote:
| I believe the author writes code as an artistic outlet. They use
| the word beauty/beautiful 12 times, the word love 8 times, and
| little (in a cute diminutive way) 10 times. The expresses a
| relationship with coding that most people don't have. It would be
| like an author expressing love for a pencil. Some may agree, but
| many would say "its just a pencil, the words are what matter." In
| a similar way programmers may say "its just a language, the
| features are what matter." Even then, Forth is chosen in the end
| for completely stylistic reasons.
|
| Even the nostalgia factor for choosing a Forth is contrived.
| There are plenty of portable, modern languages that will likely
| be runnable for decades. Lua is embeddable and will likely be put
| into new systems for decades, and can run on low power hardware.
| But Forth is ancient. Its like learning calligraphy. Either you
| are in a niche, or you just love doing it. But no one uses it for
| the daily correspondences, they have messaging apps now.
|
| I do agree that everything being connected to the cloud
| definitely excludes people and places. And that place may be
| anytime in the future. But you can combat this with more modern
| solutions.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > There are plenty of portable, modern languages that will
| likely be runnable for decades
|
| I'm actually not sure this is true. There are certainly a few
| quite venerable languages that will be around unchanged for
| decades (i.e. Java).
|
| I wouldn't however take the bet, that, say, Go or Rust will be
| able to compile code written now, on whatever the current
| compiler version is in 2035. I certainly wouldn't take the bet
| that you will still be able to download the correct dependency
| versions from a package manager after 10 years...
| XorNot wrote:
| But that's going to be true of any package manager. You're
| betting on Maven existing over the same timeframe as Go.
|
| But a go-vendored repository is buildable indefinitely, and
| the compiler itself is easy to bootstrap.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > You're betting on Maven existing over the same timeframe
| as Go.
|
| Maven is already of legal drinking age in the USA. I'm
| willing to take those odds ;)
| binaryturtle wrote:
| You can't even get Rust of Go to run easily on a slightly
| older machine (e.g. try it on a OS X Yosemite machine)
| because all the compatibility issues. That's not even getting
| to all the "online" dependencies. This are two of the worst
| language ecosystems in this regard (I don't know anything
| that would be worse actually.)
|
| No such problems with complex C compiler packages.
|
| Hopefully the gcc Rust project can mitigate some of the
| issues for Rust (since everyone wants to rust-ify long
| standing projects these days and hence breaking backwards
| compatibility of the respective packages just to be "hip &
| trendy")
| capyba wrote:
| Reading about the `left-pad` incident (almost 10 years ago
| itself!) gave me an incredibly strong aversion to
| dependencies in my own projects. I suppose that like the
| author, I care a lot about understanding the foundations and
| ensuring that whatever I build can stand on its own, as much
| as that may be. I think this philosophy has helped me learn a
| lot more than if I had just focused on "build as fast as
| possible", but definitely limited the "amount" of projects
| I've completed.
|
| I love writing in C because a) it's simple and I can
| understand everything that's going on and b) I feel confident
| that it'll compile just fine years from now, because that's
| how that particular ecosystem has worked and likely will
| continue to work.
|
| Recently, I've been writing new projects in Rust, which has
| far better ergonomics but is far more complicated and causes
| me to cede control to the whims of the community and the
| compiler. I'm sure there are simple ways to ensure that I can
| use the same compiler for all new platforms that will support
| it, but just like everything in the modern day (for both
| better and worse), is implicitly and explicitly designed to
| always be updated.
|
| Rust has become much more stable in the past few years, but
| you're right to expect breaking changes in the next ten
| years. I love using the language, it's been fun to learn and
| I (hope) it's helped me write far more robust code, but I'm
| sure in the future there will be many times where I'll miss
| C.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I think my general approach to Rust (and to C++ before
| that) in this type of scenario, is to treat it as a "better
| C", and take the absolute minimum of dependencies I can get
| away with
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Choosing Forth isn't simply an affectation, it has some
| desirable technical properties:
|
| > Forth is, to my knowledge, the most compact language allowing
| high level constructs. It is so compact that Collapse OS' Forth
| implementation achieves self-hosting with about the same amount
| of resources than its assembler counterpart!
|
| https://collapseos.org/forth.html
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23450287
| notarobot123 wrote:
| I respect this attempt to create something principled, small and
| self-contained. Uxn is great as a "toy" system or a teaching
| resource but also as something that contributes to the diversity
| of ideas of what computing is/can be.
|
| I'm skeptical about some kind of catastrophic disaster that makes
| popular technologies inaccessible (the pandemic demonstrated our
| strong impulse towards business-as-usual even when the world is
| burning) but having ecosystems that aren't as vulnerable to
| corporate capture and exploitation seems valuable in its own
| right.
| lazide wrote:
| The world was definitely not burning during the pandemic. That
| is something like WW1/2, smallpox, etc.
|
| It only lightly toasted during the pandemic. Arguably, we're
| getting more actual disruption now with Tariffs and Visa tit-
| for-tat
| PeterStuer wrote:
| "the playfulness of Microsoft Bob" somehow made me remember
| Microsoft Comic Chat.[1]
|
| Having toons with chat bubbles somehow made the foaming at the
| mouth mad ramblings of all those burgeoning future reddit
| moderators feel a little more benign.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat
| thom wrote:
| Annoyed every other IRC user though.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Interesting couple of guys. Loved the story.
|
| I have always been skeptical of dependency (both libraries and
| connected runtime services), but there's a balance.
|
| There's things that _we just can't do_ , without a dependency. We
| stand on the shoulders of giants.
|
| Right now, I'm developing and refining a demonstration
| client/server app, for a future article on implementing PassKeys
| on iOS. I require two dependencies. On the server end, I use the
| PHP lbuchs/WebAuthn library, and on the client end, I use
| KeychainSwift.
|
| The first dependency is a requirement. Implementing that
| functionality myself, would be prohibitive. The second dependency
| is one that I could do myself, but that would add a lot of
| complexity to an already fairly complex project.
|
| The moral of the story is that I _always_ have to justify _every_
| dependency that I use, and that justification involves a lot of
| figuring out the pros and cons. I'm always a bit discouraged,
| when I see folks throwing in dependencies, willy-nilly.
|
| I remember once, attending a class on GraphQL. It hardly
| mentioned the standard at all. It was a class on the abstraction
| dependency (A JavaScript library. Maybe something like Pandas).
| The class was worthless to me, as I don't work in JS. I wanted to
| find out about the standard.
| sevensor wrote:
| I admire the approach they're taking to dependencies. Use
| whatever you like to build the interpreter, and build whatever
| you like on top, but pinch things in the right place so that
| you can build an interpreter up from next to nothing
| benrutter wrote:
| I liked reading this - permacomputing is often a nice contrast
| with today's world where everything is constantly improving and
| changing and breaking at the same time.
|
| I wonder what "peramcomputing in action" would be when you're
| just trying to build a website, or a SAAS app. Those things
| aren't really the cool alternative dreams of 100 rabbits, but
| they could still benefit from these kind of ideas.
|
| One thing that often strikes me, is that the web, despite being a
| huge part of the problem, actually poses a lot of solutions. PWAs
| and WASM offer some pretty great opportunities for portability,
| and WASM in particular is probably the closest we've got yet to a
| "universal virtual machine" (I know it's still got a long way to
| go)
| globalnode wrote:
| When you really think about how unreal it is to be able to write
| some commands and automate stuff. Whether its a PC, a machine
| across the world or some other physical automation, its an
| entirely new thing for humans to be able to do. It deserves
| something other than just being functional and fiscally rational.
| Artistry should come into it somehow. Whats the point and wheres
| the enjoyment otherwise. Coming up with ways to preserve your art
| is definitely a worthy goal, and fear that someone will come
| along and buy it (or some other disaster) and deprive you of your
| art is fair enough.
| seydar wrote:
| This reminds me of _why's final writing, where he discusses
| leaving his public persona in programming. He specifically cites
| the preservability of code as a reason for his disillusionment.
|
| https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE
|
| Beautiful piece of writing, very weird, very excellent.
| drdrek wrote:
| Code as art or political movement always baffled me.
|
| I guess anything can be a statement about the world, and we all
| want our lives to have meaning, so something you poured most of
| your waking hours into must mean something.
|
| But as someone that sits by a computer for the better part of
| 30 years I just cant find beauty in it, just sadness for the
| human condition. Old hardware and software do not make me
| nostalgic, or makes me feel like we lost anything of value. It
| gives me the same feeling those abandoned listening posts in
| Chernobyl gave me, decay, the fleeting nature of existence.
|
| You can't fight the fact that the world will keep on keeping
| on, with or without you. Be a person that matters to those
| around you, it's the best you are going to get.
| simne wrote:
| I've hear, very simple and elegant was Mips-1 (Mips R-1000
| trademark) machines. Worth to look as it is example of modern and
| fast 32 bit RISC processor.
| laurentiurad wrote:
| nodejs was a mistake
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