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Search - "expensive tier"
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DevOps is a huge scam.
Whoever sold companies maintenance-free cloud is God-tier marketer, they would be able to sell fire extinguishers in hell.
First, the platform is constantly moving, keeping up with all the updates for Kubernetes/CNI/Ambassador/Calico/kube-proxy/wtf/foo/bar/etc requires a huge team constantly peddling the boat; and if not updating in time - eventually everything will suddenly break when AWS deprecates old Kubernetes version (1.23 in EKS has just 1 year and 2 months (!!!) of support) or whatever else. At least they don't deprecate services that often.
Second, all other tooling either suck, or expensive as a Boeing. DataDog/Splunk/NewRelic/Grafana? Data centers were built for the monthly prices of these tools not so long time ago. But, capex vs opex, what stupid software engineers knows (though, it's hilarious to be present on a meeting with an agenda "reduce cloud costs").
That's all really.
On the bright side, when the team is solid and really care about the product and build it in a cloud-first manner (with understanding of all the requirements, caveats and limitation) - it can be rock solid, stable and fast platform.
To bad it's incredibly easy to implement some impressively wrong architecture (much more easier than f'up single-server architecture).8 -
I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.
My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.
Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.
So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.
I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.
Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.
AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.
There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.
But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.
This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.
But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.
I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.
I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.
But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.
I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.
On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.
Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.
Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.
So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.
One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.
I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.
There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.
commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).
it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.
it also seems kinda slow for responses,
it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.4 -
Advice in building muy first custom PC/workstation.
So the main aim of this computer would be installing Linux, of course! And learning bash.
The second objective is learning Dask and doing some machine learning.
Budget, I dont want the must expensive stuff, because it usually costs double and doesnt perform double.. Second or third tier would be ok.
*this is not a gaming pc5 -
I hate the company (agency) I moved to...I've negotiated good pay and the project for cutting edge medical product which will change the world (cancer diagnose and it actually works).
Now the dark side I've got shit tier laptop which I don't want, overtime is payed 30% less, all the people in the agency from development team don't know shit and are mostly I would call them juniors (of course who would with enough seniority work with shit hardware and almost not payed overtime), only tap water and since this is the old part of town you instantly get sick, they treat people like shit.
The product dark side. We are actually working on crm for doctors to input patient data, we cannot have any real data because we are the agency people, product is being led by the guy who has 0 production experience (they choose the database basically with coin toss and emulated the mongodb in postgress with jsnob, they don't know how to build their own auth system hence my previous rant about b2c, they are using cognito and now moving to auth0 which probably won't fit their need because a lot of stuff needs to be custom), they are choosing every hipe tech out there without any prior experience. It's chaos...
I'm trying to guide them but i think this will be a huge expensive failure and that i need to leave asap.
There I feel better now, moral of the story, choose startups wisely.1 -
Travis CI is so expensive for smaller developers.
I started using it when it was free for open source projects, but now they changed it, and the lowest tier ever is $69.
Don't get me wrong, it's an amazing service, which works exactly as described, but I only need to make like 5 builds a month, but the lowest tier gives me so much more allowance.
I wish they had a cheaper tier for less money. Now I gotta swap service and reconfigure a couple of projects.2 -
(sort of rant but not totally)
so I am using Directus for headless cms and I'm always looking around for other options such as Contentful, but the problem with Contentful is that it is hella expensive in my opinion (249$/month at least after you exceed the free tier with limited capabilities)
So the real question is, do you guys know of any other Headless CMS?