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We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

engineering.nanit.com

101–110 of 261 posts

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#101
I’m sufficiently old / sensible (you decide) to think that uploading video of your baby (to anywhere) is fucking weird and fucking spooky and not needed anyway. This is a solution that doesn’t have a problem. Worse: it prays on parental / young parental fears. There’s nothing here - this is not a product that’s needed. You don’t need to “track” your baby, ffs. You don’t need to watch it while it sleeps. You don’t need “every breath, seen”. People have been having babies for fucking centuries without entering them into this hyper weird surveillance state at birth.

What an appalling screwed up world we seem to have manufactured for ourselves.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you see about this comment that seems particularly LLM generated?

I wondered myself, as it seemed ok, but I went through the poster's history as I was interested. Firstly, they have a remarkably consistent style. Everything is like this. There's not very many examples to choose from, so that's maybe also to be expected, and perhaps it is just also their personality. I worry, as I've been accused myself, that there is perhaps something in the style the accuser dislikes or finds off-…

It's the verbose writing style. I can see why you would be accused as well.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as simple as "with open(...) as f: f.write(data)" Save where? With what redundancy? With what access policies? With what backup strategy? With what network topology? With what storage equipment and file system and HVAC system and... Without on-prem, saving a file is as simple as s3.put_object() !

>> Without cloud, saving a file is as simple as "with open(...) as f: f.write(data)" + adding a record to DB. > Save where? With what redundancy? With what access policies? With what backup strategy? With what network topology? With what storage equipment and file system and HVAC system and... Most of these concerns can be addressed with ZFS[0] provided by FreeBSD systems hosted in triple-A data centers. See also iSC…

Except running ZFS on FreeBSD would certainly require dedicated devops person with very specific skillset that majority of people on market dont have.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#105
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the reason I refused to buy Nanit cameras, instead opting for unconnected models. E2E encryption is table stakes.

By the way you dont need a video (or hell even audio) baby monitor. Source: 2 kids.

Of course you don't _need_ it, but it's a useful convenience. Due to the layout of our house it was quite hard to hear my toddler if he was crying in the middle of the night - we often wouldn't wake up to it. So the monitor was very helpful.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do all your comments seem LLM generated? You do clearly have something to contribute, but it’s probably better to just write what you’re talking about than going through a LLM.

What do you see about this comment that seems particularly LLM generated?

It just has a certain feel to it, by the end of the first paragraph I also thought it was written by an LLM too.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#107
post #59

In HN style, I'm going to diverge from the content and rant about the company: Nanit needs this storage because they run cloud based baby cameras. Every Nanit user is uploading video and audio of their home/baby live to Nanit without any E2EE. It's a hot mic sending anything you say near it to the cloud. Their hardware essentially requires a subscription to use, even though it costs $200/camera. You must spend an add…

As a happy customer, I picked nanit because it actually worked. We didn’t even use the “smart” features, but “you can turn on the app from anywhere you happen to be and expect the video feed to work” is unfortunately a bar that no competitor I tried could meet. The others were mostly made by non-software companies with outsourced apps that worked maybe 50% of the time. I wish we could have local-first and e2ee consum…

[dead]

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#108
post #38

[flagged]

Why do all your comments seem LLM generated? You do clearly have something to contribute, but it’s probably better to just write what you’re talking about than going through a LLM.

They do not have anything to contribute. It's all made up.

> Having worked extensively with battery systems, I think the grid storage potential of second-life EV batteries is more complex than it appears

> Having worked extensively with computer vision models for our interview analysis system,

> Having dealt with similar high-stakes outages in travel tech, the root cause here seems to be their dependency

> Having gone through S3 cost optimization ourselves,

> The surgical metaphor really resonates with my experience building real-time interview analysis systems

The sad news is that very soon it will be slightly less obvious and then when I call them out just like now I'll be slapped by dang et. al with such accusations being against the HN guidelines. Right now most, like this one, don't care enough so it's still beyond doubt to an extent where that doesn't happen.

Unfortunately they're clearly already good enough to fool you and many here.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#109
post #95
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Self-hosted video isn't that hard Self-hosting video is not something the typical user of a baby monitor would ever even consider.

A microSD card in the camera, like most others use? From the product description though it sounds like sleep analysis is what you're paying for, which they do on servers analyzing the video.

Yeah but the reality of the microSD card is weird. E.g. Eufy puts the video on the card but encrypts it so you have to pull it through the camera through the app to your phone.

It's hilariously crazy but we were given the cams as a gift so we stuck with them.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#110
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do all your comments seem LLM generated? You do clearly have something to contribute, but it’s probably better to just write what you’re talking about than going through a LLM.

I don't know about the commenter specifically but in general, using LLMs to format text is a game changer in the ability for English-as-Second-Language folks to contribute to tech conversations. While I get where some of the bias against anything LLM generated comes from, I would keep it for editorial content and not community comments to be fair to a global audience.

This commenter is making everything up and a 3 second look at their profile puts this beyond any doubt. Regardless, the benefit of the doubt should no longer be given. Too bad for my fellow ESLers, I'm one myself, but we better get just writing in English. It's already a daily occurrence now to see these bots on HN.
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