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Bizarre. I've only tried to use Etsy once, figuring it'd be a great place to get some sort of unique jewellery as a gift. It's filled with junk, both of the sup

Bizarre. I've only tried to use Etsy once, figuring it'd be a great place to get some sort of unique jewellery as a gift. It's filled with junk, both of the super-manufactured kind and of the "modern art" kind (someone glues 2 pieces of crap together and wants $500.) I haven't gone back, though I did enjoy the Regretsy blog while it was up. >Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based services and software offered by companies such as Google and Amazon—an emphasis that was known, under Dickerson, as “code as craft” That reminds me of the silly StackOverflow "if you are a real <hacker/programmer/developer/whatever> you must setup your own servers". There are certain benefits of cloud or not, but this kind of thinking confuses me. Why stop there? Do they build their own Ethernet cables? Racks? Make their own distros, compilers, etc.? Build their own network -- after all, your network is critical in delivering pages to your users, why outsource this to XO and Cogent and so on? Edit: Yes, I understand the pricing differences of cloud. So just say "it's cheaper to run our own stuff", don't pretend its due to some desire for "craft". >food scraps were packed onto a Dutch cargo bike, which an “office ecologist” would pedal several miles to a Brooklyn farm It's like they want to parody themselves? >Senior Engineer..."I’m just allergic to capitalism" But presumably not allergic to using capitalists money to hire people to bike your leftovers around town.

ballenf 9y ago
The cure when I start getting tempted to "roll my own" is watching that Ted talk about the guy who tried (failed) to build a toaster from raw materials to match the 5 quid discount store equivalent.
- olewhalehunter 9y ago
  That failure wasn't due to skill, it was due to demand. That discount store has a high volume low skill patronage that needs toasters, if 100 engineers collectively wanted to make 100 of their own toasters for less than 5 dollars a unit, they could probably do that, or other things, much better.
- moreoutput 9y ago
  Reminds one of Friedman's pencil.
nikanj 9y ago
Wait, are you saying using your own servers is somehow comparable to building your own ethernet cables?
kuschku 9y ago
> That reminds me of the silly StackOverflow "if you are a real <hacker/programmer/developer/whatever> you must setup your own servers". There are certain benefits of cloud or not, but this kind of thinking confuses me. Why stop there? Do they build their own Ethernet cables? Racks? Make their own distros, compilers, etc.? Build their own network -- after all, your network is critical in delivering pages to your users, why outsource this to XO and Cogent and so on? Ehm, no. But if you outsource your servers, you’ve got an entirely different set of issues. I’m currently renting dedicated servers, paying around 20$ a month, for something that would cost me 900$ a month with Google Cloud Platform, or around 60'000$ a month with Firebase. Outsourcing servers – unless you have highly variable load – is always literally burning money. Remember that Google, Amazon, etc have to pay their devs Silicon Valley wages, while you can operate elsewhere, and pay half that, and save money with hardware, too.
- arenaninja 9y ago
  That's insanely cheap. Can you share where you're renting this and what plan? A cheap DigitalOcean plan is around $20 a month, and since you said "server(s)" (plural) I'm assuming you get more than one for that $20?
  - kuschku 9y ago
    I’m personally using Online.net, although you might also want to try out scaleway. You can check out https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd394f50ae https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd39... I’m personally actually paying 30€ now, for several Dediboxes from Online, running kubernetes. The big issues of Google, AWS, etc is the cost for bandwidth and performance – I can transfer 180TB in one month on one server, and pay no extra fee, and don’t get throttled – while a startup using Firebase might end up paying 7000% more (or worse).
malandrew 9y ago
Yup, everytime I hear someone complain about capitalism I eyeroll because they clearly aren't "woke" enough to realize that capitalism is the reason they can remain blissfully ignorant of how capitalism supports their blissful ignorance. Capitalism isn't without its bugaboos, but the wholesale rejection I hear people making can only come from a place of ignorance.
- athenot 9y ago
  I directly benefit from capitalism in my current occupation. Yet I'm also aware that it dehumanizes anyone who can't produce value within that model. Therefore I support attempts to make it inclusive of all human beings, even if that means making the model "less ideal" or "less pure". I find it strange that we somehow have come to value assets over humans. Yes, that means I will loose out on some of the value I earn and I'm ok with that.
  - wutbrodo 9y ago
    Yes, and "our implementation of capitalism sorely needs improvement" is different from "I'm allergic to capitalism".
- mintplant 9y ago
  Not sure I understand your point. Are you asserting that anyone who argues against capitalism as a system must be doing so from a position of ignorance?
  - Domenic_S 9y ago
    They're asserting that someone aggressively arguing against capitalism while freely and wholeheartedly participating in capitalism has some dissonance to reconcile. I've got a hard time taking an "I'm allergic to capitalism" tweet seriously coming from someone who 1) lists all the ways they participate in capitalism in their profile and 2) makes this statement in the context of their job which depends completely on capitalism functioning.
  - malandrew 9y ago
hueving 9y ago
>There are certain benefits of cloud or not, but this kind of thinking confuses me. Why stop there? Because using EC2/GCE infrastructure is an incredible waste of money if you have any reasonable-sized base-load and bandwidth utilization.
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  As I said, there are benefits to not using cloud, sure. But don't pitch it as because anyone that loves programming should build their own servers.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Etsy has pay and benefits far outstripping the competition. They should have the best engineers and developers. So why then can't they build and maintain the best infrastructure? Why does it suck so?
  - snuxoll 9y ago
    Build their own? Probably not, unless they are doing it at massive scale and the cost of replacing parts beats out buying a server with a 3/5/7 year warranty. If you have static usage, or at least a base load owning your own hardware to support it does make sense though, colo space is cheap, the biggest disadvantage from a financial perspective to owning your own gear is you have a depreciating CapEx instead of a 100% deductible OpEx.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      Real investors care about cash flow, which means the difference between purchasing/depreciating and leasing/renting(OpEx) is negligible. Whats far more important is the business benefits of the best approach for your business.
    - sciurus 9y ago
      I don't know what the current state of things is, but 5 years ago they were doing a mix of buying off the shelf and building their own supermicro-based systems. https://codeascraft.com/2012/08/31/what-hardware-powers-etsy-com/ https://codeascraft.com/2012/08/31/what-hardware-powers-etsy...
pas 9y ago
Because AWS is pretty insanely expensive compared to leasing/renting, let's say from Leaseweb. And unless you have gone completely serverless and kubernetes and [magic datastore that's easy to run], you need engineers that will eventually figure, that they can run a Ceph cluster, and a Cassandra cluster, and a Kafka cluster and Galera clusters. AWS is great for prototyping, for scaling into new territories (you need a Point of presence in Tokyo for your new startup? great, AWS), but not for running a boring e-commerce site (buy cheap shit in 2 DCs, run replication to keep things in sync, pay someone for BGP + DNS failover, call it a day).
sametmax 9y ago
The cloud is very, very expensive. If you want low cost, you do your own servers for anything under 20 nodes. Which, given the power of modern machines and with unmethered bandwidth, will take you to the millions of user easily. I have setup a streaming website with 500k/d visitors, and it runs on 7 servers for 2000$ a month give or take. That's very, very cheap compared to GAE or AWS.
- dboreham 9y ago
  There has to be something very wrong when an article about the problems with a company that facilities an online marketplace is talking about the details of how their servers are run and paid for.. By this I mean that in such a business the issues surrounding servers and even software should be very minor compared to the bread and butter of helping people sell stuff so money is made. The costs of said servers and software should also be minimal vs things like sales and marketing costs.
  - shiftpgdn 9y ago
    Except traditional "cloud" hosting is wicked expensive in comparison. Ideally you should shoot for a hybrid model where excess capacity spills into AWS/GCE/Azure. For example: A dedicated m4.16xLarge EC2 instance in AWS is $3987/month. You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s connection for $150/month.
    - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
      On the other hand, a reserved m4.Large instance is $45/month. After a year of that, you're just $550 into hosting, barely enough to select and order the case and power supply for your server. It would be 30 years before you paid the cost of that Dell, so unless you actually need that power and your time is free, it's easier to let this be a tiny fraction of Amazon's expenses and workload than a big part of yours.
      - dxhdr 9y ago
kafkaesq 9y ago
Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based services and software offered by companies such as Google and Amazon—an emphasis that was known, under Dickerson, as “code as craft” Yup, this is definitely something only a non-technical person would say (or more specifically: something a business analyst cut-and-pasting snippets of advice fed to him by the various tech-oriented randos he happens to know very likely would say).
- cat199 9y ago
  > various tech-oriented randos he happens to know or whom he has investments or partnerships with...
sciurus 9y ago
> Edit: Yes, I understand the pricing differences of cloud. So just say "it's cheaper to run our own stuff", don't pretend its due to some desire for "craft". I think your criticism would make sense if the article was accurate. But I don't think this quote > Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based services and software offered by companies such as Google and Amazon—an emphasis that was known, under Dickerson, as “code as craft” is accurate. AFAIK no one at Etsy has said that they run their own servers because it's more authentic, part of their "craft" in a way that using cloud servers could not be, etc. There's some actual information on their thinking behind running their own servers at https://www.nextplatform.com/2015/04/07/etsy-shows-how-to-be-just-crafty-enough-with-platforms/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2015/04/07/etsy-shows-how-to-be... , which boils down to three points 1) Etsy has been around longer than EC2 2) Etsy does not have a spikey workload that would benefit from scaling up/down 3) Etsy thinks they can run more efficiently on bare metal
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  Well that makes sense. I keep forgetting how articles incorrectly portray people, especially when it fits a narrative. I guess I was only too ready to believe that a company that bikes around leftovers would actually believe in craft-servers.
  - mintplant 9y ago
    "Code as Craft" was the name of their engineering blog. I suspect the author found a post about Etsy running their own servers there and decided this juxtaposition fit the narrative they were building.
    - genericpseudo 9y ago
      It looks (from the outside) like Etsy's core eng team, early, had its culture come from all of the ex-Flickr people working there. Flickr's other direct descendant, culturally, is Slack. Those are nerdy, charming, funny cultures. "Code as Craft" is a cute pun. Taking it entirely literally is a really big point-miss.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
lobster_johnson 9y ago
There's still plenty of incredible hand-made and vintage furniture and interior design objects on Etsy. The problem, as ever, is about filtering. For every quality piece there 50 amateurish things cobbled together from steel pipes and reclaimed wood (or worse: distressed "shabby chic" furniture made to look like something you'd find in an old B&B on the French Riviera). With all the AI being thrown around, can't someone build a "tastefulness" filter?
- technotarek 9y ago
  You're right about great furniture and objects. We've tried putting a local focus on some of their selection (as well as the selection from additional non-etsy sellers), by selecting/curating furniture dealers from the DC and Baltimore areas so that would-be buyers can have a look in person: https://attic-dc.com https://attic-dc.com Especially in regards to furniture, buying online, sight unseen still isn't a great proposition. We don't expect it will ever be.
  - lobster_johnson 9y ago
    Cool. Would love something like this for NYC.
  - benjaminjackman 9y ago
    Perhaps with AR or VR but it's still hard to imagine supplanting the experience without an actual tactile connection. Furniture isn't something you buy everyday or even year typically. If I am going to spend any amount of money on a couch or chair or whatever I'd like to sit in it atleast once before I do (though perhaps that's just me others may be different). Perhaps though online could be a great first step filtering process. Find a bunch of stuff that fits the rough parameters of what you are looking for and looks good in your space then go someplace to try them out with a well kept appointment and ready to go same day follow you home delivery should you decide to buy something. Maybe this already exists? I haven't had to buy any furniture is several years so not sure what the current state of the markets is.
- aantix 9y ago
delias_ 9y ago
>Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based services and software offered by companies such as Google and Amazon—an emphasis that was known, under Dickerson, as “code as craft” So many times people fail to look at problems in terms of trade-offs instead of right/wrong or fashionable/faus pax Running your own infra vs public cloud has so many considerations beyond a simple price tag. Massive scale companies on AWS have hadoop clusters just to work out their goddamn bill. But there are considerations you have to make about the number of people to maintain something and how that affects your org on just a cultural/sustainability level, what the velocity of SaaS allows you, etc. Running your own infra doesn't have to be full of cruft. And maybe the rolling-your-own approach to certain things is paradigmatic to the way your business works, maybe it isn't. You have to figure out the trade-offs. Newer, fashionable tech is often decorated with tag lines of "faster, cheaper, better". That's actually not what I care about. Instead, sell me on "recoverable", "debuggable", and "sustainable".
bluetwo 9y ago
My understanding is that eBay runs their own servers. It kind of sounds similar to me.
asdfjlkasdf88 9y ago
This concern for the survival of a particular corporation is just as arbitrary as your questioning where they drew their arbitrary lines around DIY operations. 80% of the Fortune 500 list in the 1960s is gone. Survival is not guaranteed of any of company. So why get so worried about it? You know why they do it that way? Because the people there decided to. What's more self-parodying? People on here grousing about the issues of our society, only to lean into more capitalism and VC/startup life? Or people deciding to bike their food "several miles" for their own reasons?
- opportune 9y ago
  I think there's a special hypocrisy involved in getting paid a six figure salary supported by some combination of venture capital and running an open market, and criticizing the system that pays you to do that, all the while spending money on luxurious shit like hand delivered food (which the vast majority of the world only does out of necessity, or otherwise cannot afford to do). Capitalism has issues, society has issues, the modern phenomenon of worshipping the wealthy and "self made" has issues. I think it's possible to see those issues and want to address them without decrying the idea or system as a whole as this guy does.
ninv 9y ago
> It's filled with junk Not just Etsy, go pick any online marketplace right now, they all are filled with cheap Chinese junk.
lg 9y ago
i'll take the opportunity to plug my wife's hand-fabricated jewelry :) https://www.etsy.com/shop/PhetteplaceStudio https://www.etsy.com/shop/PhetteplaceStudio
mullen 9y ago
> "if you are a real <hacker/programmer/developer/whatever> you must setup your own servers" Someone forgot to remind this guy that Developers suck at running servers. Been a heavy line Unix admin for 16 years now and never have run across a server(s) built/operated/maintained by a developer that was not a steaming pile of garbage.

ballenf 9y ago

The cure when I start getting tempted to "roll my own" is watching that Ted talk about the guy who tried (failed) to build a toaster from raw materials to match the 5 quid discount store equivalent.

olewhalehunter 9y ago
That failure wasn't due to skill, it was due to demand. That discount store has a high volume low skill patronage that needs toasters, if 100 engineers collectively wanted to make 100 of their own toasters for less than 5 dollars a unit, they could probably do that, or other things, much better.
moreoutput 9y ago
Reminds one of Friedman's pencil.

nikanj 9y ago

Wait, are you saying using your own servers is somehow comparable to building your own ethernet cables?

kuschku 9y ago

> That reminds me of the silly StackOverflow "if you are a real <hacker/programmer/developer/whatever> you must setup your own servers". There are certain benefits of cloud or not, but this kind of thinking confuses me. Why stop there? Do they build their own Ethernet cables? Racks? Make their own distros, compilers, etc.? Build their own network -- after all, your network is critical in delivering pages to your users, why outsource this to XO and Cogent and so on? Ehm, no. But if you outsource your servers, you’ve got an entirely different set of issues. I’m currently renting dedicated servers, paying around 20$ a month, for something that would cost me 900$ a month with Google Cloud Platform, or around 60'000$ a month with Firebase. Outsourcing servers – unless you have highly variable load – is always literally burning money. Remember that Google, Amazon, etc have to pay their devs Silicon Valley wages, while you can operate elsewhere, and pay half that, and save money with hardware, too.

arenaninja 9y ago
That's insanely cheap. Can you share where you're renting this and what plan? A cheap DigitalOcean plan is around $20 a month, and since you said "server(s)" (plural) I'm assuming you get more than one for that $20?
- kuschku 9y ago
  I’m personally using Online.net, although you might also want to try out scaleway. You can check out https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd394f50ae https://gist.github.com/justjanne/205cc548148829078d4bf2fd39... I’m personally actually paying 30€ now, for several Dediboxes from Online, running kubernetes. The big issues of Google, AWS, etc is the cost for bandwidth and performance – I can transfer 180TB in one month on one server, and pay no extra fee, and don’t get throttled – while a startup using Firebase might end up paying 7000% more (or worse).

malandrew 9y ago

Yup, everytime I hear someone complain about capitalism I eyeroll because they clearly aren't "woke" enough to realize that capitalism is the reason they can remain blissfully ignorant of how capitalism supports their blissful ignorance. Capitalism isn't without its bugaboos, but the wholesale rejection I hear people making can only come from a place of ignorance.

athenot 9y ago
I directly benefit from capitalism in my current occupation. Yet I'm also aware that it dehumanizes anyone who can't produce value within that model. Therefore I support attempts to make it inclusive of all human beings, even if that means making the model "less ideal" or "less pure". I find it strange that we somehow have come to value assets over humans. Yes, that means I will loose out on some of the value I earn and I'm ok with that.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  Yes, and "our implementation of capitalism sorely needs improvement" is different from "I'm allergic to capitalism".
mintplant 9y ago
Not sure I understand your point. Are you asserting that anyone who argues against capitalism as a system must be doing so from a position of ignorance?
- Domenic_S 9y ago
  They're asserting that someone aggressively arguing against capitalism while freely and wholeheartedly participating in capitalism has some dissonance to reconcile. I've got a hard time taking an "I'm allergic to capitalism" tweet seriously coming from someone who 1) lists all the ways they participate in capitalism in their profile and 2) makes this statement in the context of their job which depends completely on capitalism functioning.
- malandrew 9y ago

hueving 9y ago

>There are certain benefits of cloud or not, but this kind of thinking confuses me. Why stop there? Because using EC2/GCE infrastructure is an incredible waste of money if you have any reasonable-sized base-load and bandwidth utilization.

MichaelGG 9y ago
As I said, there are benefits to not using cloud, sure. But don't pitch it as because anyone that loves programming should build their own servers.
- valuearb 9y ago
  Etsy has pay and benefits far outstripping the competition. They should have the best engineers and developers. So why then can't they build and maintain the best infrastructure? Why does it suck so?
- snuxoll 9y ago
  Build their own? Probably not, unless they are doing it at massive scale and the cost of replacing parts beats out buying a server with a 3/5/7 year warranty. If you have static usage, or at least a base load owning your own hardware to support it does make sense though, colo space is cheap, the biggest disadvantage from a financial perspective to owning your own gear is you have a depreciating CapEx instead of a 100% deductible OpEx.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Real investors care about cash flow, which means the difference between purchasing/depreciating and leasing/renting(OpEx) is negligible. Whats far more important is the business benefits of the best approach for your business.
  - sciurus 9y ago
    I don't know what the current state of things is, but 5 years ago they were doing a mix of buying off the shelf and building their own supermicro-based systems. https://codeascraft.com/2012/08/31/what-hardware-powers-etsy-com/ https://codeascraft.com/2012/08/31/what-hardware-powers-etsy...

pas 9y ago

Because AWS is pretty insanely expensive compared to leasing/renting, let's say from Leaseweb. And unless you have gone completely serverless and kubernetes and [magic datastore that's easy to run], you need engineers that will eventually figure, that they can run a Ceph cluster, and a Cassandra cluster, and a Kafka cluster and Galera clusters. AWS is great for prototyping, for scaling into new territories (you need a Point of presence in Tokyo for your new startup? great, AWS), but not for running a boring e-commerce site (buy cheap shit in 2 DCs, run replication to keep things in sync, pay someone for BGP + DNS failover, call it a day).

sametmax 9y ago

The cloud is very, very expensive. If you want low cost, you do your own servers for anything under 20 nodes. Which, given the power of modern machines and with unmethered bandwidth, will take you to the millions of user easily. I have setup a streaming website with 500k/d visitors, and it runs on 7 servers for 2000$ a month give or take. That's very, very cheap compared to GAE or AWS.

dboreham 9y ago
There has to be something very wrong when an article about the problems with a company that facilities an online marketplace is talking about the details of how their servers are run and paid for.. By this I mean that in such a business the issues surrounding servers and even software should be very minor compared to the bread and butter of helping people sell stuff so money is made. The costs of said servers and software should also be minimal vs things like sales and marketing costs.
- shiftpgdn 9y ago
  Except traditional "cloud" hosting is wicked expensive in comparison. Ideally you should shoot for a hybrid model where excess capacity spills into AWS/GCE/Azure. For example: A dedicated m4.16xLarge EC2 instance in AWS is $3987/month. You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s connection for $150/month.
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    On the other hand, a reserved m4.Large instance is $45/month. After a year of that, you're just $550 into hosting, barely enough to select and order the case and power supply for your server. It would be 30 years before you paid the cost of that Dell, so unless you actually need that power and your time is free, it's easier to let this be a tiny fraction of Amazon's expenses and workload than a big part of yours.
    - dxhdr 9y ago

kafkaesq 9y ago

Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based services and software offered by companies such as Google and Amazon—an emphasis that was known, under Dickerson, as “code as craft” Yup, this is definitely something only a non-technical person would say (or more specifically: something a business analyst cut-and-pasting snippets of advice fed to him by the various tech-oriented randos he happens to know very likely would say).

cat199 9y ago
> various tech-oriented randos he happens to know or whom he has investments or partnerships with...

sciurus 9y ago

> Edit: Yes, I understand the pricing differences of cloud. So just say "it's cheaper to run our own stuff", don't pretend its due to some desire for "craft". I think your criticism would make sense if the article was accurate. But I don't think this quote > Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based services and software offered by companies such as Google and Amazon—an emphasis that was known, under Dickerson, as “code as craft” is accurate. AFAIK no one at Etsy has said that they run their own servers because it's more authentic, part of their "craft" in a way that using cloud servers could not be, etc. There's some actual information on their thinking behind running their own servers at https://www.nextplatform.com/2015/04/07/etsy-shows-how-to-be-just-crafty-enough-with-platforms/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2015/04/07/etsy-shows-how-to-be... , which boils down to three points 1) Etsy has been around longer than EC2 2) Etsy does not have a spikey workload that would benefit from scaling up/down 3) Etsy thinks they can run more efficiently on bare metal

MichaelGG 9y ago
Well that makes sense. I keep forgetting how articles incorrectly portray people, especially when it fits a narrative. I guess I was only too ready to believe that a company that bikes around leftovers would actually believe in craft-servers.
- mintplant 9y ago
  "Code as Craft" was the name of their engineering blog. I suspect the author found a post about Etsy running their own servers there and decided this juxtaposition fit the narrative they were building.
  - genericpseudo 9y ago
    It looks (from the outside) like Etsy's core eng team, early, had its culture come from all of the ex-Flickr people working there. Flickr's other direct descendant, culturally, is Slack. Those are nerdy, charming, funny cultures. "Code as Craft" is a cute pun. Taking it entirely literally is a really big point-miss.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

lobster_johnson 9y ago

There's still plenty of incredible hand-made and vintage furniture and interior design objects on Etsy. The problem, as ever, is about filtering. For every quality piece there 50 amateurish things cobbled together from steel pipes and reclaimed wood (or worse: distressed "shabby chic" furniture made to look like something you'd find in an old B&B on the French Riviera). With all the AI being thrown around, can't someone build a "tastefulness" filter?

technotarek 9y ago
You're right about great furniture and objects. We've tried putting a local focus on some of their selection (as well as the selection from additional non-etsy sellers), by selecting/curating furniture dealers from the DC and Baltimore areas so that would-be buyers can have a look in person: https://attic-dc.com https://attic-dc.com Especially in regards to furniture, buying online, sight unseen still isn't a great proposition. We don't expect it will ever be.
- lobster_johnson 9y ago
  Cool. Would love something like this for NYC.
- benjaminjackman 9y ago
  Perhaps with AR or VR but it's still hard to imagine supplanting the experience without an actual tactile connection. Furniture isn't something you buy everyday or even year typically. If I am going to spend any amount of money on a couch or chair or whatever I'd like to sit in it atleast once before I do (though perhaps that's just me others may be different). Perhaps though online could be a great first step filtering process. Find a bunch of stuff that fits the rough parameters of what you are looking for and looks good in your space then go someplace to try them out with a well kept appointment and ready to go same day follow you home delivery should you decide to buy something. Maybe this already exists? I haven't had to buy any furniture is several years so not sure what the current state of the markets is.
aantix 9y ago

delias_ 9y ago

>Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based services and software offered by companies such as Google and Amazon—an emphasis that was known, under Dickerson, as “code as craft” So many times people fail to look at problems in terms of trade-offs instead of right/wrong or fashionable/faus pax Running your own infra vs public cloud has so many considerations beyond a simple price tag. Massive scale companies on AWS have hadoop clusters just to work out their goddamn bill. But there are considerations you have to make about the number of people to maintain something and how that affects your org on just a cultural/sustainability level, what the velocity of SaaS allows you, etc. Running your own infra doesn't have to be full of cruft. And maybe the rolling-your-own approach to certain things is paradigmatic to the way your business works, maybe it isn't. You have to figure out the trade-offs. Newer, fashionable tech is often decorated with tag lines of "faster, cheaper, better". That's actually not what I care about. Instead, sell me on "recoverable", "debuggable", and "sustainable".

bluetwo 9y ago

My understanding is that eBay runs their own servers. It kind of sounds similar to me.

asdfjlkasdf88 9y ago

This concern for the survival of a particular corporation is just as arbitrary as your questioning where they drew their arbitrary lines around DIY operations. 80% of the Fortune 500 list in the 1960s is gone. Survival is not guaranteed of any of company. So why get so worried about it? You know why they do it that way? Because the people there decided to. What's more self-parodying? People on here grousing about the issues of our society, only to lean into more capitalism and VC/startup life? Or people deciding to bike their food "several miles" for their own reasons?

opportune 9y ago
I think there's a special hypocrisy involved in getting paid a six figure salary supported by some combination of venture capital and running an open market, and criticizing the system that pays you to do that, all the while spending money on luxurious shit like hand delivered food (which the vast majority of the world only does out of necessity, or otherwise cannot afford to do). Capitalism has issues, society has issues, the modern phenomenon of worshipping the wealthy and "self made" has issues. I think it's possible to see those issues and want to address them without decrying the idea or system as a whole as this guy does.

ninv 9y ago

> It's filled with junk Not just Etsy, go pick any online marketplace right now, they all are filled with cheap Chinese junk.

lg 9y ago

i'll take the opportunity to plug my wife's hand-fabricated jewelry :) https://www.etsy.com/shop/PhetteplaceStudio https://www.etsy.com/shop/PhetteplaceStudio

mullen 9y ago

> "if you are a real <hacker/programmer/developer/whatever> you must setup your own servers" Someone forgot to remind this guy that Developers suck at running servers. Been a heavy line Unix admin for 16 years now and never have run across a server(s) built/operated/maintained by a developer that was not a steaming pile of garbage.