Early in my career as a software engineer, I developed a reputation for speeding things up. This was back in the day where algorithm knowledge was just as important as the ability to examine the output of a compiler, every new Intel processor was met with a ton of anticipation, and Carmak and Abrash were rapidly becoming famous.
Anyway, the 22 year old me unexpectedly gets invited to a customer meeting with a large multinational. I go there not knowing what to expect. Turns out, they were not happy with the speed of our product.
Their VP of whatever said, quoting: "every saved second here adds $1M to our yearly profit". I was absolutely floored. Prior to that moment I couldn't even dream of someone placing a dollar amount on speed, and so directly. Now 20+ years later it still counts as one of the top 5 highlights of my career.
P.S. Mentioning as a reaction to the first sentence in the blog post. But the author is correct when she states that this happens rarely.
P.P.S. There was another engineer in the room, who had the nerve to jokingly ask the VP: "so if we make it execute in 0 seconds, does it mean you're going to make an infinite amount of money?". They didn't laugh, although I thought it was quite funny. Hey, Doug! :)
> "so if we make it execute in 0 seconds, does it mean you're going to make an infinite amount of money?"
I don't get it. Wouldn't going from 1 second to 0 seconds add the same amount of money to the yearly profit as going from 2 seconds to 1 second did? Namely, $1M.
> I don't get it. Wouldn't going from 1 second to 0 seconds add the same amount of money to the yearly profit as going from 2 seconds to 1 second did? Namely, $1M
Of course the joke was silly. But perhaps I should have provided some context. We were making industrial automation software. This stuff runs in factories. Every saved second shrinks the manufacturing time of a part, leading to increase of the total factory output. When extrapolating to abusrd levels, zero time to manufacture means infinite output per factory (sans raw materials).
yeah it's one of those things that are funny to the people saying it because they don't yet realize it doesn't make sense. I bet they felt that later, in the hotel room, in the shower, probably with a bottle of scotch.
earlier in my career it'd be appealing to make jokes like that, or include a comment in an email. eventually you realize that people - especially "older" or those already a few years into their career - mostly don't want to joke around and just want to actually get the thing done you are meeting about.
In principle, the reason that "every second saved here is worth $x" is because running the thing generates money, and saving time on it allows for running it more often.
Working with a task scheduling system, we were told that every minute a airplane is delayed costs $10k. This was back in the 90s, so adjust accordingly.
Unfortunately, there wasn't a single bottleneck. A bunch of us, not just me, worked our asses off improving performance by a little bit in several places. The compounded improvement IIRC was satisfactory to the customer.
May I ask: why not use Synology's own photo stack? The web UI is pretty good, the iPhone app is great, it runs locally without depending on Synology servers, and does have face recognition and all other features.
I didn’t want to be attached to the Synology system or hardware anymore. Synology Photos is great (and we’re still using it for the upload atm), but Immich lets me control the whole thing, top to bottom.
I’m running a DS1813+. It’s stopped getting new feature updates. This approach lets me keep the storage running while migrating away the server components.
Have you tried Immich? It is extremely polished and has every feature you mentioned, along with being open source with tons of community energy and no lock in.
I feel the opposite. Especially the part about NOT breathing for 7 (!) seconds, which doesn't feel naturall at all. Something like 4-2-5 would have been much closer to my natural. To me the benefit of this thread is the comments recommending other apps/methods.
Your "life hack" is not a good advice. There's plenty of well-written explanations for why perimeter based security doesn't work. What is strange is that you've started in the right place: by being "constantly worried about security implications of each app". Unfortunately it's annoying and time consuming, but that's the right way to keep your data private. And if that's too much hassle, it means it's worth it to pay others to do it.
When I'm thinking about a hypothetical situation when I need to save the world by hacking into a hypothetical villain, my best hope will be him using your approach to security.
Any serious approach to security begins with a reasonable and clearly defined threat model, and my threat model for my home network doesn't currently include a team of superheros targeting my file backups in an effort to save the world. But I'll definitely keep your advice in mind when I do decide to start executing on my evil plots.
For now my threat model consists of script kiddies and abusive corporations. Self-hosting gets me away from the corporations and keeping my stuff off of the public internet keeps me away from script kiddies.
just go and look at any of the vendors selling “zero trust” solutions. They all have white papers available about how a) perimeter security is “dead” and b) how their specific flavor of zero trust is the One True zero trust and the only thing you can trust to protect your data.
You will without exception need to provide an email address to access these white papers, so their inside sales team can ensure you fully understand the importance of trusting their zero trust, and not trusting anyone else’s.
Defense in depth though: against a strong threat actor, perimeter based security won't prevent you from getting pwnd, but it will likely take them longer than if everything is on the public internet, and a private network will make weak threat actors ignore you, so it is still valuable.
It's sad that "zero trust" has become almost the opposite of what it originally meant. Now you can have the same insecure RDP server with admin/admin login but at least it's protected by a VPN that only a few tens of thousands of people have access to.
Languages do not matter as much as you think. Ecosystems are everything. Twice in my life I started companies (the first one took all my life savings) and in both cases the right call was what you called an "inferior language".
I actually liked D very much, and WB had been a personal hero of mine when I was in college. But I am not betting my career on an ecosystem built around by a single brilliant guy. For high-stakes projects, a wise decision is building on a platform with several deep-pocketed backers.
And for toy/personal projects... do you even need a language anymore? Just ask your favorite LLM to generate you an executable which does what you want (partially joking here).
D's ImportC feature makes it super easy to access C libraries from D code. That means D fits right in with a C ecosystem, as it's no longer necessary to attempt to translate the .h files into D.
It's not perfect, as some people cannot resist using the C preprocessor for some bizarre constructions.
I used to write those bizarre things myself in C, and was proud of my work. But one day I decided to remove them all, and the code was better.
One area where Go, C# and Rust beat D is packages in a few different ways.
For C# Microsoft eventually embraced NuGet their package manager, and used it to put core packages that don't need to be fully available OOTB but can then benefit from frequent updates on a per project basis as opposed to updating the entire language runtime.
For Go it was the out of the box packages, like if I want to make a website, I can pull in net/http and their templating packages that come out of the box with Go, maybe a reasonably simple core maintainer package or packages that go into Dub would be a strong selling point. Right now Vibe.d is the only option for web dev, but there's no reason a much simpler web server couldn't exist.
For Rust, I just really love Cargo, I think its one of the nicest package managers I've ever used.
The other thing that would really help D is if something significant is built around D, whether it be a framework (like what Rails did for Ruby) or some major application that needs D to function at its core and is used by many, this could be a groundbreaking modern IDE, or anything really, a database that uses the best bits and pieces of D to scale, or even a really rich cross-platform GUI stack (my kingdom for std.gui to be a thing in D, and reasonably exhaustive).
I wish I had unlimited time and money, I would invest it in D. Alas, I'm not a language maintainer, just a guy who loves really good tools.
It seems like the parent was trying to paint a situation of you being a bottleneck to success. It seems a bit Schrödinger's BFDL though.. is Linus a bottleneck to the most used server operating system? Did Guido hold back Python? The existence of the GDC and LDC compilers torpedoes toolchain concerns.. I'd be more worried about Java or Golang suffering from some eventual corporate buffoonery.
To the parent's point of startups, betting the farm on something like a particular language out of some sense of superiority might mean you are not focusing on the right problems. But if the founders happen to know a less widely used tool it doesn't seem inappropriate either. The type of employee that can drive a startup or a big tech project forward is not going to be thwarted by a language, and they might find something new to learn fun.
D can do C++ interop when the C++ code is "C with classes" style. Some templates are supported. But then things get so complicated with C++ that it's impractical to go further.
... and the job of a programmer will be to explain, in as precise terms as possible, what they need the executable to do. (Reminds me of the idea of programming based on a natural language.)
Which is bonkers considering there is only one side that has attempted to overturn an election and has a candidate who openly admires autocrats and genocidal dictators.
Hacker News delivers again. What an incredible example of quality feedback from a would-be customer. As one of Mailgun founders, I can also confirm/agree with all of the suggestions above.
> Telling you now, someone will sign up with stolen credit card, spam like hell and you will be left with clean up. Been there, done that.
Ignoring this advice killed some companies in this space.
Exactly, it's incredible. It's a pleasure to exchange like this.
As mentioned earlier, we've already experienced similar issues and have done everything we can to prevent it from happening again.
Thank you for emphasizing this point, especially considering that Mailgun is a pillar in the field.
> My take is that Elon is suing OpenAI because he left OpenAI before they opened a commercial venture, which means he doesn't benefit from the companies current valuation
According to the Isaacson book, Sam offered Elon equity in the for-profit arm of OpenAI but he declined. He is clearly motivated by the original mission, i.e. the Open part.
> Why not, for example, celebrate the virtuous instead?
Because it's hard to celebrate the intangibles, that is why virtue signaling gets the spotlight instead. But action and achievement are tangible and can be celebrated (if they're good for society).
This is not a "bizarre false dichotomy". This is a perfect example of dichotomy: do you celebrate actions or intent?
I am not a pilot but I've been told by many that a large chunk of a new airplane price is the cost of certification which also provides a great incentive for manufacturers to design one product, get it certified, and sell it without major modifications for decades to avoid re-certifying it.
How did they manage to produce a $120K aircraft then? Is it not subject to the same certification requirements as the Cessna 172 which features similar specs but at 3x the price?
A Cessna 172 ironically is probably worth more than an average equivalent non-Cessna plane ironically because it's so ubiquitous that parts, experience, and understanding are everywhere. It's the Ford Focus of light aircraft, beloved by those learning to fly, and actually usually holds a premium as a result. I take your point though; but the real reason everything in aviation is so expensive is that it is traceable, documented, and with known MTBFs and characteristics -- all requirements that are completely and utterly written in blood.
The cost of certifying a new aircraft model is significantly higher than a car. It's like $25m for non-commercial aircraft? I forget the exact number but it's quite high.
It could be lower since this thing has only 1 passenger capacity
Early in my career as a software engineer, I developed a reputation for speeding things up. This was back in the day where algorithm knowledge was just as important as the ability to examine the output of a compiler, every new Intel processor was met with a ton of anticipation, and Carmak and Abrash were rapidly becoming famous.
Anyway, the 22 year old me unexpectedly gets invited to a customer meeting with a large multinational. I go there not knowing what to expect. Turns out, they were not happy with the speed of our product.
Their VP of whatever said, quoting: "every saved second here adds $1M to our yearly profit". I was absolutely floored. Prior to that moment I couldn't even dream of someone placing a dollar amount on speed, and so directly. Now 20+ years later it still counts as one of the top 5 highlights of my career.
P.S. Mentioning as a reaction to the first sentence in the blog post. But the author is correct when she states that this happens rarely.
P.P.S. There was another engineer in the room, who had the nerve to jokingly ask the VP: "so if we make it execute in 0 seconds, does it mean you're going to make an infinite amount of money?". They didn't laugh, although I thought it was quite funny. Hey, Doug! :)