MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aurornis | 2025-10-29 13:46:44+00:00
> I'm so surprised there is so much pushback against this.. AWS is extremely expensive.

I see more comments in favor than pushing back.

The problem I have with these stories is the confirmation bias that comes with them. Going self-hosted or on-premises does make sense in some carefully selected use cases, but I have dozens of stories of startup teams spinning their wheels with self-hosting strategies that turn into a big waste of time and headcount that they should have been using to grow their businesses instead.

The shared theme of all of the failure stories is missing the true cost of self-hosting: The hours spent getting the servers just right, managing the hosting, debating the best way to run things, and dealing with little issues add up but are easily lost in the noise if you’re not looking closely. Everyone goes through a honeymoon phase where the servers arrive and your software is up and running and you’re busy patting yourselves on the back about how you’re saving money. The real test comes 12 months later when the person who last set up the servers has left for a new job and the team is trying to do forensics to understand why the documentation they wrote doesn’t actually match what’s happening on the servers, or your project managers look back at the sprints and realize that the average time spent on self-hosting related tasks and ideas has added up to a lot more than anyone would have guessed.

Those stories aren’t shared as often. When they are, they’re not upvoted. A lot of people in my local startup scene have sheepish stories about how they finally threw in the towel on self-hosting and went to AWS and got back to focusing on their core product. Few people are writing blog posts about that because it’s not a story people want to hear. We like the heroic stories where someone sets up some servers and everything just works perfectly and there are no downsides.

You really need to weigh the tradeoffs, but many people are not equipped to do that. They just think their chosen solution will be perfect and the other side will be the bad one.
by speak_plainly | 2025-10-29 13:46:57+00:00
I opened ChatGPT on my Mac this morning and there was an update.

I updated ChatGPT and a little window popped up asking me to download Atlas. I declined as I already have it downloaded.

There was another window, similar to the update available window, in my chat asking me to download Atlas again...I went to hit the 'X' to close it and I somehow triggered it, it opened my browser to the Atlas page and triggered a download of Atlas.

This was not cool and has further shaken my already low confidence in OpenAI.
by wjnc | 2025-10-29 13:47:06+00:00
For those in workplaces that treat you well. One suggestion that is not in OP: Tell others, explain, expand, give presentations on what you went through. Not only will it help your environment understand WHAT you are doing, they then are also able to understand the WHY. I've had my share of colleagues with afflictions. Your environment must know to understand! Otherwise, you are only allowing them to react to resulting situations, without understanding of the why. Second order benefit is that if people would do this more, general kindness towards how personal situations influence business situations would rise. We need more kindness, from understanding each other. (I understand this is an advice that does not work for those workplaces where HR is the enemy, the boss is their to get you, co-workers are in a free for all for bonuses and promotions. I hope most of us are not in that kind of work situations.)
by GolfPopper | 2025-10-29 13:47:06+00:00
But the impact of AI is going to be even worse than that.

For virtually all of human history, there weren't anywhere near so many of us as there are now, and the success and continuation of any one group of humans wasn't particularly dependent on the rest. Sure, there were large-scale trade flows, but there were no direct dependencies between farmers in Europe, farmers in China, farmers in India, etc. If one society collapsed, others kept going.

The worst historical collapses I'm familiar with - the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the fall of the Roman Empire - were directly tied to larger-scope trade, and were still localized beyond comparison with our modern world.

Until very recently, total human population at any given point in history has been between 100 and 400 million. We're now past 8 billion. And those 8 billion people depend on an interconnected global supply chain for food. A supply chain that, in turn, was built with a complex shared consensus on a great many things.

AI, via its ability to cheaply produce convincing BS at scale, even if it also does other things is a direct and imminent threat to the system of global trade that keeps 8 billion human beings fed (and that sustains the technology base which allows for AI, along with many other things).
by spprashant | 2025-10-29 13:47:07+00:00
The thing I find counter intuitive about AWS and hyper-scalers in general is, they make so much sense when you are starting out a new project. A few VMs, some gigs of data storage, you are off to the races in a day or two.

As soon as you start talking about any kind of serious data storage and data transfer the costs start piling up like crazy.

Like in my mind, the cost curve should flatten out over time. But that just doesn't seem to be the reality.
by lousken | 2025-10-29 13:47:15+00:00
Didn't expect onprem since microsoft has super weird requirements on it since v2019 and haven't properly maintained it for years (except now you are also supposed to pay for it monthly), but if you would suffer with the old web version, you may want to look into Evolution+ews which should be able to handle onprem exchange on linux. Unsure if it supports niche features like public folders but the normal stuff should be covered.
by talkingtab | 2025-10-29 13:47:54+00:00
The issue of android being open is not a developer issue. I do not mean, it does not affect developers, rather that the wrong that must be righted is to the user.

The F-droid article states: "You, the consumer, purchased your Android device believing in Google’s promise that it was an open computing platform and that you could run whatever software you choose on it. "

This is an actionable issue. I believe this is a legally reasonable issue. If you buy a car and then the car manufacturer changes the car so you can only buy gas from them, or parts, that is an offense.

If you accept that users are wronged by googles action, the problem is what can be done about it?

Wrongs committed by companies like Google, Apple, Amazon are difficult to fix because of failures in our legal system. The typical legal action is a class action suit. These typically result in large "settlements" with little real effect. Users get a notice that they are entitled to $40 but only if they jump through seven hoops. Lawyers on both sides make out like bandits. The offenders have little incentive not to be repeat offenders, just not to get caught again. This is an acceptable risk for corporations and so does not act as a deterrent.

There are states Attorney Generals who can file anti-trust actions. The US government (ha ha) could file an anti-trust action. In my opinion neither of these are likely. And even if it happens, it will take years. And years.

A problem with these two legal solutions is that they rely on someone else. The result is that users are victims. We are all used to that by now.

Since we, as android users, are legally entitled to compensation - is there another way to take a legal action.

In most states the limits on small claims actions is between $3000 and $10,000. Well above the cost of an android phone. If there is one class action legal suit against google they can easily spend the money to defend it. And the time. They have the resources to do this.

However, what would happen if 1000 people filed small claims action, asking for a refund for the cost of their phone? Google is declaring war on users. They have their big legal tanks. Small claims are the equivalent of drones in the legal world.

We have the internet. We have AI. Can we generate reasonable and fair legal small claims court filings for each of the 50 states and put them online to help people.

We, the people, have learned helplessness. We need to learn something else or resign ourselves to simply being fodder for predatory actions by corporations.
by kagerou74 | 2025-10-29 13:47:57+00:00
I agree. I remember back in the days when facebook came out around mid 2000s or so my mentor started an online open-source academic journal. that was frowned upon by his colleagues. if it wasn't printed, it wasn't considered authentic. And then he went ahead and asked me (a helper, a volunteer) to create a facebook and Twitter accounts to spread the word. and that was frowned upon, too. it was considered like a really crass move among his respectable colleagues. Now social media has become a given.

Why do I need to spend hours on formatting when AI can help clean them up in seconds? Or typos? grammar inconsistencies? Clarifying sentences? I'd rather much read writings cleaned up by an AI than some incoherent fluff that really says nothing and wasting space.

And frankly, in my experience, writing with AI is no more easier than writing on your own. It's just that my priority shifts from being distracted on those externalities (like fixing typos and formatting) to the subject matter of writing itself. So I go deep dive researching topics and contents at hand with AIs and try to figure out the best way to communicate the ideas to the audience with an AI. It takes time and it's a work of its own. It takes hours depending on what I am doing.

And you probably wished I have cleaned this comment up with an AI, too! (I tried in my best human way given time I'm allowed).
by lateforwork | 2025-10-29 13:48:04+00:00
I am also using React as the "V in MVC". It is the most sensible way to use React. I also only use class components. My code is way simpler than React code these days. The only React concepts I need are props, state, and the lifecycle methods.

React was originally designed to be the "V in MVC". What happened then is the community took it in a different direction: specifically ReactRouter.
by Rooster61 | 2025-10-29 13:49:14+00:00
This is super trippy. I saw the screenshots first and though "Huh, they really nailed that early point-and-click RPG vibe. Neat, but only mildly interesting". Then I clicked on the video and realized it's 3D. "Oh..."

The castle in the distance really gives me some sort of surreal feeling of fleshing out areas that didn't exist in the old games. Back then, the highly degraded road in the distance you understood to just sort of be skipped if you clicked on the castle, whereas with this, that little brown, poorly rendered strip is an actual place you will traverse and have come alive. Neat.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-10-29 13:50:01+00:00
>> The best predictor of future events is past experience.

That's why you're currently reading HN with Internet Explorer on your IBM desktop running OS/2 2025.

The adage about history as an indicator only applies to the steady state. It compeltely breaks down when with events that are so rare as to be unpredictable when they have extreme - good or bad - consequences.

ex:

"The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology."

And I would argue the world today isn't even close to the edge of the spectrum when it comes to lack of predictability or how extreme the outcomes may be.
by whizzter | 2025-10-29 13:50:15+00:00
I do get the joke but it's a tad misplaced here.

Language developers really do struggle with debugging our data-structures since they are often both circular and complex compared to many other applications, I wrote yet-another-UI tool for inspecting code back when I was doing my thesis work.

Maybe I should brush it off (and make it general... ), it would give you a source-code view and navigating the source-text you would be shown compiler nodes related to the lines/statements.

It was almost the only way to make sense of it since I was often generating multiple paths per statement (It was a lossy type-inference system so previous type branchings could lead to multiple subsequent code-paths through each statement and expression).
by OGWhales | 2025-10-29 13:50:37+00:00
I also love that app sizes get super bloated (several gigs per app) due to cached safari data from the in-app web view. Seems the only way to clear it is to go into settings and wipe the website data for safari entirely. I don't believe app developers can clear this themselves either, despite it appearing as their app taking up so much space when really it's just due to safari cache that seemingly doesn't clear on its own.
by nkko | 2025-10-29 13:50:51+00:00
I tend to take an open-ended sabbatical every few years. I took one in 2017 and now again in 2025. It’s not a full year off; for me, it usually lasts around three to six months. That feels like the right rhythm, given that the traditional idea of a sabbatical is taking one year off every seven years. What made the biggest difference, though, was the open-ended nature of it, not having a strict return date. A fixed six-week break wouldn’t really feel like a sabbatical to me.
by incomingpain | 2025-10-29 13:51:11+00:00
When I learnt C via the "learn C++ in 24 hours" type book. It was heavily C99, c11 wasnt a thing yet, oh hey what's that grey hair. I later actually went more GNU style. More functional C vs object orientated like C++ that they taught. I practically never coded a class in C.

I havent coded in C in over 10 years now. I view it as a dead language. If you really need C-like language. Definitely go rust, no question.

Today if im not coding in python, it's html/css templates being used by python.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-29 13:51:42+00:00
Thanks for your kind reply. I wanted to put some time aside to reply the way your comment deserves.

My personal foundations are not very different than yours. I don't care about many people cares. Being a human being and having your heart at the right place is a good starting point for me, too.

On the other hand, we need to make a distinction between people who live (ordinary citizens) and people who lead (people inside government and managers of influential corporations). There's the saying "power corrupts", now this saying has scientific basis: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/power-c...

So, the "ruling class", for the lack of better term, doesn't think like us. I strive to be kinder every day. They don't (or can't) care. They just want more power, nothing else.

For the fragmented spaces, the challenge is different than the past. We, humans, are social animals and were always in social groups (tribes, settlements, towns, cities, countries, etc.), we felt belong. As the system got complex, we evolved as a result. But the change was slow, so we were able to adapt in a couple of generations. In 80s to 00s, it was faster, but we managed it somehow. Now it's exponentially faster, and more primitive parts of our brains can't handle it as gracefully. Our societies, ideas and systems are strained.

Another research studying the effects of increasing connectivity found that this brings more polarization: https://phys.org/news/2025-10-friends-division-social-circle...

Another problem is, unfortunately, not all societies or the parts of the same society evolve at the same pace to the same kinder, more compassionate human beings. Radicalism is on the rise. It doesn't have to be violent, but some parts of the world is becoming less tolerant. We can't ignore these. See world politics. It's... complicated.

So, while I share your optimism and light, I also want to underline that we need to stay vigilant. Because humans are complicated. Some are naive, some are defenseless and some just want to watch the world burn.

Instead of believing that everything's gonna be alright eventually, we need to do our part to nudge our planet in that direction. We need to feed the wolf which we want to win: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Wolves
by 9rx | 2025-10-29 13:51:45+00:00
> I don't think that there is a place I can go to make single payer health care happen

Being generous in assuming you mean while remaining in the USA: The Amish are quite prevalent in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. They've already done the hard work. Joining them may take some small amount of personal sacrifice, perhaps — there is no such thing as a free lunch — but is quite doable for someone who wants it. Like the six pack, all you have to do is jump in and do it.

Alternatively, you can produce your own metaphorical weights and food supply that is to your exact liking, but that is obviously going to take singificantly more input for you to setup and is going to be heavily dependent on other people to buy into your exacting specifications. This route would not allow you to just jump into building the metaphorical six pack at your leisure. It could take many years before you are even able to first produce weights/food, let alone starting to apply them to your six pack journey. But the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, as they say. It will never happen if you don't do anything, that much is certain.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-10-29 13:51:59+00:00
Doubtful - the costs of supporting it far outweighs any gain they'd have. In case of banks, the costs of supporting aren't just about developing software for an additional platform, but also insurance premiums and managing fallout of hacks (which always eventually happen) - both of which would go way up, as the company would be voluntarily supporting endpoint decides that are less secure than "industry standard" minimum.
by zoeysmithe | 2025-10-29 13:52:04+00:00
If everyone who wants a human readable domain did this, it would environmentally irresponsible. Then 'typo' domains would be trivial. protonmailrmez31otcciphtkl or protonmailrmez3lotcciphtkl.

Its a shame these did put in a better built-in human readable url system. Maybe a free form text field 15-20 characters long appended to the public key and somehow be made part of that key. Maybe the key contains a checksum of those letters to verify the text field. So something like protonmail.rmez3lotcciphtkl+checksum.

But this being said, I think being a sort of independent 'not needing of third parties' ethic just isnt realistic. Its the libertarian housecat meme writ large. Once you're communicating with others and being part of a shared communal system, you lose that independence. Keeping a personal diary is independent. Anything past that is naturally communal and would involve some level of sharing, cooperation, and dependency on others.

I think this sort of anti-communal attitude is rooted in a lot of regressive stuff and myths of the 'man is an island' and 'great man' nonsense. Then leads to weird stuff like bizarre domain names and services no one likes to use. Outside of very limited use cases, tor just can't compete.
by LogicHound | 2025-10-29 13:52:23+00:00
I don't think there is anything wrong with liking popular things and tbh this attitude that somehow you are better because you like more niche things is very close to snobbery. I am not saying that is your intention, but it can come off that way.

There are plenty of popular franchises that I've liked in the past. There are plenty of "slop" movies that I enjoy, I really like Mission Impossible movies, Fast and Furious movies. I've also liked some of the Call of Duty games. There is room for both.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-29 13:52:27+00:00
The implicit claims are more misleading, in my opinion: The claim that self-hosting is free or nearly free in terms of time and engineering brain drain.

The real cost of self-hosting, in my direct experience with multiple startup teams trying it, is the endless small tasks, decisions, debates, and little changes that add up over time to more overhead than anyone would have expected. Everyone thinks it’s going to be as simple as having the colo put the boxes in the rack and then doing some SSH stuff, then you’re free of those AWS bills. In my experience it’s a Pandora’s box of tiny little tasks, decisions, debates, and “one more thing” small changes and overhauls that add up to a drain on the team after the honeymoon period is over.

If you’re a stable business with engineers sitting idle that could be the right choice. For most startups who just need to get a product out there and get customers, pulling limited headcount away from the core product to save pennies (relatively speaking) on a potential AWS bill can be a trap.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-10-29 13:52:43+00:00
I mean you have a much more reasonable and nuanced opinion than the GP so I wouldn't rope you in with the aforementioned mental-gymnastic-ing fanboys. However, I feel the need to take issue here:

> It's all tradeoffs after all - similar to how we value personal freedom in the West, I value freedom to do what I want with the hardware I own, and am willing to accept a performance downgrade for that.

Genuine question: what do you mean locked down? By default the Mac won't run unsigned software, but that's not even today in MacOS 26 an unsolvable issue. I run all kinds of software not signed by Apple daily. There are nuances further still there, like sometimes if you want to install kernel level stuff or tweak certain settings, you have to disable SIP which is definitely a bit of a faff, but that's a Google-able thing that any tech literate person could accomplish inside of 30 minutes.

I would bow to the technical limitations, as you're rather locked to ARM64 compiled software, but I don't recall the last time I saw a piece of software getting current updates that doesn't include a binary for that.
by RileyJames | 2025-10-29 13:52:50+00:00
I couldn’t agree more.

I find gmail to be the absolute worst offender in this category.

1. They dark pattern you into downloading their browser (they give three options, two of which are chrome)

2. In not launching iOS, I’m not logged into the session I may already have open in safari. Which is incredibly painful for any product that sends notifications via email, which id like to action.

And if I do login, and it asks for an email verification code… fail. I can’t access it in gmail without closing the browser…

3. Their in app browser (or the way they re-write links?) doesn’t seem to play nice with opening the corresponding app. Never seems to work.

Incredibly user hostile.

Is there a better alternative mail client I can use with gsuite?
by shadowgovt | 2025-10-29 13:53:43+00:00
Sounds like they did the right thing for their business model.

I think as AWS grows and changes the curve of the target audience is changing too. The value proposition is "You can get Cloud service without having a dedicated Cloud team," but there are caveats:

- AWS is complicated enough that you will still need a team to integrate against it. The abstractions are not free and the ones that are leaky will bite you without dedicated systems engineers to specialize in making it work with your company's goals.

- For small companies with little compute need, AWS is a good option. Beyond a certain scale... It is worth noting that big companies build their own datacenters, they don't rely on someone else's Cloud. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft don't run on each other.

- Recently, the cost model has likely changed if a company pokes their head up and runs the numbers, there's, uh, quite a few engineers with deep knowledge of how to build a scalable cloud infrastructure available to hire now for some reason. In fact, a savvy company keeping its ear to the ground can probably snap up some high-tier talent very soon (https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-target...).

It really depends on where your company's risk and cost models are. Running on someone else's cloud just isn't the only option.