They should terminate TLS at the LB and use normal connection inside...unless they have some HIPAA privacy-like regulation going on.

Yes, they mention this as a 'fix' for connection-related memory usage:

> Disable keep-alive: close the connection immediately after each upload completes.

Very odd idea.

> What's disk going to add besides a little bit more resiliency

Resiliency is the point. How would you protect against machine's loss/crash?

reduced cost? you can have same storage in nvme (and for this purpose, sufficient performance) at a tenth or hundredth the cost of the same storage in memory in AWS.

This is indeed far more of a "HN Style" comment.

Regarding out-of-home access, I'll drop a note about connecting your phone to your home network with a VPN. Now you're always connecting the same way for this and everything else.

It's not perfect because wifi networks might block the VPN, but for the one wifi network I use the most, Wireguard on port 53 works splendidly, for now.

Ok that’s really cool; I didn’t know you could set up Apple’s smart home thingy to forward a live feed to the cloud.

I unfortunately did spring for a Nanit, but am keen to stop paying the subscription... any pointers of a resource you'd encourage me to look at to try to the same thing you did?

You've still had to buy a proprietary system, it just happens to run locally? Not really much better is it.

I came here to say, this is exactly what I do also.

Unifi accidentally made a fantastic baby monitor.

The recent APIs they’ve built makes me hopeful that I could run an AI model against the footage eventually and build those Ai features for myself.

I tried a high end Philips one and a Nest camera. Both were way less reliable than the Nanit. Possibly because they didn’t play nicely with my mesh WiFi at home. But regardless I just wanted to vouch for Nanit’s software, whatever they are doing with their networking and UX is really good.

i have a tplink as well and can vouch for it. it has iphone and android apps and can show live feed. mine costed 30$ and free live video.

It's a reasonable question! I'm past the baby monitor stage now, but when we used our Nanit from a different network it was for things like:

* Doing garage or yard work where Wifi coverage was spotty. May seem like an edge case but remember that when baby is sleeping is exactly when you want to be doing things like yard work.

* Hanging out across the street cooking out with the neighbors while baby sleeps

* Having a couple drinks at the hotel bar on vacation after baby goes to sleep. You're only ~30 seconds from your room if baby wakes up, but it's nice to not have to sit in a dark room for the whole evening after 7pm.

It's true! my recent real use case:

- I'm at a small party 1 block away. Baby is sleeping in the bedroom with mama but I'm trying to protect her sleep. I listen to baby with an airpod in my ear at the party. If baby shows signs of waking I come back and either bottle him or help mama feed him.

Also just because I'm out of the house and miss my baby and want to stare at him...

It seems possible to establish a p2p connection with the camera where the company servers act as a broker.

Yeah that’s fair, we had one of those too which absolutely did everything it advertised. The nanit is a different product that doubles as a home camera that lets you monitor your home while you’re away. Its software/networking is impressively reliable.

Then you’d have to trust that the option does what it says on the tin. My default for companies besides Apple is not to, too many scumbags have poisoned the well.

Technically there are two clients: The camera and whatever device is used to access the feed.

I can absolutely imagine an architecture where video can be streamed in an encrypted manner, or stored in encrypted time-stamped blobs, allowing the server to provide rough searching, and then the client can perform fine-grained scanning.

This obviously doesn't enable any kind of processing of the video data on the server side, and doing it on the receiving client would require the feed to be active This means that any kind of processing would almost necessarily have to happen on the sending device, which would probably increase the power and compute requirements by a lot.

I think the point is that effectively this is E2EE due to TLS, because the server is expected to be able to decrypt the data (and so is one “end”).

That’s not what most people expect though.

No, this doesn't get at the point of end-to-end encryption. Better to look at it in terms of the parties involved -- E2EE implies that there are two or more parties, and that only some of those parties should have unencrypted access.

In the case in point, the parent (camera owner) is one party and Nanit is another party. (Prior to the work in the linked post, AWS S3 was another party). The goal of E2EE is to deny plaintext access to some of these parties. So, in an E2EE deployment, Nanit (and AWS) would not have unencrypted access to the video content, even though they're storing it.

As chrismorgan pointed out, if Nanit did not have access to the unencrypted data, they could not do server-side video processing.

(Also, FWIW, there are multiple clients in this scenario -- the parents' phones are clients, and need unencrypted access to the video stream.)

(As an aside, where I used to work, we did some cool stuff with granting conditional access to certain server-side subsystems, so that the general data flow was all end-to-end encrypted, but customers could allow certain of our processes to be "ends" and have key access. This was really elegant; customers could dial in the level of server-side access that we had, and could see via the key authorization metadata which services had that access.)

Yeah but the reality of the microSD card is weird. E.g. Eufy puts the video on the card but encrypts it so you have to pull it through the camera through the app to your phone.

It's hilariously crazy but we were given the cams as a gift so we stuck with them.

Because it’s easy and convenient for new parents.

The typical parent has never heard of Synology or Ubiquiti, doesn’t have a NAS, and gets whatever tech their ISP gave/rents them.

Maybe you want it to be easy to grant a babysitter access to the cameras temporarily and not bother getting them VPN'en into your CCTV network.

Maybe you want to check up on the babysitter (as creepy as that sounds, there might be good reasons). Or you're traveling but your partner is home, and you want to be able to see your sleeping child from half a world away.

I do think we've gone to far in the direction of cloud-only, but I don't think it's a bad option of have. The problem I have is that many of the companies running these services have really terrible security. So for S3 for a nanny cam, I'd assume that each customer have their own bucket, with their own credentials, but I doubt that's the case.

Why is it hard for a local device to expose a REST API from home —a DDNS updater could update IP address for a cname — and then access all the local data local_device(REST API) <> Smartphone?

Hopefully as IPv6 gets more adoption we'll be able to open up some of these services, although IoT devices never get firmware updates so they'll have to sit behind Wireguard so maybe not.

"Measures not shown to be useful include positioning devices and baby monitors."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIDS

24/7?

Of course you don’t need it. But it’s very useful, especially living in a house with a layout that doesn’t lend itself to hearing a pin drop in the next room.

The v-tech ones are fine though. No need for anything with an Internet connection (though some of them even do now).

Source: also 2 kids.

Of course you don't _need_ it, but it's a useful convenience. Due to the layout of our house it was quite hard to hear my toddler if he was crying in the middle of the night - we often wouldn't wake up to it. So the monitor was very helpful.

Same here. I wonder if the market is for first-time parents and people who work 8+ hour days.

> Exactly. There are a lot of comments in this thread from people who are either non-parents or who haven’t lived in a situation where they didn’t have perfect WiFi coverage of their entire living area.

... and from people who take care of configuring their entire smart home crap of their entire relatives. In Germany we have a joke roughly translated to "Christmas is the time of the year where the children come back home to fix their parents' computers" for a reason - but a lot of people don't have family or friends who can deal with getting stuff set up.

The average user isn't competent enough to deal with a setup flow more complicated than "install this app, scan this QR code on the device, enter your wifi password, that's it". The user neither knows nor cares to know that the Thing sets up a temporary wifi access point (whose credentials are in the QR code), gets the home wifi credentials via a small API endpoint, tests the connectivity and then shuts down the temporary wifi. For them, it Just Works.

Docs written by people who make more money the more services are consumed...

You're right, I didn't pay attention there. Still seems that there a many solutions better suited than S3. Probably a classic case of "We need an MVP fast, let's optimize later".

You're definitely extrapolating, and honestly in my opinion in the worst possible direction. At a fundamental level, I personally believe that the generations raised in the previous half century (50s till 90s) are the most coddled, selfish, populations in the history of humanity: no major calamity or war, or pandemic, or anything really. Kids did enjoy insane freedoms and dangers but in retrospect doesnt look like they became responsible adults, in my opinion, electing autocrats around the world and destroying the planets future with warming all because their mollycoddled statistical anomalies of time periods didnt prepare them for any real consequences of their actions.

So I do think people from these generations should just focus on retiring, stop voting evil people into positions, and looking up latest alzheimers research, which btw was derailed by the same type of free range kid turned scientists from the greatest generation or whatever.

Its a baby monitor. Not some clockwork orange contraption.

> look at the kids these days. They are so dependent, and so sensitive to negative stimuli or emotions.

I think many of us have found people writing comments like this are not interacting with children very much. More just reading the takes of others who also don't interact with children.

And if this was a legitimate problem to address, you would not address it by taking away baby monitors.

Id take the sensitive kids these days over whatever child rearing practices created the adults of today who vote evil people in and destroy the planet due to wanton selfishness.

>> Without cloud, saving a file is as simple as "with open(...) as f: f.write(data)" + adding a record to DB.

> Save where? With what redundancy? With what access policies? With what backup strategy? With what network topology? With what storage equipment and file system and HVAC system and...

Most of these concerns can be addressed with ZFS[0] provided by FreeBSD systems hosted in triple-A data centers.

See also iSCSI[1].

0 - https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/zfs/

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISCSI

I don't think any of those mattered for their use case. That's why they didn't actually need S3.

With s3, you cannot use ls, grep and other tools.

> Save where? With what redundancy? With what access policies? With what backup strategy? With what network topology? With what storage equipment and file system and HVAC system and...

Wow that's a lot to learn before using s3... I wonder how much it costs in salaries.

> With what network topology?

You don't need to care about this when using SSDs/HDDs.

> With what access policies?

Whichever is defined in your code, no restrictions unlike in S3. No need to study complicated AWS documentation and navigate through multiple consoles (this also costs you salaries by the way). No risk of leaking files due to misconfigured cloud services.

> With what backup strategy?

Automatically backed up with rest of your server data, no need to spend time on this.

You can't ever definitively answer most of those questions on someone else's cloud. You just take Amazons word for whatever number of nines they claim it has.

So far I have seen a lot more production systems with a bus factor of zero than production systems with a bus factor greater one.

The cost being a fraction of 1 does not imply it's one person. 3 people each spending 2 weeks a year on the service is still a fraction of 1.

Have you done this? I can google or AI for the max size that postgres will allow, sure. I have googled in the past for whether this actually works well, and have gotten answers leaning towards most advice against it in real world scenarios.

So if you have experience with this and it did work well, I'm curious to hear about it! That's why i asked about if it worked well, not about the maximum size postgres allowed in various data types.

If you have no experience with it, but are just posting advice based on what AI tells you about max sizes of data allowed by pg that I can get from the same source too, then okay, fair enough, and certainly no need to give me any more of that!

Isolated partitions exist.

ap-northeast-2 is literally in Seoul

Having screwed around extensively on Internet forums, it’s always be pretty difficult to figure out who’s just a phony.

But yeah this won’t make it any easier.

> I'll be slapped by dang et. al with such accusations being against the HN guidelines

This is also the reason I toned it down a bit, although I've never received a formal reprimand from dang he's often dropped by my threads containing such callouts when the original poster of the LLM comment disagreed with my assessment.

I’m worried that LLMs could facilitate cheap, scaled astroturfing.

I understand that people encounter discrimination based on English skill, and it makes sense that people will use LLMs to help with that, especially in a professional context. On the other hand, I’d instinctively be more trusting of the authenticity of a comment with some language errors than one that reads like it was generated by ChatGPT.

I’m not sure if that’s a realistic ask. There is ample abuse of LLM generated content, and there are plenty of ESL publishers.

Personally I would recommend including a note that English is not your native language and you had an LLM clean things up. I think people are willing to give quite a bit of grace, if it’s disclosed.

Personally, I’d rather see a response in your native language with a translation, but I’m fairly certain I’m the odd one out in that situation XD

I tried that, but you end up sounding so bland and generic. It feels like the textual equivalent of the Corporate Memphis art style. I'm comfortable doing this at work because I exist outside of slack/emails, but in here I am what I write. If I delegate this to a LLM, then I do not exist anymore.

What I found useful is to use LLMs as a fuzzy near-synonym search engine. "Sad, but with a note of nostalgia", for example. It's a slower process, which in itself isn't bad.

It just makes everything sound bland and soulless. You don't know which part of the message actually comes from the user's brain and which part has been added/suggested by the LLM. The latter is not an original thought and it would be disingenuous to include it, but people do because it makes them look smarter. Meanwhile, on the other side, you might as well be talking to a LLM...

This commenter is making everything up and a 3 second look at their profile puts this beyond any doubt. Regardless, the benefit of the doubt should no longer be given. Too bad for my fellow ESLers, I'm one myself, but we better get just writing in English. It's already a daily occurrence now to see these bots on HN.

I wondered myself, as it seemed ok, but I went through the poster's history as I was interested.

Firstly, they have a remarkably consistent style. Everything is like this. There's not very many examples to choose from, so that's maybe also to be expected, and perhaps it is just also their personality.

I worry, as I've been accused myself, that there is perhaps something in the style the accuser dislikes or finds off-putting and nowadays the suspected cause will be LLM.

Secondly, they have "extensive experience" in various areas of technology, that don't seem to be especially related to each other. I too have extensive experience in several areas of technology but there is something of a connector between them.

Perhaps it is just because of their high level of technical expertise that they have managed to move between these areas and gain this extensive experience. And because of the high level of technical expertise and their interest in only saying very technical things all the time, their communications seem less varying and human, and more LLM.

LLMs are incredibly prone towards producing examples and reasons in groups of 3, in an A, B, C pattern. The comment in question does so almost every paragraph.

> We found that implementing proper data durability (3+ replicas, corruption detection, automatic repair)

> The engineering time spent building and maintaining custom tooling for multi-region replication, access controls, and monitoring ended

And so on. On top of this a 5 second look at the profile confirms that it's a bot.

They're using a very structured and detailed prompt. The upside of that for them is that their comment looks much more "HN-natural" than 99% of LLM comments on here. The downside is that their comments look even much more similar to each other than other bots, which display more variety. That's the tradeoff they're making. Other bots' comments are much more obviously sloppy, but there's more variety across their different comments.

It just has a certain feel to it, by the end of the first paragraph I also thought it was written by an LLM too.