Live data from Hacker News

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

threads.com

81–90 of 210 posts

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

#81
I know there's a lot of questions why it's so expensive, but can I just extol the work done by Riley and team?

Since the Epstein files dropped they've cloned gmail, gdrive, gmessages, amazon orders, transcribed court proceedings (yes with AI), fights, facebook, and imessages.

It's an insane amount of work. They added the latest batch of files, photos, videos in like 2 weeks. And he's keeping up files that the justice department took down.

jmail has made it so much easier for everyone to explore the files.

I don't know how Riley has planned to monetize this or if it's simply for the public good. I can totally understand not wanting to optimize for cost from the outset. And I see a lot of abject criticism on every social media platform rather than constructive.

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

#82
Public files needing to be distributed to a huge population of interested persons? Sounds like the perfect situation for an oldschool torrent. That's how large data leaks were handled back in my day. 450TB is peanuts for perhaps ten thousand peers on fast residential connections.

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

#83
post #69

The post said 450 million pageviews, likely since November. If we make very generous assumptions and assume that each pageview is a megabyte (very generous based on my own experience scanning billions of websites), then that's 450TB total in traffic. If you really did 450TB per month in traffic, you would need slightly more than one gigabit line (and hence VPS), but not more than two. With Hetzner the traffic would c…

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.

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

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is offtopic honestly, but I'm curious if I've been using this phrase wrong for my whole life. Doesn't "order of magnitude" refer to steps of powers of ten? $50000 vs €30. (or €42066.30 vs €30 if I normalize the currency) 5x10^4 vs 3x10^1.

You have it right, perhaps the original poster was referring to it in a more colloquial manner, in the sense that against 200 million in revenue, 50,000 and 30 are in the same ballpark?

I took it as a joke about the USD/EUR exchange rate ;)

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

#85
post #79
post #69

The post said 450 million pageviews, likely since November. If we make very generous assumptions and assume that each pageview is a megabyte (very generous based on my own experience scanning billions of websites), then that's 450TB total in traffic. If you really did 450TB per month in traffic, you would need slightly more than one gigabit line (and hence VPS), but not more than two. With Hetzner the traffic would c…

Isn’t part of Vercel’s value proposition a robust global CDN in front? Seems quite a bit different than one sweaty VM in Helsinki.

Yes, and I didn't mean to imply that a single VPS is all you needed. But I wanted to put things into perspective for the other posters who claimed that you couldn't possibly serve a site like this from a single machine, purely in terms of performance.

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

#86
post #69

The post said 450 million pageviews, likely since November. If we make very generous assumptions and assume that each pageview is a megabyte (very generous based on my own experience scanning billions of websites), then that's 450TB total in traffic. If you really did 450TB per month in traffic, you would need slightly more than one gigabit line (and hence VPS), but not more than two. With Hetzner the traffic would c…

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.

Fair enough, I just loaded some pages and some of them are even bigger than 2MB. But then again those static resources would be cached client-side. So unless you have 450 million unique visitors who only ever go to one URL on your site, you are looking at significantly less per pageview. I reloaded the frontpage with caching enabled and it was ~ 30kB of data transfer.

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

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is offtopic honestly, but I'm curious if I've been using this phrase wrong for my whole life. Doesn't "order of magnitude" refer to steps of powers of ten? $50000 vs €30. (or €42066.30 vs €30 if I normalize the currency) 5x10^4 vs 3x10^1.

You have it right, perhaps the original poster was referring to it in a more colloquial manner, in the sense that against 200 million in revenue, 50,000 and 30 are in the same ballpark?

> in the sense that against 200 million in revenue, 50,000 and 30 are in the same ballpark

I don't understand how those are in the same ballpark? I thought saying something is in the same ballpark suggested that they are similar in scale, and the implication is that little-leauge does not play in the same ballpark as a NBA team. They are in the same category (baseball), but not at all the same level.

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

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It shouldn't. The issue is that most developers would rather spin up another instance of their server than solve the performance issue in their code, so now it's a common belief that computers are really slow to serve content. And we are talking about static content. You will be bottlenecked by bandwidth before you are ever bottlenecked by your laptop.

To be fair, computers are slow if you intentionally rent slow & overpriced ones from really poor-value vendors like cloud providers. For people who started their career in this madness they might be genuinely unaware of how fast modern hardware has become.
Post reply on HN