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fcesco

17 karma · joined March 10, 2019

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fcesco··on Show HN: Vanish moves heavy computation off your laptop
only the first run pays the full cost, after that, only what changed is shipped.

For example on a 20MiB repo you would upload ~11MB on the first cold run, but only 3.3KB on repeats. I tried to make this as efficient as possible and only sending whats needed

fcesco··on Show HN: Vanish moves heavy computation off your laptop
A VM you manage yourself is cheaper per hour. An 8 vCPU / 16 GiB machine costs $0.66/hr with us, versus about $0.42/hr for an on-demand EC2 c7i.2xlarge. Roughly 1.5x. GCP's free tier has 1 GB of RAM and shared CPU, afaik, so it's pretty limited for builds.

The premium is for not doing the infra dance yourself. Forget the EC2 instance is up and it's $10.18/day. We bill by the second while a command runs, so against a VM you leave running all day, your break even is around 15 hours of compute.

I used to run my VMs and I would forget to tear them down and got tired of rsyncing and explaining to my agents what the setup was or where to run stuff.

That's what I wanted to fix. Your uncommitted working tree runs remotely, results come back to disk, exit codes and Ctrl-C work, and there's nothing to remember to shut down. Adding vanish cargo test just works as cargo test

If you keep on top of your VMs and don't mind the syncing, running your own will be cheaper.

fcesco··on Rust for JavaScript Developers – Functions and Control Flow
Coming from writing JS all day, I've recently started learning Rust and I find it extremely refreshing. Yes, it is heavy, low level and forces you to think about how things work under the hood, but it empowers me to do high performance stuff I just coulnd't do in JS before.

Def recommend it as a second / third language

fcesco··on Rust for JavaScript Developers – Functions and Control Flow
Well you couldn't resolve "this" lexically without some closure tricks like that = this , so sure, you could do everything you do with arrows without them, but not with one function alone
fcesco··on Exponential Growth and Covid-19 [video]
If anyone wants to dig into the math, this is a non linear recurrence relation, with an external dependency, that is n_d+1 = f(a,n_d) n^(d+1)

bad news: How this behaves will depend a lot on a (containment measures etc...)

good news: If we can make a grow faster than an exponential, we can win