MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ericd | 2025-10-29 21:51:13+00:00
You can just set up your own cloud on leased machines, and pocket the huge difference in cost. Devops languages are pretty easy to learn, IME, and the infra stuff takes less maintenance than the AWS proponents seem to think. I guess it depends on your usage profile, but like bandwidth especially is ruinously expensive compared to what you get with leased machines.
by hunter2_ | 2025-10-29 21:51:35+00:00
I don't think GP meant "here" the way you are interpreting "here" (i.e., this site / that site). Rather, I think they meant "here" to mean "in the sentence you wrote."

Put another way, I think GP was asking why you think the term "grifter" has anything to do with graphic designers who are obsessed with dithering right now. Basically, you aren't asserting that they're obtaining value illicitly (i.e., swindling, conning), as would need to be the situation for a grift to occur. If they're convincing customers that their dithering product is a must-buy because dithering is the best thing ever, and the customer hands over their money upon being convinced, that really isn't a grift unless the product somehow ends up not doing the thing.

If I lie on a website, and the subsequent wave of additional readers leads me to collect tons of ad revenue, the readers have not been grifted (they still have their money) and the ad network was not grifted (I gave them legitimate traffic). If I lie to a reader in order to take the reader's money, then at that point yes, the reader was grifted.
by deathanatos | 2025-10-29 21:51:45+00:00
Maybe in a perfect world, or in a free market.

But the cloud compute market is basically centralized into 2.5 companies at this point. The point of paying companies like Azure here is that they've in theory centralized the knowledge and know-how of running multiple, distributed datacenters, so as to be resilient.

But that we keep seeing outages encompassing more than a failure domain, then it should be fair game for engineers / customers to ask "what am I paying for, again?"

Moreover, this seems to be a classic case of large barriers to entry (the huge capital costs associated with building out a datacenter) barring new entrants into the market, coupled with "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" level thinking. Are outages like these truly factored into the napkin math that says externalizing this is worth it?
by Libidinalecon | 2025-10-29 21:52:52+00:00
You also can't just leave out the bond market.The dotcom bubble sat on top of the 10 year bond at 5%. The US had a balanced budget and 10X less debt than now. It was the peak of the unipolar moment. Part of the AI bubble is the lack of safe investments to act as a flight to safety. I just don't think they are really comparable. The AI bubble could certainly be more destructive given the circumstances and concentration when it pops, even if not bigger. The other main difference is we actually had the internet in place. So much of what is fueling the AI bubble doesn't even exist.
by al_borland | 2025-10-29 21:53:06+00:00
They weren't any cheaper in the past, and this isn't an ongoing expense.

Save up, $10/month for 5 months, and get a used laptop that will likely last for years. If someone can't afford that, then it simply isn't a priority for them, which is fine.

The bigger issue for someone in a very rural area is getting internet access. That will be a bigger issue and expense than the computer. Over time, internet is likely a bigger expense for everyone than the computers they use to access it.
by godelski | 2025-10-29 21:53:35+00:00
I agree that not expanding scope makes things easier but it doesn't solve the problem.

I also agree that knowing the stack goes a long way, but again, doesn't go all the way.

Omniscience is required, by definition. Even if just omniscience about the software you are building. MEANING you know not just all your lines, but all the lines of all the dependencies, the compiler, and the system it is operating on. I have yet to meet anyone that comes anywhere near approaching this knowledge, including many gray beards.

It is utterly foolish to proclaim your code as "bug free". Since you don't seem to be aware of sayings like "software rot" allow me to introduce to you to another one

There's two types of programs: 1) Those with bugs 2) Those that nobody uses

In case it isn't obvious, the joke implies that all programs have bugs, it is just that developers are less likely to be aware of them when few people use them. This is, of course, because there are too many variables for any developer to account for, even in simple programs.
by submeta | 2025-10-29 21:54:29+00:00
WezTerm is an absolute joy to use: Scriptable (in Lua), allows creating your own shortcuts, has a command palette, has something like tmux (called mux) for which I have created lua scripts to setup my workspace for different projects. Something like tmuxinator impelemented in WezTerm. - I still use tmux, but mux is nice as well, and I can use splits and navigation natively in WezTerm, no need for prefix-{command} like in tmux. But can have workspaces in WezTerm.

It allows adding a custom background image, also transparent background, and I can toggle all of that via my custom shortcuts: Transparent on/off, background image on/off/rotate randomly.

It is such a joy to use and so beautiful. That plus neovim, yazi file browser, and lazygit: Dreamteam. Best dev environment I ever had.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-10-29 21:54:39+00:00
I have often found limiting the buffer size as a simple way to communicate back to producers that more work can't be taken. Then what happens is all a producer strategy to drop work or wait for a period of time then drop or just hold onto the work until the buffer has a clear space. Its about the simplest message from consumer to producer you can do and how games tend to do backpressure and how Go channels work.
by jackvanlightly | 2025-10-29 21:56:04+00:00
> A 500 KB/s workload should not use Kafka

This is a simplistic take. Kafka isn't just about scale, it, like other messaging systems provide queue/streaming semantics for applications. Sure you can roll your own queue on a database for small use cases, but it adds complexity to the lives of developers. You can offload the burden of running Kafka by choosing a Kafka-as-a-service vendor, but you can't offload the additional work of the developer that comes from using a database as a queue.
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-29 21:56:20+00:00
The hedonic treadmill is a choice

The entire concept of "comfort food" and "poverty food" is about people excusing the enjoyment of "low class" stuff that is eminently enjoyable and shouldn't need justification.

You can learn tasting notes in wines, and how to identify wines that are well balanced with good tasting notes or an interesting character. You can appreciate all the care and expertise that went into that process and how it meshes with the "flavor pairing" guides and cheese that it was served with. You can then buy an entire case of $6 wine from that winery because that wine tastes exactly like Welches concord grape juice and when you were a kid you always expected wine to taste like tasty grape juice but make you drunk and have always been disappointed that wine doesn't taste like grape juice.

That wine was so good and it was $6 because snobs hate simple pleasures.

Don't be a snob. Good is not the inverse of simple, and complex is not inherently good.

Nobody can stop you from drinking boxed wine cut with gatorade. Nobody can stop you from enjoying boxed wine cut with gatorade.

If you find you can't enjoy the simple things, you don't need to "upgrade" or get more expensive stuff or keep up with the Jones's, you need therapy.
by BizarroLand | 2025-10-29 21:57:13+00:00
It was a simple criminal matter, dismissed for lack of evidence and I was innocent besides.

I work with lawyers now and the highest paid lawyer I know charges $1,200/hr. The associates charge $350/hr.

$10k is still insane unless you're getting a named partner to run your case or if you're in for a serious crime.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-10-29 21:57:24+00:00
I've been binging a lot of videos on things like rewilding and other approaches that can be used to restore landscapes. The Chinese have successfully executed a number of large scale projects over the decades. They started this early. Where other countries talked about doing things, the Chinese went ahead and did those things.

One of their projects is allowing them to undertake infrastructure projects in the desert. They simply stick bales of straw into ditches to stop soil being blown away by wind. The straw traps soil, water, and breaks down over a few years allowing plants to take hold. It's a simple approach that works. Very pramatic, dig a ditch, stick in some straw. Done. Repeat.

Outside of China, the green wall in Africa is a very pragmatic approach that involves digging a lot of half moon shaped ditches to trap rain water. Simple and effective.

Other approaches involve using fences to stop sheep and other grazers from preventing anything vaguely green tinted shoots from being eaten and giving them a chance to actually turn into trees.

What I like about these approaches is that some relatively simple measures can have big effects. People spend a lot of time hand wringing over seemingly insurmountable problems. The Chinese are showing that in addition to the power to destroy landscapes, we also have the power to remake them. It works. They aren't tree huggers. Better landscapes also mean local economies benefit. Deserts don't feed people. Water retention means agriculture gets a second chance.

What I admire in the Chinese is the pragmatic can do attitude. Their motivations are of course self serving. They value having clean air in their cities, clean drinking water, and a landscape that can support agriculture and infrastructure. And in the end that's the best kind of motivation you can get. It's something worth copying. Whenever economy, science, and environment align, everybody wins.

A lot of areas in the rest of the world that are subject to desertification, pollution, etc. are fixable. And there's value in fixing them that needs more attention. I don't see this as a green/left topic. If you exist on this planet, why wouldn't you want something to be done to clean up the mess we've all created in the last centuries? Breaking out this topic from the usual left/right day to day politics is key. The rest is just work. The Chinese put the rest of us to shame with hard work.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-10-29 21:57:35+00:00
Yeah, Tailscale is really cool. The only thing I wish is that they didn't tie auth to either a big tech monopoly (Google, github etc) or running your own IDP service. I would love to use Tailscale for some self hosted stuff I have, but hesitate to start exposing something like an identity management tool because that's a high value target. And of course, I don't really want to let Google et al be in control of my VPN setup either.
by FateOfNations | 2025-10-29 21:57:35+00:00
> I wonder what iOS Edge does which iOS Safari doesn't do

Being a "Managed App" through MDM/Intune. Typically it's used when installing corporate apps in a BYOD scenario. The managed apps are isolated from information sharing with unmanaged apps, e.g. policies can be applied preventing copy/paste, access to Files.app, etc. It (and it's isolated storage) can also be remote wiped without nuking the whole device. Edge.app still uses the Safari rendering engine, etc. like is generally the case with 3rd party browsers on iOS.

You can't do this with Safari.app unless the whole device is managed, which doesn't work well for BYOD.
by rikroots | 2025-10-29 21:58:20+00:00
I responded in that post (though not to you, and probably not what you're after) with a link to my JS canvas library's "reduce palette" filter. It includes both supplying an array of colors to act as the palette, and setting the required number of colors for which the filter can calculate a "commonest colors" palette, calculating color distances in the OKLAB color space - https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/demo/filters-027.html

If anyone wants to see the filter code, it in the GitHub repo here: https://github.com/KaliedaRik/Scrawl-canvas/blob/064469928a3...
by guax | 2025-10-29 21:58:33+00:00
OpEx means that if demand for your service goes down, cost goes down, your hardware does not become a capital liability since it depreciate fast. Way easier to justify changes to it too, you don't need a purchase project to get new instances, you're already "approved" and the contract was already signed with fluctuating costs. Needs more hardware? press a button, no need to research vendors, get contract negotiations in place.

AWS makes the life of finance and leadership a lot easier because they spend a lot of money justifying their superiority in ways that you don't have to think too hard to use and be taken seriously. They're to CTOs what think tanks and lobbyist are for lawmakers.

"No one got fired for buying ibm" for the new era.

There is a lot of truth in AWS propaganda, they're great for many things. But some of it is built on lies, cost being one, performance another.
by jeeybee | 2025-10-29 21:58:43+00:00
If you like the “use Postgres until it breaks” approach, there’s a middle ground between hand-rolling and running Kafka/Redis/Rabbit: PGQueuer.

PGQueuer is a small Python library that turns Postgres into a durable job queue using the same primitives discussed here — `FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED` for safe concurrent dequeue and `LISTEN/NOTIFY` to wake workers without tight polling. It’s for background jobs (not a Kafka replacement), and it shines when your app already depends on Postgres.

Nice-to-haves without extra infra: per-entrypoint concurrency limits, retries/backoff, scheduling (cron-like), graceful shutdown, simple CLI install/migrations. If/when you truly outgrow it, you can move to Kafka with a clearer picture of your needs.

Repo: https://github.com/janbjorge/pgqueuer

Disclosure: I maintain PGQueuer.
by 1rhino2 | 2025-10-29 21:58:59+00:00
Modsec is a sloppy tool thats honestly sucky. Its config hell, rule hell and its outdated ash. Its vulnerable to just about EVERY modern attack surface. We are gonna make that change: https://github.com/1rhino2/RhinoWAF/

Just to clarify, we are not a company of any sorts, simply people willing to help.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-10-29 21:59:00+00:00
> Have you read about the impact of data centers in non-US countries? Building a data center that requires potable water in a drought stricken country that lacks the resources to defend itself is incredibly destructive.

And? Have you read about the impact of ${production facilities} in non-US countries? That's literally what industrialization and globalization are about. Data centers aren't unique here - same is true about power plants, factories, industrial zones, etc. It all boils down to the fact that money, electricity and compute are fungible.

Note: this alone is not a defense of LLMs, merely me arguing that they're nothing special and don't deserve being singled out - it's just another convoluted scenario of multinational industries vs. local population.

(Also last time I checked, the whole controversy was being stoked up by a bunch of large interest groups that aren't happy about competition disturbing their subsidized water costs - it's not actually a grassroots thing, but an industry-level PR war.)

> Man’s best friend > online sex bot.

That's disingenous. I could just as well say: {education, empowering individuals to solve more of their own problems, improving patient outcomes} > pets and trimmed lawns. LLMs do all of these and sex bots too; I'm pretty sure they do more of the former than the latter, but you can't prove it either way, because compute is fungible and accurate metrics are hard to come by :P.
by trhway | 2025-10-29 22:01:04+00:00
>The same article says Russia is on 2nd place in reforestation.

Reforestation alone doesn't matter. What matters is total result of deforestation and reforestation. Russia reforests only about 1Mha/year :

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1059300/russia-reforeste...

while the total resulting loss is

https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/RUS/?ca...

"In 2020, Russia had 748 Mha of natural forest, extending over 44% of its land area. In 2024, it lost 5.59 Mha of natural forest, equivalent to 816 Mt of CO₂ emissions."

>But export of Baikal fresh water? That’s fake news. Didn’t happen and won’t happen

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/07/parched-chines...

in Russian, that another waterpipeline - from river Ob' was approved at some Russian Parliament "roundtable on strategic projects with China and Kazakhstan".

https://topwar.ru/159671-bajkal-xxi-veka-druzhba-druzhboj-a-...

and there were strong leaks, not officially dispelled, that Baikal water was raised during the most recent Putin/Xi meeting.
by frozenseven | 2025-10-29 22:01:32+00:00
Ah, more insults. This will be my final reply to you.

I'll say it again. The hardware exists. The paper and code are there. If someone wants to insist that it's fake or whatever, they need to come up with something better than permutations of "u r stoopid" (your response to their paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45753471). Just engage with the actual material. If there's a solid criticism, I'd like to hear it too.
by ModernMech | 2025-10-29 22:02:10+00:00
It's called dogfooding -- writing tools for the language in the language. Not doing so here, where the result is "best thing to happen to the ecosystem in a decade", is a tacit admission that Python isn't up for the task of writing best-in-class Python tooling (the use of Rust wasn't incidental). Having seen uv, people will probably start writing more Python-ecosystem projects in Rust.

Which is fine, Python is not for everything.
by FateOfNations | 2025-10-29 22:02:23+00:00
The reason Expensify does that is because they want/need access to the cookies from the login flow. The in app browser provides the hosting application access to those, but they can't access Safari's cookiejar. The modern way of doing it is to put the login in Safari (or iOS's dedicated "in app browser for logins") and then redirect to something like expensify://login_complete?token=xxxxxx, which pops back over to the app. This is mostly tech debt on Expensify's part, but it might not solve the Edge vs. Safari issue.
by kcon | 2025-10-29 22:02:23+00:00
I was looking for more info about developing for Board on https://board.fun/pages/developers and became confused because the page mentions an SDK that can be accessed but does not explain how or link to any other information. Poking around the website some more, I found https://board.fun/pages/support?hcUrl=%2Fen-US%23article-289... which clarifies:

> Can I add or create my own games?

> Soon. We’re building tools that will let anyone design their own Board games, starting with developers and expanding to players. The future of play is one you can help create. Learn more at board.fun/developers.

So I think I understand the SDK is not available yet. Can you clarify that developer tools are not yet available but are coming soon on https://board.fun/pages/developers to avoid confusion?
by godelski | 2025-10-29 22:02:26+00:00
It was an illustrative example, but this is true for even things that are much more mundane. Maybe you'll come back and say that this is on builders or engineers taking shortcuts, but we could draw the analogy to programmers not using formal verification systems[0].

> But then again, comparing rockets to software is unfair. Rockets have a finite scope.

You are literally talking to someone who worked in that space and now works in software. How confident are you that you know more about that space than someone with years of professional experience? I'll add that I also have a degree in physics. My shift to software was through modeling and simulation of engineering designs. I'm sorry, I think you are overestimating your knowledge about rocket science. I'm pretty sure even in Russia they have "it's not rocket science" (or some equivalent) jokes.

I promise you, your years of expertise in software makes you an expert in software, distinguishing you significantly from other experts. But I also promise you that this is true for any profession. Being an expert in physics doesn't make one automatically an expert in software. But the same is true in the other direction. You need to get your ego checked if you think differently.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification
by bayindirh | 2025-10-29 22:03:06+00:00
Evernote isn't being "maintained". It's being actively developed with new, useful features and being transformed to a much bigger and powerful tool month by month.

Features felt like stuck on it haphazardly are now completely integrated into the tool itself, and everything incl. performance is getting better.

I'm no longer actively using Evernote, but I have some shared notebooks there and still use it from time to time.
by troyvit | 2025-10-29 22:03:24+00:00
> That's like saying it's ironic for soldiers to fire their guns while in a trench.

ICE using military tactics (be it trenches or masks) is the real problem here. ICE aren't soldiers, they're a part of law enforcement.

Unfortunately in the U.S. today we not only do use troops for law enforcement, but we're using law enforcement as troops. Neither is the correct role for those services.
by jjmarr | 2025-10-29 22:04:03+00:00
Roblox was tiny in 2006. I joined in 2008. It was still leading the market.

To give an example, Roblox added user-created cosmetic t-shirts as a way to monetize the platform. Developers immediately scripted their games to recognize special "VIP t-shirts" that would provide in-game benefits. And quickly created idle games called "tycoons" where you could wait 2 hours to accumulate money to buy a fortress, or buy the t-shirt to skip all that.

I don't think there were any modding systems with mtx support.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-10-29 22:04:38+00:00
Yes, but what do you use as a second factor to authenticate and confirm money transfers?

In large parts of the world, the answer is usually "my uprooted, remotely attested smartphone". Increasingly, it's becoming the only supported method. When that's the case, what you use to load the banking UI doesn't matter anymore - the mobile device is the only actual requirement.
by tecoholic | 2025-10-29 22:05:09+00:00
I am on the same boat. I like uv for its speed and other niceties it brings and being a single tool to manage different things. But lockfile is not that big a deal. I never got Poetry as well. Tried it in a project once and the lockfile was a pain with the merges. I didn’t spend much time, so maybe I didn’t understand the tool and workflow or whatever, but pip and pip-tools were just fine working with requirements.txt.
by jkhdigital | 2025-10-29 22:05:11+00:00
I can tell this is much more than just “Tabletop Simulator on a tablet”, although at $500 you’re likely to get a lot of attention from the Twilight Imperium and Gloomhaven crowd. I know more than a few childless people in my local gaming circle who would drop a half-large on accessories that simplify game execution.

But clearly this product isn’t about making existing board games easier to set-up/play/clean-up. I think the marketing dept has a lot of heavy lifting to do, convincing buyers that this isn’t just Juicero for existing board games.
by DebtDeflation | 2025-10-29 22:05:54+00:00
Near as I can tell, the only valid point the author makes is that since mortality rates increase as cancer progresses stages and since progression through stages takes time, a 5 year mortality rate is not a great metric and it would be better to also have 10 and 15 year mortality rates to determine the degree to which early detection + treatment actually increases life expectancy.