MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Canine – A Heroku alternative built on Kubernetes
by czhu12 | 2025-06-16 18:27:59+00:00
Hello HN!

I've been working on Canine for about a year now. It started when I was sick of paying the overhead of using stuff like Heroku, Render, Fly, etc to host some web apps that I've built. At one point I was paying over $400 a month for hosting these in the cloud. Last year I moved all my stuff to Hetzner.

For a 4GB machine, the cost of various providers:

Heroku = $260 Fly.io = $65 Render = $85 Hetzner = $4

(This problem gets a lot worse when you need > 4GB)

The only downside of using Hetzner is that there isn’t a super straightforward way to do stuff like:

- DNS management / SSL certificate management - Team management - Github integration

But I figured it should be easy to quickly build something like Heroku for my Hetzner instance. Turns out it was a bit harder than expected, but after a year, I’ve made some good progress

The best part of Canine, is that it also makes it trivial to host any helm chart, which is available for basically any open source project, so everything from databases (e.g. Postgres, Redis), to random stuff like torrent tracking servers, VPN’s endpoints, etc.

Open source: https://github.com/czhu12/canine Cloud hosted version is: https://canine.sh
by JohnMakin | 2025-06-16 18:28:35+00:00
My belief that's kind of settling in after a few years of observation is that I absolutely believe the "hype" claim that AI is a force multiplier. However, lots of things out there are terrible and shouldn't be force multiplied (spam, phishing, scams, etc) or say like, people that are very bad at their jobs. If people like this's output is multiplied, it clearly can and will be very bad. I have seen this play out at a small scale already on some teams I've worked with.

For the maybe ~1-5% of people out there that have something valuable to contribute (that's my number, and I fully believe it) then I think it can be good, but those types also seem to be the most wary of it.
by franga2000 | 2025-06-16 18:28:47+00:00
Fuck no! Lowering the cost of keeping people in prison would make it even easier for the government to lock people up for smaller crimes and with bigger sentences. It's even worse with the privatised prison system that the US has. They already know the "market price" (what the government is willing to spend) so adding "free money" into the equation just makes it easier for them to raise prices and end up pocketing even more money than they already do.

Framing it as offsetting the cost would also make it very easy to increase the cut, bit by bit, until it gets to a truly unreasonable level. And since the person is already in prison and we have to pay for them no matter what, why would they choose to work if the deal is so bad?
by bananalychee | 2025-06-16 18:29:09+00:00
What the author presents as "sincerity" comes off as injecting (his) biased views into reporting. The post devolves into a tedious series of anecdotes that ostensibly prove that "context" can reframe a story, and he argues that sincere reporting should take that context into account, which is reasonable in principle, but he doesn't seem to realize that he's only presenting context that suits his worldview and tosses out the rest. For example, he decries journalists being wrong or underemphasizing his bias by failing to account for data that proves him right in retrospect. In the same paragraph, he smears reporters for under-weighing and over-weighing soft data. That's easy to do in hindsight. My takeaway is that he undermines his own premise by demonstrating everything that can go wrong in opinionated reporting: cherry-picking, double standards, and confirmation bias.

P.S.: the most surprising thing to me about this blog post is that it went through an editor.
by fuzzythinker | 2025-06-16 18:29:21+00:00
Hats off to years of dedication that wants his creation to shine.

My question is: It says you sold the assets and everything to the new company, yet also personally invested in the new company for years of runway. I don't get it. If the exchange of funds is equal, why not just transfer ownership? If net money out is greater, then why not just transfer and fund. If net money in is greater, why not just sell for the net amount?
by kragen | 2025-06-16 18:29:58+00:00
> But you can’t take a random Python GC’d workload and slap it on a bump allocator and call it good. A consequence of bump allocators is you can’t, ahem, freely free objects in the middle.

Yes, actually, you can, if your pointer-bumping allocator is the nursery allocator for a generational GC, which is the case in PyPy. In fact, you can free objects in the middle so freely that it takes literally zero instructions to free them; all you have to do is not retain a reference to them, and when it is time to move the live objects out of the nursery, the GC will avoid moving them because it never finds a pointer to them. That's how this microbenchmark is able to spend only 2% of its time in the GC, even though it's doing nothing but allocating and initializing objects!

This allows you to, precisely, take a random Python GC'd workload and satisfy almost all of its allocations with a simple pointer-bumping allocator. It avoids all the trickiness of pushing onto alternating lists/vec/etc.

It's true that in production workloads the time spent in the GC is usually more than 2%, typically more like 15%. The time wasted on write barriers, or on writing your code to copy objects unnecessarily to avoid write barriers, is harder to quantify, much like the time wasted on mutating objects unnecessarily to avoid allocation.

It is also true that workload always matters for allocator performance. So it's instructive to see how well RPython's allocator does with a workload which would be a pathological worst case for the kinds of allocators you're accustomed to, yielding performance so dramatically superior that you dismissed it as impossible, like when GMail launched with a gigabyte of email storage per user and Hotmail assumed it was a joke.
by Arathorn | 2025-06-16 18:30:19+00:00
One thing that Matrix does do well is scale. The matrix.org homeserver handles around several million monthly active users, and rooms can scale up to hundreds of thousands of users (although things currently get a bit sluggish if there are more than a few thousand servers participating in a single room).

Meanwhile, usability has improved radically on Matrix clients over the last few years (although many people don't realise if they're stuck on the old legacy Element clients, rather than using newer clients like Element X).

So, not sure what the full story is here.

If they did use Matrix, someone would have to run the server - and Element doesn't have the $ to provide hosting for free, and perhaps k8s doesn't want the admin hassle of running their own. One solution could be for Element to provide a cheap license for the Element Server Suite enterprise distro (https://element.io/server-suite), which would then (ironically) use k8s to scale elastically and be supported by Element's SRE team. It would also have the pleasant side-effect of helping fund Element's development on Matrix and improve things further.

If this is of interest to anyone reading this, you know where to find me :)
by FilosofumRex | 2025-06-16 18:30:23+00:00
This is a better YouTube video describing granular physics and shows the speed (amplitude) of vibrations can cause counterintuitive arrangements of particles.

At lower speeds you get something akin to Newtonian gravity but at higher velocities you get something resembling MOND gravity where galaxies clusters and large voids appear - no dark matter needed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKvc5yDhy_4
by echelon | 2025-06-16 18:30:58+00:00
> We've known about global warming for almost 50 years and yet to this day the debate is divided between "eh" and "no, it isn't".

So much work is being done on that front.

> Coal plants have been consistently depositing smog in our lungs with no end in sight.

Not the #1 killer of humans. We're still making lots of progress on healthspan, especially in pulling people out of poverty. We're well ahead of where we were 50 years ago. People are no longer starving to death at unprecedented scale.

> Boeing has successfully lobbied itself out of criminal charges for the deadly consequences of their (IMHO) negligence regarding the 737 Max.

Sometimes bad things happen. Not to diminish these lives, but this is just a footnote in the list of impressive things technology and society have accomplished, though. Boeing and execs should face punishment, but this is a very small downside to a much greater set of accomplishments that vastly outweighs the bad.

> Companies have stopped pretending that they'll put human lives before profit. As a human, I am therefore beyond giving any company the benefit of the doubt that they'll "engineer around it" when it comes to safety.

What are you talking about? To just cite one instance, Waymo is already going to be one of the biggest needle movers in terms of human lives saved. Or another - look at what Moderna did during Covid.

Life is better than it used to be, not worse. You're wearing miasma-tinted glasses.
by altairprime | 2025-06-16 18:31:10+00:00
The message, if stripped of emotion and audience, may not be wholly unique. The target audience of the two pieces is certainly different, and the emotional tone as well. Zitron doesn’t seem to direct his writing towards any single ‘audience’ week-to-week, as some others do; but each post does always appear to have a target in particular. So the way I would read Zitron, then, is to ask: ‘what is he trying to persuade who of, and how does his emotional intensity uniquely promote that outcome?’ (relative to less-intense others).
by jmyeet | 2025-06-16 18:31:14+00:00
"Random" is a really interesting concept because it's intuitive yet hard to define. It's really a definition by exclusion, that is if you can't describe something in any way then it's random by default. But how do you know you just haven't found the way to define it yet?

This is somewhat related to the idea of complexity. So if you have a sequence of "random" numbers, how do you know they're random? Take a look at a Mandelbrot Set and you wouldn't guess it's not that complex.

I really like the idea of Kolomogorv complexity [1], which is to say that the complexity of an object (including a sequence of numbers) is defined by the shortest program that can produce that result. So a sequence of number generated by a PRNG isn't complex because an infinite sequence of such numbers can be reduced to the (finite) size of the program and initial seed.

There are various random number generators that use quantum effects to create random numbers. One interesting implication of this is that it ends the debate about whether quantum effects can affect the "classical" or "macro" world.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity
by ty6853 | 2025-06-16 18:31:34+00:00
Yes I'm sure we could keep digging up more. I've been down this rabbit hole before so I know how it always ends: I provide a data driven take backed by source after source which ends in endless nitpicking and scrutiny and rejection of the sources, meanwhile unsourced hot takes go completely unchallenged without the demand sources, as seen in your sister comment.

This is the key of this two-pronged approach, one commenter can bury the data driven comment in source rejection (without being beheld to prove a counter point, since the asserter has the burden of proof) while the sister comment can drive the more approved comment unchallenged. Of course we really know, in many cases, the two separate commenters are advancing the same line of opinion, but using this split strategy both are compartmentalized in their burdens.

Although, the truth is, the scrutinizer is rarely offering counter sources of their own, which they of course are under no obligation to provide. But barring that, we're left at worst with "I don't know" which is a terrible standard under which to assume the word of the wife is predictive of guilt, thus even if all the sources are rejected you leave from a practical perspective no off no better than you started in predictive guilt.
by District5524 | 2025-06-16 18:31:54+00:00
It's not a problem that you try multiple sources at all. That's a smart move as long as you do realize what you are doing and give these extra sources appropriate weight. But that's very difficult to do with LLMs due to a) pointy-haired bosses and the capital very much wanting to believe they can do away without third-party expertise and the unpleasent dependency on humans in general, and b) the market hype around technical tools that technical people are much more prone to (excellent, it works well in my field, it should also work in other fields, we're smarter then the others etc.). The difficult part is that if many people go with bad contracts and bad legal advice, that will be visible only after many years of litigation, and in general, by rising legal costs in courts. And that also means a lot more people will have to swallow agressive counterparty propositions from the better financed side, bad default judgements, and in general, a lot more third-party financed litigation (which will not benefit lawyers in the end, but most lawyers do not care). That will also be seen just as a further rise in legal costs... Which will probably be promised to be solved by less human judges and more LLMs, run by people interested courts spending more on LLMs. LLMs do not work in the way that humans do, benchmarks are very primitive and unreliable, even the best tools marketed for lawyers are unreliable on real life scenarios, while evaluations costs a lot, so very few people do them.
by borski | 2025-06-16 18:32:09+00:00
> They didn't get rich by creating value. They might have created value…

Odd to contradict yourself with only a period separating the contradictory statements.

> I would also argue that they don't create the value themselves, but their workers do.

Sure, that’s fair - but those workers also have jobs and salaries because of risk the founders took to de-risk the company before the employees joined.

The level of risk required is not everyone’s cup of tea.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-06-16 18:32:35+00:00
Above thread created 2 days ago but also isn’t this a broader bug? I was getting no emails on gmail either fwiw (wanted a recovery code, never got the email).

Let’s just wait and see for this one. I do not think it’s OpenSMTPD specific. The reply there is not from Meta, its from OpenSMTPD saying the bug is on Metas side. Which i think is true. I think they might have a major issue which has nothing to do with OpenSMTPD, Metas mail servers are just failing all round.
by codingdave | 2025-06-16 18:32:42+00:00
This seems to be written by someone who knows the surface levels of React, but not how it actually works. Which is fine, I suppose - I don't want to gatekeep someone from creating something new, but their marketing is all about being better than React. So when some (not all) of their complaints about react are somewhat fictional... it doesn't encourage me to try their work.

Neither does a week of OP doing nothing on HN but self-promotion of this work, but that is more of a pet peeve than a legit critique.
by xenadu02 | 2025-06-16 18:33:29+00:00
Was it part of beautiful nature when an asteroid strike killed most life on earth?

What does it matter if a bunch of non-sentient animals keep on trucking here on earth? Some disaster will eventually kill most of them just like it has repeatedly over the eons.

Then the sun will die and all life on earth with it permanently. In fact the sun's red giant phase will erase even the traces that life ever existed here. Is there some value in that abstract notion of everything being melted into slag and disappearing?

It is entirely possible we are the last chance life on earth has of becoming inter-planetary. Of surviving in the long term.

As for the heat death of the universe who knows. That's far enough into the future some future generation can deal with that problem. We don't know enough to say if that's what will happen or if there is any way to avoid it (like escaping into another universe).

Not that I think a planet full of non-sentient life is worth very much. It is no different than a huge factory of machines left on automatic. A bunch of biological machines fussing around accomplishing nothing and having no purpose. The concept of beauty only exists while there is an intelligence around to enjoy or contemplate it.
by astuteficus | 2025-06-16 18:33:36+00:00
We've been working on a way to turn Telegram channels into an auto-updating knowledge base for AI research tools like NotebookLM. The idea is to get specific, deep answers by tapping into expert discussions without the constant manual effort of exporting and updating data.

This builds on the concept of using AI to structure and analyze information from Telegram channels, effectively "learning" from experts you follow. The goal is an AI that operates on specific, current, and deep knowledge rather than just generalized data. While one approach involves manual periodical exports for the expert’s Telegram channels, we aimed to automate this.

How it Works (MVP with Junction Bot): Our tool, Junction Bot, has been around since 2017 for Telegram automation (content aggregation, filtering, etc.) and is used by over 17,000 people monthly. We've extended it for this use case: - Collect from Telegram: Point Junction Bot at expert Telegram channels (public, or private if you connect your account). It can copy existing message history and then automatically fetch new messages. For this AI expert scenario, you'd typically focus on text content. - Auto-Sync to Google Docs: The bot automatically transfers the collected content into Google Docs. These documents act as a continuously updated knowledge base. If a document hits Google's size limit, a new one is created. - Feed to NotebookLM: Use these Google Docs as sources in NotebookLM. You're providing the LLM with a rich, specific, and current context. You can also add your own internal business documents as sources.

What You Get: An AI assistant that provides qualitatively different, deeper, and more current answers based on the curated expert content. This transforms the AI into a partner that helps extract insights and make decisions based on professionals you trust, automatically staying updated with their latest articles. We use it to do business analysis, feeding it also with internal company documentation.

Current Status & Call for Feedback: This is an MVP for this specific scenario, built within the broader Junction Bot product. It's experimental, and we're keen to hear if this approach is useful.

Disclaimer: Junction Bot is a paid tool (basic plan is €3/mo, full GDocs automation from €12/mo), with a free trial available.

We're exploring this application actively. Please share your thoughts and experiences if you try it!
by IshKebab | 2025-06-16 18:33:40+00:00
> The more typical way of doing this would be to call piece of the code but without the elaborate setup you argue you'd need.

But how do you call the code if you don't know where it's called from?

Let's have a concrete example. In this `initialize` method how do I know what the arguments are meant to be?

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/master/lib/gitla...

There's no type annotation so the main ways to know are documentation (haha) and seeing what it is called with in existing code. But how do you find where that method is called?

(Note this isn't the best example because I would imagine the `initialize` isn't magically generated, but it is still difficult to search for so it's almost as bad as the magic identifiers.)
by wildzzz | 2025-06-16 18:34:43+00:00
I'm not that familiar with Starlink but it looks like the normal process is to use an app that can read off error and diagnostic codes from the terminal. If you are bypassing the built-in router and just using the terminal as a modem connected to an SBC, you won't have a smartphone connected to see these errors. You could write up a script to check the error codes and respond accordingly.

Like if you have a Starlink terminal attached to a drone, it could automatically change its location if service is interrupted, like a UAV could fly higher if an obstruction is detected. Or if a geofence is inadvertently crossed and service is disrupted, it could turn off the Starlink terminal and then turn on a backup comms system. Essentially, you could use those disablement codes as a sensor.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-06-16 18:35:31+00:00
If they wanted to improve things, they could include a small little xml link in their password change and registration pages that tells my password manager what passwords are allowed so it could auto-generate them rather than me trying to find out that they disallow anything longer than 32 characters, or that the ampersand isn't permitted. (Or, like years ago, when I discovered that Adobe didn't disallow long passwords they just truncated them to 64 characters internally and wouldn't accept the longer one after.)
by gspencley | 2025-06-16 18:36:58+00:00
> Maybe you meant 'everyone' rather than 'anyone'?

Maybe. IMO the sentence works to convey the meaning I had intended either way.

It is not a strawman to suggest that there are people, a lot of them, who believe that certain words are bad by nature. That any given person (the fully qualified way of expressing "that anyone") who hears them will be offended, or have their soul diminished, or other bad things will happen as a result of hearing them. It's not a strawman, because I grew up around such people. They exist. And that's what I was talking about.

And while I was not talking prescription - what we should do as a result of such people existing - I would ask a rhetorical question. WHY do people get offended by certain words? Is their offence rational? And how should rational people regard such offence?
by tptacek | 2025-06-16 18:37:41+00:00
I feel like I pick up all that stuff but I don't really understand who the audience is for it. It would make more sense to me if these companies were public and taking investment (I mean, Google and Meta are, but they're not "AI plays", and this most recent piece focuses on Anthropic and OpenAI). Then the point of the piece would be, like David Gerard's blockchain pieces, "don't invest in this".
by rootsudo | 2025-06-16 18:37:42+00:00
Almost, the reason it's free is because competition from t-mobile for the internet provider and that the legacies are providing it free and well almost legacy airlines like southwest and alaska.

Whatever one legacy does, the other do - charge bag fees, the others do too within a quarter. Free internet (Delta afaik was the leader here) the others offer free internet.

Soon it will go the way of having an added fee or being tied to your ticket on the airline, w/ Tmobile its already linked to your phone number.
by cowboylowrez | 2025-06-16 18:38:10+00:00
>Why? Massachusetts voters are overwhelmingly Democrats, and all sorts of disgusting characters like Ted Kennedy are elected to high office. The Democrat voters of Massachusetts were willing to overlook Chappaquiddick and that's all there is to it.

thats not wrong, look what the US was willing to overlook in 2016 and 2024 when electing our president lol! I do think the US should take the DUI thing more seriously but the trouble is that in many areas a car is central to ones very economic existence.

>The most famous example of a joke at Chelsea Clinton's expense was told by John McCain, who stated that the reason for her ugliness was the fact that her father was Janet Reno. John McCain was elected by a plurality of his constituents many, many times.

poor Chelsea lol I still did not totally dislike McCain like I do trump and his boyfriend musk.