MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Hosting options for my freeware
by bubblebeard | 2025-07-19 06:10:21+00:00
I’m looking for a good service / VPS to host a freeware I’m working on and will soon be releasing. It will weigh about 50mb.

I’m thinking that if I choose a VPS it needs unlimited bandwidth and scalable resources, to ensure I do not spend more than required and that the software is always available.

Been some time since I hosted anything at all, any suggestions?
by mirdaki | 2025-07-19 06:12:06+00:00
Agree. If low cost and maximum value is you're goal, grab a used one of these or similar speed laptop (and you sort of get battery back up in that case)

Really, any machine from the last decade will be enough, so if you or someone you know have something lying around, go use that

The two main points to keep in mind are power draw (older things are usually going to be worse here) and storage expandability options (you may not need much storage for your use case though). Worse case you can plug in a USB external drive, but bare in mind that USB connection might be a little flaky
by meehai | 2025-07-19 06:12:30+00:00
Mine is much more barebone:

- one single machine - nginx proxy - many services on the same machine; some are internal, some are supposed to be public, are all accessible via the web! - internal ones have a humongous large password for HTTP basic auth that I store in an external password manager (firefox built in one) - public ones are either public or have google oauth

I coded all of them from scratch as that's the point of what I'm doing with homelabbing. You want images? browsers can read them. Videos? Browsers can play them.

The hard part is the backend for me. The frontend is very much "90s html".
by rdtsc | 2025-07-19 06:12:38+00:00
> I asked Erik if the room needed to be cleaned [...] And he said it wasn't needing special cleaning so he offered me $250

Well that sort of says everything we'd want to know. They charged the customer $500, like they'll need to tear up the room and bring in a large team to clean everything. But they never bothered with that because they know it's a scam, and the company selling these knows exactly how their customers will use these.

Unsurprisingly, the customers just love this new technology and can't get enough of it:

(review from https://www.restsensor.com)

> "Rest’s in-room smoking detection service has helped us capture a lucrative ancillary revenue stream while also improving our guest experience." Kirsten Snyder, Asset Manager, Woodbine
by UltraSane | 2025-07-19 06:12:49+00:00
This is called the The Platonic Representation Hypothesis

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.07987

We argue that representations in AI models, particularly deep networks, are converging. First, we survey many examples of convergence in the literature: over time and across multiple domains, the ways by which different neural networks represent data are becoming more aligned. Next, we demonstrate convergence across data modalities: as vision models and language models get larger, they measure distance between datapoints in a more and more alike way. We hypothesize that this convergence is driving toward a shared statistical model of reality, akin to Plato's concept of an ideal reality. We term such a representation the platonic representation and discuss several possible selective pressures toward it. Finally, we discuss the implications of these trends, their limitations, and counterexamples to our analysis.
by wilg | 2025-07-19 06:13:55+00:00
On a recent episode of Dithering, Ben Thompson's claim is this is downstream of an effort to make acquisitions of small companies more difficult, and that this is worse than the previous regulatory status quo: https://dithering.passport.online/member/episode/techs-chest...

> Unfortunately, regulators didn’t listen. The effort to indiscriminately throw sand in the gears of the Silicon Valley machine — which, it should be noted, started under the first Trump administration, but was dramatically accelerated under the Biden administration — is undoubtedly the biggest driver of these stinky deals. Big Tech, starting with Microsoft, realized that the easiest way to avoid regulatory annoyance around acquihires was to separate the acquisition from the hiring; what has happened as these deals have evolved is that tech companies increasingly realize that if they are simply hiring and not acquiring then they don’t have to hire everyone. That, however, breaks the implicit social contract that made startup employment significantly less risky for rank-and-file employees.

> What is frustrating about this development is that there is a good chance we will never go back. The fact of the matter is that picking-and-choosing who to hire from a failed startup is great for Big Tech: they get the IP they want and the employees that matter, and get to jettison everyone else without having to do a future layoff. That they never thought to do so previously was, in retrospect, downstream of “the way things are done”, not some sort of legal requirement; once the law, in the form of over-eager regulators who didn’t understand what they were regulating, gave them no choice, it’s not at all clear why they would go back to the old model.

> This, in the long run, is very bad for startups. The incentives for founding a company do still remain; the founders of all four of the companies in the stinky list are doing very well for themselves. The people who are getting screwed, however, are the folks who were never necessarily going to get rich — that’s reserved for founders, and appropriately so — but who could justify rolling the dice on a positive outcome as long as they had downside protection in the form of guaranteed employment with a Big Tech company if things didn’t work out. Now, however, the best route for any non-founder is simply to pursue employment with a Big Tech company directly; the alternative, if the downside is unemployment or a contract with a hollowed-out doomed company, isn’t worth the risk (which, ultimately, again favors Big Tech, as it lowers competition for rank-and-file employees).

> It is, in the end, one of the clearest examples of a Chesterton Fence you can come up with: regulators didn’t understand the role that seamless small acquisitions played in making Silicon Valley work, so they made them undesirable and untenable; the end result is a diminished ecosystem that further entrenches the biggest players, reduces long-term innovation and risk-taking, and destroys individual employees’ opportunity and bargaining power with big companies and their chances of earning a nice payday if things worked out.
by teo_zero | 2025-07-19 06:14:22+00:00
> IsOdd(E(x)) = E(x) mod 2

I don't get this. Did you mean

IsOdd(E(x)) = x mod 2

But who provides such function? In the case of a web search,the function is the search engine. I expect Google to provide it, not the user: the refinement and completeness level of its engine is the only reason to choose Google over its competitor. If I have to provide the function, then I'm only buying the compute power from them.
by chii | 2025-07-19 06:14:56+00:00
> Railroads lead to a distribution of capital into the society

does it? I recall that railroads were monopolies (the vanderbilts). The gov't had to pass an act to break them up, because there were price collusions and farmers were forced to pay a higher price for their transport of foodstuffs.

> Ai leads to a capital concentration on the hands of those that already have money

that is true for a lot of other capital intensive ventures. Why pick ai specifically?

And AI is less monopolistic - at least it's not a natural monopoly. There are competition, and there are alternatives.
by cycomanic | 2025-07-19 06:16:11+00:00
It's not really that hard to be honest. If you are not dead set on specific services, but make sso compatability the main selection metric for the services it's very feasible and not that difficult. I had very little experience when I set up my self hosted system and was set up very quickly using caddy and authentik. Alternatively yunohost is a very easy to use distribution that sets up everything using SSO.
by amy_petrik | 2025-07-19 06:16:24+00:00
Also, people are usually like LOL it's just mRNA it goes away

But evidence does show it CAN go back to DNA with mechanisms familiar to anyone edgycated in molecular genetics - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35723296/

Now, that particular study is in whatever cell line, highly dubious how it pertains to a human body, a few steps removed. But if you say "will you see this if you vaccinate 500 million times in 500 million people each with 500 trillion cells" - yea probably you would
by hmkoyan | 2025-07-19 06:16:40+00:00
Yes, I can certainly be open and provide a lot of detail. The landing page is a standard Next.js application hosted on Vercel. The web app itself is a React app that uses Shadcn, Tailwind CSS and TanStack/React-Query, and the backend is a Node.js application. I use PostgreSQL and Redis instances to store data in the long and short term, respectively. For deployment, I use Dokploy, which is an excellent way of deploying stuff in containers and making them communicate with each other (and actually this is my first time that I use it). You can self-host it on a VPS, which is what I do. Finally, I use AWS S3 for object storage and backups.

I would definitely use this tech stack again if I were to start again. The only thing that may change in the future, when there's a lot of traffic, is how the app is served and hosted overall. Currently, it's on a VPS, but depending on the traffic volume, it would make sense to switch to AWS infra (e.g. using lambdas etc) at some point in the future.
by actinium226 | 2025-07-19 06:17:04+00:00
I'm not convinced that "we know they work really well for some people." So far I just see people really excited about the potential and really impressed at what it's capable of, but I think people are extrapolating poorly. It's like, yes it's impressive that it can make a video game with a few prompts, but that doesn't mean that with a few more prompts it'll turn into a AAA game.

I'm on board with some limited AI autocompletion, but so far agents just seem like gimmicks to me.
by michalc | 2025-07-19 06:17:06+00:00
For a while now some colleagues and I have been thinking about how to improve ways of working, and specifically around the limitations of Agile - especially how it's practiced. As has been suggested by others before us, Agile is all too often a cargo cult: surface level features - often ceremonies taken from Scrum - are prioritised over delivery and getting feedback. Our solution to this is a simplified manifesto with exactly one principle: "Deliver value daily", which we're hoping will reshape thinking, at least a little bit.

Full disclosure: I posted an earlier version here about a month ago, but have since refined it a bit, so hopefully it's appropriate to post it again.
by simion314 | 2025-07-19 06:18:02+00:00
>Implying that you like the idea of fucking your own children. You have just exposed yourself.

You imply that people that play shooter games like the dea of killing people, and people that play GTA like the ideas of being criminals and killing cops and innocents, do this people also exposed themselves?

Do you also imply same things for movie watchers and book readers ? And metal listeners are Satanists right ?

If we let the Christian extremists ban something without any proof then they will move to the next thing and soon enough they will ban your favorite video game because it gives you the option to be bisexual. (I read about such extremists moving from Texas to Ruzzia since Texas is not Christian enough, it did not end well)
by davydm | 2025-07-19 06:18:33+00:00
Try the "I don't care about cookies" addon, paired with "cookie auto-delete".

The first should swipe away most of those silly overlays for you.

The second is configurable to either forget cookies after the tab is closed, remember for this session, or whitelist to keep them as long as they're valid (useful to stay signed in on sites between browser restarts)
by Animats | 2025-07-19 06:18:34+00:00
Here's a "vape detector" with more explaination.[1]

It contains an air particulates detector and a CO2 detector, plus humidity, temperature, and noise and light sensors. They're probably looking for particulates and CO2 ramp up, hence the "algorithm". It's not clear how accurate this is, but it's not mysterious.

There's a version sold to schools that adds "bullying detector" capability. This adds detection of "keyword calls for help, loud sounds, and gunshots."

[1] https://fobsin.com/products/mountable-air-quality-vape-detec...
by mirdaki | 2025-07-19 06:19:06+00:00
Everyone will have different goals and preferences. For instance, my dad just wanted a way to backup and remotely access some files, so we got him a Synology NAS. It's great for it's target users and if you're one of them, awesome!

I just don't like the lock-in that you get Synology. Plus I do enjoy tinkering with these things, so I wanted to put together something that balances usability, complexity while minimizing that lock-in
by deathanatos | 2025-07-19 06:20:32+00:00
Why is having it be syntax necessary or beneficial?

One might say "Rust's existing feature set makes this possible already, why dedicate syntax where none is needed?"

(…and I think that's a reasonably pragmatic stance, too. Joins/selects are somewhat infrequent, the impediments that writing out a join puts on the program relatively light… what problem would be solved?

vs. `?`, which sugars a common thing that non-dedicated syntax can represent (a try! macro is sufficient to replace ?) but for which the burden on the coder is much higher, in terms of code readability & writability.)
by northhnbesthn | 2025-07-19 06:20:39+00:00
To be fair, Postal and SOF haven’t been relevant in almost 20 years, though your point stands.

I wonder how a modern implementation of these two games would look given the vast visual improvements since then. I assume UE5 or 6 already comes with a Ghoul-esque framework ready to go. Though I hope they would feature a curmudgeon caricature of Jack Thompson.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-07-19 06:20:53+00:00
The people who care signed their names[1]. It's not a secret or anything.

Most of the signatories are associated with Australian anti sex trafficking and exploitation groups, although there are several UK signatories and a couple Americans.

A publication[2] by one of the signatories connects the dots. It's driven by the core idea:

"Pornography Use Shapes and Changes Sexual Tastes"[3] which is supported by "In a survey of men involved in online sexual activities, 47% reported being involved in practice or seeing pornography which previously was not interesting to or even disgusted them."[4]

I'm trying to steelman when I say I believe that the authors would agree that this also applies to games with sexual content.

To address your comment specifically, while I see the appeal of consistent moral framework. I personally believe that moral frameworks trade consistency for completeness and rarely accomplish either. You have to assume the value-perspective of the other in order to understand why consistency might take a back seat to some other value we could only speculate on.

1. https://www.collectiveshout.org/open-letter-to-payment-proce...

2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391732869_Not_A_Fan...

3. ibid. pg 30

4. ibid
by nothrabannosir | 2025-07-19 06:20:58+00:00
why does it have to be a non-technical next of kin ? Write down the details for a technically inclined person to follow, maybe a specific friend. Print at the top of the page “show this to X”. In the document explain how to recover the necessary data and replace the setup with a standard one.

I assume most people know at least one person who would do this for them , in the event of their death?
by tazjin | 2025-07-19 06:21:03+00:00
There's a few points to make here, actually, based on discussion of the article in the weeks before it hit HN:

Two major and immediate reasons why the pulling is slow are clear and fixable:

1. Guix will try to substitute from unreachable caches for a LONG time before giving up, and Guix infrastructure is less developed than Nix. When I kept experimenting after this post I set up https://mirror.yandex.ru/mirrors/guix/ eventually which fixes the substitute problems for me (Guix mirror on bigcorp infra).

2. Guix by default pulls its channel from GNU Savannah which, for some reason, is incredibly slow in serving git. The project moved over to Codeberg, and setting the URL to there significantly speeds up pulling.

In NixOS, channels (esp. the unstable ones) advance when CI finishes building a certain subset of packages successfully (this is what https://status.nixos.org/ shows). CI populates the binary cache, so this means that a channel HEAD always has a large number of packages available in the cache. Guix has no such guarantees, so updating to any latest commit might even yield one where you end up rebuilding all of its Scheme from scratch or whatever. Picking a commit that's a few days old helps with this.

I eventually switched to a laptop with a "normal" Intel CPU, and pulling did not magically turn fast. In fact, some of the slowest stages (there's one where it says "Computing Guix derivation") don't seem to exercise the CPU much at all. I haven't spent time looking at why (yet).

Guix System does a lot more per-user stuff than NixOS by default, which means that you'll likely end up pulling multiple times.

Pulling remains a much slower operation than Nix evaluation in any case.

There's a few ways to make this all more palatable (e.g. the `guix time-machine -C $channels` setup), but those might be for a follow-up post in the future.
by asperous | 2025-07-19 06:21:20+00:00
The framers noted that the system was vulnerable to a single "faction" [1]. The solution was to have many competing factions. I think first-past-the-post, corporate election influence, and mass media consolidated power into a single faction that ended up causing the system to break down (in that the branches don't seem to be checking each other's power right now).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._10
by roenxi | 2025-07-19 06:24:49+00:00
> Would you feel the same about a game where the player runs around raping women, or capturing and lynching escaped slaves? It's just pixels!

Yeah. Same thing. Should be ignored. If someone feels an urge to run around raping women and lynching slaves, I'd much rather they were sitting around at home playing videogames than doing anything else in their spare time. What do you want them to be doing, the traditional creep move of figuring out how to get into positions of power and influence?

In addition taxpayers shouldn't be footing the bill in the war on pixels; if the banks are taking a firm moral stand then clearly the government is involved and that means they're probably spending money on expunging victimless non-crimes which is a low.
by naruhodo | 2025-07-19 06:24:56+00:00
The rabbit hole I just went down is called C/C++ Statement Expressions [1] which are a GCC extension:

#define FAST_STATIC(T) \ *({ \ \ // statements separated by semicolons reinterpret_cast<T *>(ph.buf); \ // the value of the macro as a statement })

The reinterpret_cast<T*>(...) statement is a conventional C++ Expression Statement, but when enclosed in ({}), GCC considers the whole kit and kaboodle a Statement Expression that propagates a value.

There is no C equivalent, but in in C++, since C++11 you can achieve the same effect with lambdas:

auto value = [](){ return 12345; }();

As noted in the linked SO discussion, this is analogous to a JS Immediately-Invoked Function Expression (IIFE).

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76890861/what-is-called-...
by rixed | 2025-07-19 06:25:03+00:00
Come on, I don't need a dna analysis to tell if one has Down syndrome or is obese. Again, a google search teach me much more about a candidate than his or her dna.

And about dna to be used baselessly to take decision, sure, like graphology, or astrology could be used... but then concealing dna is like concealing your handwriting or exact date of birth. Why not, but we are no longer speaking about privacy protection but about fighting superstition.
by anthk | 2025-07-19 06:25:53+00:00
There's a modern Lynx build for Classic Mac.

Also: gopher://magical.fish has tons of services, among gopher://sdf.org for phlogs and gopher://bitreich.org/1/lawn for a big directory.

And, by connecting to the public servers of http://bitlbee.org with any IRC client you can access modern IRC+TLS servers and a good chunk of protocols too (Discord, Mastodon, Steam, Jabber, Linc, Facebook chat, Telegram....)
by cranky908canuck | 2025-07-19 06:26:34+00:00
Fair enough.

I have dealings with Gen(xyzqbvwhatever) that don't respond to the 'more considerate forms' in a timely fashion. So after a grace period, I jangle the bell.

I get the other side of this. I get a ping for a message while driving, I can't do anything about it (distracted driving etc). So I either pull over (or turn off the highway altogether), or resolve to deal with it at my destination.

Nine times out of ten, if I pull off, it's an urgent notification that 1) my screen time is up by 17 minutes, 2) Second Cousin in Arkansas reposted a message about another missing cat, or 3) your soliac serucity number has been supsedned, CLICK HERE NOW TO AVOID ARREST AND JAIL.

However, when I get to the destination, I forgot that I got a ping.

Sometimes I think that the best option is to toss the cellphone, so that nobody has illusions about how (not) to contact me.
by mirdaki | 2025-07-19 06:28:42+00:00
I think that's a fair point. Kinda like with Arch, you do have to know what you want to setup NixOS right now

I really like what's happening in the ublue space were folks are tweaking and optimizing distros for specific use cases (like bazzite for gaming) and then sharing them

NixOS does support that to an extent, but it certainly doesn't have the same community movement behind it like those
by cornholio | 2025-07-19 06:29:22+00:00
One of the remedies proposed, tying product reviews to the manufacturer instead of the storefront is a very difficult thing to implement.

Manufacturers are in a fundamental conflict with Amazon precisely because they desire to fully control the retail channels and set their own promotions, online discounts etc. and capture most of the surplus themselves while still segmenting the market and, for example, selling at different prices through certain local distributors.

Amazon has the exact opposite incentives, they want distributors of the same brand to compete amongst themselves so they can offer the lowest global prices, and that it's Amazon and its users that capture most of the surplus.

This is the root of the forgery problem Amazon can't solve, manufacturers aren't willing to vouch for their products when sold in secondary channels they do not fully control. So this means they will not collaborate on the "global rating" scheme either.
by ruined | 2025-07-19 06:30:15+00:00
railroads are for moving freight, and you don't move freight if you're not selling goods. yes there were trust issues, but fundamentally a railroad requires a surrounding market.

ai does not, and seems to suffer the "resource curse" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mak2kZuTq8Hpnqyzb/the-intell...
by bruce511 | 2025-07-19 06:31:45+00:00
I spent several years working on an embedded hardware project.

The key skill is C. Most everything else can be learned on the job, and will differ from project to project.

Obviously not all embedded programing is in C (although a lot is) but folks proficient in C are typically quick to pick up other languages.

So from a resume-bolstering point of view I'd suggest getting a Raspberry PI (or similar) and build some C projects on it. That would expose you to a lot of embedded skills. Bonus points if you choose a device either severe memory and/or cpu constraints.