aparks517

What a coincidence! I just finished reading this. It's the work of many authors, so you may find it a little uneven. But overall I found it to be an outstanding document. It helped me get the lay of the land quickly and easily, coming from OpenBSD. OpenBSD has very good documentation too, but I don't think they have anything quite like this.

The suggestion below to search for "1u server" is probably good to get a feel for what the overall used market is like and what relative availability is. It helps to keep up a little with the product line of whoever moves a lot of equipment in your area (Dell around here) so you'll know what the popular/good models are to watch out for when they hit the used market. It also helps to know what options are available and/or common for the model you're looking at so you know if you're seeing something that's specced up or bare-bones or in between.

Server manufacturers usually have someplace on their websites for hardware or technical guides or spec-sheets. They're often available for 10+ years after they quit selling a model, so you can research a system before you buy a truckload of them.

eBay has a good selection. I prefer to buy from sellers that specialize in server gear -- the descriptions are usually more complete/accurate and they'll (hopefully) know how to pack things so they arrive in good shape.

If you have a good surplus store or recyclers in your town it might be worth checking with them to save shipping (servers are heavy!). If you plan to buy a lot of gear regularly, it may pay you back to do some networking and make friends with folks who buy new and replace after five years -- become their recycler ;)

I colo at a local ISP. I've been with them for about a year and I'm happy. Selection was easy: I wanted a local shop and there's only one in town. I had worked with them before on other projects and figured we would get along well.

I manage the hardware myself, mostly remotely. Occasionally I'll go onsite to upgrade or repair something. I buy used servers and parts from a little over five years ago or so. A lot of folks buy new and replace every five years, so this is a sweet-spot for performance per dollar. Kinda like buying a car just off-lease.

Working a cycle behind has its own benefits. If you pick a very common model you'll get cheap and easy-to-find parts. I was able to get a full set of spares for far less than what a typical hardware maintenance contract would cost per year (and I have them on hand rather than in 2-4 hours). Drivers (especially open source drivers) will be better developed and less buggy and you can probably find someone else's notes about anything that usually goes wrong.

Of course if you need cutting-edge gear, this won't be a good option. But I don't, so I take advantage!

I think whether you'll save money depends a lot on how you do things. There are efficiencies of scale that big providers benefit from, but there are also efficiencies you can leverage if you're small and flexible (like tailoring hardware to your use-cases and not doing/supporting stuff you don't personally use).

I didn't make the move to save money, but to get more power and flexibility. So far, so good!

Good luck! If you decide to dive in, I hope you'll come back and let us know how it goes!

#787# and #632# work for me on Ting with an X3 SIM, but #662# says "unable to process request." I'm guessing you actually need to be a T-Mobile customer to use the service.

Niche music streaming service http://lofi.limo/

Front end: plain JavaScript

Back end: Phoenix and Elixir, Postgres, OpenBSD

Deployment: tmux on a bare-metal server at a local colocation facility

Does Apple have a legal or regulatory requirement to scan iCloud photos for CSAM? I poked around but didn't find a quick answer.

Reading through the two linked PDF's, I got the impression that they're aiming to use cryptographic techniques to meet a (possibly self-imposed) requirement to scan for CSAM while revoking their current ability to decrypt photos stored in iCloud. I guess they may want to revoke this ability so that they can no longer be compelled to hand over customer's photos except those for which the requirements of this new system are met.

I guess if it results in an increase of the privacy of iCloud content, that's nice as far as it goes. But it does skeeve me out to be reminded that my phone can (and does) paw through my stuff.

My impression back when Google really took off was that other search engines were basing their relevance scores on page content and getting lots of spam in their results from pages that gamed the relevance algorithm. Then here comes Google using human judgment via PageRank and getting great results, because who would link to garbage?

Of course the web has changed since then. And I think you're right on in thinking that the signal-to-noise ratio of links has gone way down. But it may not be fair to chastise Google for not getting good results just from page content. Has anyone ever done a good job of information retrieval in an adversarial environment without leaning on human judgment?

Your hobby (whatever it may be) is interesting to at least one person: you! I bet you find other folks on the Internet who are interested too. If it's not a common topic, they'll likely appreciate your blog all the more because of that.

I've been doing this for a while and it's great. If you know a few tricks (optional closing tags, for example), writing HTML by hand can actually be rather pleasant. Go for it!

Don't let the kids get you down. My deployment scripts look something like this:

rsync --rsync-path=/usr/bin/openrsync -r --delete config lib mix.exs mix.lock priv server:my_project

ssh server "tmux respawn-window -t my_project:1 -k"

It's only weird if it doesn't work, right?

> poultry feed is grains and "mostly" edible in theory

Yeah, some of them definitely. We fed our chickens a fair bit of wheat, which of course makes good bread. Plenty of field corn too, which... I guess if you like corn chips as much as I do... okay! Poultry and eggs might be better for you than loading up on grains though.

> per-capita meat consumption in the US has gone up dramatically in the last 50 years, and so has the average caloric intake

Perhaps as little as double those fifty years ago it would have been unthinkable that even the poorest among us could be troubled by obesity. We live in an age of riches and I guess we're still figuring out how that works. What a problem to have, though!

> it seems like we have room to downsize some, right?

This is perhaps the most amusingly uncontroversial thing I've read on the Internet lately. Thank you

I imagine some grazing land could be converted, but I do think most of it is used for grazing because that's about all it's good for. My family used to graze a small herd on land that could /almost/ be used to grow grain (with lots of chemical help), but definitely not vegetables.

You may be able to use a UTF BOM instead of the meta tag, or I think someone mentioned elsewhere having the server declare the character encoding in a header. I guess it depends on whether you count the header size which is better for golfing.

That seems like a reasonable attitude to me. You might be surprised to learn that not everyone shares it, though.

My personal experience is that my paid customers have been much friendlier and less demanding than users of things I've put out for free. That's not a problem in and of itself: sometimes demanding users is just what I need to sharpen up myself and what I'm building. Having noticed this, though, I've tried to be more thoughtful about what I put out, in what format, and under what terms.

All that to say: I sympathize with both points of view.

Fair enough. I think it just depends on what you're going for :)

I don’t build my life around it, but I try to sometimes do things that would have tickled my teenage self. I did sell the loud, blue-with-green-flames 1988 Fiero that all the kids in the neighborhood waved at. I still try to do cool stuff and scare myself from time to time.

I agree it’s not bad to be boring... but it’s not the only thing that /I/ want to be.

Cool, thanks!

Yeah, Twilio has a lot of documentation. It's pretty good, though. It felt like most of the time I spent on this project was finding the right documentation and setting up my account and number correctly.

Maybe what the world really needs is a Twilio Concierge as a Service -- a meta-Twilio if you will. ;)

What a delight! I implemented an HTTP server from scratch (well, from RFC) in Objective-C some years ago. Many of these hit pretty close to home. Lots of plot twists in those RFCs.

I'll consider it. The way it sits now is a bit specific to my deployment environment and in a language that I'm not sure a lot of folks would choose for new development (Perl 5 forever!)

Would you say that you're mostly interested in having the code for learning purposes so you could write your own thing, to deploy your own instance mostly as-is, as a starting place for significant modification, or for other purposes I haven't considered? Knowing this would help me understand what sort of open source contribution would be most valuable.

Twilio does the heavy lifting with SMS. My piece is just a short Perl CGI script that downloads attached pictures and rebuilds the sender's site. Thanks! I'll keep that in mind.

Oh, wow. I had missed that Ask HN. Thanks for making that connection! There are a bunch of cool suggestions in that thread, particularly regarding photography. I can't get over how good photography has gotten on phones.

Thank you for the kind words! Not at this time. It's only a few hundred lines of Perl. I had planned for it to be a weekend project, but I think I was able to mostly finish it on just a Saturday.

I don't charge anything from my end. Your carrier may charge something, depending on your agreement with them.

Yeah! We used to use something like that at a place I worked. I think the audience being live put some social pressure against spam. It worked out well for us, especially for big meetings where even the more outgoing folks might have felt uncomfortable putting their hand up and waiting for a microphone.

In my experience, 90 days is very common in B2B. Though I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it varies by industry.

Thank you for the kind words! I guess it might depend on how your site is put together, but I bet you could whip up something like this for it pretty easy. I had meant for this to be a weekend project, but I had it mostly done before supper on Saturday, so... ;)

I figured I might use ImageMagick to scale the images and maybe jpegoptim afterwards. Thanks for the tip on guetzli, I'll check it out!

Thanks for that link! I remember hearing of Posterous, but I don't think I ever tried it out so that was an interesting read.

Yep, I keep a hash of the incoming number and associate that with the path. The path itself is not based on the hash, so it can't leak information that way and as a pleasant side-effect it wouldn't be hard to make customizable.

I think some kind of command over SMS is a good idea for setting settings. I guess if the settings got too complicated, maybe a command to send back a link to a settings page. But I think I'd rather not let it get too complicated.

Static SMS microblog, https://phasedust.com

Been trying this out with friends and family for a couple of weeks. Some things we like about it: no setup or signup, fast and snappy, doesn’t demand or abuse attention.

Some things I’m still thinking about: image scaling and optimization, discovery (search? hashtags? web-rings?).