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> they didn't want to pay for storing all of those recipe and cooking videos twice...videos are big and space is expensive... And yet... from people who never

> they didn't want to pay for storing all of those recipe and cooking videos twice...videos are big and space is expensive... And yet... from people who never pay the bills for anything, all I ever hear is 'space is cheap, computing is cheap, blah blah blah'. It's all 'cheap' until you have to pay for it.

fossuser 8y ago
In this case they destroyed the company instead of just saying 'space is cheap' and paying for it. It isn't free, but it's certainly cheaper than killing your entire company.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Well, they clearly didn’t realize that they would end up deleting their original data because they had tried to skimp on storage…
  - fossuser 8y ago
    I think that's the point though - you never realize this kind of failure until it's too late. That's why you're better off biasing towards just paying for space and being careful with added complexity unless you really need it. Being cheap about this is just likely to lead to more bugs and cost in debugging later anyway. There are tradeoffs and exceptions, but there's a reason the saying exists.
    - myhf 8y ago
      It's not just about the cost of file storage. Storing information can be a legal liability. This is why businesses that deal with information need staff who are able to reason about the lifecycle of information.
      - fossuser 8y ago
        True, but in this case they were storing what was the core value of the site and what the users were using the site for. It’d be different if they were just collecting all PII forever because they didn’t want to think about it.
- wstuartcl 8y ago
  ... Not making a reference count and respecting it killed the company using one store of duplicate data, if anything, prolonged the company.
Nasrudith 8y ago
The people who say that are the ones who pay for programmer time which is much more expensive. Telling your programmers to erase all comments and noncompilation important whitespace would be monumentally dumb for instance. It is far cheaper to keep every version of code back to 1997 than to have to reverse compile and reverse engineer to document once for instance. If you are getting anything out of it net greater than it and there isn't a better use for it keeping it is worth it.
- mgkimsal 8y ago
  > The people who say that are the ones who pay for programmer time TYPICALLY the ones I hear that from are developers who aren't in charge of money/budget, and usually don't ever think about the cost of anything. The 'shiny/new' syndrome, coupled with little oversight, leads to nasty $ surprises later on. And yep, "programmer time is more expensive" all night long. But at some point, other expenses are coming out of someone's budget someplace. Just because it's less than some other line item doesn't mean those costs can't add up to more than was expected (or needed, or budgeted for).
tetrazine 8y ago
Well. Videos are orders of magnitude larger than many other common web content formats. And there are probably several codecs available on a CDN. It's reasonable to call that expensive and still claim that cloud computing is cheap overall. It is amazing to store gigs of photos for cents per month on AWS. But I would guess bandwidth dwarfs storage costs here, so it does seem odd.
- Cpoll 8y ago
  But that's another good point, if you're storing multiple encodings, storing a single backup is less than double the cost, because you only need to back-up one encoding. Slow-to-retrieve backup services like S3 Glacier are usually much cheaper, too.
theoh 8y ago
This is basic, though. If the stuff was stored in a Unix filesystem it would be the difference between a symlink (correct strategy) and a hard link (risky). Correctly implementing the hard link strategy (in the Unix analogy, this happens in the filesystem code itself) requires reference counting. Either you invest the time to implement that, or you should stick to symlinks.

fossuser 8y ago

In this case they destroyed the company instead of just saying 'space is cheap' and paying for it. It isn't free, but it's certainly cheaper than killing your entire company.

saagarjha 8y ago
Well, they clearly didn’t realize that they would end up deleting their original data because they had tried to skimp on storage…
- fossuser 8y ago
  I think that's the point though - you never realize this kind of failure until it's too late. That's why you're better off biasing towards just paying for space and being careful with added complexity unless you really need it. Being cheap about this is just likely to lead to more bugs and cost in debugging later anyway. There are tradeoffs and exceptions, but there's a reason the saying exists.
  - myhf 8y ago
    It's not just about the cost of file storage. Storing information can be a legal liability. This is why businesses that deal with information need staff who are able to reason about the lifecycle of information.
    - fossuser 8y ago
      True, but in this case they were storing what was the core value of the site and what the users were using the site for. It’d be different if they were just collecting all PII forever because they didn’t want to think about it.
wstuartcl 8y ago
... Not making a reference count and respecting it killed the company using one store of duplicate data, if anything, prolonged the company.

Nasrudith 8y ago

The people who say that are the ones who pay for programmer time which is much more expensive. Telling your programmers to erase all comments and noncompilation important whitespace would be monumentally dumb for instance. It is far cheaper to keep every version of code back to 1997 than to have to reverse compile and reverse engineer to document once for instance. If you are getting anything out of it net greater than it and there isn't a better use for it keeping it is worth it.

mgkimsal 8y ago
> The people who say that are the ones who pay for programmer time TYPICALLY the ones I hear that from are developers who aren't in charge of money/budget, and usually don't ever think about the cost of anything. The 'shiny/new' syndrome, coupled with little oversight, leads to nasty $ surprises later on. And yep, "programmer time is more expensive" all night long. But at some point, other expenses are coming out of someone's budget someplace. Just because it's less than some other line item doesn't mean those costs can't add up to more than was expected (or needed, or budgeted for).

tetrazine 8y ago

Well. Videos are orders of magnitude larger than many other common web content formats. And there are probably several codecs available on a CDN. It's reasonable to call that expensive and still claim that cloud computing is cheap overall. It is amazing to store gigs of photos for cents per month on AWS. But I would guess bandwidth dwarfs storage costs here, so it does seem odd.

Cpoll 8y ago
But that's another good point, if you're storing multiple encodings, storing a single backup is less than double the cost, because you only need to back-up one encoding. Slow-to-retrieve backup services like S3 Glacier are usually much cheaper, too.

theoh 8y ago

This is basic, though. If the stuff was stored in a Unix filesystem it would be the difference between a symlink (correct strategy) and a hard link (risky). Correctly implementing the hard link strategy (in the Unix analogy, this happens in the filesystem code itself) requires reference counting. Either you invest the time to implement that, or you should stick to symlinks.