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

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

#191

Post by eqvinox »

eirpoeior wrote: post #66
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.

Is there any feasible way to implement search client-side on a database of this scale? I guess you would need some sort of search term to document id mapping that gets downloaded to the browser but maybe there's something more efficient than trying to figure out what everyone might be searching for in advance? And how would you do searching for phrases or substrings? I've no idea if that's doable without having a dat…

I think the key thing here is the context and size; the searchable content of even a lot of e-mails is quite dense and small. I'm not a search expert but I'd look at precalculated indexes on very short substrings (3-4 characters maybe?), have the client pull those it needs for a particular query and then process client-side from there. (Doesn't even need figuring out in advance what people will search for, though that'd certainly improve things.)

I did say you pay with engineering, didn't I? :)

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

#193

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

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

People act like this is an easy problem. What should a cloud provider do when you hit your limit? Delete your files from storage? Kill your database instance? Automatically terminate your VMs? Erase your backups?

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

#195

Post by throwaway290 »

dban wrote: post #109
js3642 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I used to think Railway was an amazing service, I had a production workload get broken because they removed a feature without any depreciation period or warning. I now struggle to recommend it for anything more than a hobby project. Vercel has the benifit of being big enough they have to do things properly. For reference https://station.railway.com/questions/smtp-connection-failur...

SMTP is gated behind the $20/mo Pro plan to reduce spam on the internet. It sounds like you were running a production workload on the Hobby plan

that's rich, from Railway employee.

your company's mod in that thread said there was supposed to be no SMTP at all for any plan but it was enabled by a bug. then once you saw people were using it you decided to milk your bug via the most expensive payment plan.

but that's your internal dealings. from your paying customers perspective, company had a change in the environment where something was working and now it's not. which could be even okay if it was a legit bug that was fixed, but what makes it worse is instead you said "just pay us 4x more and you get it back". for some users it probably just broke production, is there a more perfect time for blackmail right?

don't try to paint it as altruistic attempt to reduce spam in the internet, this is sleazy af

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

#196

Post by rasz »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #132
SahAssar wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, https://jmail.world/jacebook-logo.png is 670KB by itself and loaded on initial load, so I think they might have blown your suggested traffic budget and still have some optimization to do.

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.

I got it down to 200KB using normal png encoder and just limiting number of colors, but it should be replaced with tiny SVG.

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

#197

Post by rasz »

guywithahat wrote: post #96
mhitza wrote: post #2

Unreadable without an instagram/threads account

It's also dumb because the original interaction happened on X https://x.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622 Say what you want about Elon but X is where all the investors and tech execs are. Nobody is going to sign up for threads because they saw it link to a picture in a HN post

>Say what you want about Elon but X is where all the investors and tech execs are

You could say the same thing about certain Island not to long ago, its where business and world leaders are!

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

#198

Post by rasz »

iOSThrowAway wrote: post #33
Nextgrid wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t it just serving static content and the content fitting in RAM? If so your laptop can serve it just fine even.

A laptop would have a hard time serve thousands of people hitting a single endpoint multiple times a day.

I was serving >50K accounts gaming forum with ~10K daily users hitting us multiple times a day on a Pentium 133 desktop LAMP server back in 2000.

Kids these days :-)

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

#199

Post by factsaresacred »

miki123211 wrote: post #156
PostOnce wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nut…

2 reasons basically. 1. Because people vote with their wallets and not their mouths, and most companies would rather have a cost accident (quickly refunded by AWS) rather than everything going down on a saturday and not getting back up until finance can figure out their stuff. 2. Because realtime cost control is hard. It's just easier to fire off events, store them somewhere, and then aggregate at end-of-day (if that…

> I strongly suspect that the way major clouds do billing is just not ready for answering the question of "how much did X spend over the last hour", and the people worried about this aren't the ones bringing the real revenue.

See: Google's AI studio. Its built on Google Cloud infrastructure so billing updates are slow which peeves users used to instant billing data with Anthropic and OpenAI.

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

#200

Post by kriz9 »

kstrauser wrote: post #194
acejam wrote: post #105

450 million pageviews on Vercel = $46,000 450 million pageviews on a single 16c/32t OVH box with nginx and a 3 Gbps connection = $245

Having someone on-call 24/7 to keep that $245 box running: $400K.

To run a $245 box, you'd need an entire team with Kubernetes experience — at least one Scrum Master included. Under $2M, I’d say it’s impossible.
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