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- Hacker News
- > because your laptop stops running when you close the lid.
There's a world outside Apple.
by conradfr - Thanks to clamshell mode, mine doesn’t stop running
- Macs let you disable suspend just like (or possibly better) than any other operating system. The point being made is that it's the wrong tool for the job, precisely because of the user desired compromises made to create a great mobile computer.by seemaze
- > Theo startled us, because we’re in the middle of a run of strong quarters that have included the best financial months in the company’s history.
I don't know if it's worse that Kurt is taking some bozo Youtube devfluencer seriously, that he was surprised that there was doubt in the future of Fly (whose reliability--but not customer service!--has been a joke for years), or that they continue to prioritize interesting engineering over basic success.
Bro, you just had to make a reasonable clone of Heroku. That's all you had to do.
by ai_critic - > Five of the most dangerous words in startups are “¿Por qué no los dos?”.
So are the prior products going to be shut down? If not, then when? if not when, then why not?
- No. Mu. Mu.by tptacek
- Yeah that seems like a weird way to end an article that includes this paragraph:
> Fly Machines and our Platform As A Service features aren’t going anywhere. But Sprites was the product of a tiny skeleton crew inside of Fly.io[†], and now it isn’t.
So it's both indeed.
by jorams - This really sucks. I not only like fly a lot, I have two production apps; thousands in annual creds up for renewal soon; and some mildly embarrassing discussions about migrations to have.by x0x0
- I don't think these sprites are worth betting the company on, but I guess that will be for the new CEO to decide.
> A Sprite is a hardware-isolated execution environment for arbitrary code: a persistent Linux computer. Whether it's an AI agent like Claude Code or a binary your user just uploaded, Sprites are the simplest answer for "where should I run a blob of code".
I think eventually this isolation may be built in to Claude code / codex, or provided by AI companies themselves.
by yellow_lead - Yuk I don't want to rent my appartment from my drug dealer. I love I can say thanks for the code Claude now fuck you I am deploying it (waggles finger in westerly direction...) there.by hahahaa
- I think sprites are very cool abstraction.
I know git worktrees solve similar problem, but you can use sprites for quickly spinning up your instance and run your service and hand it over to coding agent to improve a feature.
you can run multiple parallel agents to do same and choose one of them as a final result, and you are not constrained by number of ports or your CPU (because some agents are CPU hungry at the moment)
Think about even more use cases, add to that RAM shortage is not going away yet, you can run 100s of agents in those sprites
by throwaw12 - Sprites are about more than just providing an environment for Claude Code et al to run code in. They're also useful for anyone who's building their own product that needs an inexpensive way to execute unsafe code.by simonw
- >We’re launching a new iteration of Sprites, and focusing the company on them and the problem they solve. And I’m tagging in Scott Johnston as CEO.
Feels a bit rough to refocus the whole company and immediately bail out. At least give a new CEO a fighting chance by letting them set their own direction.
by cube00 - Saw this on my RSS feed and was surprised to see it hasn't been discussed yet on HN - fly.io used to be on the front page pretty regularly with some pretty big comment threads, but I had to go back over a year to find anything from them with more than a handful of comments. I guess they've become less relevant on here since they stopped allowing new users to host apps for free?by subarctic
- > fly.io used to be on the front page pretty regularly with some pretty big comment threads
But that doesn't mean they are not doing stuff. It's just HN doing HN things. At the moment we're into "AI is eating the world alive" and other topics are in the background.
by rdtsc - No one talks about new software anymore. All the conversation is meta about LLMs that write software instead. This is a dead career, I’m just waiting for the LLMs to start writing code in binary.by dyauspitr
- It's probably getting less discussion because there's less user energy, the existing VM / database product has clearly not been a top focus for a while and in any case that business is becoming even more of a tough commodity for the reasons the post points out.by hedgehog
- Did they? I have stuff I launched in the last two months that’s still under the $5 limit and haven’t paid a thing.
- they lost a lot of aura among folks i know with the 'ai skeptics are nuts' article[1]. haven't read a blog post since.by rileymichael
- I think they became less relevant, at least amongst human users, when they hit a particularly rough patch with awful reliability issues a couple of years back. At least that's when my own social circle and loose constellation of developer acquaintances started saying "we should probably avoid Fly.io".
- What do you mean? We ran a big post about Litestream Writeable VFS just a couple months ago, and we've had several big posts over the last 12 months, including the Sprite launch. We got pretty busy, and there's a lot going on, and I am a bottleneck on big posts going up on the blog. We have a couple months of technical catching up to do. But it's not like we've vanished off HN.by tptacek
- Sprites seems like a solid lifestyle business for a few friends, not a startup that has taken funding.
As a developer, I use docker/podman. Works great.
The new massive market that will open up, where grandma and grandpa are making apps, will be taken up by Lovable (and the like). Non-devs will not be using sprites.
You’re capturing some small percentage of existing developers.
by emerongi - In theory I'm in OP's described target market here, b/c I am absolutely terrified of agents wrecking my pooter/home network/life as they 100x my sw dev. Every day a new story comes out about OpenCode, CC whatever being a security nightmare.
If it's so easy to containerize these things then why aren't more devs doing it and these stories going away? I for one am actively avoiding the agentic coding switch because I have no interest in opening my home environment to a remote corporate LLM just to write code faster. But of course I'm missing out, as soon as I have more than one source file that I want my chat LLM to analyze in a single go.
by spopejoy - > Scott was the CEO of Docker, and led that through a really challenging time that began with Docker’s own enterprise-vs.-developer identity crisis and ended with them blowing the doors off the business.
Did Docker "blew the doors off the business"? Does he mean that in a Boeing sense?
by ethersteeds - Scott was instrumental in turning around Docker (which was "broken" [0]), after a $23m Series B raise from Arjun Sethi at Tribe Capital: https://medium.com/better-programming/the-greatest-startup-t... / https://archive.vn/loTwW
[0] Some interesting remarks on it by Bryan Cantrill: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28460504
by ignoramous - Most people are going under identity crisis right now because of recent LLM advancements. This post is a good example that shows that it's not only happening at the individual level, but also on the company/organization level.
Is it still worth building products or companies that can be one-shotted by AI? Probably not.
One interesting consequence is that this force everyone to be more ambitious and do something bigger that's impossible before.
I hope more people are working on something that can always bring net positive to humanity even if there are hundreds of people working on the same thing, like clean energy.
by karimf - > We’re launching a new iteration of Sprites, and focusing the company on them and the problem they solve. And I’m tagging in Scott Johnston as CEO.
Hard for me to see this as anything other than fly.io committing suicide. AI sandboxes are a crowded product space, basically a complete commodity at this point, and the new CEO will likely focus on profit to the detriment of creative vision.
Happy to be proven wrong though.
by wavemode - The AI sandbox play also confuses me because (aside from the fractional pay-as-you-use billing) it's trivially implemented on top of any VM/container as a service provider. Given the reduced importance of data retention (the containers are disposable) and ability to redo work trivially you can even go a step further and have your agent spin it up on bare metal. Turns out agents spend most of their time waiting on GPUs so with memory dedup on your own similar workloads you can run "hundreds" of them on pretty minimal hardware.
I also don't see how the cloud-for-agents will break the AWS monopoly: AWS already is the cloud for agents! As the article notes all the pain of using AWS is trivialized by agents (and IaC).
To me the value now is in building the right tools for agents to make better decisions, not fighting for basis points on hardware margin in the orchestration or model serving layer.
by ericpauley - As an elixir dev fly was a company I very much wanted to succeed but I twice had to leave them because they just never found the right balance between cool engineering and ops.
For a long time they would have global outages where the status page would list everything as green and the only reason you'd know something was wrong was the forum threads. Their response was that they were too busy fixing the issues to update the status board. Right.
Then once they finally started updating the board they would go several hours between updates with no indication of what was happing "Region x is down" then nothing, again "too busy fixing the issue".
When they came out with paid support I signed up immediately only to find that it gave me an email address to contact support with fast responses promised but most of the time no one was monitoring it. I'd report large outages and not get back responses until the next day and on a few occasions I'd get back a response several days later being like "Can you explain the problem you're seeing?" No mate it was an outage several days ago.
This would all just be annoying customer service if it was a rare occurrence but the reality of using them was that I was dealing with major outages almost monthly at points. If you scroll back through my post history here there were brief periods where stability would improve and I'd get optimistic about them only for it to crash back down to regular outages again days after I posted.
I eventually had to move everything off them to self hosted again which is a pain but far less of a pain since my uptime is dramatically better(!) and when something breaks I know what it is.
I still want fly to succeed but if you're going to host peoples stuff you need to accept responsibility and move budget to ops. Otherwise just kill the hosting entirely and try to become another HashiCorp.
by sanswork - > For a long time they would have global outages where the status page would list everything as green and the only reason you'd know something was wrong was the forum threads. Their response was that they were too busy fixing the issues to update the status board. Right.
Are you talking about AWS or Fly here? I seriously cannot tell.
by vinnymac