Lesson learned: use OBS Studio
A single line of code cost $8000
261–270 of 423 posts
Re: A single line of code cost $8000
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Contrarian approach: $8000 is not a lot in this context. What did the CEO think of this? Most of the time it is just a very small speed bump in the overall finances of the company. Avoidable, unfortunate, but the cost of slowing down development progress e.g. 10% is much higher. But agree that senior gatekeepers should know by heart some places where review needs to be extra careful. Like security pitfalls, exponenti…
> What did the CEO think of this? I doubt there’s a CEO. Despite the use of “we”, pretty sure this is one guy building the app. All the copyright notices and social media go back to one person.
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Re: A single line of code cost $8000
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
> their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes How on earth is a screen recording app 250 megabytes
Or.. Why on earth you need to check for updates 288x per day. It sounds and seems more like 'usage monitoring' rather than being sure that all users have the most recent bug fixes installed. What's wrong with checking for updates upon start once (and cache per day). What critical bugs or fixes could have been issued that warrant 288 update checks.
They probably just combined all phoning home information into one. Usage monitoring includes version used, which leads to automatic update when needed (or when bugged...).
Re: A single line of code cost $8000
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
While we're listing complaints... 250MB for a screen recorder update?
Screen recorder under 100 bytes: ffmpeg -video_size 1024x768 -framerate 25 -f x11grab -i :0.0+100,200 output.mp4
Last time I checked, statically built ffmpeg was 100 MB, at least on Linux.
Re: A single line of code cost $8000
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or.. Why on earth you need to check for updates 288x per day. It sounds and seems more like 'usage monitoring' rather than being sure that all users have the most recent bug fixes installed. What's wrong with checking for updates upon start once (and cache per day). What critical bugs or fixes could have been issued that warrant 288 update checks.
What's wrong with checking for updates upon start once (and cache per day) For me that would also be wrong, if I cannot disable it in the configuration. I do bot want to extend startup time.
Wait until you learn about non-blocking IO. And threads.
It's a whole new world out there.
Re: A single line of code cost $8000
#266For people finding this thread via web search in the future: screen.studio is macOS screen recording software that checks for updates every five minutes. Somehow, that alone is NOT the bug described in this post. The /other/ bug described in this blog is: their software also downloaded a 250MB update file every five minutes. The software developers there consider all of this normal except the actual download, which c…
Microsoft InTune WUDO has a similar bug costing my department 40000 € internal charging per month for firewall log traffic of blocked tcp 7680 requests. 86000 requests per day per client, 160 million per day total. MS confirmed the bug but did nothing to fix it.
how? Do you investigate each blocked packet as separate alert?
Re: A single line of code cost $8000
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s pretty much the floor for an Electron app. If you’re a small shop or solo dev, it is real hard to justify going native on three platforms when electron gives it for (near) free. And outside of HN, no one seems to blink at a 250MB bundle. There are alternatives like Tauri that use the system browser and allow substantially smaller bundles, but they’re not nearly as mature as Electron, and you will get cross pla…
> And outside of HN, no one seems to blink at a 250MB bundle. I can remember when I would have to leave a 250MB download running overnight. Before that, I can remember when it would have filled my primary hard drive more than six times over. ... Why can't the app-specific code just get plugged into a common, reusable Electron client?
Different versions of electron bundle different versions of chromium. There can/will be rendering differences between them.
Tauri is an alternative framework that uses whatever web view the OS provides, saving ~200mb bundle size. On Mac that’s a (likely outdated) version of Safari. On Windows it’ll be Edge. Not sure what Linux uses, I’d guess it varies by distro.
The promise of Electron (and it’s an amazing value prop) is that your HTML/JS UI will always look and work the same as in your dev environment, no matter what OS the host is running.
I don’t have the time or inclination to test my app on the most recent 3 releases of the most popular operating systems every time I change something in the view layer. With Electron, I trade bundle size for not having to do so.
I do think alternatives like Tauri are compelling for simple apps with limited UI, or where a few UI glitches are acceptable (e.g. an internal app). Or for teams that can support the QA burden.
Re: A single line of code cost $8000
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everyone even has an Internet connection that can reliably download 250MB in 5 minutes. Yes, even in metropolitan areas in developed countries in 2025.
Even doable on very long range ADSL, guess there are still some dialup users.
My current AirBnB has only cellular backed WiFi which would struggle to download 250MB at peak times.
Re: A single line of code cost $8000
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And outside of HN, no one seems to blink at a 250MB bundle. I can remember when I would have to leave a 250MB download running overnight. Before that, I can remember when it would have filled my primary hard drive more than six times over. ... Why can't the app-specific code just get plugged into a common, reusable Electron client?
You mean like WebKit which Tauri uses?
I go into more detail in a sibling comment, but Tauri does not provide a standardized web runtime. The webview you get depends on your OS and OS version. They’re all “WebKit”, but definitely do not all render the same. I have built a Tauri app and switched to Electron after encountering multiple x-plat rendering bugs.
Re: A single line of code cost $8000
#270Just $8000?
A giant ship’s engine failed. The ship’s owners tried one ‘professional’ after another but none of them could figure out how to fix the broken engine.
Then they brought in a man who had been fixing ships since he was young. He carried a large bag of tools with him and when he arrived immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.
Two of the ship’s owners were there watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away and the engine was fixed!!!
A week later, the owners received an invoice from the old man for $10,000.
What?! the owners exclaimed. “He hardly did anything..!!!”.
So they wrote to the man; “Please send us an itemised invoice.”
The man sent an invoice that read:
Tapping with a hammer………………….. $2.00
Knowing where to tap…………………….. $9,998.00