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That sounds like something I would've done... When I was a kid, the 5€/month for a VPS was a massive expense, to the point where I occasionally had to download my 10GB rootfs to my mom's windows laptop, terminate the instance and then rebuild it once I had enough money. Eventually I got an old Kindle that was able to run an app called Terminal IDE which had a Linux shell with some basic programs like busybox, gcc. Spartacus Rex, if you're out there, thank you for making my entire career possible.

by miki1232113 hours ago|

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And I think this point is heavily under-appreciated in the cloud Vs. on prem debate.

The cost for 1 hour of cloud CPU time is the same (barring discounts), no matter who you are. THe cost for 1 hour of engineer time varies wildly. If you're a non-profit or a solo dev, you may even consider that cost to be "free."

If your engineer costs are far lower than what AWS assumes they are, going with AWS is a stupid decision, you're far better off using VPSes / dedicated servers and self-hosting all the services you need to run on top.

by bityard4 hours ago|

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The author did write that, yes. But it's very obviously a joke. The real reasons are literally the very next paragraph:

> I thought it was a neat trick, a funny shitpost that riffs on the eternal curl | sh debate. I could write a blog post about it, I tell you about how you can do it yourself, one thousand words, I learn something, you learn something, I get internet points, win win.

by cardanome5 hours ago|

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> it's more likely that there's some social work that needs to be done, and that obsessing over running doom on curl is not a very productive use of one's time in a critical economic spot.

It can be a problem but it can be also just a human following their special interests that give them joy.

For me as a ADHD person engaging with my special interests is a hard requirement to keep my mental health in check and therefore a very good use of my time.

by jmalicki5 hours ago|

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I like the term host employee, carrying the LLM parasite as it uses us to embody itself and reproduce into the singularity.

by GranPC4 hours ago|

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I think they meant employees from the hosting company. But that's a funny interpretation!

by 5 hours ago|

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by pwdisswordfishy4 hours ago|

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> if we can't afford 1.50$/mo, then we aren't really professionals and are just coasting on real infrastructure subsidized by professionals

This is a strange claim.

Whether someone is getting paid or not to do something is what determines who is a professional, not whether or how much they're paying someone else. (And that's the only thing that matters, unlike the way that "professional" is used as a euphemism in Americans' bizarre discursive repertoire.)

by TZubiri4 hours ago|

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I think the sense of the word professional here is not as a boolean professional/amateur, but the sense of professionalism, the characteristic of taking business seriously, not letting personal matters intervene, and in this case, investing into tools.

To put an example, suppose you hire a painter, and they show up with non-work attire, no ladder, no brush, they ask you to buy a can of paint for them and a brush. Compared to a contractor that bills you flat and brins their own ladder, has work clothing and shoes, an air pneumatic spray painter, a breathing mask. Who is more professional?

It's part of a broader debate for sure, OP seems to have done it more for the experience than to actually save 1.50$.

by bigyabai3 hours ago|

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It always depends on results. It can be unprofessional to design a system that takes an external variable like S3 for granted, especially if it's not needed. As long as the hack isn't worse than the official $1.50 happy-path, you might as well save the end-customer a monthly fee and reduce your attack surface.

I think hacks like these have a positive effect on the industry. It pushes back on meaningless, encroaching monetization and encourages Conatbo to reevaluate their service offerings to ensure they justify the price.

by astralbijection6 hours ago|

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... I think you're reading a bit much into it. It's less that I couldn't afford to pay that, and more that I didn't want to pay that, and iterating on the solution I used to dodge that led me down a giant rabbit hole of learning more about Linux while solving stupider and stupider problems posed for myself.

by jcul5 hours ago|

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That four part blog was one of the most entertaining things I've read this year, thanks.

Really in the spirit of "hacker" news IMO.

I get the motivation, it's less avoiding the 1.50 per month and more like a challenge to work around it!

by hrmtst938374 hours ago|

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Calling cheap hacks unprofessional misses the point, some suprisingly portable tricks only show up when you stop paying for everything on autopilot.

by TZubiri3 hours ago|

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I really get that, and I value these otherwise pointless hack articles as much as the next guy. But I think I was specifically getting at the fact that these might actually turn into an economically useful skill just by finding a sweetspot in the amount of money they can save.

1.5$/mo is still in the toy realm, (and games can be very good for practicing before the real stuff), but using tricks like this to save 50$/mo or 500$/mo or 5k$/mo or 50k$/mo and so on can definitely cross the threshold into actually (massively) useful.

The biggest challenge in crossing that bridge is matching up clients with bad engineers but good budgets, with good engineers with no budget. There's probably thousands of engineers that are currently spinning 5$/mo into impressive architecture for their blog or their 2 user startup, and clients throwing buckets of cash into tokens and zapier/n8n. The world needs Cupids that match those together.