MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: FormZero – Self-hosted form back end as easy to deploy as SaaS signup
by BohdanPetryshyn | 2025-10-29 12:58:54+00:00
Hey HN!

Recently, I was looking for a free form backend and wasn’t able to find one. So I built one. But I believe I found an interesting way to do it!

I needed an endpoint to send waitlist submissions from my static website. As I quickly found out, most of the free options out there are artificially limited to a point where they are almost unusable - 50 submissions per month, no data export, unwanted redirects. And I understand - no matter how commoditized the technology is, a hosted solution can’t be entirely free. The service providers need to make money to maintain infrastructure, pay for emails, etc.

Of course, there are open-source self-hosted solutions out there but deploying them is much harder than signing up for their managed version. Again, I get it.

So I thought: “what if I there was a free self-hosted solution that is as easy to deploy as signing up for a commercial service?” And I remembered “Deploy to Cloudflare” buttons that are primarily used by Cloudflare in their tutorials/docs.

Meet FormZero - Form backend with zero paid features that you can deploy to your free Cloudflare account with one button in about 3 minutes. Cloudflare doesn’t even require credit card. It’s literally as easy as signing up for a SaaS:

1. Click the button 2. Provide three parameters: - Project name in your account (just use “formzero”) - Database name in your account (just use “formzero”) - Auth Secret for auth internals (use jwtsecrets.com or `openssl rand -hex 16` to generate one) 3. Get your unique workers.dev URL where you can start using FormZero

Here’s what FormZero gets you on a free Cloudflare account:

1. 100,000 form submissions a day 2. 4,000,000 submissions stored 3. Infinite retention and data export 4. Email notifications with a free Resend API key

The application is a Cloudflare worker that handles form submissions and serves a protected dashboard where you can see data you collected. The data is stored in a D1 database. I’m really looking forward to the public release of Cloudflare email service which should allow zero-setup email notifications.

Just go and try how smooth the installation process is!

https://github.com/BohdanPetryshyn/formzero
by bayindirh | 2025-10-29 12:59:06+00:00
To clarify, the complete sentence in my mind was "...after a year or two I got my Intel Mac". I got mine in Q3 2008, just before Unibody ones introduced.

So, I effectively got 2 years out of Rosetta 1, but didn't meant to say Apple supported it for two years only.

Sorry for the confusion.

Looks like I can't edit my comment anymore to clarify.
by vbezhenar | 2025-10-29 12:59:13+00:00
Linux is so not polished.

Just few days ago something updated and my virtual desktop switching now behaves erratically. I'm pressing <Super>+<1>, it changes to desktop 1 with vscode opened. And immediately it starts typing "1" into vscode. Seems to bug with all X applications. I fixed it for vscode to make it work under wayland, but now it doesn't draw border around vscode window. Another irritation and I have other X apps.

It works, it's free, I love it. But it's so not polished and it'll never be. I miss macOS polish, where basic things just work.
by jgrahamc | 2025-10-29 12:59:58+00:00
When I was the editor in chief of the Cloudflare blog we had a very, very strong mission to "educate, educate, educate" our readers. That often meant including details that someone versed in the field would skip over or find too basic. After all, we were writing for a general technical audience interested in learning about a topic.

So, its natural that some readers would find parts over-explanatory but the hope was that they could read past those bits and the less educated reader would come away having learnt something new.
by LauraMedia | 2025-10-29 13:00:17+00:00
I thought the same but let's not pretend Windows is a holy grail for compatibility anymore. Especially when it comes to older games, this facade / image breaks down fast.

I once tried to play Trackmania Nations (not Forever or United Forever, the ESWC one) because that was the first entry of this series I played. I still have all the files from back then so I thought it would be as simple as installing it and running it. Other games such as Trackmania Sunrise came with the nasty SecureROM DRM that will break your current installs, but ESWC was always free to play and without DRM.

Well, after install, I played a lot in my first sitting. A few days later, my Windows install was broken. I used a restore point before installing Trackmania, everything was back to stable. A few weeks later I tried again, same situation, a day or two after install, my Windows would break.

I thought it was a general system instability, maybe some weird configuration and the game only triggers that specific bug. So I did a full clean reinstall. And installed the game a few days later. Who would've thought, my Windows breaks yet again.

What I'm trying to say is: I've been running Fedora on my main PC for 2 years now and the game has been installed via Proton for 1 year. It never broke, it always just worked.
by clort | 2025-10-29 13:00:35+00:00
Lighthouses are usually white. They used to rotate (sweeping the beam) but tend to flash now I think. Nautical charts show the elevation of the light, the visibility ranges and the pattern of on/off (eg Fl (2) 10s 41m 17NM). Some lights are sector lights, so red/white/green depending on your position, they indicate if you are in the correct approach channel.

It can be really confusing approaching a port at night. Never mind the city lights behind, and the cars driving about. 20+ lights flashing at different rates in the dark, some of them disappearing for seconds at a time. Oh, and if you turn your light on to refer to the chart, there goes your night vision!

Boat masts above 25m also have blinking red lights for the low flying aircraft (I guess its a bragging point)
by mikkupikku | 2025-10-29 13:00:59+00:00
Most of that stuff is probably still running windows 98 or XP. If it's airgapped, and it works, and it controls a million dollar piece of equipment, then management will tell anybody suggesting it be updated to the newest windows version to stfu.

Also, the extent to which windows is needed to accommodate uneducated operators is overstated. A lot of industrial equipment runs other oddball operating systems configured by the manufacturer and machine operators don't need to know the difference because they just know which buttons to press to get the job done.
by everdrive | 2025-10-29 13:01:45+00:00
The fridge example is an interesting problem. A middle class person would probably be much better off just buying a used or cheap fridge. ~$100 - $1000. It will last as long as the $3500 - $5000 fridge and will cost a fraction as much. (and due to not being premium-aka-huge will be much easier to cart inside and outside of your house when it does break down.)

In _principle_ the truly rich person would be better off with a really expensive fridge. Except the chances that it performs better or lasts longer are tiny. So for 4x-10x the price, you have no improvement. The only way to improve your outcome is to spend enough time doing research such that you can figure out if _any_ refrigerators aren't pieces of crap. A for-real rich person has more money than time, so this isn't worth it either. Yes, they might settle on the first fridge that's available and looks nice -- and this _could_ be a premium fridge -- but they really don't get any benefit from a premium fridge either. ie, there's nothing to really push them from a $2k fridge to a $5k fridge unless it's just something like capacity.

In other words, poor-to-middle class should NEVER buy a premium fridge -- but only because the market is terrible and "premium" _usually_ does not mean "more reliable." (if premium meant "much more reliable" then they should buy premium when they can afford it, as it would cost less over time due to longevity.) However, a rich person also accrues almost no benefit from a premium fridge, as the real cost to them is research time and not money.

So, who are these products for? Probably middle class people who want to _appear_ rich.
by panick21 | 2025-10-29 13:01:48+00:00
Oh yeah totally agree. I was just thinking at the primary sales package, most people likely would open the box and put in new rams. Developing a standard socket makes a huge aomunt of sense. Back then every company had their own standard (or many).

I think Amiga was fine at reading the room, at least the engineers. But the never did any signifciant chip develpement to improve things. Only the new chipset for the Amiga 1200 when it was already much to late.
by andai | 2025-10-29 13:01:52+00:00
I can't remember where I read this, but I read a very similar sentiment: "If you can only afford $2 pizza on a regular basis, never buy a $20 pizza, because it will just ruin the $2 pizza for you."

Another aspect of this which doesn't depend on price, is when I get attached to some regional variety, and then I move. That's always a bit painful.

Or sometimes they just stop making it. Or they change the formulation!

Attachment is the root of suffering...
by stetrain | 2025-10-29 13:02:26+00:00
Yep, it was a very similar situation where Apple wanted to keep their hardware cadence but were beholden to a third party on the chip roadmap.

These days they're still somewhat beholden to TSMC continuing to make progress on nodes etc, but I think they have a closer partnership and a lot more insight into that roadmap so they can keep their hardware plans in sync.
by ecshafer | 2025-10-29 13:02:45+00:00
AWS is extremely expensive, and I think I have to agree with DHH's assessment that many developers are afraid of computers. AWS is taking advantage of that fear of actually just setting up linux and configuring a computer.

However to steelman AWS use. Many businesses are STILL running mainframes. Many run terrible setups like Access as a production database. In 2025 there are large companies with no CICD platforms or IAC, and some companies where even VC is still a new concept or a dark art. So not every company is in the position to actually hire competent system administrators and system engineers to set up some bare metal machines and configure Ceph, much less Hadoop or Kubernetes. So AWS lets these companies just buy this capabilities while forcing the software stack to modernize.
by Joeboy | 2025-10-29 13:02:45+00:00
Wikipedia still thinks it means the thing I (and presumably you) do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bare_metal

Edit: For clarity, wikipedia does also have pages with other meanings of "bare metal", including "bare metal server". The above link is what you get if you just look up "bare metal".

I do aim to be some combination of clear, accurate and succinct, but I very often seem to end up in these HN pissing matches so I suppose I'm doing something wrong. Possibly the mistake is just commenting on HN in itself.
by keyringlight | 2025-10-29 13:02:57+00:00
I think just saying "installing the OS" is a bit of a trap, that's step one, and important step but then you get to all the different subsets of features and software that they use, including not included in the OS or its repos.

When you're looking at consumer usage of a PC for anything that remotely makes sense to do on that platform I think windows has the advantage of decades of a different software ecosystem. Cumulatively there's a huge broad library of software that linux can't touch, or gets partway there but falls short. For example I can tag music files on linux, but it's painful compared to something like Mp3tag (which has been going for about 17 years). Or if I want fan control on my 9 year old intel platform I need to learn about and add a kernel parameter and manually detect sensors before I get started whereas it's straightforward on software available on windows.
by bsimpson | 2025-10-29 13:03:34+00:00
As a lifelong Mac user, I'm mildly tempted to do something like this in SteamOS, but with limited real estate: two panels feels like potentially wasting pixels, and the bottom edge is probably easier to reach on a touchscreen gaming handheld. I'll do some tweaking, but the ultimate UX has to feel right on this device, not just familiar to what I use elsewhere. Plus, I mostly use Desktop Mode for Chrome, which doesn't really use the menu bar.

But I appreciate the share!
by L_226 | 2025-10-29 13:04:18+00:00
> The fact that mobile phones aren't yet just a standard type of portable computer with an open-ish harware/driver ecosystem that anybody can just make an OS for (and hence allow anybody to just install what they want) is kind of wild IMHO.

It's because the "killer app" of phones is that they are a phone, aka a remote communications tool that relies on a subscription payment to access someone else's infrastructure. People don't care that phones are not general purpose platforms, because the point of having a phone is to communicate with others, which currently requires paying for that privilege.

If you didn't have to pay for access to a network, and the phone still worked as a phone, then you might see a change.
by hotpotat | 2025-10-29 13:04:28+00:00
Interesting to see all the people in this thread who had a stroke. I had a mild and then moderate cerebellar stroke within a 7 day span about two years ago. I remember being on the stroke neurology floor of the hospital with a lot of bed ridden people who had also suffered them. I know because, within 24 hours, I was doing hourly walking laps with my nurses because I was bored. In other words, I was one of the lucky ones. Within a week I was back at work — not because I felt pressured to by them, they were completely understanding, but because I had no more symptoms that were experienced simply because I was sitting down to work.

I also see some advice about listening to your body after the fact, which I fully agree with. In my case, without going into too much detail, the stroke might not have happened if I had listened to my body beforehand, as it was caused by an injury I could have prevented.

So if I could give any advice from this place of experience it would be to listen to your body, and try to hear it when your fears and ego are shouting.
by actionfromafar | 2025-10-29 13:04:39+00:00
You put the finger on it - there's something sad about "if only deviance was more easily monetized". Money perverts everything, in a much sadder way than kinks ever can on their own. When you do the thing to get another thing, the inherent joy can so easily seep away.

See every content producer following the posting schedule exactly, because the Algorithm punishes deviance from the schedule. Not everyone can be Captain Disillusion.
by lucideer | 2025-10-29 13:04:56+00:00
> It's pretty obvious that they think the distinction is worth having because they can vet apps they signed

This is an assumption made in exceptionally generous good faith. It's certainly possible, but I would argue this is far from obvious, & there's enough circumstantial evidence to support this being completely untrue.

Sure, Google can vet apps they sign. Whether having this ability is their primary motivation for having a distinction (or whether they will actually vet apps they sign) is a very different question.
by vidarh | 2025-10-29 13:05:17+00:00
I'm generally strongly in favour of bare metal (not so much actually on prem) but your case is one of the rare cases wher AWS makes sense. Even for cheap setups like that, bare metal could likely be cheaper even factoring in someone on call to handle issues for you, but the amounts are so small it's a perfectly reasonable choice to just pick whatever you're comfortable with.

That's the sweet spot for AWS customers. Not so much for AWS.

The key thing for AWS is trying to get you locked in by "helping you" depend on services that are hard to replicate elsewhere, so that if your costs grow to a point where moving elsewhere is worth it, it's hard for you to do so.
by Symmetry | 2025-10-29 13:05:22+00:00
They're children were taught in schools that ensured that they learned English but many adult immigrants never learned to speak English. Carnegie Steel used to try to avoid having too many workers with a common language as part of a strategy to make unionization more difficult. And when Norman Borlaug was growing up in Saude, Iowa in the 1920s there were still a lot of older people around who only spoke Norweigen.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-29 13:05:23+00:00
I've used GraphViz/Dot (I call `dot` in my terminal, but the package to install is `graphviz`) for probably two decades at this point, and what is what is still not clear to me, kind of like the whole imagemagick/convert thing which is similar, at least to someone on the outside.

Not sure why they can't come up with new names, use those, then when you invoke the program in the terminal, call the binary the same thing, instead of mucking about with calling everything differently, except some things, that share names.
by dspillett | 2025-10-29 13:05:23+00:00
> This is just a formatting/display issue. Excel isn't rounding the number internally.

It isn't rounding or truncating while you are actively using the workbook or saving in its native formats, but it does when saving back out to CSV or certain other formats.

As much as I like Excel for many things, it is sometimes the bane of my existence wrt people using it to manipulate tabular data that isn't in its native formats and causing accidental corruption.

One of the many projects on my list of “things I'll never get around to” is a good⃰ CSV (or other text-based tabular data) editor.

--------

[*] There are actually quite a few that look good, but don't have some of the features behaviours I want, or in some cases are not available on an appropriate platform (there are a couple of Mac only options for instance), or are paid proprietary apps that are surprisingly expensive (I could justify it and get work to pay in DayJob, but not for my own use).
by iLoveOncall | 2025-10-29 13:05:32+00:00
This is a completely meaningless article if they don't provide information about their technical stack, which AWS services they used to use, what TPS they are hitting, what storage size they're using, etc.

The story will be different for every business because every business has different needs.

Given the answer to "How much did migration and ongoing ops really cost?" it seems like they had an incredibly simple infrastructure on AWS, and it was really easy to move out. If you use a wider-range of services the cost savings are much more likely to cancel themselves.
Show HN: MicroBuilder – Describe your idea, get it built fast (no agency needed)
by Dbra | 2025-10-29 13:05:45+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been building SaaS products and running small service businesses for a while, and I kept running into the same issue — founders with great small ideas (like an internal dashboard, automation, or MVP) struggle to get them built quickly without overpaying or managing freelancers.

Agencies quote $5k–$10k, freelancers are hit-or-miss, and even with no-code tools, you still need design and tech skills.

So I built MicroBuilder.dev - a simple way for non-technical founders and small teams to get small builds done.

Here’s how it works: 1. You describe what you want built or your pain. 2. An AI system gives an instant price estimate 3. We match you with a vetted builder who delivers within a few days

Focusing mainly on small, fixed-price builds – Mini SaaS apps – Dashboards or client portals – Automations (n8n, Make, Zapier, etc.)

Each project includes 30 days of free bug-fix support and full code ownership.

I’d love feedback from this community — especially on: – Pricing and tier structure – How to make it more transparent or self-serve – Whether this fills a real gap between agencies and no-code tools

This is an early-stage experiment; I’m validating demand this week.

Appreciate any thoughts or critique

David
by Thorrez | 2025-10-29 13:07:12+00:00
throwawaykf10 said:

>On this topic HN almost always devolves into anecdotes. There's gotta be data on this. What does the data say? How much have DEI efforts shifted the demographics in these companies and/or the professional prospects of minorities?

>My guess: no change at all, because it's all performative.

I provided data. Not anecdotes. The data shows how the demographics of Google have shifted. The data shows how the professional prospects of minorities have shifted when it comes to Google jobs. The data does not show "no change at all".

A change from 90.4% to 90.7% percentage points I doubt is statistically significant. Phrasing it "at the expense" sounds like it's some terrible decline.

The conversation so far I believe has been about DEI in the US. Why focus on APAC, instead of the the US?

>Only looking at hiring % doesn't mean anything if we don't know the composition of the hiring pool.

What does that mean? Are you saying that if the fraction of CS grads that are Black+ also increased from 2.2% to 10.0%, then Google's DEI efforts did nothing? That conclusion doesn't hold. Google has a lot of DEI efforts, including ones to increase the number of Black+ people who choose to major in CS.
by jeudesprits | 2025-10-29 13:08:11+00:00
Welcome to Cocoon — the Confidential Compute Open Network

Cocoon is a decentralized network for executing AI inference securely and privately.

In this network, app developers reward GPU owners with TON for processing inference requests.

Telegram will be the first major customer to use Cocoon for confidential AI queries — and will invest heavily in promoting the network across its global ecosystem.

App developers who want to run inference through Cocoon are invited to contact us via DMs to this channel.

Please specify which model architecture you plan to use (e.g., DeepSeek, Qwen), along with your expected daily query volume and average input/output token size.

GPU owners who want to earn TON by contributing compute power can also message this channel using the button below.

Please indicate how many GPUs you can provide and include details such as type (e.g., H200), VRAM, and expected uptime.

Cocoon is ready — launching in November, once we’ve gathered your applications.
by Tajnymag | 2025-10-29 13:08:40+00:00
Well, yes, but APIs aside, as long as the developers and users have the choice, they won't choose a new backwards incompatible solution if when they can stay with their old solution.

Look at Apple Macs, all went from x86 to arm, breaking software and fixing incompatibilities later. Users had no choice but to use m1 macOS if they wanted a new device.
by microtonal | 2025-10-29 13:08:46+00:00
Though I think that is not warranted with respect to my original comment. I have used Linux in some form or shape for 31 years now (jikes), I would love Linux to win, and I have used Linux on a wide variety of hardware (last few laptops have been ThinkPads).

I think desktop Linux will not improve until people start acknowledging the issues and work on it. It's the same as the claim that Linux is very secure (which Linux fans will often repeat), while it has virtually no layered security, and a fairly large part of the community is actively hostile towards such improvements (e.g. fully verified boot).
by t_mahmood | 2025-10-29 13:08:46+00:00
I agree with you completely.

The point we are all missing, Google is not going to pull back, they have already invested in this change, it's in rollout phase, infrastructure is in place. It's not going to be rolled back. The ship has sailed. Keep Android Open is unfortunately dead on arrival, IF we are going to depend on Google.

And, are we going to keep depending on a profit oriented company to follow our bid? If so, then, we are very well have lost already.