Almost all our software is written in Node with the exception of the Kraken.io frontend which is PHP-based. We make heavy use of Node Streams as our optimization pipeline is capable of consuming a stream of binary data.
.. Optionally, if the API user requests, we can store optimized assets in his or her external storage of choice – S3, Azure, Cloud Files or SoftLayer.
.. Image optimization and recompression has enormous processing requirements. Cloud was never an option for us as we are continuously trying to lower our total cost of ownership. By signing a pretty long contract with our datacenter we were able to reduce colocation bills by 30%.
.. All single-socket machines (API, Web, Load Balancers, Webhook Delivery) are currently running Xeon E3-1280 v5 (Skylake). For Optimization Cluster where all the hard work is done we use 2 x Xeon E5-2697 v3 per machine with 128 GB RAM and four SSD hard drives in RAID-1 setup for mirroring. With HT enabled the above setup gives us access to 28 physical cores and 56 threads per Cluster machine.
.. Kraken.io’s platform is both CPU and I/O intensive
.. two independent 10 Gbps uplinks
Compressor.io image optimization
Compressor.io is a powerful online tool for reducing drastically the size of your images and photos whilst maintaining a high quality with almost no difference before and after compression.
Scapegoat: Motivational poster
A Good Scapegoat is nearly as welcome as a solution to the problem.
Why Don’t Americans Save More Money?
Maybe the only way to make people richer in the long run is to take their money away from them.
In 2008, several researchers studied the stereotype that minorities spend more than whites on “visible goods”—like clothes, shoes, jewelry, watches, salons, health clubs, and car parts. They discovered that, even after controlling for income, minorities save less than whites and spend more on such conspicuous consumption goods. But the story wasn’t just about race. White people in poor U.S. states spent more of their income on visible goods than whites in higher income states.
.. One possible explanation is that people spend more to signal that they’re not poor, Megan McArdle suggested. “If you’re a member of an identifiable demographic with low average incomes (southern, racial minority, rural) you are likely to be treated as if you are poor,” which makes it harder to get both social respect and work, she wrote. In a perfectly homogenous country with all white people, there would be less reason for the poor to signal their wealth with expensive visual cues, since they already look just like the rich. But in a diverse country where some demographic groups are stereotyped as poor, lower-income people might be more likely to pay for clothes and cars that say “I’m not who you think I am.”
.. They even discovered a positive relationship between the income of the state’s richest households and the number of personal bankruptcies in that state.
.. The American middle class made up for decades of flat wages with debt. But the last two studies offer a cultural explanation. Minorities and poor whites have spent more to signal that they are not poor, while Americans in general have spent more to signal that they are just like the rich.
.. A college graduate at 29 is 30 percent more likely to be married than a peer who never finished high school. That helps to explain why nearly 60 percent of first births in lower-middle-class households are now to unmarried women.
.. The lottery is a $70 billion government-financing initiative disproportionately funded by the poor.
.. But it’s not clear that higher earnings will necessarily lead to wealth creation for the poor. In the 1990s, after all, rising incomes were plowed into homes that eventually destroyed the savings of many poor and middle class families.
.. In a world obsessed with the wizardry of behavioral nudges, perhaps policymakers should consider putting away the magic wand and just do the paternalistic thing: Force people to save more, by expanding Social Security or by creating new forced savings policies.