bojangleslover

It's neither capitalist nor socialist. If it were fully socialist you would have long wait lists but it would be free and there would be one payer. It is like this for Medicare and Medicaid which I've heard are a fantastic UX. But this is only the case for about half of Americans (the ones who don't pay for it).

On the other side, if it were fully capitalist you would be able to see the price and walk away if you didn't like it. This is what makes capitalism work. Your margin is my opportunity. Instead, the upper middle class, who pays for everything already, and is unable to use Medicaid, is forced to use a certain "network" of providers and never, ever sees the price upfront. This is the cornerstone of capitalism. Does the buyer like the price? If so, transact. It's completely not there. Instead, it's actively discouraged and banned, and the price is maximized post-hoc by the same entities who negotiate directly with the employee's employer. Ie, a quantitative shakedown.

He's an idiot. He pulled off one of the most incredible stunts I've ever seen. Not only does was he able to find and extract the gold over a mile down, which is incredible, he was also able to rally over 100 investors and raise capital. Ironically this is basically how capital markets originated, from shipping ventures not unlike this one.

He should have given the investors their money, taken his performance fee, and not spend up to half of his remaining lifespan (and probably around 3/4 of his remaining health span).

On the other hand, if he has grandkids and he manages to give them say 100mm instead of 20mm, he may feel it was worth it genetically.

What I do now is I make an MVP with the AI, get it working. And then tear it all down and start over again, but go a little slower. Maybe tear down again and then go even more slowly. Until I get to the point where I'm looking at everything the AI does and every line of code goes through me.

Didn’t this happen a long time ago?

Currently moving Carolina Cloud to Kubernetes. I had built a custom orchestrator but really want the freedom of pod movement as well as KubeVirt's live migration capabilities. My ultimate plan is to open a second location in South Carolina at a cheaper colocation and then drain the nodes one by one, moving them to there, and leave my prior colocation. Kubernetes will make this possible.

Completely different situations. None of the MinIO team worked for free. MinIO is a COSS company (commercial open source software). They give a basic version of it away for free hoping that some people, usually at companies, will want to pay for the premium features. MinIO going closed source is a business decision and there is nothing wrong with that.

I highly recommend SeaweedFS. I used it in production for a long time before partnering with Wasabi. We still have SeaweedFS for a scorching hot, 1GiB/s colocated object storage, but Wasabi is our bread and butter object storage now.

The complexity is what gets you. One of AWS's favorite situations is

1) Senior engineer starts on AWS

2) Senior engineer leaves because our industry does not value longevity or loyalty at all whatsoever (not saying it should, just observing that it doesn't)

3) New engineer comes in and panics

4) Ends up using a "managed service" to relieve the panic

5) New engineer leaves

6) Second new engineer comes in and not only panics but outright needs help

7) Paired with some "certified AWS partner" who claims to help "reduce cost" but who actually gets a kickback from the extra spend they induce (usually 10% if I'm not mistaken)

Calling it it ransomware is obviously hyperbolic but there are definitely some parallels one could draw

On top of it all, AWS pricing is about to massively go up due to the RAM price increase. There's no way it can't since AWS is over half of Amazon's profit while only around 15% of its revenue.

Great comment. I agree it's a spectrum and those of us who are comfortable on (4) like yourself and probably us at Carolina Cloud [0] as well, (4) seems like a no brainer. But there's a long tail of semi-technical users who are more comfortable in 2-3 or even 1, which is what ultimately traps them into the ransomware-adjacent situation that is a lot of the modern public cloud. I would push back on "usage-based". Yes it is technically usage-based but the base fee also goes way up and there are also sometimes retainers on these services (ie minimum spend). So of course "usage-based" is not wrong but what it usually means is "more expensive and potentially far more expensive".

[0] https://carolinacloud.io, derek@

Really it's for both. One of our cofounders came from a genomics background and so that's why we have the Marimo notebooks + R Studio Server + genomics container. But we've also had a lot of requests for general VMs so we made some of those as well.

I guess you're right. Is it even possible to truly own everything yourself? Even if you open your own data center, at some point you have to agree to peer with big fiber providers like Segra, Lumen, AWS Edge Network, right?

Did you try to log in with Github or gmail?

We have no egress fees but you're right about Hetzner. They're cheap. We aim to offer more value-added software to make up for it. Also that machine is in Europe, Americans don't like the latency (at least I don't), they have been known to shut people down (within reason).

Also I'm seeing that the most they can go RAM-wise for a dedicated US location is 192G. We go to 512 and will soon go beyond. I'm sure they'll get there soon but that's a consideration as well.

We have about 1000 cores right now.

We're really excited for the AMD EPYC Venice — 256 physical cores each -> 512 vCPUs -> 1024 vCPUS on a single board with dual-socket. It will probably be about $40k per machine with these RAM prices but we're definitely going to buy a few. A full data center on a single motherboard!

So we're limited on capacity since we own all our own hardware. Please do not use us for auto-scaling just yet. Our software would have no issue with us linking up other cloud machines such as AWS EC2 to our fleet and offering it there, which could help with auto-scaling, but we would not make any money on that and it would be a lot of engineering effort for us right now.

We don't have on-demand API-based bare metal provisioning right now. Sorry if that is misleading on the website. Our bare metal is OTC right now (over the counter).

For the rest of our provisioning (VM and container) I wrote the software myself. It's based on a Django app called the "master" that hosts the console and keeps track of who has rented what etc + a bunch of "host" nodes that listen for instructions from the "master". Pure python, the only thing that's in Go is the CLI.

I looked into Proxmox but ultimately decided I wanted full control. ZFS storage from Proxmox is something I do sometimes wish we had — going to offer s3-compatible storage very soon but I know Proxmox does ZFS out of the box really well.

Yes we're going to offer this very soon, we have a bunch of SSDs but we're still deliberating on what to use now that MinIO is moving toward closed source.

Landing page or console? We didn't really build our console for mobile though we probably should.

We fixed this, please try again, also if anyone knows how to run a Three.js shader without exploding people's laptops I am very open to suggestions.

We actually ran out of my house in our very early stages at which case we owned everything. We had Google Fiber 8gbps for $150/mo. The only issue was the Google Fiber terms of service — ie they could shut us down at any time. This was one reason we went to colocation.

We've yet to have any DDoS problems. We don't even use cloudflare proxy which we feel keeps our API and frontend super fast and responsive.

We own all our own hardware but we rent from a colocation provider in Charlotte. They provide the backed-up power and network + the IP block, we do literally everything else. We used to be in my house and I was considering installing my own generator (actually not that expensive) but we got a great deal on colocation, shout out Ivan Teoh at Tier.net!

We own all of our own hardware and we rent space in a colocation center in Charlotte, NC. We used to run out of my house since I had 8Gbps unmetered from Google Fiber but ultimately went to colocation since it was relatively cheap and has the backup power/network infrastructure.

If you need more trial credits than our pitiful $1 email me at derek@carolinacloud.io. We were inundated with crypto miners from Russia so we had to ban all .ru domains from signing up + shrink the free trial.

People on HN are obviously legit users so anyone reading this please email me at derek at carolinacloud.io and we will give you $250 free credits at least or maybe more if your workload requires it!

Thanks for the honest feedback. We just fixed this, I was hoping people wouldn't stick around on the landing page for too long since our console lets you do almost everything without needing an account. That assumption was obviously misguided!

Thanks for the explanation. As a long time user I feel embarrassed to have not known this but I will definitely keep this in mind going forward.

You are right for probably 60% of customers. For someone spending $3k/mo on cloud on a company doing $500k/yr of revenue then going down to $1k/mo on cloud for a less tried and true product (us) is likely a bad idea.

Similarly for a mom-and-pop bakery (contrived example) hosting a website for $60/mo, going down to $20/mo (just to keep the 1/3 ratio) also is probably not worth it.

But some of our customers are not like that. For example a hedge fund we have been working with needs 512G RAM and 256 vCPUs for a mortgage model. The data size is not too big and once they get their results they rip it back to on-prem. The complexity is low, ie they just ssh in and do their models. Often they let them run over the weekend.

And these guys are very price-sensitive. In their industry, saving money means more carry for partners and bigger bonuses for quants. These guys are counting nickels.

So I think you're totally right for the large part of the market that we're not really for, and we're not really competing for those types of customers. But we're not really providing much managed service, we're providing a commodity that, assuming you don't need the high-complexity ecosystem surrounding it, can be very nice for customers who are price-sensitive.

Does that invalidate the point?

Where did you read that?

This myth needs to die. PE does not own that many homes. There was a small period in early COVID where interest rates were lower than cap rates. During this time PE, along with the investment market in general, invested in real estate including SFRs. That is no longer the case. It's a great boogeyman but trust me, having worked in the industry, institutional investors own less than 5% of SFRs.

Real estate investing in general went bananas during COVID (plenty of non-PE buyers as well) because it's one of the only ways the average citizen can access that amount of leverage.

Supply and demand. It's no surprise that when we had 10% of people going to university in the 1960's and now we have over 38.8% [1] that the economic value of a degree seems to be getting watered down.

No different than any other form of inflation from the government blowing on the fire (subsidizing with money) without adding any actual fuel (intrinsic value). Just like housing and healthcare.

[1] https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics#:~...