My old trusty Dell PowerEdge R720 in the utility room at home. It works fine, and powers everything from web hosting to locally running LLM's. It would have costed a fortune running the equivalent compute capacity in any of the big 3.
How do you handle hardware failures or screw ups for the server to go offline?
When I saw one of my server not coming back up at home for some reason on a reboot, I realized I needed spare hardware to reliably operate them. I can't let it stay offline while I order for the spare parts to arrive, even though I have backup data ready elsewhere to be restored.
Agree that cloud is too expensive these days. When you realize buying a server with 32 GB memory with 1TB nvme is only $250 (apparently
no virtual neighbors bugging for your resource) and you're meant to pay that same price monthly to be on the cloud, it starts to feel like a joke.
Uptime for the last 3 years has been >99%.
1. Keep spares (esp. fans and drives). Hot swap if needed.
2. Dual ISP (1Gbit/s primary, auto switch to Starlink if primary link fails).
3. Keep a separate server for testing. Actually I lied, I test things in prod, sue me.
The monthly AWS bill is roughly 5 USD and consists of Route53 only!
Oh, I’ve heard many No’s. So many No’s that I will never, ever try to work with VC’s ever again. Fuck them. There’s a very high probability that you won’t need them either. In my case, I just kept going. If you have a good product then you will succeed. With VCs or not!
Sometimes it's just strange, and it doesn't seem like a coincidence. It's far too often that I see, read or experience something and then it pops up on HN a few moments later.
In this case, I went to Duxford a day before this was posted on HN. I visited the #962 SR-71 in person. At the day this was posted, I also discussed about the SR-71 with a neighbour and how it was stationed at RAF Mildenhall here in the UK.
With that said, SR-71 is such an awesome machine, it contains so many breakthroughs and innovations. It was so advanced that even the tooling, methods, paint and even fuel had to be invented specifically for this aircraft.
It’s a quite boring project, but it is niche - and there is no alternative, at least not in the JS/TS ecosystem. Many startups/crypto/financial institutions (including YC startups) uses and are paying customers of my product.
I’ve tried finding an investor (including YC) to grow the project but no-one is interested. It doesn’t matter, I’ll keep going anyway. But if someone is interested reach me at info@fixparser.io
Working with Flash was like working with future technologies, back in the day. You could build amazing things with it, things that was not possible using standard browser API’s. In fact, Flash led the way and was the prototype for what browsers can to today.
If you cared about what you built, with clever hacks and bitwise performance tricks then the Flash runtime could run your code efficiently. I remember developing an app which used Box2D, camera based gesture control with sound effects and background music all running simultaneously, reaching 60 FPS. In other projects we used software based 3D (à la Papervision 3D), Adobe dropped the ball and Molehill/GPU accelerated 2D/3D arrived too late. Perhaps it’s not common knowledge but we could develop true cross-platform apps, compiling for different targets (SWF, IPA for iOS and .app/.exe).
That letter from Steve Jobs destroyed it all, many talented developers left the Flash world at that time. It was a bit depressing to see all the (unjustified) mainstream hate for the Flash platform that started to appear at that time, which felt bad as there were many of us that put a lot of time, care and effort in creating amazing stuff with it. Thanks Flash!
> That letter from Steve Jobs destroyed it all, many talented developers left the Flash world at that time. It was a bit depressing to see all the (unjustified) mainstream hate for the Flash platform that started to appear at that time,
You might not have seen it but the hate for Flash was well-established by then, solely due to Adobe’s gross mismanagement of their platform. Flash was what crashed and took out your entire browser session. Flash was what made drive-by compromises so easy and common. Flash was what popped up annoying “you should manually update” prompts because they sat out the automatic update trend for nearly two decades. Flash was also what made your entire computer visibly slow down because it was so inefficient - they weren’t an option on phones due to the UI differences but performance and memory alone would have ruled them out in any case.
Flash was also painful to develop for. Yes, you could do things which browsers couldn’t do back then but it came at the cost of having to pay Adobe thousands of dollars for shoddy, unsupported tools[1] and while there were a handful of ways where AS3 was ahead of JavaScript there many areas where it was behind and unlike browsers it stayed there, and it was really common to find bugs in Adobe’s libraries which meant you had to build a complete replacement or wait years to never for them to fix it.
People made cool things despite that but I attribute almost all of the blame for Flash’s demise to Adobe. They could have cut their executive bonus pool by 10% to hire a QA team and they’d have had a much better chance at long term success. Instead, they let the platform stagnate to the point where one of the early Chrome selling points was that when Flash crashed you’d only lose that page!
1. I bought a Flash license once. I naively filed bug reports for reproducible crashes in the player and IDE (the debugger was especially unstable), as well as compatibility and correctness issues with their various libraries. Each time, I got no reply before the next major release and then I got a generic “please pay $1,500 for the upgrade and let us know if we fixed it” message.
At the time it was unfortunately both true that Apple needed idle CPUs for battery life and Adobe had no intention or probably no ability either to make that happen with Flash.
Spent 9 years building a JavaScript library, earned about 4490 USD in total from it. Then spent 23900 USD in manufacturing a single product (quantity of 1, ran out of budget) for which I have no known client for. Built an iPhone app and made maybe 300 USD for that. Yeah business is hard.
In my personal projects? Absolutely. It's fun and satisfying to build something on a server sitting in the corner of my room, something I can actually look at and kick.
For professional projects? Only if given a _very_ compelling reason.
In the beginning of my career I worked on a volatile multidimensional house of cards project. It was a classic ASP enterprise content management system, patched together by external contractors for 10 years or so, with seemingly no structure at all. The code base was truly “magical” in the sense that it was a miracle that it sort of worked. Contained a number of “don’t change this” and gotchas.
Projects like this doesn’t build character, it just sucks.
