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stemukon Announcing Google Cloud Spanner as a Vault Storage Back End

It is, that is also where the name is coming from (Firebase + Datastore = Firestore).

Firestore also differs a lot from Cloud Spanner, most notably in the way that it can be used directly on the client, whereas Cloud Spanner is meant to be used in combination with a server side application.

stemukon Spotify hit with $1.6B copyright lawsuit

Great explanation, thanks for taking the time to write this down!

stemukon Matcha: Mobile apps in Go

Looks promising! Is it implementation wise more comparable with Flutter (flutter.io) or Cordova?

stemukon A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic

Maybe a site like gwern.net is generally less suited for A/B experiments like that because of the unique look and speed 'HTML only' sites have. Sites like cnn.com or yahoo.com are generally much more crowded and colorful, so banner ads blend in much better. This might in return result in a higher user acceptance rate for banner ads and probably a different engagement rate too.

stemukon Shoutem – A platform to build, publish, and manage React Native apps

Looks pretty great, are there any demo apps available to play with?

stemukon Show HN: Zent – A set of high quality React components

I wasn't able to use any of the components on my android phone, so mobile friendliness doesn't seem to be a priority here.

stemukon OVH Incident in Strasbourg

https://twitter.com/olesovhcom/status/928552251458818048

ETA: 15 min

stemukon Show HN: LearnSearch – User Curated Learning Resources built with Vue, Firestore

What framework did you use for the Material Design look? Pretty cool website!

stemukon Explaining React's license

True, what I really love about polymer is https://webcomponents.org, basically a collection of webcomponents that can be used either individually or in combination without much setup.

This creates great looking results pretty fast and also enables you to easily give back to the community by open-sourcing your own components. Last time I checked already 1100 components were listed, of which the vast majority seemed really well build.

stemukon Why I’m dumping Firebase for Web

It is definitely true that pagination could be much easier. The way it currently works however seems fine to me: You query a node with say the rate limit of the first 30 children. Then you store the key of the last result, and use it as the starting point for the next limited query. This way you can easily query a node with 1000+ children without overloading the client.

stemukon Why I’m dumping Firebase for Web

As far as scalability goes the open-source solution doesn't seem too promising. Beeing capped at 10.000 connections seems like a very low limit to me, especially considering that the blog post complained about 100.000 connections not beeing enough.

stemukon Why App Speed Matters: Revenue

The single site I visit the most when I am on mobile is Hacker News. The reason is simple: It's very fast and well structured, and most importantly it is free from bloat, no ads or unnecessary menus.

I feel like Hacker News is pretty much the best example for the concepts mentioned in the blog post and it proofs that beeing fast can be a sites main feature (or one of them).

stemukon Hetzner Private Cloud

What do you think of their more 'server-like' offerings like the PX61 line [0]? What do I have to expect in terms of downtime and component replacements?

[0] https://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/px61nv...

stemukon Hetzner Private Cloud

Ok, thanks a lot. Since we're on it, is there any open-source software available that is specifically targeted at easily setting up storage servers (maybe with an S3 like SDK)? I found myself pretty much forced to use GCS because of a lack of good alternatives.

stemukon Hetzner Private Cloud

I am really reluctant on setting up my own server cluster on bare-metal right now, can you recommend some specific open-source tools to manage and monitor these clusters?

stemukon Hetzner Private Cloud

As far as I understood it the OpenStack software will be automatically updated on the releases of the LTS channel, so calling the product dangerous seems like an exaggeration to me.

stemukon Hetzner Private Cloud

True, but for the sake of easy management I would still imagine the OpenStack setup to be better. Hopefully they will add some configuration options that make it possible to choose every server type in their lineup to be configured as OpenStack cloud.

stemukon Open sourcing the Firebase SDKs

I really appreciate the input, however the note taking example mentioned above was just a test project of mine. The actual project needs real-time synchronization, which isn't something I was expecting pouchdb/couchdb to be capable of.

stemukon Open sourcing the Firebase SDKs

In particular I would love to see the query size change in the real-time database. This could either be achieved by compressing the JSON response, or by calculating the traffic differently.

As a user of Firebase about a year ago I saw much, much higher egress traffic from the Real-time database than I expected. To be specific, for testing purposes I set up a note-taking app, which (being a test) had the database size of 31kb. But here comes the weird part: by querying the database exactly 10 times, my console was showing 24.5mb of traffic, which is much higher than 31*10=310kb/0.31mb.

Ultimately this caused me to change tracks to an open-source alternative, but if changes would be made on that front I'd be willing to take another dive into Firebase.

stemukon A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month

It is hard to believe that tools to prevent overage use in the $25 plan haven't been developed earlier. All the necessary components were there: It has always been possible to track the use of resources per user, and it has at least in the early version of Firebase been able to send out warning emails if the enforced limits are approaching. So, to me it seems like a no-brainer to combine these two, in particular for a large company like Google.

stemukon A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month

Sometimes I am wondering who is actually steering the discussion to a certain point. I wouldn't go so far to call it censorship, but if the Google employees take over the comment section, it is very hard to call the flow of information "unbiased".

YCombinator shouldn't let companies use Hacker News as a marketing tool, at least not to the extent Google does.

stemukon A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month

True, I used to be really interested in Firebase and their set of products. But because of several pretty bad experiences related to vendor lock-in and (very) high prices I switched over to an open source alternative.

It might not be so well known, but I found http://www.deepstream.io to have a relatively similar feature set, without having to deal with bad support (if it bothers you, just fix it yourself) and high prices, since you are the one who picks what suits you best.

stemukon A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month

No, because most self-hosted services are 10-20x cheaper than comparable SaaS offerings. In the realtime space Firebase is particularly known for being really expensive for the scalable plans (blaze plan).

stemukon A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month

I think it's kind of weird to see Google/Firebase team members swarming around in dozens on HN when they present a new feature, which seems to me like a coordinated marketing effort by Google. But once problems arise or they get criticized by their own users, no one seems to be available for a comment.

stemukon A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month

I would also doubt that it would be worth it even without keeping in mind the risk of loosing the service. Google is usually pretty clever when it comes to TOS Agreements.

stemukon A startup’s Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month

Did a Firebase team member already comment on this? In a few hours Google will present some new Firebase features at io17, and I would expect them to avoid bad press now as much as possible...

stemukon Introducing Surface Laptop

It can, like pretty much any other Intel-based laptop. The main issue however might be the limited touchscreen support of most linux distros...

stemukon DeepstreamHub: a faster Firebase with an open core

Here you go: https://deepstream.io/info/performance/single-node-vs-cluste...

stemukon The Firebase Story

Really like the fact that deepstreamhub doesn't have a strong vendor lock-in like Firebase. I feel like it would ease many developers minds if they offered some sort of open source version, if only for the sake of being able to change your stack.

The option to export your users data in a RethinkDB compatible manner would probably do the job too.

stemukon A million-dollar engineering problem

This. I really feel like egress traffic costs is the most overlooked issue with popular cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud. Charging 9 or 12 cents for a mere GB of regular traffic is just insane, keeping in mind that even most CDNs are cheaper.

Data driven applications on AWS are already expensive because of the high traffic costs, but storing/serving media on S3 single handedly lets your bill explode. For everyone who feels like the statements above are exaggerations, just check out their actual prices (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/) in comparison with a regular CDN (https://www.stackpath.com/pricing/).