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I applaud Colin's (Tarsnap Founder) attitude. Sure it could be priced better. Sure it could make much, much more than it currently does. But I dislike the notio

I applaud Colin's (Tarsnap Founder) attitude. Sure it could be priced better. Sure it could make much, much more than it currently does. But I dislike the notion that every software company needs to optimize for the same things. Tarsnap is a service that I am sure makes comfortable amount of money for its founder and has remained faithful to its initial audience. Why does anything other than that matters? Yes, some things Patrick points out are indeed low-hanging fruits, but I believe it's a conscious decision to completely ignore all the "optimisation" aspects. Tarsnap doesn't even have any tracker on its homepage. Tarsnap has had the same basic pricing structure for the past ten years. It does one thing and does it well. I hate the pursuit of growth and everything that comes as a result: bloat, shiny landing pages, a/b testing, conversation rate optimisation. Reminds me of the adage of a Mexican fisherman. > “Afterwards? Well my friend, that’s when it gets really interesting,” answered the tourist, laughing. “When your business gets really big, you can start buying and selling stocks and make millions!” > “Millions? Really? And after that?” asked the fishermen. > “After that you’ll be able to retire, live in a tiny village near the coast, sleep late, play with your children, catch a few fish, take a siesta with your wife and spend your evenings drinking and enjoying your friends.” > “With all due respect sir, but that’s exactly what we are doing now. So what’s the point wasting twenty-five years?” asked the Mexicans.

dools 3y ago
Except that’s not what being a fisherman is like at all
- nullcipher 3y ago
  neither is it like that to be a multi millionaire. rare is the multimillionaire who "retires" to a village and enjoys siesta. usually, they want to move even more money (which is fine).
  - thayne 3y ago
    > which is fine I disagree. I think the world would be a better place if many millionaires had decided to retire instead of trying to extract as much wealth as possible from others.
vasco 3y ago
> It does one thing and does it well From the posts I've read recently it seems like it does one thing and it does it by renting a single EC2 server that will bring the service down if it needs to reboot, and it does it by reselling S3 at 10x the cost. It's funny because maybe it's a good service but going by HN, it's not reliable or cost effective.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jacquesm 3y ago
  > but going by HN, it's not reliable That's a cheap shot, it's been as reliable as the underlying fabric, the only thing that really stood out for me is how utterly weird HN is when it comes to determining what constitutes reliability: no data was lost other than a tiny bit that was in inbound transit which can still be recovered (and which you could not realistically protect against). Note that this is a backup service and not something that is normally found in your primary business processes. As such if it stores the crown jewels safely, allows for them to be restored if and when needed and doesn't leak them in the meantime that's mission accomplished. > or cost effective. That depends on your use case, and not everything is about cost. The way it is set up I think the trust factor that even Colin can't read your data and that there will always be a way to get your data back out if you should need it is what matters. Backups that don't work are a net negative, a backup that does work can be, given the right circumstances, absolutely priceless.
  - Kwpolska 3y ago
    Reliability is important for a backup service. If your machine explodes and you need to restore from backups, but the backup service is down, you need to wait and may lose money due to the outage (SLA, unhappy customers, no ability to onboard new customers etc.). If you’re doing weekly backups, but the backup service was down during the backup slot, and your crontab setup doesn’t yell at you and doesn’t retry until it succeeds, you might lose two weeks’ worth of data if disaster strikes.
    - 3y ago

dools 3y ago

Except that’s not what being a fisherman is like at all

nullcipher 3y ago
neither is it like that to be a multi millionaire. rare is the multimillionaire who "retires" to a village and enjoys siesta. usually, they want to move even more money (which is fine).
- thayne 3y ago
  > which is fine I disagree. I think the world would be a better place if many millionaires had decided to retire instead of trying to extract as much wealth as possible from others.

vasco 3y ago

> It does one thing and does it well From the posts I've read recently it seems like it does one thing and it does it by renting a single EC2 server that will bring the service down if it needs to reboot, and it does it by reselling S3 at 10x the cost. It's funny because maybe it's a good service but going by HN, it's not reliable or cost effective.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jacquesm 3y ago
> but going by HN, it's not reliable That's a cheap shot, it's been as reliable as the underlying fabric, the only thing that really stood out for me is how utterly weird HN is when it comes to determining what constitutes reliability: no data was lost other than a tiny bit that was in inbound transit which can still be recovered (and which you could not realistically protect against). Note that this is a backup service and not something that is normally found in your primary business processes. As such if it stores the crown jewels safely, allows for them to be restored if and when needed and doesn't leak them in the meantime that's mission accomplished. > or cost effective. That depends on your use case, and not everything is about cost. The way it is set up I think the trust factor that even Colin can't read your data and that there will always be a way to get your data back out if you should need it is what matters. Backups that don't work are a net negative, a backup that does work can be, given the right circumstances, absolutely priceless.
- Kwpolska 3y ago
  Reliability is important for a backup service. If your machine explodes and you need to restore from backups, but the backup service is down, you need to wait and may lose money due to the outage (SLA, unhappy customers, no ability to onboard new customers etc.). If you’re doing weekly backups, but the backup service was down during the backup slot, and your crontab setup doesn’t yell at you and doesn’t retry until it succeeds, you might lose two weeks’ worth of data if disaster strikes.
  - 3y ago