MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mjr00 | 2025-10-29 15:18:24+00:00
> I have dozens of stories of startup teams spinning their wheels with self-hosting strategies that turn into a big waste of time and headcount that they should have been using to grow their businesses instead.

Funnily enough, the article even affirms this, though most people seemed to have skimmed over it (or not read it at all).

> Cloud-first was the right call for our first five years. Bare metal became the right call once our compute footprint, data gravity, and independence requirements stabilised.

Unless you've got uncommon data egress requirements, if you're worried about optimizing cloud spend instead of growing your business in the first 5 years you're almost certainly focusing on the wrong problem.

> You really need to weigh the tradeoffs, but many people are not equipped to do that. They just think their chosen solution will be perfect and the other side will be the bad one.

This too. Most of the massive AWS savings articles in the past few days have been from companies that do a massive amount of data egress i.e. video transfer, or in this case log data. If your product is sending out multiple terabytes of data monthly, hosting everything on AWS is certainly not the right choice. If your product is a typical n-tier webapp with database, web servers, load balancer, and some static assets, you're going to be wasting tons of time reinventing the wheel when you can spin up everything with redundancy & backups on AWS (or GCP, or Azure) in 30 minutes.
by mindcrime | 2025-10-29 15:18:51+00:00
It's a trivial and non-critical need, but it's also exemplifying the basic user freedoms being denied to us: the ability to freely process information on my own device.

I hate to risk sounding like I'm beating a dead horse, but when I hear this I flash back to Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow. I interpreted his message in that book as something approximately like "you can't out-tech the bad guys", where "bad guys" can mean government surveillance agencies (probably more what he had in mind) OR "big corporations trying to control your life" (this may be me extrapolating). But even if I'm over-generalizing a bit, I think the point still stands.

"We" (open source advocates / hackers / hobbyists / makers / whatever) can't win on just tech alone. We have to use the legislative process, political pressure, social pressure, whatever, to achieve our goals. And so we should use our superior knowledge of technology to support doing that. So don't just think "how can I hack my phone to use an open source OS" but think "How can I help use technology to influence the outcome of the next election, and elect candidates who really represent the things I care about?" or "How can I help use technology to stir up enough activists making enough noise to persuade my bank to let me access my account using a non-proprietary OS", etc.

Now I'm not saying any of this is easy. By no means. Just suggesting that we need to at least approach things with that mindset in view to some extent.
by forgetfulness | 2025-10-29 15:18:53+00:00
Software is a line of work that has astounding amounts of autonomy, if you compare it to working in almost anything else.

My point stands, company loyalty tallies up to very little when you’re looking for your next job; no interviewer will care much to hear of how you stood firm, and ignored the siren song of tech and practices that were more modern than the one you were handed down (the tech and practices they’re hiring for).

The moment that reverses, I will start advising people not to skill up, as it will look bad in their resumes.
by vbezhenar | 2025-10-29 15:19:03+00:00
How do you implement "unique monotonically-increasing offset number"?

Naive approach with sequence (or serial type which uses sequence automatically) does not work. Transaction "one" gets number "123", transaction "two" gets number "124". Transaction "two" commits, now table contains "122", "124" rows and readers can start to process it. Then transaction "one" commits with its "123" number, but readers already past "124". And transaction "one" might never commit for various reasons (e.g. client just got power cut), so just waiting for "123" forever does not cut it.

Notifications can help with this approach, but then you can't restart old readers (and you don't need monotonic numbers at all).
by red-iron-pine | 2025-10-29 15:19:06+00:00
This is the Russian Firehose model

detailed report about it from RAND Corp: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

The approach can be considered something of a DDoS attack on your attention span and mental energy: keep up a constant attack, and then, at intervals known only to the attacker, drop the flow just for a second to allow for an attack -- in this case, to allow for the official party line to be created and spread via Fox News, RT, etc.

When mentally exhausted, people eventually gravitate to that which hits their "bellyfeel" best, and by pandering to that and tying it into whatever agenda you want to push, you can essentially push a narrative that is 100% against the interests of the people supporting it.

Capitalism's ruthless, creep-into-everything marketing approaches make this even easier, since there exists apparatus to do this already, and all you need to make it work is to pay for the marketing (via ads, influencers, marketing bots, etc.).
by milch | 2025-10-29 15:19:10+00:00
Personally I started getting wrist pain 2 or 3 years ago. I have been using Colemak anyway for more than 15 years - my original reason for switching was because the German QWERTZ layout I grew up with is not very programming friendly, symbols like []<>{}/\ are hidden away behind hard to type chords. I found as a nice side benefit that my typing speed increased by 20-30 or so WPM... I did also have typing classes in school, so it is not simply because I started paying more attention to learning how to type with the new system.

After switching to a split keyboard my pain went away, and I think I learned that at least for me it was caused by exactly these symbols - on both US QWERTY and Colemak when you constantly type [];:{}| and so on, your pinky has to reach over to do it. At least for me that meant contorting my hand a bit to reach over. On my split keyboard all the symbols are behind a layer on the home row, and I barely use the pinky for anything, which fixes the issue. I also learned to hover while switching to the split keyboard, but that did nothing for my wrist pain when going back to my laptop's built in keyboard - after a full day of programming there the pain is back.
by uberduper | 2025-10-29 15:19:59+00:00
Has this person actually benchmarked kafka? The results they get with their 96 vcpu setup could be achieved with kafka on the 4 vcpu setup. Their results with PG are absurdly slow.

If you don't need what kafka offers, don't use it. But don't pretend you're on to something with your custom 5k msg/s PG setup.
by arghwhat | 2025-10-29 15:20:12+00:00
> The open source baseline is still there, which is great, but if someone else was making these packages they'd be less likely to silently drop it.

Packages are deprecated and orphaned all the time, including in OSS package repos. It's often silent by virtue of the package maintainer just... ignoring it, until someone takes administrative action by just whacking the package.

> When it's a free option from a paid company, you get the worst of both worlds for risk of disappearing. And that's the situation here.

I don't really see that as having any impact. I also don't see a packing method for an active free project being deprecated as anything having "disappeared". People just need to update their deployment, just like if the release had included a breaking change.
by wildredkraut | 2025-10-29 15:20:13+00:00
Confident politics and military, meaningful future proof investments, innovation in modern tech areas like CPU/GPU, AI, EV, Mobiles, etc. there is a lot.

What else, hmmm... Ohhh yes digitization, we "Germans" still can't let our FAXing machines go.

What we are good at, outsourcing and riding into deeper dependency of other continents.
by 827a | 2025-10-29 15:20:34+00:00
The worst part is how these people almost always work on the most boring, rote crap. They could be selling mens hair loss medication on the internet (cough) and key individuals in the organization are convinced what they do is life-and-death, future of humanity, work nights and weekends, we're the next Google. It's so deeply cringe-worthy. Meanwhile, I know a ton of people in the traditional pharma industry (e.g. not Novo, but Novo-adjacent); those companies broadly treat their employees pretty well, very minor amounts of overwork, they're well-staffed, some still have pensions, people spend their whole working lives there.

Tech sucks. It's filled with talentless hacks who think "because we use computers" means you've got a blank check to make every individual do the work of three individuals. And then your company gets gutted by private equity anyway, because it turns out hiring talentless hacks and overworking has consequences.

This is a weird take, but I genuinely and deeply believe the world would be a far better place if everyone experienced a life-threatening but recoverable major medical event and/or had children, while young. Perspective-shifting events that are core to the human condition and help ground your reality in work not being everything. By the way: The businesses our society would build would also be stronger.
by luisml77 | 2025-10-29 15:20:59+00:00
Linux, even though you may think is a massive project and you may be right in some regards, doesn't require massive amounts of capital, human resources and paid developers, etc. to build it.

Android on the other hand is developed by thousands of engineers and is a much larger project in terms of monetary investment than Linux. Linux was essentially built by a single guy. Android could never have been built by a single person or even a open-source project. It's too massive.

However complex you think Linux is, its just a kernel and doesn't require a conglomerate to build and maintain for billions of users. Android does, and those developers need to get paid for the massive value they provide.
by r_singh | 2025-10-29 15:21:02+00:00
It’s fair to be angry at abuse and "aggressive bots", but it's important to remember most large platforms—including the ones being scraped—built their own products on scraping too.

I run an e-commerce-specific scraping API that helps developers access SERP, PDP, and reviews data. I've noticed the web already has unsaid balances: certain traffic patterns and techniques are tolerated, others clearly aren’t. Most sites handle reasonable, well-behaved crawlers just fine.

Platforms claim ownership of UGC and public data through dark patterns and narrative control. The current guidelines are a result of supplier convenience, and there are several cases where absolutely fundamental web services run by the largest companies in the world themselves breach those guidelines (including those funded by the fund running this site). We need standards that treat public data as a shared resource with predictable, ethical access for everyone, not just for those with scale or lobbying power.
by kevincox | 2025-10-29 15:21:05+00:00
I agree that a powerful permission model is a great feature. But that doesn't obsolete the option to have the "root permission" that you can give when required. Sure, for my specific gripe a "full filesystem access" permission would be sufficient and better. But there are going to be other use cases that require other permissions. So it is always going to be useful to have that backup root permission that you can assign to very specific apps when required.
by Jtsummers | 2025-10-29 15:21:06+00:00
> Can anyone explain to me, why grand negative headlines appear to translate into "oh no, 47% dropped to 45%".

He went from a barely positive approval rating (+2% approved vs disapproved) to a significant disapproval rating in just 9 months. Assuming the "not sure" group at 5% has been stable, his approval rating dropped from 49 to 39 by the numbers they've shown.
by grishka | 2025-10-29 15:21:31+00:00
> we are not omniscient writers who can foresee all problems, fix all bugs, and write software that is unhackable

We can come close to that in all other areas of engineering, but somehow not software? We can build buildings and bridges and be certain that they won't collapse. We can engineer machines that work reliably and safely. But for some reason we can't do the same for software? I call bullshit.

> Hardware changes.

And operating systems do need to be updated for that sometimes, sure. They would even sometimes need to expose new APIs to apps, so the apps could make use of new hardware capabilities. However, there isn't much reason to update an OS on existing hardware. Especially when all that update does is bring a new stupider UI design that no one asked for.

> Software rots.

What the heck do you even mean by that? Software is a sequence of CPU instructions. It can't "rot". It's the runtime environments that rot for no good reason.
by giamma | 2025-10-29 15:21:33+00:00
My elderly father unknowingly installed an application on Android after seeing a deceptive ad. An advertising message disguised as an operating system pop-up convinced him that his Android phone's storage was almost full. When he tapped the pop-up, and followed instructions he installed a fake cleaner app from the Play Store. While the app caused no actual harm, it displayed notifications every other day urging him to clean his phone using the same app. When he opened it, the app — which did nothing except display a fake graph simulating almost full storage — pressured him to purchase the PRO version to perform a deeper cleanup.

In reality, the phone had 24 GB of free space out of 64 GB total. I simply uninstalled the fake cleaner and the annoying notifications disappeared.

How such an app could reach the Play Store is beyond me. I can only imagine how many people that app must have deceived and how much money its creators likely made. I'm fairly certain the advertisement targets older people specifically—those most likely to be tricked.

For better or worse, I'm pretty sure that such an app would never land into the Apple App Store.
by sceptic123 | 2025-10-29 15:21:49+00:00
The point is valid, they mention adding that, so at one point they didn't have that. They're also only storing monitoring & observability data, that's never going to be mission critical for their customers.

It's probably the main reason why they were able to get away with this and why their application does not need scalability. I see they themselves are only offering two 9s of uptime.
by mjr00 | 2025-10-29 15:22:08+00:00
> 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.

This is revisionist history. DevOps was a reaction to the fact that many/most software development organizations had a clear separation between "developers" and "sysadmins". Developers' responsibility ended when they compiled an EXE/JAR file/whatever, then they tossed it over the fence to the sysadmins who were responsible for running it. DevOps was the realization that, huh, software works between when the people responsible for building the software ("Dev") are also the same people responsible for keeping it running ("Ops").
by oblio | 2025-10-29 15:22:24+00:00
> Belief in Doomsday Happening in Their Lifetime

> There is no single consensus figure, as results vary by how the question is phrased (e.g., "apocalypse" vs. "second coming").

> Belief in "End Times" (General): 39% of U.S. adults (or 2-in-5) believe that humanity is "living in the end times," according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey.

> Belief in a Lifetime Apocalypse:

> 29% of U.S. adults think an "apocalyptic disaster" is likely to occur in their lifetime, according to a 2020 YouGov poll.

> 10% of all Americans (and 21% of evangelical Protestants) believe the second coming of Jesus will "definitely or probably occur during their lifetime" (2022 Pew Research).

I'm not an American but there are some statistics about the US that freak me out - because the US has huge global reach and impact, for better or - these days - for worse.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-29 15:22:37+00:00
> Commercial banks can be easily replaced? How so?

End user deposit accounts held at the central bank [1] and narrow banking [2]. The Fed does not like these ideas though [3] [4], which is why their policy is designed to support commercial banks.

The funny part is the Tether become the narrow bank outside of the traditional financial system; they hold mostly only US treasuries, at nation state scale [5]. Does it matter they don't have a master account at the Fed? I argue no, considering treasuries are backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, and that debt is backstopped by the Fed.

Consumer deposits are unnecessary for lending; credit can be issued by entities who issue debt into the bond market for capital.

[1] https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/GD...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrow_banking

[3] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/safest-bank-fed-wont-san...

[4] https://southerncalifornialawreview.com/2024/03/11/squeezed-...

[5] Tether is now the 17th largest holder of US debt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45747578 - October 2025

(jqpabc123 mentions in a sibling comment FedNow instant rails, which makes moving value trivial for a few pennies per transaction, up to $10M at a time)
by tauchunfall | 2025-10-29 15:23:01+00:00
>graph-viz is MASSIVE and a binary. mermaid requires the browser's svg rendering system to work.

I succeeded to use resvg-js [1] with dagre/graphlib [2] to render graphs. resvg-js uses a 4 MB node library to render SVGs. dagre is used by mermaid for graph layout (for some of the diagram types). if you disable loading system fonts in resvg-js it just takes milliseconds to render the SVG.

I know that mermaid is well-known and very useful, but I don't like the code quality (especially consistency) and the bloat of dependencies. Last time I went through the code I assessed it requires significant refactorings to make it work with resvg-js, i.e. server-side graph layout and rendering.

There is also nomnoml [1], which is so great, it should deserve at least the same amount of attention as mermaid. the nomnoml codebase is a joy to read. the author even converted the dagre/graphlib codebase to typescript [4].

[1] https://github.com/thx/resvg-js [2] https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre [3] https://github.com/skanaar/nomnoml [4] https://github.com/skanaar/graphre

---

Edit: One of the refactorings to make mermaid work with resvg-js is related to measuring svg text width. It's needed to determine the width of the graph node boxes. mermaid needs to be able to also use `resvg.getBBox()` to make it work with server-side rendering.
by larsiusprime | 2025-10-29 15:23:15+00:00
If all labor is automated and nobody can earn anything selling their own anymore, all that’s left are the other two factors of production: capital and land.

Land is scarce and cant be produced, so whoever already owns it will benefit after the change.

Capital can be produced, but what produces it? Labor. Even worse, capital depreciates over time so just owning some now doesn’t guarantee you an income in the post labor future.

In a fully automated world where human labor is truly of zero value it seems the main returns in the long run are to those who can gate keep valuable land, natural resources, and other fundamentally scarce assets.
by hedora | 2025-10-29 15:23:33+00:00
They matter at scale, where 1% issues end up happening on a daily or weekly basis.

For a startup with one rack in each of two data centers, it’s probably fine. You’ll end up testing failover a bit more, but you’ll need that if you scale anyway.

If it’s for some back office thing that will never have any load, and must not permanently fail (eg payroll), maybe just slap it on an EC2 VM and enable off-site backup / ransomware protection.
by mpeg | 2025-10-29 15:23:45+00:00
It really doesn't matter if a personal blog decides to serve only http as a niche protest. But you really don't want to go back to the times when most sites were http; we had:

- Massive government spying programs, people forget that Chat Control used to be the standard, everything you ever browsed, posted or said online could be monitored

- Tracking that you could not disable, where your ISP would work with publishers appending http headers to every request that uniquely identified you.

- Not only little guys, as you say, were using http, it was government sites, news sites, a huge part of the internet was unencrypted and vulnerable to mitm. As you say, yes, it's not the only attack vector but it was one of the easiest to exploit, where any random wifi access point you're connected to could steal your credentials.
by nicce | 2025-10-29 15:23:49+00:00
Generally speaking of Rosetta means Rosetta 2 since Rosetta 1 is deprecated. It is very difficult to say what they are meaning.

The deprecation is mentioned in the context of Rosetta translation environment [1]. Rosetta for Linux uses same wording [2].

For example, Docker at least used to use this same binary translation internally year ago (the same tech as deprecation is mentioned). I don't know how it is today.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...

[2]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
by dboreham | 2025-10-29 15:23:54+00:00
Curious: why? Aren't bubbles about people buying some instrument (stock, bond, bitcoin...) with borrowed real money that is not eventually worth as much as they think it is? People buying stablecoins are exchanging presumably not-borrowed real money for something that amounts to a zero-interest money market fund. Presumably not borrowed because the stablecoin explicitly pays no yield.
by matwood | 2025-10-29 15:24:06+00:00
Like most of AWS, it depends if you need what it provides. A 20PB tape system will have an initial cost in the low to mid 6 figures for the hardware and initial set of tapes. Do the copies need to be replicated geographically? What about completely offline copies? Reminds me of conversations with archivists where there's preservation and then there's real preservation.
by writeslowly | 2025-10-29 15:24:47+00:00
I look at products like Hershey's chocolate or Reeses more like their own category of processed food, kind of like Spam. They have a close, but not exact resemblance to "normal" chocolate or peanut butter, but they're also sort of an acquired taste, and I think their customers would be upset if Reese's Peanut Butter cups suddenly tasted like the Trader Joe's versions (with real peanut butter instead of a mysterious chalky peanut-flavored substance), or if Hershey's stopped using the butyric acid process that makes them taste like vomit to non-americans.
by codexb | 2025-10-29 15:24:51+00:00
I agree with you, but that only works if people value it and are willing to pay for it.

Look at email. It’s technically open, but in reality there are a few large players who control the majority of it.

The only way open source phone software succeeds is if there is real money behind it and there is an attractiveness to it that makes people pay for it.
by pizzafeelsright | 2025-10-29 15:24:56+00:00
I grew up around woodworking and then went off to the soft world of computers.

I learned to cut 2x4s floating them in on hand with a circular saw in the other, cutting so the longer one side remained in hand without the concern of binding.

It is best to learn from old men with all their fingers or young ones with digits numbering less.