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> I’m sure you knew that your code was running on computers somewhere even when you first started and wasn’t running in a literal “cloud”.

Meh, I just knew that the browser would display HTML if I wrote it, and that uploading the HTML files made them available on my domain. I didn’t really think about where the files went, specifically.

Try asking an average high school kid how cloud storage works. I doubt you’ll get any further than ‘I make files on my Google Docs and then they are saved there’. This is one step short of ‘well, the files must be on some system in some data center’.

I really disagree that “people who come on HN and say “there is no such thing as serverless and there are servers somewhere” think they are sounding smart when they are adding nothing to the conversation.” On the contrary, it’s an invitation to beginning coders to think about what the ‘serverless’ abstraction actually means.






> an invitation to beginning coders to think about

If that's how it's phrased, and it's in a spot where that's on-topic, then obviously nobody would mind.

This subthread is talking about cases where there's a technical conversation going on and somebody derails it to argue about terminology.


If we can’t count on people on Hacker News to know that code runs on computers, what is this forum for?

Is Hacker News only for experienced coders who are already familiar with the inner workings of the ‘cloud’?

I’d like to think that this forum is also a place for the proverbial high school kid, who’s just learned JavaScript and deployed their first site to Vercel using their school Chromebook, to learn a thing or two from the greybeards.


No. But it isn’t too much to expect people to know that code runs on computers and that the “cloud” is made up of computers running in a server room somewhere



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