Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

threads.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 210 posts

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#141

Post by SahAssar »

the_fall wrote: post #137
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that image 670 KB!? Definitely some optimization low-hanging fruit there. Edit: dang, even pngcrush can't get it below 580 KB. Disappointing performance on PNG's part.

Because inexplicably, there's random pixel-level noise baked into the blue area. You can't see it unless you crank up contrast, but it makes the bitmap hard to compress losslessly. If you remove it using threshold blur, it doesn't change the appearance at all, but the size is down to 100 kB. Scale it down to a more reasonable size and you're down to 50 kB. Modern web development never ceases to amaze me.

None of this is due to "modern web development". It's just about a dev not checking reasonable asset size before deploying/compiling, that has happened in web, game-dev, desktop apps, server containers, etc. etc.

This should be an SVG (a few kb after proper compression) or if properly made as a PNG it'd probably be in 20-ish kb.

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#142

Post by PostOnce »

prodigycorp wrote: post #138
ramoz wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single mentioned service is either an AWS or GCP abstraction.

Wake me up when GCP allows you to spending limits

It is fucking CRAZY how many cloud companies don't let you set a spending limit.

I had to hunt around for a host in a suitable geography with a spending limit, almost had to go on-prem (which will happen eventually, but not in the startup phase)

Waking up to bankruptcy because of bots out of your control visiting your website seems a little nuts. Adding some other bullshit on top (like cloudflare) seems even more nuts.

Yeah I can manage all that and have the machine stop responding when it hits a spending limit -- but why would I pay for the cloud if I have to build out that infrastructure?

grumble.

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#143

Post by Mordisquitos »

SahAssar wrote: post #141
the_fall wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because inexplicably, there's random pixel-level noise baked into the blue area. You can't see it unless you crank up contrast, but it makes the bitmap hard to compress losslessly. If you remove it using threshold blur, it doesn't change the appearance at all, but the size is down to 100 kB. Scale it down to a more reasonable size and you're down to 50 kB. Modern web development never ceases to amaze me.

None of this is due to "modern web development". It's just about a dev not checking reasonable asset size before deploying/compiling, that has happened in web, game-dev, desktop apps, server containers, etc. etc. This should be an SVG (a few kb after proper compression) or if properly made as a PNG it'd probably be in 20-ish kb.

The dev not having the common sense to check file size and apparently not realising that the PNG format was being grossly misused for this purpose (by not even having a single tone of white for the J and the corners, let alone for the blue background) is modern web development.

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#145

Post by ndneighbor »

ramoz wrote: post #134
forsakenharmony wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS is still expensive as fuck, just go for a VPS or dedicated server at that point

Every single mentioned service is either an AWS or GCP abstraction.

Angelo from Railway here, Railway runs our own metal for the sheer reason to preserve margins so we can run for perpetuity.

We're nuts for studying failure at the company and Heroku's margins was one of the things we considered to be one of the many nails in that coffin. (RIP)

(my rant here: https://blog.railway.com/p/heroku-walked-railway-run)

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#146

Post by edflsafoiewq »

the_fall wrote: post #137
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that image 670 KB!? Definitely some optimization low-hanging fruit there. Edit: dang, even pngcrush can't get it below 580 KB. Disappointing performance on PNG's part.

Because inexplicably, there's random pixel-level noise baked into the blue area. You can't see it unless you crank up contrast, but it makes the bitmap hard to compress losslessly. If you remove it using threshold blur, it doesn't change the appearance at all, but the size is down to 100 kB. Scale it down to a more reasonable size and you're down to 50 kB. Modern web development never ceases to amaze me.

What is that noise actually? It's clearly not JPEG artifacts. Is it dithering from converting from a higher bitdepth source? There do appear to be very subtle gradients.

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#148

Post by eqvinox »

stackskipton wrote: post #77
eqvinox wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a 2025 tech stack, yes. With a 2005 tech stack, no. Don't use any containers, no[/limited] server-side dynamic script languages, no microservices or anything like that. Considering the content is essentially static, this is actually viable. Search functions might be a bit problematic, but that's a solvable problem. Of course you pay with engineering skills and resources.

SRE here, Containers are not causing any performance problem.

Containers themselves don't, but a lot of the ecosystem structures around them do. Like having reverse proxies (or even just piles of ethernet bridges) in front of everything.

Or if you go ping pong across containers to handle a single request. That will certainly make a laptop unable to handle this load.

Re: Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'

#150

Post by Mordisquitos »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #146
the_fall wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because inexplicably, there's random pixel-level noise baked into the blue area. You can't see it unless you crank up contrast, but it makes the bitmap hard to compress losslessly. If you remove it using threshold blur, it doesn't change the appearance at all, but the size is down to 100 kB. Scale it down to a more reasonable size and you're down to 50 kB. Modern web development never ceases to amaze me.

What is that noise actually? It's clearly not JPEG artifacts. Is it dithering from converting from a higher bitdepth source? There do appear to be very subtle gradients.

Not even the white is pure. There are at least #FFFFFD, #FFFFFB and #FEFEFE pixels sprinkled all over the #FFFFFF.
Post reply on HN