singleserver.com v0.2.0: • improved setup wizard • quieter install (a checklist, not a wall of logs) • set env vars when adding an app • works on servers that already have Docker installed

iPhone 5s was the best design ergonomically. Perfect size to reach across the screen with one thumb, no camera bulge, fingerprint sensor, nice materials, and 33% lighter than the latest iPhone 17 Air.

There's been big drama about this technology recently. Back in 1999, a man named Steve Gass invented a system that sensed flesh and allowed the blade to stop and retract before it could cut into hands and fingers. This wasn't some gimmick. It actually worked. 40,000 people in the US alone end up in the ER because of table saw injuries. When a human makes contact with a 2lb blade spinning at 5000rpm, the outcome is never a couple of stitches and a bandaid. This is when you go to hospital with your fingers in a zip bag and beg doctors to reattach them. Or when the blade goes between your fingers and bifurcates your hand in two. Nasty catastrophic injuries. Gass' invention fixed this. The brake worked fast enough to prevent almost all these bad injuries. What could be a major catastrophe turns into a small scratch and a $150 brake and blade replacement. And it was commercially viable too. The tech worked with any regular metal blade, and the brake mechanism could be made for under $100. The brake was just a consumable item that could be replaced quickly with no tools. Initially Gass tried to license this technology to all the major saw manufacturers. But they all turned him down. The speculation is that manufacturers couldn't afford to put this on their low end saws because of the added cost of the brake and the need to make the saw sturdy enough to support the energy absorbed from the brake. Some low end saws retail for $150-$300, so even though the brake was cheap, it would have made that product segment unviable. And if manufacturers chose to put the brake only on their higher end models, they were afraid they'd open themselves up for lawsuits if they possessed the safety technology and intentionally omitted it on the cheaper models. So they didn't want anything to do with this. Then Gass went to the government and lobbied for regulators to compel the use of this technology. But back then there was no appetite for that kind of intervention and Gass got a lot of bad PR for trying to impose this on the public. So Gass decided to go with the free market approach, and started a company called SawStop which made table saws using this technology. And he proved that a lot of people were willing to pay an extra $200 to save their fingers. Who knew? In time, the other manufactures lost almost all market share to SawStop for the medium to high end saws. Almost any new saw sold in the US over $800 was a SawStop. And miraculously, the manufactures had a change of heart! Now they wanted this technology. So a few of them began developing their own versions. Almost none managed to bring anything to market, but at one point Bosch developed a similar technology called Reaxx and started selling these saws in the US. But SawStop sued them for infringing on their patent. In the end, the court ruled that Bosch couldn't sell these saws in the US, and this ticked consumers off because they said this was further proof that SawStop was more interested in money than safety. But shortly after SawStop won that lawsuit, they changed their mind. They gave Bosch a free license to use their technology. But Bosch still didn't bring back their Reaxx products. Some say that Bosch never managed to implement a reliable solution and they realized their solution would be compared to SawStop's and it would harm their brand if it didn't work as well. Fast forward to today, 25 years after Gass invented this system. The political situation is very different, and now it's looking very likely that SawStop technology will be mandated for all new table saws sold in the US. SawStop still have a patent for this technology until 2033, and if this regulation passes the other manufactures would theoretically have to pay license fees for every saw they sell in the US. But in a shocking move, SawStop said that if the regulation passes, it will release the patent for free to the public. The US public safety commission, prepared for a fight, was baffled by this news. When the news sunk in, they concluded that at this point there are no more barriers for any other company to match SawStop safety. This means that SawStop will give their rivals permission to use their technology. It doesn't mean that it will sell the parts to them, but they are not going to sue anyone who tries to make their own version. They are basically giving up their monopoly on this technology. But the manufactures are still unanimously opposed to this regulation (except SawStop of course). They claim that this will put them out of business and that cheap affordable saws are going to be a thing of the past. The cheapest SawStop table saw costs $899, while most manufactures sell saws under $300. Since they're not selling any high end saws anymore (SawStop took all of their business), the low end is what's making them money at the moment, and now this regulation will force them out of the market completely. If this regulation passes, we're likely not going to see saws on the market for under $700 anymore. And this will be a real obstacle for people looking to get started in woodworking, carpentry, and other construction trades that need to buy table saws. The regulation will also likely incentivize manufacturers to recall all the old saws, and that would make it hard for consumers to find cheap used saws without this safety feature. (This already happened with Craftsman's radial arm saws in the early 2000s.) But what about the saved fingers? 400,000 catastrophic injuries and amputations over the next 10 years could be saved if this regulation passes. That seems substantial. This feels like progress. This is what an advanced society does. The end consumer will ultimately pay for it, but would you want the cabinet maker of your next kitchen remodel risk fingers and permanent catastrophic injury just to save a $100 part? Hell no!

Imagine commuting 45 minutes each way just to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours a day.

The pinnacle of engineering in one photo

How it started / How it's going

Is anyone still convinced Twitter needed 8,000 employees to keep the lights on?

Still enough time if you employ the 80/20 rule

Nine women can make a baby in one month

Took my 7yr old to his annual pediatric dentist appt last month (near Seattle) and the dentist found 4 cavities in his baby teeth, all needing filling and one needed a cap. The dentist said this had to be done with general anesthesia. Cost $2,750. We found it bizarre to have to put a 7yr old under general anesthesia, outside of a hospital, in a small clinic above a Starbucks, with full intubation and put on a ventilator, just to fill 4 cavities in baby teeth that would fall off on their own anyway. The dentist insisted the intervention was necessary because these teeth won't fall off in 5 years, and one of the cavities was almost guaranteed to become problematic. And that general anesthesia was required because of the length of the intervention. We had a bad feeling about all of this, and declined the procedure after considering the risks of general anesthesia outside of a hospital. The dentist gave my wife a lecture about how this is totally safe and they do it all the time, and that we should take some time to think about it, but we should come again after the summer to talk with them again and reconsider our decision. The dentist insisted this was the only way to proceed and that it would be very imprudent to postpone it. The entire rant made the whole thing feel even more shady to me. It felt like a Hertz rep trying to sell me car insurance at the airport. We're now in Malta, and took the kid to a local dentist for a second opinion. We thought we'd ask the dentist if we could do the fillings one by one, over multiple sessions, in order to avoid any sedation. And guess what? This dentist took a look at the kid's teeth, and couldn't find anything! Zero cavities. Perfectly healthy teeth. Not even a cleaning was required. We paid €15 and were sent home. Now, the Maltese dentist didn't do an x-ray. They said it would be an over-intervention to order an x-ray with no visible signs of decay. The Seattle dentist does an x-ray every year, and found the cavities from the latest x-ray. They never sent us the x-rays though. Is there a chance the Seattle dentist was right, or is this a classic case of violating the Hippocratic Oath for personal gain? The insistence on general anesthesia just didn't sit well with me, and smelled of malpractice in an attempt to do this procedure quickly and more conveniently (plus charge a lot more). What's your interpretation?

A quarter of Goldman Sachs employees are Vice Presidents

Amazon: We want everyone back to the office! My office when I worked at Amazon:

Here's what China banned. Google YouTube Twitter Facebook Wikipedia TikTok GitHub ChatGPT Reddit Instagram WhatsApp LinkedIn Signal Vimeo Discord Twitch Dropbox Medium DuckDuckGo HBO Pinterest SoundCloud BBC The New York Times The Guardian SlideShare The Washington Post Internet Archive Bloomberg Flickr The Wall Street Journal Reuters NBC News TIME The Economist

This is how meaningful Meta’s numbers are:

Why would my Mac be holding to 621GB of system data? That's the size of 6 wikipedias.

Can someone explain to me what's the rationale of having no speed limit on German highways? How is this not massively endangering others? Not even F1 allows cars to have a 100mph difference. The 107% rule prevents cars that are 7% slower from competing, for safety reasons.

This is my first presidential election as a US citizen. I dislike both candidates, but the country is asking me to make a choice. Today I voted for: - Stronger law enforcement - No mercy on violent crime - More police funding - Harsher penalties for drug dealers - Less wars - Skepticism of foreign intervention - Stronger national defense - Reduce trade dependency with China - Return essential manufacturing to the US - More control on illegal immigration - Less federal oversight on education - More parental rights for gender reassignment in minors - More conservative interpretation of the constitution - Getting rid of mail-in voting - Less DEI nonsense - Elon Musk as secretary of cost cutting

if (prompt.toLower() == “thank you”) return “You’re welcome” There, saved them millions of dollars!

How can web browsers render something like this at 60 FPS but if I add a few rows to an HTML table the page freezes for half a second while it repaints?

I find it distasteful, almost unethical, to say this when you have 18 million subscribers. Hard to explain why, but with great reach comes great responsibility. Potentially killing someone else’s nascent project reeks of carelessness. First, do no harm.

My 7yr old wants me to buy him a 1x1 rubik's cube. What's the point of this thing and what does he know that I don't? 😅

164,000 employees and this “this update introduces 8 new emojis”

If hard work leads to success, the donkey would own the farm. - old rural saying

- You read 100 books. 99 are meh, 1 changes your life. - You try 100 things. 99 don't work, 1 changes your life. - You meet 100 people. 99 you never see again, 1 changes your life. Life is more random than it seems. Act accordingly.

Hot take: Start a family. Your career will thank you. You’ll realize you’ve been working directionless until then.

My real business plan: Avoid going back to this

Brutal 🌶️

You only become an adult once you have kids. Until then, you're just a grown up child.

Accidentally opened LinkedIn today and saw a bunch of ex-colleagues got laid off. Not bloated middle managers, but purple badge senior engineers with 15+ years at the company.

If we need to bail out 45 million student loan borrowers, maybe most degrees aren’t a very good investment.

My self-employment income progression so far: Revenue Profit 2019 $33,449 -$74,061 2020 $350,989 $209,912 2021 $336,706 $304,120 2022 $541,369 $436,752

$3,000 on my front porch. The European mind cannot comprehend this:

When I worked at Amazon we used to make some software slow on purpose. Then when a problem caused real slowness, we’d remove the fake delays and things would feel normal. The fake delays made users happier, even though they all wanted faster software. Makes you think.

Total comp $900,000, but at what cost? I got out of this rat race when I looked around me and realized that even the winners were miserable.

2000 customers @ $39/month is almost $1M/year. - You don't need to dominate the market. - You don't need to disrupt anything. - You don't need to conquer the competition. You can add 1 new customer/day & before you know it, you'll have a $1M/yr machine. Wouldn't that be enough?

Haha, you might be onto the root cause!

Sometimes I buy a garden hose made in Germany, or some silly item like that, and it's like it was made by an advanced alien species. Why is Germany quality so good?

- You read 100 books. 99 are meh, 1 changes your life. - You meet 100 people. 99 you never see again, 1 changes your life. - You try 100 things. 99 don't work, 1 changes your life. Life is more random than it seems. Act accordingly.

You should discover asap if you're a hunter type or a farmer type. Hunter type: work preference is bursts of high intensity with lots of idle wandering in between. Farmer type: work preference is a ritual of structure and consistency, same thing day after day, week after week.

The current generation of young developers has been brainwashed by tech influencers from overfunded platforms to see everything as too difficult for them to comprehend. Want to host a site? Servers are too dangerous. Use our platform. Want to do auth? Hackers will break you. Use our auth service. Want to store data? You're too dumb to manage a database. Use our storage service. Want to send emails? It's too hard. Use our service. Want to collect payments? The tax man will ruin you. Use our MOR service. Things have never been easier, yet these merchants of complexity want you to think otherwise. Follow the money, and don't ask the barber if you need a haircut.

“Open in App” is the worst iOS feature:

A killer AI app would let me upload all my 66,000 photos and have the machine organize, enhance, select the best ones from dupes, etc.

UnitedHealthcare has a profit margin of 3.63% and makes $32,500 per employee. If they are so greedy why does their business make so little money?

If you’re a programmer, you can: - Make SaaS products - Write eBooks - Make apps - Create video courses - Do freelancing - Give live training - Do paid support - Publish a paid newsletter If you accumulate $325/day from doing many of these at the same time, you’ll make $10K/mo.

Things you absolutely don’t need to launch: - a favicon - unit tests - a logo - an LLC - tax compliance - VAT handling - a merchant of record - terms and conditions - a privacy policy - a copyright notice - a trademark - commit messages - code reviews - code comments - a deployment system - continuous integration - docker - a web framework - monitoring - pager duty - reset password - dark mode - a nosql database - serverless functions - cloudflare - a load balancer - a twitter handle - multiple pricing plans - purchasing power parity - a blog - a roadmap - animations - a changelog - venture capital - an affiliate program - a system status page Things you absolutely need to launch: - some way to bring attention to your product

founder mode vs manager mode

Tech culture creates a bunch of grown-up babies. People earning $300K/yr complaining they don’t get free lunch. Bring your own lunch and have some dignity.

Believe it or not, house affordability hasn't changed much in the last 40 years. What got inflated was people's desire for bigger and more luxurious homes. The median new house today is almost 1000 sqft bigger than 40 years ago. Price per sqft, inflation adjusted:

2000 customers @ $39/month is almost $1M/year. If your software can handle 2000 customers, you can worry about scalability once the $1M/year is flowing in. Scalability doesn’t get you cutomers. First have customers, then worry about scalability. The order matters.

Productivity is against nature. Our ancestors would go hunting because they didn’t like being hungry. They built houses because they didn’t like being cold. They didn’t try to be productive. They badly wanted something and motivation for action came automatically.

I can't think of a single thing that would induce this trend to reverse. It will probably have to be some Black Swan event. Something so unexpected that it lives beyond the limits of our imagination.

YC brainwashed a generation of smart people to think this is a glorious way to spend a decade of their lives.

The is embarrassing for America

Maybe MKBHD is not a good judge of product quality after all.

Tech people making $100/hr+ who fantasize about working on a farm just need to work a bit less and grow some tomatoes as a hobby.

My 2023 goal continues to be avoiding this:

Let’s see what DocuSign’s 6,840 employees do about this

LinkedIn is such a deranged product. Not only they're not doing anything to fight the flood of AI slop comments, they built AI slop comments natively into the product:

A few $100K/year revenue streams, for inspiration: - 300 customers @ $29/mo - 6 sales/day @ $45 each - 1 sale/day @ $270 each - 50 students/quarter @ $500 each - 15 hrs/week @ $125/hr No capital necessary. Parallelizable. Achievable as a one-person business.

Musk deserves respect but if his grandiose accomplishments inspire you to “dream big”, remember that he sacrificed everything: his life, his family, probably his sanity. And almost didn’t make it. Almost no one makes it.

My 2021 income streams: • video course: $78,620 • cohort course: $79,285 • ebook: $16,952 • cutting boards: $4,495 • membership: $29,895 • freelancing: $120,000 • affiliate sales: $2,020 • saas: $4,582 revenue: $335,849 profit: $304,498

We’re taking humanity to mars, but this is too hard

Breaking news: This happens at most tech companies. If an employee is about to get a $500K bonus and you’re not happy with them, it makes sense to let them go before their bonus vests. The upcoming vesting date prompts the evaluation. Remember this is high stakes employment with ~$500K-$1M/yr comp packages. It’s part of the game. This is not a minimum wage cashier job at Walmart. And BTW, employees do this too. They tend to leave ~10 days after vesting. I did it myself. I was done and ready to leave Amazon in Nov 2018 but had a big vest coming at the end of the year, so I took all my leave and gave my notice 2 days after my vest. I waited until the cash landed in my bank account before I told anyone. Everyone I know who left Amazon did the same thing. And I know multiple managers and higher ups who got fired days before a $300K vest. This is how the system works at this level. Nothing retarded about it. If you want to avoid it, don’t play this game, or be so good they can’t fire you.

Profile of a typical corporate drone: “Engineering leader, husband, dog parent. Likes coffee, travel, outdoors. he/him. ex: amazon, google, microsoft. Opinions me own.” Every interaction with these people is a posture to improve their employment status. A soulless conversation.

Imagine releasing all this goodness and the company instantly loses $30 billion on announcement. Markets are so complex.

This is why I left #AWS: medium.com/@dvassallo/only-i…

This is why my X bio says what it says :)

The data is 40,000 ER visits for table saw injuries per year.

You should put “used by wayfair” on your landing page now!

We’re back in Seattle in August and will likely get x -rays done from a different dentist to be sure. Thanks for replying.

Best career advice? Start a family, and nothing else will matter.

These VC-funded mfs charged me $5,000 for bookkeeping, made me categorize all my transactions, shutdown the business with zero notice 3 days before the end of the year, kept all the money, and told me to go fuck myself.

I've been in the self-published ebook business for 16 days now, and just crossed $40K in sales. I can't pretend I'm an expert in this profession, but here's everything I did so far. A thread.👇

DigitalOcean is how the cloud should have been. You choose a $64/mo server, and at the end of the month you get charged $64. No NAT_GATEWAY_EGRESS_INTER_REGION nonsense fees.

After almost 10yrs of dealing with US immigration, I’m finally an American citizen. 🇺🇸 🦅 🗽

If you’re truly ambitious you should want to have it all: lifestyle, family, work, health, hobbies. It’s not a pick one or two out of five. Pick all five.

Just spent $360,000 today. A 10 acre lot adjacent to our 2 acres just went on the market, and we snatched it. It comes with a gorgeous salmon-bearing stream in it.

POV: 5000ppm CO2

China doesn’t let these American businesses sell their digital services on the Chinese market. Google YouTube Twitter Facebook X GitHub ChatGPT Reddit Instagram WhatsApp LinkedIn Signal Vimeo Discord Twitch Dropbox Medium DuckDuckGo HBO Pinterest SoundCloud The New York Times SlideShare The Washington Post Internet Archive Bloomberg Flickr The Wall Street Journal Reuters NBC News TIME The Economist They didn’t put a tariff. That outright banned them. So why should any Chinese business have free access to the American market? Doesn’t seem fair.

Hetzner is offering an S3-compatible object store (currently Beta), and the pricing is insane compared to AWS. Storage: 4X cheaper — $4.9/TB-mo vs $21/TB-mo Traffic: 50X cheaper — $51/TB vs $1/TB And no request fees. AWS charges $0.4-$5/M requests. docs.hetzner.com/storage/obj…

Asking for one-time payments is almost becoming an unfair advantage

A few $100,000/year revenue streams, for inspiration: - 300 customers @ $29/mo - 6 sales/day @ $45 each - 1 sale/day @ $270 each - 50 students/quarter @ $500 each - 15 hrs/week @ $125/hr All achievable on your own terms, as a one-person business.

Node.js with Express.js can serve 15,000 requests per second (1.3 billion requests per day) on a single MacBook Pro. There are only 8 billion people in the world. You probably don’t need to scale beyond one server.

My “business plan” is to not let this get too low

Amazon is becoming a dinosaur like IBM.

Oh look. A “fact” stopped being a fact.

Today is my 3yr anniversary since I started working for myself. I made $760K in revenue, and had a few realizations along the way. Here are some of them:

Small Bets is joining Gumroad! Yes, I sold Small Bets. I’m going to keep running it myself, but Gumroad is now the 100% owner. It’s a good deal for me, and it should only bring more benefits to the community. Details - $3.6M sale price. - 50% cash / 50% stock options. - Cash payment in 2 parts: $900K received last week, $900K in 12 months. - My options vest in 10% increments every 6 months. - I will continue to run Small Bets for 5 years. If I quit, I lose any unvested options. - I will also be helping part-time to make Gumroad better. - I won't take any salary*. My goal is to help Gumroad (the company) become a $10M profit/yr business and make my equity return a $200K+/yr dividend. * technically my state of WA is forcing Gumroad to pay me a minimum wage of $69,500/yr, but I’ll use that to exercise my options. Valuation - Gumroad had already acquired 10% of Small Bets last year for $500K. - $3.6M for 90% = $4M valuation. - Small Bets made almost $500K in profit last year excluding Gumroad fees. Based on 2024 earnings, this sale would represent an 8X profit multiple. Under the Gumroad umbrella, we expect to grow this business to $1M in profit within the first 2 years, which would be a forward-looking 4X profit multiple. Future - I will continue running Small Bets myself as its own autonomous subsidiary. Basically, nothing changes. I still decide what happens there. Of course, that could change in the future but Small Bets has had 41 consecutive cash-flow positive months, and if that performance continues I see no reason for me getting kicked out. - Payment processing is likely becoming a race to the bottom, almost a commodity nowadays. Gumroad wants to be doing more than just payments to remain a valuable business. - The goal is to eventually turn Gumroad into a community rather than just a payment processor, where new and aspiring entrepreneurs get help starting and succeeding with whatever they want to do, even if it doesn’t involve using Gumroad’s products. The plan is still fuzzy, but that’s the direction. Small Bets will act as a laboratory for these ideas. - Small Bets has already shown the value of a support network and how having people with first-hand experience in your corner can help beyond what any AI or piece of software can. We will try to scale this concept further so that Gumroad can help creators with much more than just payments. - And if you’re one of the 6,692 lifetime members of the Small Bets community, thank you so much for trusting me and supporting my project. You will continue to benefit from all the goodness we’ll add following this partnership. Ask me anything!

The art of twitter is repeating yourself over and over without anyone noticing

- You read 100 books. 99 are meh, 1 changes your life. - You meet 100 people. 99 you never see again, 1 changes your life. - You try 100 things. 99 don't work, 1 changes your life. Almost everything consequential in life is randomly determined. Act accordingly.

Instead of studying how Bezos made his billions, it's much more useful to learn how someone like you is making $10K/mo.

The idea that anything is possible if you work hard enough is a dangerous delusion. Life is more random than it seems, and favorable payoffs are more often attributable to making good bets rather than a good work ethic. Don’t sacrifice more than it’s worth.

An email that worked. This is how it started:

Whatever you do, always keep this story in mind:

Never set goals without cost constraints: - I want to start a business… without spending more than $10K - I want to make $100K… without working more than 2hrs/day - I want to get promoted… without sacrificing my family .. and so on. Else you become a slave of your goals.

Break it down: $100K/year ... $8,300/month ... $270/day ... 7 sales of $39 ... 140 views @ 5% conversion Now your job is getting 140 daily views.

Something you never see in those viral morning routine videos is kids

I gave up a lot of money and career status to be able to do this on a weekday without asking anyone’s permission.

Forms of self-employment income for developers: 🔴 SaaS: Takes a long time for meaningful returns. 🟢 Info Products: High volatility, unpredictable, potential for extremely high ROI. 🔵 Freelancing: Predictable, stable, choose your own hours. Mix together for maximum effect!

More people should consider working with the seasons: High intensity for 3-4 months, and doing almost nothing for the rest of the year.

”Work hard, be bold, be willful, be over-confident…” and other BS nonsense. The best thing you can do to get ahead in life is to realize you’re not special and to learn how to deal with all the uncertainty life throws at you.