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

engineering.nanit.com

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

#111

Post by deaux »

BoredPositron wrote: post #103
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FWIW the people accusing the person you're replying to would be clearly wrong as this sentence alone directly rules it out being straight LLM output:

> and nowadays the suspected cause will be LLM.

It's very unlike the original person, who is a bot indeed.

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

#112

Post by deaux »

LPisGood wrote: post #78
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #53

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?

LLMs are incredibly prone towards producing examples and reasons in groups of 3, in an A, B, C pattern. The comment in question does so almost every paragraph.

> We found that implementing proper data durability (3+ replicas, corruption detection, automatic repair)

> The engineering time spent building and maintaining custom tooling for multi-region replication, access controls, and monitoring ended

And so on. On top of this a 5 second look at the profile confirms that it's a bot.

They're using a very structured and detailed prompt. The upside of that for them is that their comment looks much more "HN-natural" than 99% of LLM comments on here. The downside is that their comments look even much more similar to each other than other bots, which display more variety. That's the tradeoff they're making. Other bots' comments are much more obviously sloppy, but there's more variety across their different comments.

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

#113

Post by sandGorgon »

vachina wrote: post #68
sbrother wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What competitor have you actually tried? My girlfriend’s parents have a few cheap TPlink solar powered CCTV and they work flawlessly since setup. I used to jerryrig an Android phone for Alfred and that too worked well. My impression is live feed is a solved problem.

i have a tplink as well and can vouch for it. it has iphone and android apps and can show live feed. mine costed 30$ and free live video.

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

#116

Post by bee_rider »

varenc wrote: 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…

I actually don’t really get the point of a cloud service for this. Aren’t babies usually left in situations where there’s at least one trusted adult locally available?

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

#117

Post by ramraj07 »

dmje wrote: post #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 nee…

Of all the hills to die on w.r.t. how the world is screwed up, this seems like the silliest.

Different folks parent differently, culture evolves. You're free to have your "old school" thoughts as are people who use services like this.

Its not like they're publishing it in public. The service in discussion especially just stores it in the server only temporarily to use ML to detect things such as sleeping or crying. Sounds innocuous to me.

Many of us can do the math ourselves and choose to make choices based on our own beliefs. That's true freedom.

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

#118

Post by globular-toast »

cbg0 wrote: post #82
varenc wrote: 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…

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

My parents bought a camcorder in 1995 and "self-hosted" the video just fine. But you're right it shouldn't even be something consumers should consider, because it should be the default and should be easy. You can get low power SSD-powered NAS devices now so hopefully this will change soon.

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

#119

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Their architecture is internet bandwidth heavy and storage heavy; these are some of the most expensive things in AWS. You probably want to use a different provider for those things.

> It turns out that when AWS says an instance can do “Up to 12.5 Gbps”, that’s burstable networking backed by credits; when you’re below the baseline, you accrue credits and can burst for short periods.

Yes, AWS has a burst rating and a sustained/baseline rating for both EBS types as well as instance types. Use https://instances.vantage.sh/ (and make sure you choose specific columns) to compare specific criteria and then export as a CSV to find the lowest price that matches your performance/feature/platform criteria. Design to the baseline if you need guaranteed performance. Do sustained performance testing.

> When we Terminated connections idle >10 minutes, memory dropped by ~1 GB immediately; confirming the leak was from dangling sockets. Fix: make sockets short-lived and enforce time limits.

We used to do that with Apache 20 years ago. Config option forces a forked subchild to exit after N requests to avoid the inevitable memory leaks. AKA the Windows 95 garbage collector (a reboot a day keeps the slowness at bay).

FWIW, if the business feasibility of your architecture depends on custom stuff, performance enhancements, etc, you will find that you eventually have harder and harder problems to solve to keep your business functioning. It's more reliable to waste money on a solution that is brainless, than invest human ingenuity/technical mastery in a solution that is frugal.

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

#120

Post by bee_rider »

deaux wrote: post #108
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #53

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.

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 gon…

Having screwed around extensively on Internet forums, it’s always be pretty difficult to figure out who’s just a phony.

But yeah this won’t make it any easier.

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