MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DrewADesign | 2025-10-29 13:59:11+00:00
> 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.

What the modern software business seems to have lost is the understanding that ops and dev are two different universes. DevOps was a reaction to the fact that even outsourcing ops to AWS doesn’t entirely solve all of your ops problems and the role is absolutely no substitute for a systems administrator. Having someone that helps derive the requirements for your infrastructure, then designs it, builds it , backs it up, maintains it, troubleshoots it, monitors performance, determines appropriate redundancy, etc. etc. etc. and then tells the developers how to work with it is the missing link. Hit-by-a-bus documentation, support and update procedures, security incident response… these are all problems we solved a long time ago, but sort of forgot about moving everything to cloud architecture.
by state_less | 2025-10-29 13:59:15+00:00
I booted Slackware from a pile of floppies back then. I thought the Germans had a pretty good offering with SuSE at the time.

Look I get it, even back then, most folks felt Windows was the obvious choice (and still do) for their jobs and so on. Sometimes you have to make do with with the unappealing choice in front of you.

For a little more context, my cracked screen iPhone can still do banking or whatever, but I chose not to pony up $800-$1200 for a new iPhone and bought the cheaper $350 Motorolla. It works for me and I think I'm not entirely alone. There are probably some cracked phones, some handme down phones that folks could use for those situations where you really need to use the closed platform, but otherwise are free to use something more open.
by shadowgovt | 2025-10-29 13:59:23+00:00
Too true. The old model is that you have to sneaker-net that first step. To get someone's public key, you'd literally meet them in person and they'd hand you a copy. We don't do that anymore.

I can imagine alternate approaches (service that stores personal keys on an HTTPS server signed via a public cert, keys in peer-to-peer filesharing with the checksum provided side-channel), but that gets increasingly more elaborate for diminishing return.
by gspencley | 2025-10-29 13:59:30+00:00
> that was never in question on normal computers.

One of the things that really worries me is that this seems to be creeping in to desktop OS's as well. It's still possible, for now, to install software on Windows 11 without going through the "Microsoft Store", but I remember having to tweak some security settings to make that possible... and was really alarmed the first time I tried to install software on a fresh install and got blocked and directed to the Microsoft Store.

I've always had mixed feelings about RMS and FSF, mostly due to their hardline attitudes (I'm not opposed to proprietary closed-source software even if I have a preference for FOSS... I think there's room for both) but this trend of software installation gate-keeping that came from mobile has me really worried (and I've never been much of a mobile user either, so any creep from mobile into desktop is always unwelcome and alarming to me).
by mcintyre1994 | 2025-10-29 13:59:55+00:00
I'm guessing that they take down videos that give you instructions that install malicious scripts etc, if they're reported. I don't know for sure, but that seems likely to be against their rules. And I'd guess that most of those would target Windows. Obviously they're not responsible for it, but I'm guessing they don't allow it and would remove it if it's reported.
by berkes | 2025-10-29 14:00:20+00:00
What you describe is an old and common problem with Microsoft Windows. Hell, even Windows applications built by microsoft itself, even within the same team, are inconsistent often.

This is a problem. One that end-users may not recognize, but the cognitive load and learning curve this brings is real and costly.

It is one of the many reasons people like Mac. It's also one of the reasons people feel awkward on e.g. Ubuntu (or just linux). Because eventhough GTK is highly consistent, the apps that don't follow this consistency (Libre office, Gimp, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc) are more common than the ones that do.
by ItsBob | 2025-10-29 14:00:31+00:00
I had a website earlier this year running on Hetzner. It was purely experimenting with some ASP.NET stuff but when looking at the logs, I noticed a shit-load of attempts at various WordPress-related endpoints.

I then read something about a guy who deliberately put a honeypot in his robots.txt file. It was pointing to a completely bogus endpoint. Now, the theory was, humans won't read robots.txt so there's no danger, but bots and the like will often read robots.txt (at least to figure out what you have... they'll ignore the "deny" for the most part!) and if they try and go to that fake endpoint you can be 100% sure (well, as close as possible) that it's not a human and you can ban them.

So I tried that.

I auto-generated a robots.txt file on the fly. It was cached for 60 seconds or so as I didn't want to expend too many resource on it. When you asked for it, you either got the cached one or I created a new one. The CPU-usage was negligible.

However, I changed the "deny" endpoint each time I built the file in case the baddies cached it, however, it still went to the same ASP.NET controller method. By hitting it, I sent a 10GB zip bomb and your IP was automatically added to the FW block list.

It was quite simple: anyone that hit that endpoint MUST be dodgy... I believe I even had comments for the humans that stumbled across it letting them know that if they went to this endpoint in their browser it was an automatic addition to the firewall blocklist.

Anyway... at first I caught a shit load of bad guys. There were thousands at first and then the numbers dropped and dropped to only tens per day.

Anyway, this is a single data point but for me, it worked... I have no regrets about the zip bomb either :)

I have another site that I'm working on so I may evolve it a bit so that you are banned for a short time and if you come back to the dodgy endpoint then I know you're a bot so into the abyss with you!

It's not perfect but it worked for me anyway.
by IshKebab | 2025-10-29 14:00:41+00:00
Exactly. Equating CLI and LLM text input is completely wrong. Hard to see past that huge mistake.

Although there is one aspect in which the LLM interface still isn't discoverable - what interface does it have to the world.

Can I asked Alexa+ to send a WhatsApp? I have no idea because it depends if the programmers gave it that interface.
by saghm | 2025-10-29 14:00:52+00:00
I guess I'm old and out of touch after only a bit over three decades, because I can't figure out why this would helpful to have as a video in the first place over the text summary you posted here. I could see screenshots maybe being slightly helpful, but to having this sort of thing as a video feels like an extreme inconvenience; I'd much rather see all of it at once and be able to visually scan (or even better, ctrl+f) to find specific parts over having to scrub around if I wanted to go back to a previous part or skip ahead. My eyes also don't require any sort of manual timing to pause on something I want to copy.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-29 14:01:08+00:00
> Being able to start small from a $1/mth bill without any fixed cost overheads is incredibly powerful for small startups.

Yes, no doubt about it. Initially AWS was mostly sold as "You never know when you might want to scale fast, imagine being featured in a newspaper and your servers can't handle the load, you need cloud for that!" to growing startups, and in that context it kind of makes sense, pay extra but at least be online.

But initially when you're small, or later when you're big and establish, other things make more sense. But yes, I agree that if you need to aggressively be able to scale up or down, cloud resources make sense to use for that, in addition to your base infrastructure.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-10-29 14:01:19+00:00
> At its peak in 2000, the nuclear sector provided 30% of electricity nearly emission free. Renewables supplied only 6.3% at the time. As nuclear fell away, Germany’s coal plants filled the void — the majority being fired by brown coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel of them all. This autumn, Germany produced nearly 30% of its electricity that way.

German coal was 50% in 2000 and down to 22% for the full year in 2024. It seems they peaked at 26.5% in October that year.

Wild that they need to torture the statistics so much to try to support their point.

What really "filled the void" and more was deploying what is now 15% solar, 28% wind. That's rising from 0 and 1.5% in 2000 (the rest of the 6.3% renewables in 2000 they refer to seems to have been hydro and bioenergy).

Some people are never going to forgive Germany for kicking off the solar revolution.

Oh, and 50% of gas in Germany goes to heating and 30% to industry.

If you find someone supporting nuclear and hating heat pumps and EVs, then dependence on Russian gas is not the reason.

Well, they might be trying to increase dependence on it.
by AAAAaccountAAAA | 2025-10-29 14:01:40+00:00
If that "disaster" was so "inevitable", it would have happened ages ago.

It's not like it was somehow possible to accidentally sideload apps. You have to first find the correct option from the system settings to enable sideloading, and then approve the specific app source you want to install from.

It is not like how things are/were on Windows. Back in the turn of the millennium, it was easier to catch malware than it was to install useful apps. For former, you only needed to double-click on an email attachment, for the latter, you needed to actively to go look for the website of the app developer, and download it from there.

Android already was pretty much at the sweet spot between security and freedom, what it came to sideloading. What Google should have done was to crack down on the scam apps in Play Store. However, they are not going to do that, since it would cut their profits.
by fluoridation | 2025-10-29 14:01:42+00:00
>Forcing a private company to modify their product

You have it backwards. The consumer is the one who pays for the product, he's the ones who should get a say of what does or doesn't run on it. You would not accept the same restrictions of any other kind of device. You would think it's an overreach for a printer manufacturer to design its printers so they only accept ink cartridges it approves.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-29 14:02:35+00:00
> I reason about the same amount as anyone else.

Being frugal, thinking about what you need and similar ways of thinking is not common in the real world, it's a small selection of any population that acts and reasons like that. I'm not sure what to tell except go out more in the world and interact with people outside your bubble, if this isn't obviously clear to you already.
by fluidcruft | 2025-10-29 14:03:10+00:00
Maybe the answer is to put whatever the banks etc need on something like a smartwatch. Smartwatch + phone is better than two phones IMHO and they're so tedious to use/install anything on that it reduces the attack surface for hackers etc. Tap to pay or digital signatures or identity, passkeys etc via a smartwatch interaction seems like a good use case. Sort of a souped up yubikey. I don't know how good biometrics is on watches nowadays but my Pixel phone has some sort of camera behind the screen to read fingerprints so I can't imagine its impossible. Even adding a capacitive pad on a band seems plausible. Who knows, I don't feel like biometrics have been a real focus of design in the smartwatches I've used.

Personally, I have found smartwatches fairly useless (I do enjoy the activity tracking and notifications but that's not much really) so freeing my phone from bullshit by moving some functions to a watch could increase the value/utility of a some sort of smartwatch. Ultimately, it doesn't need to be that "smart" even.
by GamingAtWork | 2025-10-29 14:03:34+00:00
You said: "You might think that more propaganda will result in people voting for bad politicians"

In the US at least, the people who vote the most are typically the older people 40+ and those people have very little experience with tech and AI and are easily tricked by fake crape. Add AI to the mix, and they literally have no perception of the real world.
by SRKD | 2025-10-29 14:03:54+00:00
Tried Pomelli from Google Labs, interesting concept: it scans your website, builds a “Business DNA” and generates branded content.

But honestly? It still feels a bit template-y.

Here’s why I built Brandiseer and where it pulls ahead: - While Pomelli captures colors and fonts, it mostly reuses website assets and applies them generically. - Brandiseer takes any design inspiration you upload, then remaps every element: typography, layout, tone, logo placement to fit your brand. - Instead of “your brand meets template,” Brandiseer gives “your brand becomes the design,” ensuring each asset looks unique and deeply aligned with your identity.

If you care about true brand voice and visuals, not just “on-brand enough” I believe Brandiseer gives you that extra edge.
by bell-cot | 2025-10-29 14:03:57+00:00
> your harmless recipe site can ...

As can every recipe site with httpS - but a vulnerable WordPress plugin, or too-easy admin password, or malvertising, or a zillion other things.

But conveniently, "all sites gotta be httpS" puts the biggest part of the blame/load on the littlest little guys - who want to make and post good, unmonetized content. But don't have an IT skill set, nor want to deal with yet more admin overhead & costs.
by steve_gh | 2025-10-29 14:04:41+00:00
So if I am right in thinking, annas-archive.org is a pro-anorexia site.

If that is the case, then the UK Gov restricting access to a site that is promoting a recognised mental disorder with significant (and potentially fatal) health implications seems entirely appropriate. It seems like well formulated public health policy that would not be seen as contentious across the vast majority of the political spectrum in the UK.
by thelastgallon | 2025-10-29 14:04:44+00:00
These are the features that AWS provides

(1) Massive expansion of budget (100 - 1000x) to support empire building. Instead of one minimum-wage sysadmin with 2 high-availability, maxed-out servers for 20K - 40K (and 4-hour response time from Dell/HPE), you can have 100M multi-cloud Kubernetes + Lambda + a mix-and-match of various locked-in cloud services (DB, etc.). And you can have a large army of SRE/DevOps. You get power and influence as a VP of Cloud this and that and 300 - 1000 people reporting to you.

(2) OpEx instead of CapEx

(3) All leaders are completely clueless about hiring the right people in tech. They hire their incompetent buddies who hire their cronies. Data centers can run at scale with 5-10 good people. However, they hire 3000 horrible, incompetent, and toxic people, and they build lots of paperwork, bureaucracy, and approvals around it. Before AWS, it was VMware's internal cloud that ran most companies. Getting bare metal or a VM will take months to years, and many, many meetings and escalations. With AWS, here is my credit card, pls gimme 2 Vms is the biggest feature.
by davorak | 2025-10-29 14:05:06+00:00
> YC's Jessica Livingston and the founder of TripleByte

I listened to video and I did not see anywhere where Jessica made an observation along those lines.

I did not hear quotas talked about explicitly either, though companies wanting more diverse candidates from TripleByte, which might have been caused by quotes in the company but Harj does not indicate any companies came out and said that.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-29 14:05:18+00:00
We're already there. Attestation is not in your phone, but in your ID card. European passports and ID cards carry biometric data of your face, so you can be computationally verified.

I'm aware of this slippery slope for a very long time, esp. with AI (check my comments if you prefer). On the other hand, I believe that we need to choose our battles wisely.

We believe that technology is the cause of these things, it's not. Remember:

Necessity is the mother of invention.

The governments believe that this is the "necessity", so the technologies are developed and deployed. We need to change the beliefs, not the technology.

The same dystopian digital ID allows me to verify my identity to my bank while I'm having my breakfast saving everyone time. That e-sig allows me to have a practical PKI based security in my phone for sensitive things.

Nothing prevents these things from turning against me, except the ideas and beliefs of the people managing these things.

We need to change minds. Not the technology.
by overfeed | 2025-10-29 14:05:24+00:00
> Why do we have to beg Google to keep Android open?

We don't! Instead, we go to regulators. Though I suspect your question really is "Why bother with salvaging Android at all?"

Mobile platforms are hard - famously, Microsoft failed to make Windows phone a viable platform, and John Carmack successfully argued that Meta didn't need a custom OS. Mozilla's Mobile OS that had OEM partners making real phones spluttered out, and nor for the lack of trying. Both Firefox OS and Postmarket rely on an Android foundation for HAL/drivers, IIRC. Device bring-up is hard, and negotiating with OEMs is harder still, and that comes "free" with Android-supporting devices.

Logistically, the vast majority of people who install apps from non-Play-Store sources do so ok their daily-driver phone, which is running the stock operating system. They are not tech savvy at all
by rkozik1989 | 2025-10-29 14:05:34+00:00
Israel stole US nuclear secrets to create their own nuclear weapons program, they killed American navy men, they destroyed 90% of the buildings in Gaza and very blatantly committed genocide in the process of doing so, Palestinians prisoners are commonly held without trials or charges i.e. they're hostages. Zionism literally cannot exist without them committing ethnic cleansing because everywhere Israelis live used to be Palestinian properties.

Honestly, what is your point? What are you seeing that the rest of us aren't getting? For the record, my mother's family is mostly Sephardic.
by wonderwonder | 2025-10-29 14:05:48+00:00
Question to the OP or anyone else that has experienced something similar. Have you tried grey area or Peptide space medications like Dihexa, P-21, Semax, etc to see if there are any benefits there?

Very much self experimentation but they do work in mouse models as well as Russian medicine. I'm not encouraging anyone to experiment, just interested to see if anyone that has undergone experiences like OP's has experimented.

I have not experienced a stroke or similar but I just started a 6 - 8 week Dihexa course, low dose to test tolerance and I find I am experiencing benefits such as improved recall. I am learning guitar as my test suite. Something I have attempted multiple times before and given up on relatively quickly. 2 weeks in so far.

My intention is to drop the Dihexa at week 8 and then switch to Semax. The theory being that Dihexa improves synaptogenesis but inhibits pruning. Semax allows for pruning but optimizes the efficiency of existing used synapses. Dihexa is an experimental Alzheimer's medication and Semax is a Russian post stroke drug
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-29 14:05:52+00:00
Not just bias. I see at least two options.

I recall seeing the statement "Profanity is the attempt of a weak mind to express itself forcefully." Well, these childish insults and put-downs seem to me to be the same. They may sense that they don't have the intellectual horsepower to have a serious discussion about the issue, so they just insult.

Alternatively, they're not trying to have a serious conversation about the issue. They're talking to their own in-group, not to the other side, not even to those who are neutral or undecided. Instead, they're just telling their own in-group how right they are and how stupid the others are. They aren't trying to engage at all; they've given up on that. This is a deeply non-serious response - if the situation is as bad as you claim it is, why are you not trying to persuade at least the neutrals? Why are you instead doing things that make you look childish to everyone except your in-group?
by whstl | 2025-10-29 14:05:52+00:00
I've worked on both kinds of companies in almost 25 years and I can confirm this is true.

The biggest ops teams I worked alongside were always dedicated to running AWS setups. The slowest too were dedicated to AWS. Proportionally, I mean, of course.

People here are comparing the worst possible of Bare Metal with "hosting my startup on AWS".
by dkdcio | 2025-10-29 14:05:56+00:00
same -- I wish Helix would just have a full vi-compatible mode, it would probably be enough to get me to switch

the other thing for me is lack of the GitHub Copilot extension. I am far too used to having tab-complete. there's some effort for Helix extensions to handle this but it's not close to on-par last time I checked
by Neil44 | 2025-10-29 14:06:10+00:00
Same, I have a few hundred Wordpress sites and bot activity has ramped up a lot over the last year or two. AI scrapers can be quite aggressive and often generate a ton of requests where for example a site has a lot of parameters, the bot will go nuts seeming to iterate through all possible parameters. Sometimes I dig in and try to think of new rules to block the bulk, but I am also wary of AI replacing Google and not being in AI's databases.
by mhitza | 2025-10-29 14:06:42+00:00
It's a chicken and egg problem. If the cloud didn't become such a proeminent thing, the last decade and a half would have seen the rise of much better tools to manage on-premise servers (= requiring less in-depth sysadmin expertise). I think we're starting to see such tools appear in the last few years after enough people got burned by cloud bills and lockin.
by jaltekruse | 2025-10-29 14:06:47+00:00
I have been involved in open source projects with various structures and sustainability models. Open-core Enterprise software startups, unfunded or underfunded middleware/libraries and underfunded end-consumer software/apps. A real problem that I have with lots of open source is a mismatch between technical talent to produce software, an open ethos/philosophy (finding true believers in a much more open future), AND the most important often missing piece, a product mindset and willingness to do work that isn't just software dev. So many FOSS projects I have seen, with capable engineers spending years of their lives working on them, are lacking product management, a willingness to let users actually push the project in a direction that is more approachable to a mass audience, and the willingness to do the hard boring work of making software run everywhere. Lots of stuff falls into this general gripe, and a bunch of it isn't news to anyone. Lots of open source has shitty design/UX, every damn one of us that lives with desktop Linux knows exactly why it's not the year of the Linux desktop. The sleep function on the laptop I am writing this comment on doesn't work right (when booted into Linux), and every few months you have to find terminal wizardry to fix normal shit that should have a GUI config interface to un-fuck it, but "real software people don't touch their mouse unless they absolutely must". This comment got a bit off the rails, anyway, long live FOSS!