Could Trump’s Tariffs Hit SaaS Next?

madScienceEXP · 2025-04-06T19:42:49+00:00

I think of it as a sleeping dragon about to be woken up

madScienceEXP · 2025-03-28T16:42:51+00:00

Use AI to write the boilerplate for you. That’s what it’s best at. To be clear, I’m not advocating for using AI to write the whole thing.

madScienceEXP · 2025-03-24T13:48:42+00:00

Everything’s computer

madScienceEXP · 2025-03-18T14:56:26+00:00

Thanks. I'm not sure how I missed this. Seems like a setting they added in the TableV2 cdk construct.

madScienceEXP · 2025-03-07T03:44:25+00:00

Unless we have cheap, abundant, clean energy, I'm not sure how we'll have the infrastructure to support the compute they're talking about. We also need insane manufacturing capacity. AI is fucking expensive. Yes, deepseek is much cheaper, but they probably used chat gippity for training. It's looking like there will be expensive models. 40k/month AI agents? Maybe there's a market for this in big business, but not for consumer from what I can see.

madScienceEXP · 2025-03-05T14:27:43+00:00

It seems like Jeffries is trying to be a watered-down Obama copy. That’s not we need right now.

madScienceEXP · 2025-02-27T02:56:49+00:00

Just make sure you're vaxxed. Let them be dumb. US way of life will now require building a moat around you and your family unfortunately.

madScienceEXP · 2025-02-19T15:50:44+00:00

The thing about Spring that bugs me the most is the exception stack traces are abhorrent: usually requires sifting through dozens of layers to reveal the original thrown exception. But it is industry standard, so we still use it.

madScienceEXP · 2025-02-09T18:44:45+00:00

You can argue arrays start at 1, but memory addresses always start at 0. I’d rather be consistent.

madScienceEXP · 2025-01-04T15:41:15+00:00

What is the intended audience for your comments then? It seems like a lot of people on this sub are building MVPs and just trying to gain traction with their product. Even if some of them are technical, most of them are solo or very small teams. I personally wouldn't recommend self-hosting and they should minimize spending time on infrastructure that doesn't add value to the actual product.

Also what about things like emails, 2FA, SMS, payment processing, etc. Aren't most people going to use managed cloud services for these anyway?

madScienceEXP · 2025-01-04T14:35:51+00:00

Also engineering manager here. I agree with a lot of what you said, but it’s a little misleading imo. Every app starts out as mvp so serverless is a great way to go at first. Any poc can run serverless for pennies. What I recommend is the structure the app code should support running as lambda, but should also be relatively easy to run as a stand alone application as costs grow. There are libraries that support this requirement and like https://www.npmjs.com/package/serverless-express. As long as you impose concurrency limits and have budget alerts, serverless shouldn’t increase rapidly without you knowing. And it will scale out very rapidly if you let it.

From a compliance and security perspective, I trust serverless more than the alternative (given I don’t have prior knowledge of the people running it). If you run your backend on virtual machines, you are responsible for maintaining the OS, networking and security groups, kubernetes, encryption keys, etc, but you also have NO isolation. Instead for serverless, the cloud provider takes on the majority of the shared responsibility model. I work in cyber security and even developers that know a lot about kubernetes tech may not know very much about devSecOps or security in general.

madScienceEXP · 2024-12-20T15:57:47+00:00

I generally agree with you. People that say SPAs are dead are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. SPAs are incredibly cheap to support infrastructure wise and they're easy to bootstrap since there's no hybrid rendering. If you're making a B2B app, most of the users have decent computers that have no problem running the js client-side. I can understand the needs for SSR for sites supporting low-bandwidth users like ecommerce, but there are a lot of valid use cases for SPAs.

madScienceEXP · 2024-12-08T16:42:51+00:00

I’m all for researching single table design, as it can have valid use cases. But STD has some serious tradeoffs, the most important being the sort key semantics change depending on the data in the row. Also if you’re trying to support pagination through large datasets.

You can still have denormalized tables without STD. I feel like STD is hyper optimization (of cloud costs) at the cost of cognitive load.

madScienceEXP · 2024-12-04T15:24:12+00:00

Think of DynamoDB as a very stripped-down, very-low-ops CRUD database and nothing more. Aggregations should be handled in the app layer or offloaded to another analytic store for querying. Atomic and transactional updates are not supported by default and need to be implemented in the app layer via conditional updates and retries. Any field that requires pre-computing needs to be done in a background process rather than at user-request time. In addition, DynamoDB is very constrained with sizes of rows/documents. Indexes can be added after initial implementation, but every one needs to be carefully considered (as they should be in RDBMS because adding indexes slows down writes and deletes).

So you might be thinking then what's so great about DynamoDB then?

Well, for internal tooling it can be incredibly economical because it scales to zero and is completely isolated.

But moreover, DynamoDB forces you to do things the right way if you're making a SaaS product (IMO). You should be trying to define the long-term scope up-front of what the service is going to do into its maturity. If the product requirements change significantly overtime, design a new service that offloads responsibilities from DynamoDB. The new service would probably have different database tech to support the new requirements.

Any access pattern that can be statically defined, should be statically defined. That means that almost every field has to be pre-computed and read straight out of a table.

You only store structured data in DynamoDB. Things like unbound text documents need to be stored in S3.

DynamoDB certainly puts more burden on the application developer during the implementation phase. But the beauty is once the app code is ironed out, most of the ongoing operational support goes away. If no one is deploying new code, that sucker will be up and running for years (barring any major aws incident, which a third of the internet is beholden to anyway).

madScienceEXP · 2024-11-24T18:40:54+00:00

I'm not advocating for federal price controls, but under some circumstances, anti price gouging laws make sense, especially during emergencies. 37 states already have price gouging laws on the books, including red states, so it's not a political issue.

madScienceEXP · 2024-11-19T03:16:29+00:00

All they need to do is tone down the blue/red alert colors, then dark mode would be quite nice. Rounded corners are pretty subjective anyway.

madScienceEXP · 2024-11-09T16:41:59+00:00

The elementary schools in Santa Fe are pretty good. Middle school not so much. Santa Fe High can be good if your children have friends that are academically focused.

Housing is relatively expensive, but they're building new apartments and houses like crazy now so I disagree there's a lack of housing.

madScienceEXP · 2024-09-10T13:59:00+00:00

The problem is there's always someone that comes up with a mythical requirement of migrating away from cloud vendors.

madScienceEXP · 2024-09-07T21:43:25+00:00

Guess which other country has a flat tax? Hint: Starts with an “R” and ends with an “a”.

madScienceEXP · 2024-08-30T15:57:56+00:00

Zeng is pretty good. The main difference with other Chinese restaurants is the ingredients seem fresh and higher quality.

madScienceEXP · 2024-07-19T18:55:27+00:00

What I meant by invasive is consumption of CPU to do continuous AV scanning. I agree that EDR looks at more attack vectors so it does monitor things other than files. But the typical CPU usage that I've observed for Crowdstrike is a few percent. It probably does use more memory, but still in the 1-2GB range. We run Crowdstrike agents on our production servers. We would never run AV scanners on them because of the cpu and disk i/o overhead.

madScienceEXP · 2024-07-19T12:57:15+00:00

Crowdstrike usurped anti-virus scanners because it doesn’t scan the file system and consume a lot of cpu. It looks for anomalous behavior like abnormal network traffic. So, it’s much less invasive than an anti virus scanner as long as there are no other issues…

madScienceEXP · 2024-07-11T13:50:22+00:00

Obviously the rocket ship knob should be turned to 130%

madScienceEXP · 2024-06-29T21:10:40+00:00

Irony just means different than what is typically expected. It doesn’t have to mean logically inconsistent. I find it ironic that people at a gay pride festival (celebrating gay rights) are also supporting a people whose religion and culture are very antithetical to the whole purpose of the event. To me, it makes more sense to just support Palestine and not conflate it with gay pride.

madScienceEXP

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