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Icer5k

158 karma · joined August 26, 2009

Engineering at Coinbase, lover of all things tech.

m {at} mike (.) ai

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Icer5k··on Ask HN: How would you store 10PB of data for your startup today?
As others have said, it’s a complicated question, but if you have the resources/wherewithal to run Ceph but don’t want to deal with co-location, you can get a bunch of storage servers from Hetzner and get a much better grasp on cost over S3.

For example, at 10PB with every object duplicated twice (so 20 PB raw storage), you’d need ~90 of their SX293[1] boxes, coming out to around €30k/mo. This doesn’t include time to configure/maintain on your end, but it does cover any costs associated with drive replacement for failure.

I’ve done similar setups for cheap video storage & CDN origin systems before, and it’s worked fairly well if you’re cost conscious.

[1] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/sx293/configura...

Icer5k··on Principles for Building New SaaS Products on AWS
I don't think you're in a bubble, but we've recently started evaluating Coder and have found the switch to a cloud-based IDE (especially when you add Progressive Web Apps to the mix for native keyboard shortcuts) has been extremely attractive. I'm finding myself more and more drawn to hosted IDEs where I don't need to worry about network performance or how the Docker VM on my Mac is eating up my battery life...
Icer5k··on Backblaze Announces B2 Compute Partnerships
None of the servers on Packet.net include any bandwidth - it's all usage based if it leaves the datacenter. Internal bandwidth is free from what I can tell.
Icer5k··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2016)
KEYPR | Application Engineer | Los Angeles | ONSITE - Relocation Provided | Full-Time

We're bringing the hotel experience into the 21st century. Think mobile check-in, big data analytics, and IoT devices (Nest, Sonos, etc) in hotel rooms.

Our offices are located in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles. We currently have about 20 engineers across 2 locations (LA & Kiev) working on everything from cloud services to custom hardware solutions. Our stack is mostly Python 3, Django and Angular.

If you're interested, you can see open positions at http://keypr.com/careers/.

Contact: mike (at) keypr (dot) com

Icer5k··on Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2
It's not quite the same thing, but X.IO [1] from OTOY does a lot of the things mentioned, and can even run Steam directly without having to use in-home streaming (and we can take advantage of things like NvFBC to cut down capture time).

Going that method you lose the price advantage you'd get with the spot market, but a lot of the underlying complexity is removed.

Disclosure: I work for OTOY

[1]: https://www.x.io

Icer5k··on Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2
It runs through a custom HTML/JS client over web sockets with a video codec designed to be decoded with low CPU overhead [1], or a native client [2] for better performance, especially with game streaming.

For anyone interested in the space, we also have https://x.io which wraps our streaming tech up with a bunch of other stuff to make running an app as easy as making an API call.

Disclosure: I work for OTOY

[1] http://aws.otoy.com

[2] http://cloud.otoy.com

Icer5k··on Paperspace – A full computer you can access from any web browser
I'm curious what performance issues you were seeing in Firefox. I'm doing quite a bit of work with the same stack, and have been able to get sub-10ms decode times with Broadway.JS in all the major browsers. As long as you use transferable objects to pass data around, I haven't had any problems using web workers as decode threads either.
Icer5k··on New EBS volume type: General Purpose (SSD)
All I have to say is "Wow". I just switched our boot drives in us-west-2 over, and our initialization time was cut in half (~7 minutes to ~3 minutes).

As someone who launches a lot of instances based on user demand, I'm very excited EC2 has finally addressed the glaring speed issues with EBS volumes. This brings boot times in line with the original GCE boot times, which were stellar.

Of course, time will tell if the new General Purpose volumes can hold up as more users come onto the system, but for now I'm impressed.

Icer5k··on Facebook conference call about acquiring Oculus
Yeah, this is a recording of the shareholder call earlier today (mentioned on the press release), not an internal call.
Icer5k··on Mailgun Down – SSL cert is expired
Another vote for Digicert for corp certificates - their support team is top-notch and if you opt to chain to Entrust you get browser support back through 1999, if you need to support older devices.
Icer5k··on Show HN: Email Templating API
Unique recipients per month?
Icer5k··on Show HN: Boxster - A better Dropbox client
What would Evernote support look like? Do you want to access your notes, or are you more interested in attachments?
Icer5k··on Show HN: Boxster - A better Dropbox client
Thanks for the feedback.

You're correct - it does map Dropbox, Google Drive and Box to removable drives on Windows, and it also allows you to mix multiple accounts from (say) Dropbox so you can have a work and personal account mounted at the same time. It's not currently a webapp, although we have plans to create one.

Icer5k··on Show HN: Boxster - A better Dropbox client
I just fixed it, thanks!
Icer5k··on Show HN: Boxster - A better Dropbox client
It actually exposes multiple removable drives (with independent drive letters) which can than be interacted with, just like a USB drive.

On top of that, we add a cache which minimizes interactions with the various provider APIs so it feels local, even though we're actively making calls over the internet in the background.

Icer5k··on CDN vs S3
True, S3 is not a CDN, but for a lot of use cases, serving directly from S3 is fine.

Taking Vine for example, I picked a random vine from twitter (https://vine.co/v/bE3YI365gxd) and a popular vine from twitter (https://vine.co/v/bEFFxdwjK9x). The popular video and thumbnails are served from a CDN, where the new one with no traffic is served directly from S3.

YouTube did the same thing in it's early days. CDNs are not required for all traffic, and blindly recommending them is a bad prescient. They're really great for content that is frequently accessed, but their value greatly decreases on long-tail content.

Icer5k··on CDN vs S3
Cloudfront as a CDN supports directory indexes and 404s, it's just S3 that doesn't. If you point a CF distribution at your own server with directory indexes enabled, CF will send those through to the user.
Icer5k··on Introducing the Square Stand
There's a power cable the plugs into the bottom of the unit - https://squareup.com/help/en-us/article/5114-square-stand-se....
Icer5k··on Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail Released
I'd imagine most people on 12.04 will stick with it until 14.04 comes out. 12.04 is an LTS release, and is supported for 3-5 years from the release date where 12.10 through 13.10 are normal releases, and are only supported for 9 months from release.

However, anyone on 12.10 should be able to "do-release-upgrade" and upgrade themselves to 13.04.

Icer5k··on Google Wants To Operate .Search As A “Dotless” Domain
Not only that, but how does ICAAN expect to get around DNS search domains that aren't there by choice, but by default?

Almost every ISP I've used has provided a DNS name as part of their DHCP info, and if apex of TLDs start having anything more than NS records, it seems like a lot of things could break until browsers/netadmins/etc. can come up with a fix. Based on how the IPv6 rollout is going, that doesn't inspire confidence...

Icer5k··on ElasticInbox – Open Source Distributed Email Store
Interesting concept, especially with the recent changes Google has made to GMail/Apps. The biggest benefit/downside that jumps out at me is the complexity required to run an email system this way - Cassandra clusters, LDAP, external MTAs, and web severs all need to be managed. Obviously every email system requires these components to run, but most full-blown systems handle the relationships between components on their own.

TL;DR - Looks great for large businesses or maybe as a platform for a startup, but not as a hobbyist project.