Skill issue. Not to mention the ongoing effort required to maintain and secure the service. But even before that, a lot of people are behing CGNAT. Tailscale makes punching a hole through that very easy. Otherwise you have to run your own relay server somewhere in the cloud.
>Yet if I spent one hour making my app one second faster for my million users, I can save 277 user hour per year. But since user hours are an externality, such optimization never gets done.
I have never been convinced by this argument. The aggregate number sounds fantastic but I don't believe that any meaningful work can be done by each user saving 1 second. That 1 second (and more) can simply be taken by me trying to stretch my body out.
OTOH, if the argument is to make software smaller, I can get behind that since it will simply lead to more efficient usage of existing resources and thus reduce the environmental impact.
But we live in a capitalist world and there needs to be external pressure for change to occur. The current RAM shortage, if it lasts, might be one of them. Otherwise, we're only day dreaming for a utopia.
Time saved to increased productivity or happiness or whatever is not linear but a step function. Saving one second doesn’t help much, but there is a threshold (depending on the individual) where faster workflows lead to a better experience. It does make a difference whether a task takes a minute or half a second, at least for me.
But there isn't just one company deciding externalizing cost on the rest of us is a great way to boost profit since it costs them very little. Especially for a monopoly like YouTube that can decide that eating up your battery is fine if it saves them a few cents in bandwidth costs.
Not all of those externalizing companies abuse your time but whatever they abuse can be expressed in a $ amount and $ can be converted to a median's person time via median wage. Hell, free time is more valuable than whatever you produce during work.
Say all that boils down to companies collectively stealing 20 minutes of your time each day. 140 minutes each week. 7280 (!) minutes each year, which is 5.05 days, which makes it almost a year over the course of 70 years.
So yeah, don't do what you do and sweettalk the fact that companies externalize costs (private the profits, socialize the losses). They're sucking your blood.
One second is long enough that it can put a user off from using your app though. Take notifications on phones for example. I know several people who would benefit from a habitual use of phone notifications, but they never stick to using them because the process of opening (or switching over to) the notification app and navigating its UI to leave a notification takes too long. Instead they write a physical sticky note, because it has a faster "startup time".
This is very true, but I think some of it has to do with expectations too. Editing a profile page is a complex thing, therefore people are more willing to put up with loading times on it, whereas checking out someone's profile is a simple task and the brain has already moved on, so any delay feels bad.
> I have never been convinced by this argument. The aggregate number sounds fantastic but I don't believe that any meaningful work can be done by each user saving 1 second. That 1 second (and more) can simply be taken by me trying to stretch my body out.
I’d see this differently from a user perspective. If the average operations takes one second less, I’d spend a lot of time less waiting for my computer. I’d also have less idle moments where my mind wanders while waiting for some operation to complete too.
Just because one individual second is small, it still adds up.
Even if all you do with it is just stretching, there's a chance it will prevent you pulling a muscle. Or lower your stress and prevent a stroke. Or any number of other beneficial outcomes.
I am not a system programmer but, from my understanding, Torvalds has expressed strong opinions about microkernels over a long period of time. The concept looks cleaner on paper but the complexity simply outweighs all the potential benefits. The debate, from what I have followed, expressed similar themes as monolithic vs microservices in the wider software development arena.
I'm not a kernel developer myself, but I’m aware of the Tanenbaum/Torvalds debates in the early 90’s. My understanding is the primary reason Linus gave Tanenbaum for the monolithic design was performance, but I would think in 2025 this isn’t so relevant anymore.
And thanks for attempting to answer my question without snark or down voting. Usually HN is much better for discussion than this.
>"My understanding is the primary reason Linus gave Tanenbaum for the monolithic design was performance, but I would think in 2025 this isn’t so relevant anymore."
I think that unlike user level software performance of a kernel is of utmost importance.
Sure. Till an extent. And if you run some mission-critical application, definitely.
But most applications run fine from local storage and can tolerate some downtime. They might even benefit from the improved performance. You can also fix the durability and disaster recovery concerns by setting up on RAID/ZFS and maintaining proper backups.
Inability to build a business easily nor allow others to build one. The union culture is way too strong. There is a joke that the Kerala model of development requires a rich oil state nearby.
There are hundreds of people selling pre-built components, landing pages, templates etc. This at least gets you up and running and not stressing over design. As a dev who lacks design sense, this was immensely helpful.
Other option as sibling points out is to use bolt or lovable and give it explicit instructions on what kind of design to use. For example, with lovable, try this prompt "use neo brutalist design."
This is a massive insight for me. That entire landing page is a template with small edits. No wonder it looks so good. You nailed it. Thanks for this. I think the last time I looked into templates I wasn't impressed with what I found, and I think I underestimated what was available now in 2024.
If you don't have a lot of services to access, you can hard code the tailscale IP address in /etc/hosts.
My personal /etc/hosts is at 10 services all hard coded since the internal IP address of a machine on tailscale is static. Way cheaper and easier to deal with than setting up a separate DNS resolver.
Of course that won't work if you have hundreds or thousands of services to work with.
If I may ask which model are you using? I have tried OCR'ing my bank statements in AI studio and the results have been less than optimal. Specifically it has a tendency to ignore certain instructions combined with screwing up the order.
Some pointers on what worked for you would be greatly appreciated.
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