MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by owenversteeg | 2025-10-17 11:11:08+00:00
Anecdata, but putting it out there because HN comments have solved many medical problems of mine that doctors couldn't:

I had a wound that wouldn't close and the thing that eventually got it to close was topical collagen powder - packed directly into the wound. This is something that the literature is quite positive on, but large Western hospitals mostly don't do for some reason. On oral collagen, the literature seems a bit more mixed but still generally positive. Collagen is something that used to make up a much larger part of our diet, so at the very least I don't think there's much risk in trying - and perhaps there are other benefits.
by tmoertel | 2025-10-17 11:11:18+00:00
Do you also remember the researcher Philip Zimmerman’s hack to get around the cryptography-is-munitions edict? The source code to PGP was published by MIT Press as a book that just happened to be in a format suitable for OCR. That framing made it into a First Amendment issue, one the researchers were confident they’d win in court.

https://archive.org/details/pgpsourcecodeint0000zimm
by Arch-TK | 2025-10-17 11:12:03+00:00
SQLAlchemy Core isn't an ORM, it's just a very good query generator.

Although nobody seems to use the term ORM correctly any more so it's entirely possible that neither is peewee or sqlorm.

The story behind why ORM is nowadays no longer used correctly is kind of funny:

1. Query generator sounds primitive, like cavemen banging rocks together. Software engineers are scared of primitive technologies because it makes their CVs look bad.

2. Actual ORMs attempt to present a relational database as if it was a graph or document database. This fundamentally requires a translation which cannot be made performant automatically and often requires very careful work to make performant (which is a massive source of abstraction leaks in real ORMs). People don't realise the performance hit until they've written a chunk of their application and start getting users.

3. Once enough people encountered this problem, they decided to "improve" ORMs by writing new "ORMs" which "avoid" this problem by just not actually doing any of the heavy mapping. i.e. They're the re-invention of a query generator.
by olex | 2025-10-17 11:12:52+00:00
And this is why my setup will be using Reolink cameras integrated locally via HomeAssistant and Frigate. Detection runs locally on cameras and/or in Frigate, HA manages events and UI, and the only way to access any of it remotely is via VPN, no "cloud" anything.

If the authorities come knocking with a warrant, or frankly, even a nicely-worded sensible request, sure, have at it. But ain't nobody accessing the footage unnoticed and without my approval.
by magnuspaaske | 2025-10-17 11:13:05+00:00
Even if you go back to using react it's still useful and fun to read about how people can implement things like virtual doms to get an idea about what's happening under the hood. From there it's easier to figure out if react is the best choice or other choices might be better.

From there one big question is if everything needs to be dynamic or not. You often have menus and navigation that you don't need a framework for and that even something like jQuery is well suited for. On the other hand a framework would probably slow things down for the writing experience in Obsidian, which is the main draw for me to use Obsidian. Once the writing module is written from scratch, it won't seem like such a big lift to also do all the navigation and controls by hand.

That doesn't mean this is the right way for everyone. A lot of times the speed to releasing new features is more important, while the handicraft of the UI/UX is less important and in those cases using a framework is absolutely the right choice.
by anentropic | 2025-10-17 11:14:05+00:00
TBH I might be inclined to put up with the DRM if the Kindle reader was also usable for other things (PDFs, ebooks purchased from other vendors)

But the library management is broken/non existent

So it's not just that you can't read Kindle books on other devices, but the Kindle itself is pretty much useless for reading things you purchased from other stores

Even though it was cheap and 2nd hand, I regret buying this thing
by oytis | 2025-10-17 11:14:11+00:00
I'd argue transfer of services is not really an issue. People buying services from a foreign entity is a pretty fringe case, and most legitimate businesses will try to establish a local presence for that anyway.

Sovereign firewalls are mostly used by countries that have them for censorship and surveillance, and I think letting governments use a pretext of digital services being able to avoid tolls and taxes to establish such a powerful tool would be a huge mistake.
by int_19h | 2025-10-17 11:14:26+00:00
In this case it is actually relevant. The ability to draw a pelican on a bicycle correctly depends a great deal on understanding not only what both look like in general, but on the spatial relationships between the various objects and their parts. Models that can draw this kind of thing better also tend to be better at tasks that require understanding of how things go together and interact in 3D space.
by noir_lord | 2025-10-17 11:15:11+00:00
Aye, I suspect under perfect conditions, one write, optimal storage conditions it'll be more than the 30 years some tapes are specced for.

I find it entertaining that high speed magnetic tape - a technology in the consumer space that is basically obsolete is still one of the optimal solutions for "I have hundreds of terabytes of data I need to be able to read in 15 years".
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-17 11:15:31+00:00
> It's the government that wants unchecked power, no matter what.

"The Government" is not a entity with "wants" or "needs", it's a collection of people with their own motivations. Motivations that usually end up being about power or money, or a combination, because the people who end up in the government are capitalists.

> why it was the 2nd most important thing to those

I mean, not really? The 2nd amendment includes stuff that they didn't even think of originally when creating the constitution, so just because it was the second amendment that went through, doesn't mean it was "the 2nd most important thing", the most important things are the original articles in the constitution, so the amendments must start ranking at 8th place or something like that, 2nd amendment ends up being the 9th most important thing if we were to rank things like you did, but honestly.
by xnavra50 | 2025-10-17 11:15:59+00:00
If a migration of breaking changes seems like a lot of work for you then I suppose that rolling your own framework won't be any better.

With the framework, you have structure. It might not be the best structure to use, but you have one. React lasted really long and is still works today.

Going without framework works if:

- you have a really small project

- you are so advanced developer or have specific use-case that using a framework creates more burden than time saving

- you are creating something so valuable that reimplementing it yourself is worth it

I think that regular website will bleed via maintenance costs in the long-run if you don't use a framework. Instead of paved road with framework migration you would be fixing and debugging bugs in your framework/codebase.
by kachapopopow | 2025-10-17 11:16:47+00:00
This is pretty bad still, with colocation you can get the costs down to 1/100th with good deals at datacenters especially ones that are struggling to attract customers. Most of your bill is power so if you rack efficiency optimized servers you can have a lot of compute for very cheap.

In terms of networking many offer no-headache solutions with some kind of transit blend.

<rant>I recently had to switch away from hetzner due to random dhclient failures causing connectivity loss once ip's expired, complete failure of the loadbalancer - stopped forwarding traffic for around 6 hours and the worst part is that there was no acknoledgement from hetzner about any of these issues so at some point I was going insane over trying to find what is the issue when in the end it was hetzner. (US VA region)
by pndy | 2025-10-17 11:18:15+00:00
Probably because people tend to think in extremes and "1984" shows the ultimate dystopian world set around totalitarian regime, mass invigilation with no place for individuality. "Brave New World" is indeed much closer to our real world but honestly, I think our reality seems to be heading in a direction where we'll see more of both novels in it.

I recommend reading both and Eugene Zamiatin's "We" novel which most likely inspired both Orwell and Huxley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)?useskin=vector
by jedisct1 | 2025-10-17 11:19:20+00:00
Of course.

A dedicated server or VPS from OVH, Hetzner, Scaleway, etc., or even Docker containers on Koyeb, will give you way more bang for your buck.

Call me a dinosaur, but I’ve never used any of the big cloud providers like AWS. They’re super expensive, and it’s hard to know what you’ll actually end up paying at the end of the month.
by chipsrafferty | 2025-10-17 11:19:26+00:00
I don't think it's that people want a certain nostalgic UI. It's that most of these applications are built by volunteers, for free, and are already understaffed. From an individual's perspective, it's much more important, and possible, to fix bug #155 or implement a new feature than to try to overhaul the entire UI. In order to do that, you'd have to get everyone on board and everyone would have to agree with the changes. A lot of projects are too flat as organizations for this to go smoothly.
by tefkah | 2025-10-17 11:20:10+00:00
i didn’t take the advice as “ask your doctor whether this is a good idea” (I also doubt the average GP’s ability to say anything useful about nutrition) but more as “keep your doctor in the loop of doing a weird diet and do regular check-ups for obvious markers like cholesterol”

i’d qualify eating 700 eggs as weird enough to warrant keeping your dr in the loop.
by shrubble | 2025-10-17 11:20:10+00:00
When you take this info and combine it with the ability of Wifi7 routers to "see" where people are in their house, you realize that the recent demo of Anduril's helmet that gives an information display that the soldier/cop wearing it can use to "see who is in the house" or "see around corners" etc. is not sci-fi but instead, something they can do today.
I wanted to work on a newsletter but I realized I was building a cage around it
by yuwahhid | 2025-10-17 11:20:16+00:00
I'm about to launch a newsletter and I'm stuck picking the right platform.

On one hand, the simplicity of something like Substack is tempting. I just want to focus on writing.

But if I go that route, every post will be invisible to Google, trapped inside their ecosystem. I'll be renting my audience on someone else's land.

The alternative is a WordPress blog, but wrestling with plugins and updates on top of writing every week feels overwhelming.

For those of you who have been down this road:

1. If you were starting over today, what would you do? 2. Is the discoverability problem on closed platforms as bad as I'm imagining, or am I overthinking it?
by akarshc | 2025-10-17 11:20:51+00:00
That’s fair, Rails + Hotwire is excellent for building fast MVPs. What really set Phoenix apart for me was the built-in real-time layer (via channels), the BEAM’s fault tolerance and concurrency, and how effortlessly it scales with background jobs, PubSub, and LiveView without needing extra services. Rails can absolutely do all that, but Phoenix gives you those capabilities natively with far less setup and overhead. I appreciate your feedback, I’ll definitely try to add more details in the next one. Also, I’m not implying Phoenix is better than Rails or Laravel.
by jraph | 2025-10-17 11:21:03+00:00
Yep, the Sybase Open Watcom Public License. The OSI considers this license open source [1], the FSF and major distros don't [2], including Fedora [3] and Debian [4].

It is notably used by the Open Watcom C compiler, which is used to compile VirtualBox's BIOS. Which is the reason why you won't find VirtualBox in most distros, including Debian.

The reason the FSF and major distros don't consider it free is that there are cases where you can't use it privately without releasing your modifications. The license doesn't pass Debian's Desert Island test [5]:

> Imagine a castaway on a desert island with a solar-powered computer. This would make it impossible to fulfill any requirement to make changes publicly available or to send patches to some particular place. This holds even if such requirements are only upon request, as the castaway might be able to receive messages but be unable to send them. To be free, software must be modifiable by this unfortunate castaway, who must also be able to legally share modifications with friends on the island.

I don't have an example of a license that the FSF / GNU project considers free and that the OSI doesn't consider open source.

[1] https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:Watcom-1.0

[2] https://opensource.org/license/sybase-php

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybase_Open_Watcom_Public_Lice...

[4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=376431

> Oops... it looks like OSI smoked something especially bad this time, I'm afraid. This license looks like someone took his time to collect every single problematic clause.

[5] https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html#desert_island
by e12e | 2025-10-17 11:21:08+00:00
Very interesting and detailed article!

I'd love to hear more about how you use terraform and helm together.

Currently our major friction in ops is using tofu (terraform) to manage K8s resources. Avoiding yaml is great - but both terraform and K8s maintaining state makes the deployment of helm from terraform feel fragile; and vice-versa depending on helm directly in a mostly terraform setup also feels fragile.
by sergioisidoro | 2025-10-17 11:21:20+00:00
I really liked Hetzner but I got burned by one issue. I had some personal projects running there and the payment method failed. Automated email communications also failed among so much spam and email notifications I receive, and when I noticed the problem they had wiped all my data without possibility of recovery.

It was a wake up moment for me about keeping billing in shape, but also made me understand that a cloud provider is as good as their support and communications when things go south. Like an automated SMS would be great before you destroy my entire work. But because they are so cheap, they probably can't do that for every 100$/month account.

I've had similar issues with AWS, but they will have much friendlier grace periods.
by codethief | 2025-10-17 11:22:04+00:00
> I would love to know if they are any north-american (particularly canadian) companies that can compete with price and the quality of service like Hetzner

FWIW, Hetzner has two data centers in the US, in case you're just looking for "Hetzner quality but in the US", not for "American/Canadian companies similar to Hetzner".
by jcarrano | 2025-10-17 11:22:47+00:00
A big problem with modern interfaces is that they are too dynamic, with widgets appearing and disappearing or changing size, etc. Compare that with the old DOS console or Windows 9x (and later too) where the layout was fixed and inactive widgets were grayed out. There's an increased cognitive load from having to find where the information is displayed. On mobile I often press the wrong button because the UI decided in a split second to change the number of buttons in a row and move what's below my finger.

A spreadsheet-like interface shows a lot of information, but it is not overwhelming because it stays fixed, so after using the software a couple of times you can remember where things are.
by asim | 2025-10-17 11:24:07+00:00
So I just started doing this using LLM embeddings for semantic search. It actually works quite well. You index every piece of data with metadata and it's content. Then you choose specific metadata fields you might want to correlate on e.g knowing two pieces of data are of type "product" or "design" and then the query will return the related items. OpenAI gets used for turning your query into what can then be used against your index which is basically a vector dB. If you are using Go then chromem-go does this quite easily and has examples.
by amiga386 | 2025-10-17 11:25:02+00:00
Which part of the text "You can get DeCSS from http://lemuria.org/~tom/DeCSS/" on a website constitutes distribution of "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof" ?

Judge Kaplan very likely went beyond what the law allows, in issuing the injunction against Eric Corley for even _adding a hyperlink_ to the DeCSS code on his website.

However, we don't know this for sure, because Corley did not take this to the Supreme Court. There is a chance that the SCOTUS would have accepted the case, and found that neither a hyperlink to computer source code, nor computer source code itself, constitutes "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof"... but at the same time, maybe they wouldn't accept it, and maybe they would but it'd cost a lot of money Corley didn't have to see the case through. So who knows? Corley seemed satisfied enough that, even though he was personally enjoined from linking to DeCSS, it nonetheless spread like wildfire all over the world, and DVDs were effectively copyable from that day forward.
by jlokier | 2025-10-17 11:26:08+00:00
I agree, and I've done similar to this for mobile banking successfully. This is the way :)

However, I expect at some point they'll insist on biometric authentication.

That'd exclude people who can't use the biometrics. But one bank (Revolut) told me that they're dropping customers who don't have a passport or driving license in the UK, for KYC reasons that they said they were required to follow, despite there being a large number of people without either.

So I expect banks to have no problem excluding <x% of people in a discriminatory way, if they can find an excuse, eventually.
by roenxi | 2025-10-17 11:26:10+00:00
It is a safe starting point that my comments are my opinion. If I'm presenting a fact or someone else's opinion I usually hyperlink it with square brackets.

> Then why are they not paid by the government?

They're not government propagandists. They're more an outcrop of the military-industrial complex propaganda and generally associated with the neocons from what I've seen. From the outside this looks like it might be a turf war between the Trumpists and the Neocons, but it is hard to be sure.

> You are just parroting the usual 'luegenpresse' shit.

If they put more effort into intellectually honest reporting of what the US military is doing it'd be harder to make the epithet stick. Always an option; a bunch of journalists do actually manage it. Just not so many of the ones literally sitting with the military. Someone like Snowden may well have walked past a lot of journalists at his day job, but I don't think any of them were leaking the large and credibly illegal government spying program.
by candiddevmike | 2025-10-17 11:26:28+00:00
IMO, JavaScript frontends have three components:

- Routing

- State

- Rendering

A lot of frameworks try to cover all three of these, and that's where you tend to see a lot of feature churn. I would recommend picking a rendering library (like react) and writing your own routing and state library, even if it's just a light abstraction on top of an existing library. This will make it way easier to upgrade or move in the future, as you will control the API.
by austin-cheney | 2025-10-17 11:26:29+00:00
The reasons I avoid large frameworks like React, Angular, Vue, and even jQuery is that they are aren't necessary. They are code decoration that slows things down. Here is what you can expect without these:

* greater flexibility

* faster execution, My current application produces a large single page application that fully renders visually and executes state restoration in about 105ms localhost or under 200ms across a network

* faster maintenance, I can do massive refactors that touch most files in the application in about 2 hours thanks to thorough use of TypeScript interface definitions

---

Here is how I do it:

1. Just start building your application. Realize that for any significant application the front end UI is probably only about 20% of the application code, or less.

2. Start the UI by writing static HTML. Reserve JavaScript, in the browser, only for handling events and state restoration and execute state restoration only on page load.

3. I prefer to use WebSockets over HTTP as much as possible for absolutely everything I can get away with. WebSockets are full-duplex, where HTTP is not, and have far less overhead. That will substantially reduce the complexity around messaging in and out of the web browser.

4. Everything after that is just execution, planning, refactoring, and feature addition.

5. You can do absolutely all of it in TypeScript now without any compile step. Node.js now executes TypeScript directly, but the browser does not. To solve for the web browser just include the browser code into your Node application using ES6 module import. If the imported code is a function you can convert it directly into a string for transport, and otherwise use JSON.stringify for objects/arrays.
by normie3000 | 2025-10-17 11:26:35+00:00
This is one key draw to Big Cloud and especially PaaS and managed SQL for me (and dev teams I advise).

Not having an ops background I am nervous about:

* database backup+restore * applying security patches on time (at OS and runtime levels) * other security issues like making sure access to prod machines is restricted correctly, access is logged, ports are locked down, abnormal access patterns are detected * DoS and similar protections are not my responsibility

It feels like picking a popular cloud provider gives a lot of cover for these things - sometimes technically, and otherwise at least politically...
by ta1243 | 2025-10-17 11:27:03+00:00
For self hosted / cohosting my own kit, I buy refurbed servers from https://www.etb-tech.com/ because I can spec exactly what I want and see how the cost varies, what the delivery time is, etc.

Years ago Broadberry has a similar thing with Supermicro, but not any more. You have to talk to a sales person about how they can rip you off. Then they don't give you what you specced anyway -- I spec 8x8G sticks of ram, they provide 2x32G etc.
by bloomca | 2025-10-17 11:27:18+00:00
It is not that hard, DOM model is amazing, that's why there are so many frontend frameworks in the first place.

However, you'll inevitably end up with your own after some time. Even if you try your best to stay away from it, you'll need abstractions for:

- components and lifecycle - some sort of templating - connecting your app's data and components

But you can have minimal layers for that.
by jefozabuss | 2025-10-17 11:27:39+00:00
While it does not use a commonly used "framework" it uses many libraries and likely has its own custom framework.

In the past we used http://microjs.com/ and similar to find small libs to work with when we threw together marketing websites, not sure how maintained that list is nowadays but the idea is that you can make websites like lego, sometimes you don't need a whole box of Eiffel tower to make a little tree.

If your functionality is well thought out and not super complicated, don't have 10s or 100s of devs on the same project then working without a well known framework could make sense, otherwise there can be steeper learning curve when onboarding new devs, scope creep / bloat, etc that will likely cause issues down the road.

To learn about this you could try to replicate for example the mentioned Obsidian by yourself and research solutions for all the issues you run into, e.g. minimal routing, custom view renders, reactivity, performance, etc.