MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ygouzerh | 2025-10-21 21:09:10+00:00
Single server is very cheap for hobbyist.

Just something to consider if you are in a professional environment before switching your entire infra: maintenance cost is expensive. I strongly suggest to throw man-days in your cost calculation.

To prevent security vulnerabilities, the team will need to write some playbooks to auto-update regularly your machine, hoping for no breaking changes. Or instead write a pipeline for immutable OS images updates. And it often mean testing on an additional canary VM first.

Scaling up the VM from a compute point of view is not that straightforward as well, and will require depending of the provider either downtime or to migrate the entire deployments to a new instance.

Scaling from a disk size point of view, you will need to play with filesystems.

And depending on the setup you are using, you might have to manage lets encrypt, authentication and authorization, secrets vaults, etc (here at least Disco manages the SSL certs for you)
by bluGill | 2025-10-21 21:09:58+00:00
Where the speed of light is probably law (our universe) there is no way aliens could reach earth. The only possibly scenario where earth is in danger is if we terraform and colonize mars (Venus would also do, or a few other large rocks), then we have a falling out and start a major war. The few survivors would not know if anyone is on Mars, but if so they might still be out to get earth so better be quiet. If you are not already in this solar system you can't get here in a useful timeframe no matter how long lived you are.
by alexjplant | 2025-10-21 21:10:01+00:00
> You end up building this circle for each character, where the plot becomes the vehicle for them seeking and satisfying (or failing to) some need. You don't need purple prose, you just need characters that have motivations that are self-consistent and understood by the viewer. Such understanding does not require sympathy, either.

How does "2001: A Space Odyssey", arguably one of the greatest films ever made, fit into this framework? Are we ever apprised of HAL's motivations? Does the crew have some deeper desire that we aren't aware of besides completing a mission? Is it ever explained what specifically the monoliths do? Many of these questions are only answered in the sequel which does take a more traditional tack and had less critical acclaim.

Nobody's saying that this formula doesn't work. I'm just saying that it doesn't have to be the one that successful narratives follow just because the Rick and Morty guy happens to like it.
by YouAreWRONGtoo | 2025-10-21 21:10:34+00:00
I did understand; it's just that I am way ahead of you.

Your point is that users are too stupid/lazy to comprehend specifications. That is, they won't bother to read that the specification of their formally verified secure version of Google Maps really just copies their credit card data to a random server.

I just don't agree.
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-21 21:11:20+00:00
Teaching a whole bunch of developers some cloud basics and having a few cloud people around is relatively cheap for quite a while. Plus, having test/staging/prod on similar configurations will help catch mistakes earlier. None of that "localstack runs just fine but it turns out Amazon SES isn't available in region antartica-east-1". Then, eventually, you pay a couple people's wages extra in cloud bills, and leaving the cloud becomes profitable.

Cloud isn't worth it until suddenly it is because you can't deploy your own servers fast enough, and then it's worth it until it exceeds the price of a solid infrastructure team and hardware. There's a curve to how much you're saving by throwing everything in the cloud.
by aspenmayer | 2025-10-21 21:11:26+00:00
I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple’s malware notification comes via the same or similar mechanism as Apple 2FA codes on iOS, as iMessage itself is a common vector for these kinds of malware being warned of, such as Pegasus. Apple also notifies you of this kind of malware via the email used for your AppleID, in addition to on-device, though I wouldn’t be surprised if that same malware would attempt to monitor for these messages from Apple to prevent them from being received and/or read.

The Apple Support app, for example, has capabilities which when triggered from the Apple side, allow screen-sharing and logging to be shared with Apple. I don’t know if this functionality relies on iMessage being enabled either, but I do know that the Apple Support app seemingly still works in Lockdown Mode.

I’d be curious if the person in TFA had their device in Lockdown Mode, which supposedly is supposed to make these kinds of exploits harder to install. If they were using Lockdown Mode, and they still got exploited, that isn’t great news for the rest of us, but the fact that Apple notified them is better than the alternative of Apple not being aware of the breach and/or Apple being aware and not notifying them for reasons.
by spoiler | 2025-10-21 21:11:46+00:00
Yes, there's always sloppy packages, or ones that need side effects (but that's usually very rare, and sometimes even then it's because of sloppyness), but installing something via package manager comes with certain expectations (I can update it, I can uninstall it, it's usually got a few standardised places where its config lives, etc). curl|sh makes most of these things a greater nuisance rather than frictionless
by zimpenfish | 2025-10-21 21:11:54+00:00
> And for the hallway I would suggest the tried and true motion sensor.

By the time I'm in the dark hallway, it's a bit late. "But just add a motion sensor outside!" Yeah, except this is a block of flats and you can't add stuff to the communal areas like that.

> if you want the lights to go on at certain times

I don't. I want the lights to go on -as if we were at home-. Which is "random times depending on which room and what people are doing and if there is cooking going on and ..." Home Assistant learns from smart bulb activations and can simulate our presence effectively.
by EGreg | 2025-10-21 21:11:57+00:00
I thought I'd share with HN how my development workday looks, by showing my chats with ChatGPT. Maybe this will inspire some people, or give them reference into what various other people are doing. (This is also what I'd want to look at when interviewing candidates for a job at our company.)

And this is a follow-up of how I used the code running sandbox in the app I'm making:

https://chatgpt.com/share/68f7f6f0-46f4-800a-ad66-0a6511512a...

And here is how I write a pipeline process contacts in my cordova app for instance... you can feel the speed of development:

https://chatgpt.com/share/68f80413-4c90-800a-92fb-047580ea5e...

I'm making very general components here and re-using them later. That's a story for another day:

https://engageusers.ai/ecosystem.pdf

If you had a chance to skim through this, I would love to get some feedback on what you think of my approach, and what I could improve.
by sointeresting | 2025-10-21 21:12:02+00:00
Ya I babel all sorts of things. I have sql queries saved in my notes for things like creating a user after I reset the project locally. Common rest queries. I create an orgmode heading for every ticket I pick up and often end up with rest and/or sql queries littered in the notes for testing and development and I can run them right from the notes and when I'm done with the ticket I can just copy/paste them into the pull request description to fill out the manual test steps for those reviewing.
by SalmoShalazar | 2025-10-21 21:12:16+00:00
You know that really powerful computer you have with a fancy graphics card and next-generation processor and all that RAM? You know that really fast Internet connection you have? Yeah we’re not really going to use any of that. Instead, we’re gonna farm out all of tasks you do to a data centre halfway across the country and complete it in the most inefficient way imaginable. Enjoy!
by Tiberium | 2025-10-21 21:12:38+00:00
The situation is interesting, and self-hosting is indeed a very nice solution often. However, I wanted to comment on the article itself - it seems to be very heavily AI-edited. Anyone who has spent time with LLMs will easily see it. But even that's not the issue; the main issue is that the article is basically a marketing piece.

For example, the "Bridging the Gap: Why Not Just Docker Compose?" section is a 1:1 copy of the points in the "Powerful simplicity" on the landing page - https://disco.cloud/

And this blog post is the (only) case study that they showcase on their main page.
by xyx0826 | 2025-10-21 21:12:42+00:00
Valetudo. I haven’t had personal experience using it (due to an unsupported model of NAND memory chip), but I’ve heard good words: https://valetudo.cloud/

That said, I did some research last year before buying my first robot vacuum. I wasn’t able to find a project - Valetudo included - that would support the bigger, fancier robots made by Roborock etc. If you’re looking to decloud a recent model, I don’t have a good answer.
by isaacremuant | 2025-10-21 21:12:48+00:00
This is so funny to me.

Hand-coding is no longer "the future"?

Did an AI write your post or did you "hand write it"?

Code needs to be simple and maintainable and do what it needs to do. Auto complete wasn't a huge time saver because writing code wasn't the bottleneck then and it definitely is not the bottleneck now. How much you rely on an LLM won't necessarily change the quality or speed of what you produce. Specially if you pretend you're just doing "superior prompting with no hand coding involved".

LLMs are awesome but the IDE didn't replace the console text editor, even if it's popular.
by speedgoose | 2025-10-21 21:12:51+00:00
Looking at the htop screenshot, I notice the lack of swap. You may want to enable earlyoom, so your whole server doesn't go down when a service goes bananas. The Linux Kernel OOM killer is often a bit too late to trigger.

You can also enable zram to compress ram, so you can over-provision like the pros'. A lot of long-running software leaks memory that compresses pretty well.

Here is how I do it on my Hetzner bare-metal servers using Ansible: https://gist.github.com/fungiboletus/794a265cc186e79cd5eb2fe... It also works on VMs.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-10-21 21:14:05+00:00
It's a bit more than that.

You should trust political volunteers after you have seen their track record of being honest and truthful. (Though there is some default amount of trust the process gets because of the adversarial nature of volunteers with opposing biases checking the process).

This is along the same vein as

You should trust candidates for the seat after you have done your due diligence that they have honest and truthful, and will faithfully represent you in the legislature/administration.

as well as

You should trust civil servants to have done state activities justly and produced truthful records and reports of state activities after you have seen a record of them doing these things correctly over time.

Democracy with humans is built on a lot of trust in humans. We have to keep this in mind when arguing about these things.
by tempest_ | 2025-10-21 21:14:26+00:00
It is way more than that though.

It offloads things like - Power Usage - Colo Costs - Networking (a big one) - Storage (SSD wear / HDD pools) - etc

It is a long list but what doesnt allow you do it make trade offs like spending way less but accept downtime if your switch dies etc etc.

For a staging env these are things you might want to do.
by zamadatix | 2025-10-21 21:14:29+00:00
I think workload might be as (if not more) the factor than the uniqueness of the topology itself for how much pinning matters. If your workload is purely computationally limited then it doesn't matter. Same if it's actually I/O limited. If it's memory bandwidth limited then it depends on things like how much fits in per core cache vs shared cache vs going to RAM, and how is RAM actually fed to the cores.

A really interesting niche is all of the performance considerations around the design/use of VPP (Vector Packet Processing) in the networking context. It's just one example of a single niche, but it can give a good idea of how both "changing the way the computation works" and "changing the locality and pinning" can come together at the same time. I forget the username but the person behind VPP is actually on HN often, and a pretty cool guy to chat with.

Or, as vacuity put it, "there are no hard rules; use principles flexibly".
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-10-21 21:14:37+00:00
Really? Everything about religion is fantasy and unprovable. Unless you believe that the earth is only 6500 years old, created in 7 days then a few centuries later someone built a boat that took two of each animal in the entire world to save them.

Then fast forward to a man being born from a virgin that rose from the dead three days after being crucified.
by fogzen | 2025-10-21 21:15:26+00:00
I don't need any news to function as a voting citizen. When election time nears, I can inform myself of the candidates. And I definitely don't look at news articles to research them. I prefer primary sources (listen to the candidates themselves) and Ballotpedia or other tools to research issues and candidates.

I subscribe to newsletters from lobby groups I support, that's about the only "news" I get besides reading HN.
by aspenmayer | 2025-10-21 21:15:34+00:00
Apple has the capability to remotely disable iPhones, which has been used when large numbers of iPhones were looted during riots in the US. I’m not sure if that capability relies on the devices not already being activated or not, but I’ve seen credible screenshots of the message when iPhones are so disabled.

If I got a message in my iPhone saying it had been remotely disabled, I would take it to an Apple Store or authorized Apple Service Center, where they could tell me what should happen next. This would be inconvenient, to be sure, but it would be preferable to continuing to use the device.
by rurp | 2025-10-21 21:15:37+00:00
It's wild that they needed this even explained to them, but I figured as much given how terrible Maps and some other Google products are at working in offline mode. One of the most basic features in Maps, simply adding a pin to the map, has been broken for many years if you don't have an active internet connection. There's absolutely no reason you need internet to save a pin locally and it originally worked fine, but they clearly can't be bothered to fix simple glaring issues like that now.
Is there anything like Searchcord still around?
by URLx64 | 2025-10-21 21:15:40+00:00
I’m looking for something like Searchcord, which was a site with full text search of public, indexable messages from public Discord servers. It got taken down after people complained about their messages being stored or tracked, even though they were posting in public Discord servers :)

I don’t want to self-host or scrape 30+ TB of messages myself, so if there’s anything similar already out there, I’d love to know.
by tzs | 2025-10-21 21:15:43+00:00
> You also need to walk in the door with your own financing

But also check out what the dealer/manufacturer offers. Sometimes there are factors other than just the terms of the loan to consider.

For example I financed my new car (2025 Hyundai Kona SEL Electric) through Hyundai because Hyundai was offering $7500 off if you financed through them. I could have gotten a better interest rate from my bank, but I'm going to pay the loan off early and even if I could have somehow gotten 0% from the bank it wouldn't have saved enough over the time I'll actually have to loan to come anywhere near matching that $7500 from Hyundai.
by gregsadetsky | 2025-10-21 21:15:50+00:00
6 staging servers: main, dev, and any branches that you want to let other (non tech people) QA.

As for the staging servers, for each deployment, it was a mix of Performance-M dynos, multiple Standard dynos, RabbitMQ, a database large enough, etc. - it adds up quickly.

Finally, Idealist serves ~100k users per day - behind the product is a lot of boring tech that makes it reliable & fast. :-)
by jampekka | 2025-10-21 21:16:28+00:00
> The irony is that self hosting is relatively simple, and alot of fun. Personally never got the appeal of Heroku, Vercel and similar, because theres nothing better than spinning up a server and setting it up from scratch.

It's fun the first time, but becomes an annoying faff when it has to be repeated constantly.

In Heroku, Vercel and similar you git push and you're running. On a linux server you set up the OS, the server authentication, the application itself, the systemctl jobs, the reverse proxy, the code deployment, the ssl key management, the monitoring etc etc.

I still do prefer a linux server due to the flexibility, but the UX could be a lot better.
by hbn | 2025-10-21 21:16:44+00:00
If you go to

Help > ChaptGPT Atlas Help

it'll link you to some docs[1] and under "Setting up the Atlas browser"[2] it opens with

> Atlas is OpenAI’s Mac browser built on Chromium.

If that counts for anything.

[1] https://help.openai.com/en/collections/16051538-chatgpt-atla...

[2] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/12628461-setting-up-the-...
by Terr_ | 2025-10-21 21:16:55+00:00
> Pile up money during the good years to allow themselves to not need continued outside income to keep going, so they can do what is right instead of compromising their vision for the sake of hitting quarterly earnings.

Typically, individuals want to pile up money so that they don't need outside income to keep going, and the shareholders of a "quarterly earnings" company will squeeze the entity to get it for themselves in the form of dividends or higher share-price.
by ebiester | 2025-10-21 21:17:24+00:00
If you are large enough, you will need an ops team to manage allowing your developers to write terraform and manage AWS costs already.

If you are small enough, you are not going to be truly affected by downtime. If you are just a little bigger, a single hot spare is going to be sufficient.

The place where you get dinged is heavy growth in personnel and bandwidth. You end up needing to solve CPU bound activities quicker because it hurts the whole system. You need to start thinking about sticky round robin load balancing and other fun pieces.

This is where the cloud can allow you to trade money for velocity. Eventually, though, you will need to pay up.

That said, the average SaaS can go a long way with a single server per product.
by stefap2 | 2025-10-21 21:17:50+00:00
When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after experiencing the slowdown, they still believed AI had sped them up by 20%.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45661775
by bigyabai | 2025-10-21 21:18:13+00:00
> why isn't more 'reshoring' happening via industrial robotics?

This one's pretty easy, from a business logic perspective; there's no money in it. The most cost-effective corporations in America (eg. Apple) are critically reliant on not building this infrastructure. They can take advantage of global supply chains with dirt-cheap human labor and they're first in line to use state-subsidized factories wherever they're built. Who would spend a dollar on domestic manufacturing when that same money is worth 100x more in Vietnam or China?

There's no reward for reshoring like there is for building a software monopoly or disrupting a hardware business.
by nunez | 2025-10-21 21:19:20+00:00
You might be right about search being "dead." Nonetheless, I think this is a hugely detrimental development.

Hallucinations and misrepresentations aside, my problem with LLMs as search engines is that they purport to give you "the truth" based on the "truth" it thinks you want to see from your query.

While I think LLMs do a much better job of natural language search than search engines do, they also remove the critical thinking that's employed in going through a list of results, processing the information therein and rendering a result.

LLMs might short-circuit the need to trawl through that "crappy blog," but they can, just as well, exclude key information in that blog that adds important context to what you're looking for.

You're doing the right thing by continuously refining your answer and cross-checking it with other LLMs, but I'm sure you've also met many people who use the Gemini AI overview answer and call it a day (which has been hilariously wrong in some searches I've done with it). Regardless, I still strongly believe that well-formed search queries beat rounds of refining LLMs every time.
by bluGill | 2025-10-21 21:19:29+00:00
When you look up remember that the majority of what you see is in the same sub-arm of the spiral arm of the milky way that we are in. Of those we can see a large number or binary systems - two stars orbiting each other. We fancy telescopes we can see a lot more of course.

All the power of stars, and most of them still are not powerful enough that we can see them even on a dark night! What chance does any alien have of sending a message that reaches us if the light from their star isn't even powerful enough to be easy to detect? It was suggested elsewhere that even if we find an alien, we probably cannot respond if they are more than 100 light years away just because we can't get a message out powerful enough that they can detect (I can't verify this claim but it is reasonable)
by jmyeet | 2025-10-21 21:20:23+00:00
I expect China to be the other major player in global space industries for the simpel reason that they're the only ones with the means and resolve to undergo such an endeavour. China is a command economy and they engage in long-term projects all the time. You can see with with all the intercity rail and metro systems they've built in the last 2 decades. It's crazy. As is all their power generation (hydro, solar).

the US may have gone to the Moon 50+ years ago but a lot has changed. There's no big enemy to rally behind as we manufactured in the Cold War. We don't have titans of industry anymore. We have titans of finance who coast on the inertia of early successes while raising prices, cutting costs and engaging in rent-seeking behavior.

There are serious design issues with Starship as a platform for going back to the Moon.

I'm not at all convinced the US can build anything anymore.
by jf93ap29sh | 2025-10-21 21:21:14+00:00
Cool to hear on the savings. But now the team has to maintain two different deployment models, so you have account for the ongoing cost that your team now has to own and maintain two different processes of deployment (prod & staging).

The key element here is the need to continuously exercise both processes (Heroku + your staging server), to work out both processes & maintain familiarity on both.

Depending on the amount of staff involved in the above, it might eclipse the compute savings, but only OP knows those details. I'm sure they are a smart bunch.
by planckscnst | 2025-10-21 21:21:23+00:00
I don't remember an event like that, but I'm rather certain the scenario you described couldn't have happened in 2017.

The very large 2017 AWS outage originated in s3. Maybe you're thinking about a different event?

https://share.google/HBaV4ZMpxPEpnDvU9
by codethief | 2025-10-21 21:21:24+00:00
So far the story with Wikipedia has always been that the number of contributors is declining, and I believe this will only get worse when fewer people read it (directly from the source). As much as I hate the idea, are people (in particular, Wikimedia) experimenting yet with using LLMs to contribute to/improve/check Wikipedia? Will page discussions and edit wars in the future get replaced with an arena of partially collaborating, partially competing LLM agents?