MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cisophrene | 2025-10-17 10:48:07+00:00
Dedicated servers on a host like Hetzer and OVH surely beats any virtualization based cloud offering on price and performance. The tradeoff is availability. It's a great choice for entities that are optimizing on cost, but not a great choice if your business cannot tolerate downtime.

A good example is a the big lichess outage from last year [1]. Lichess is a non-profit, and also must serve a huge user base. Given their financials, they have to go the cheap dedicated server route (they host on OVH). They publish an Excel sheet somewhere with every resources they use to run the services and last year, I had fun calculating how much it would cost them if they were using an hyperscaler cloud offering instead. I don't remember exactly but it was 5 or 6x the price they currently pay OVH.

The downside, is that when you have an outage, your stuff is tied to physical servers and they can't easily be migrated, when cloud provider on the opposite can easily move around your workload. In the case of Lichess outage, it was some network device they had no control of that went bad, and lichess was down until OVH could fix it, that is many hours.

So, yes you get a great deal, but for a lot of businesses, uptime is more important than cost optimization and the physicality of dedicated servers is actually a serious liability.

[1]: https://lichess.org/@/Lichess/blog/post-mortem-of-our-longes...
by rkomorn | 2025-10-17 10:48:13+00:00
I've bought multiple laptops that either shipped with Linux or were widely recognized as Linux-friendly.

They all functioned better (hardware support wise) with Windows than Linux.

I don't buy that it's just an issue of informing the general public.

The products need to be better.

And yes, I'm very familiar with all the anecdotes about how people's relatives have never been happier since they switched them over to Linux.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-17 10:48:19+00:00
Yeah, their support, for better or worse, is really technical and you need to send all the evidence of any faults to convince them. But when I've had random issues happening, I've sent them all the troubleshooting and evidence I came across, and a couple of hours later they had provisioned a new host for me with the same specs.

And based on our different experiences, the quality of care you receive could differ too :)
by Topfi | 2025-10-17 10:48:29+00:00
It goes back to Sparks of AGI [0] unless I am mistaken. Can recommend the talk, one that has stayed in the back of my mind since I first saw it two years ago. Personally, still have major reservations about throwing claims of intelligence or understanding around, but I do agree that SVG code generation can be a very effective source to get a quick and easy to present understanding of a models ability to output code with a rather open ended prompt that needs a high degree of coherence and were a lot of layers depend/build on each other.

Helps that these are eye catching (literally as the output is visual) and easy to grasp. Same reason a lot of hype is created around the web desktops.

[0] https://youtu.be/qbIk7-JPB2c?si=_TNRrxN-_5FOlfy5&t=1342
by netdevphoenix | 2025-10-17 10:49:28+00:00
> On the web, if your server is compromised it's game over, even if the publisher is not malicious. In app stores, you have some guarantee that the code that ends up on your device is what the publisher intended to ship (basically signed packages)

Not quite. It is possible for an account to be taken over or bought and a new update deployed. It is also possible for the server the app gets its data from to be taken over just like in your example and serve you fake data to make you regurgitate whatever data the malicious actor wants
by endymion-light | 2025-10-17 10:49:28+00:00
It's really dismissive and frankly quite ignorant to have an attitude that just because a product doesn't have a massive AWS bill it's a toy project.

It's a rotten attitude, and judging a projects worth by an AWS bill is a very poor comparator. I could spin up a massive aws bill doing some pointless machine learning workloads, is that suddenly a valid project in your eyes?
by owenversteeg | 2025-10-17 10:49:34+00:00
That thread is illuminating. I see two serious problems.

- - -

First, the quality of a modern American education.

Let's assume 2000sqft house with 8.5ft ceilings = 17k cu ft or ~500 m3, 1-0.1 μmol/mol ozone produces irritation to respiratory passages, so we need 1-0.1g total ozone left in 500m3 of house.

"170g of a highly reactive gas is generated over two days in a house full of organic materials. The windows are open and the heat is on; after what time will less than 0.1g gas remain?"

Make virtually _any_ assumptions and the answer could not possibly be longer than "minutes."

Mind you, I used very generous numbers and assumptions here. Mexico City averages over 0.1 μmol/mol and seconds of Mexico City air does not "totally destroy" anyone's lungs or cause you to cough up green phlegm.

In other words, with a few seconds of basic math and two basic facts about ozone it is trivial to see that the ozone is effectively gone. This guy has a university biochem degree and experience with organic synthesis? He's on there calling for an "atmospheric chemist" and thinking up ideas to fill the entire house with aerosolized cooking oil (!?!?!?) What is it that makes so many people today entirely incapable of critical thinking? Mind you, this guy literally once had a professor give him a hands-on demonstration of the rapid reaction of ozone - the sort of hint you would give if a student somehow failed the above question - and he still somehow couldn't get it after a week of Googling and reading "the literature."

How do we teach critical thinking?

- - -

Second, the modern synthetic chemicals we live with.

Ozone is always present around us, sometimes at quite high concentrations, depending on your environment. Obviously (... perhaps not always too obviously ...) it is always reacting around us. Most people own hundreds to thousands of pounds of modern synthetic materials. Innovative new chemistries. Formulas changed yearly. Those things are not static, they are off-gassing, they are reacting, they are releasing compounds unknown into the air we breathe. Just your mattress alone might have a hundred pounds of polyurethane foam, the precise composition of which is unknown to any one individual. Perhaps it is enclosed in a polyester cover, and then likely one treated with a fire retardant. Perhaps the corner protectors are recycled plastic of unknown origin, and then maybe they contain an odor-reducing additive. How do all these things react with the air around us? How do they interact with each other? I suspect that when we eventually study this better we are not going to like what we find - but for now, why do we allow plastics manufacturers to use us all as guinea pigs?
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-10-17 10:49:36+00:00
> They are a joint venture with VIA which acquired most of Cyrix in 1999

FYI: Zhaoxin (兆芯) [1] is a Joint Venture between VIA Technologies (威盛電子) and the Shanghai Municipal Government. Zhaoxin is mentioned in the article:

"As pointed out in the Phoronix Forums, it could be Zhaoxin. But as they have contributed GCC patches, Glibc patches, Linux kernel patches, etc, over the years it's not clear why they would go unnamed or have to relay the message via Ludloff rather than their prior direct mailing list posts."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhaoxin
by eric_khun | 2025-10-17 10:50:04+00:00
AWS won't raise the limits on our new account (we're stuck at 1GB RAM in Lightsail after 2 months, even though we need to launch this month).

Looking at Hetzner or Vultr as alternatives. A few folks mentioned me Infomaniak has great service and uptime, but I haven't heard much about them otherwise.

Anyone used Infomaniak in production? How do they compare to Hetzner/Vultr?
by refurb | 2025-10-17 10:50:16+00:00
It’s not like Cambodia was a stable democracy before the bombings.

The Khmer Rouge and other opposition groups were fighting the government in an armed conflict since 1950. The Khmer Rouge controlled almost half of Cambodia’s territory 10 years before the bombing.

In the grand scheme of Cambodias civil war, the US bombing didn’t play that big a role at all.
by jlokier | 2025-10-17 10:50:17+00:00
> You check your banking apps multiple times each day with the frequency and unpredictability expected from messaging apps?

I almost do, yes. Life's complicated, I use several bank and credit card services a day. I'm not at home at suitable times for my banking needs. And payments for purchases sometimes require confirmation in real time via phone app.

> If not that frequently or unpredictably then you could just plan to use your laptop for banking some time during the day.

I used to do that years ago back when it was an option.. But these days, 3 banks I use (two for business) require using their mobile app to authenticate login on a laptop browser. There's no other option.

One of the card apps I have to use often won't even run when Android developer mode is enabled, which is quite annoying.
by mihaaly | 2025-10-17 10:50:40+00:00
I already have problem with negligent people using products like Ring that is to surveil anyone around without control, with uncontrollable and unreliable level of standard handling collected data (no high hopes here). But when I find it very very hard and limited purchasing products that cannot spy on me - special mention here for smart phones and cars - that makes me mad to the next level. Even for the elevated level privacy concious folks the car and the smart phone bringing hostility for your private life is getting harder and harder to avoid. Not having the suitable time to do the tedious investigations and costly trials into the reliability of products with low surveillance risks, not to mention the constant need of keeping yourself up do date to everything involved in this regard! We need to live our life, cannot spend it on constant workarounds, hacks, and very reasonable paranoia. When logging into essential services are MANDATING the use of smart phones (i.e. MFA, but own apps sometimes, requiring specific vendors!!), not to mention the need of getting from A to B the way required (goods, children, time limits, navigation), but cannot procure a solution that will not expose you to adverse agents or even criminals (those getting in and out of systems nowadays like they live there) that makes me really really mad! This society is shit. I cannot do it, but feel the highly increasing need for becoming the real life Captain Fantastic [1].

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3553976/
Ask HN: How does one build large front end apps without a framework like React?
by thepianodan | 2025-10-17 10:50:55+00:00
I had a mind-blown-moment when I learnt that Obsidian was built without any frontend JS framework. ( https://forum.obsidian.md/t/what-framework-did-the-developer-use-to-create-obsidian-desktop-application/30724/11 )

The benefits, I can see.

JS frameworks move really quickly, and when we're working on a large, long-term project, it sucks when big breaking changes are introduced after only a couple of years. Sticking to slow-moving web standards (which are quite mature by now) increases the longevity of a project. And the stability also means that more time is spent on delivering features, rather than on fixing compatibility issues. There is also the benefit of independence. The project's success is not tied to the framework's success. And it also makes the project more secure, from supply chain attacks and such. Because there is no "abstraction layer" of a framework, you also have greater control over your project, and can make performance optimizations at a lower level. I feel not using a framework can even make us a better developer. Because we know more of what's going on.

There are benefits to using frameworks too, I'm not here to challenge that.

But this alternative of using none... it seems rarely talked about. I want to learn more about building large (preferably web-based) software projects with few dependencies.

Do you have any suggestions on how to learn more about it? Are there any open source projects you know which are built this way? It needs to be large, complex, app-like, and browser based. I'm more interested in the frontend side.

Thank you!
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-17 10:51:06+00:00
> It's a great choice for entities that are optimizing on cost, but not a great choice if your business cannot tolerate downtime.

Even hosting double of everything when you're doing dedicated servers will let you have cheaper monthly bills, compared to the same performance/$ you could get with AWS or whatever.

But Hetzner does seem a bit worse than other providers in that they have random failures in their own infrastructure, so you do need to take care if you wanna avoid downtime. I'm guessing that's how they can keep the prices so low.

> is that when you have an outage, your stuff is tied to physical servers and they can't easily be migrated

I think that's a problem in your design/architecture, if you don't have backups that live outside the actual servers you wanna migrate away from, or at least replicate the data to some network drive you can easily attach to a new instance in an instant.
by saubeidl | 2025-10-17 10:51:23+00:00
Immigrants with no criminal record now largest group in ICE detention: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/immigrants-c...

ICE Agents Rappel from Helicopter in Overnight Chicago Raid, Dragging Kids from Beds to U-Hauls: https://people.com/ice-agents-overnight-chicago-raid-1182308...

Feds detain WGN-TV staffer, slam into resident’s car in Lincoln Square: https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/10/10/feds-arr...

We Found That More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days: https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-dhs-american-...

Videos of violent ICE interactions flood social media: https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/ice-agents-violent-...
by jasonvorhe | 2025-10-17 10:51:23+00:00
I've had several doctors, some with a general approach and some more specialized on fitness and nutrition regarding questions about vegan/vegetarian/OMAD/intermittent fasting and I can't remember them being in agreement on anything. Felt like talking with an overly confident LLM more often than I'd like. Might be different in other countries but in Germany I'll just stick with trial and error and be my own doctor until I break a bone or something. Pairing multiple LLMs for these questions brought great results though, as long as you dedicate the time to research and make sure you're not just blindly following instructions you don't understand yourself. My trust in Western medicine has suffered already around 2016-2017 but ever since 2020, it's obvious this system isn't working at all.
by skerit | 2025-10-17 10:52:01+00:00
Gemini might be a good model, it is _incredibly_ shit in tool calls and it has this incredibly tendency to multishot itself to death. When using their own gemini-cli tool, it's impossible to take it seriously, it's that bad.

For example:

If it makes a mistake, it'll keep on making the exact same mistake, and it'll act all cute like "Oh no, look at the mess I'm making". Some people say this is just a side effect of long contexts degrading performance, but it can happen even when 98% of the context is unused.

I'm also using a Ghidra MCP server to decompile some binaries. Claude is great with this. It really gets it and is able to use it properly. Gemini? Just one or two tool calls, and it'll start repeating the output of the tool calls for some reason.

Gemini also often isn't able to properly call the MCP tools. It just outputs the tool call as JSON text to the user.

Gemini-cli isn't even able to properly resume previous chat sessions. You have to actively save chats in order to resume them. Being able to simply resume the previous conversation using a flag like `--resume` or `--continue` has been a feature request since day one, and similar issues keep popping up weekly on the Github issue list. There are even multiple pull requests for this feature, but it's like nobody over there gives a damn.
by tialaramex | 2025-10-17 10:52:07+00:00
You were correct about the lack of billion dollar mistake in Zig, once I'd decided to list some "C replacement" languages not just C and C++ I should have either checked they all make exactly this mistake (Odin does, Zig does not) or removed that part of my comment.

However actually in practice for this nVidia bug Zig's "defer" is just irrelevant, which is why nVidia's "fix" doesn't attempt the most similar C equivalent strategy and instead now performs a heap allocation (and thus free) on the happy path.

There's a kernel Oops, likely in someone else's code. When that happens our stack goes away. In Rust they can (I don't happen to know if they do in Rust for Linux but it is commonly used in some types of application) recover from disasters and unwind the stack before it's gone, such as removing the threadState from that global state. In Zig that's prohibited by the language design, all panics are fatal.
by a-ungurianu | 2025-10-17 10:52:21+00:00
In interesting implementation of this is the Grafana Flow plugin: https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/andrewbmchugh-flow-panel...

This lets you do pretty much the same thing in the post above, but have the colors tied to Grafana metrics. It's been great to make very intuitive dashboards, especially building dependency graphs and annotating them with live data.
by master_crab | 2025-10-17 10:52:26+00:00
"your margin is my opportunity"

Yup, that phrase was running through my head as I skimmed the comments.

To that, an interesting observation I’ve made is that their frequency for service price cuts have dropped in the past several years. And the instances of price increases have started to trickle in (like the public IP cost).

If core compute and network keep getting cheaper faster than inflation, and they never drop their prices (or drop them by less relatively) the margins are growing.
by pwmtr | 2025-10-17 10:53:58+00:00
We’ve been seeing the same trend. Lots of teams moving to Hetzner for the price/performance, but then realizing they have to rebuild all the Postgres ops pieces (backups, failover, monitoring, etc.).

We ended up building a managed Postgres that runs directly on Hetzner. Same setup, but with HA, backups, and PITR handled for you. It’s open-source, runs close to the metal, and avoids the egress/I/O gotchas you get on AWS.

If anyone’s curious, I added here are some notes about our take [1], [2]. Always happy to talk about it if you have any questions.

[1] https://www.ubicloud.com/blog/difference-between-running-pos... [2] https://www.ubicloud.com/use-cases/postgresql
by icameron | 2025-10-17 10:54:11+00:00
It’s voluntary, and many of us are happy to contribute our livers if we are in the unlikely scenario of being in a vegetative state so that it can help a recipient. I don’t think the recipients estate is financially enriched by the procedure- in fact the opposite. I’m no Christian but isn’t that something Jesus would do? He’d give his earthy body obviously, and certainly not for financial incentive.
by cb321 | 2025-10-17 10:54:19+00:00
I am not sure you'll be satisfied but this article by mhoye has a section on Watson and typewriters that seems relevant and is fun to read regardless: https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/10/23/80x25/

Parenthetically, I think much discussion around this neglects the constraints / true ultimate causes of human eye resolving power (in minutes of arc not DPI|millimeters) and cognitive "line tracking" (think narrow newspaper columns). I.e., they are from the perspective of device manufacturers / producers not receiving brains / consumers. At least in theory, the former is trying to please the latter after all, but eyes/brains haven't really evolved much in this respect since antiquity / the dawn of writing. This is just a pet peeve of mine that maybe you share, and clearly in the realm of 2x..4x not few% and so not on track with your question like the article I linked :-) TLDR - while a "standard viewing distance" is good enough for eye charts, I guess it's too complicated for "marketing hardware" and it's all too easy to get caught up in manufacturer framing.
by delaminator | 2025-10-17 10:54:51+00:00
Yeah, I've done this just now.

I installed ImageMagik on Windows.

Created a ".claude/skills/Image Files/" folder

Put an empty SKILLS.md file in it

and told Claude Code to fill in the SKILLS.md file itself with the path to the binaries.

and it created all the instructions itself including examples and troubleshooting

and in my project prompted

"@image.png is my base icon file, create all the .ico files for this project using your image skill"

and it all went smoothly
by mustache_kimono | 2025-10-17 10:55:43+00:00
> It's of course not ridiculous.

I have the feeling you're arguing against and about something I never said.

To clarify, I'll restate: "I believe Linus has even opined that any filesystem which was developed after Linux, whose developers are aware of Linux, could be considered a 'derived work'. [The view that any new filesystem, simply aware of, but created independent of, and after Linux, is a derived work of Linux] is of course ridiculous,..."

> It's why black box reverse engineering exists and is generally legal, while white box reverse engineering is generally illegal.

Oh, I agree a clean room implementation is generally the best legal practice. I am just not sure there are cases on point that always require a clean room implementation, because I am aware of cases which expressly don't require clean room implementations (see Sony v. Connectix and Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc). And, given the factual situation has also likely changed due to FOSS and the Internet, I am saying some of these questions are likely still open, even if you regard them as closed.
by bakugo | 2025-10-17 10:56:03+00:00
> and a couple of hours later they had provisioned a new host for me with the same specs.

To be fair, they probably would've done the same for me if I'd pushed the issue further, but after over a week of trying to diagnose the issue and convince them that it wasn't an problem with the hard drives (they said one of the drives was likely faulty and insisted on replacing it and having me resilver the zpool to see if it fixed the issue. spoiler: it didn't) I just gave up, disabled SIMD in ZFS and moved on.
by saalweachter | 2025-10-17 10:56:29+00:00
For Achilles tendonitis, I was told the following:

1. It's going to come and go for the rest of your life.

2. Just try to stay off it while it hurts; here's a couple of simple things to try when it's flaring up (eg, wear shoes or lifts with a > 1 inch difference between the heel and to) to reduce the pain. Don't worry about it when it's not hurting, feel free to keep running etc.

3. At some point it may stop going away; at that point there's some surgical interventions, but they all have mediocre outcomes so you don't want to try that unless you're out of options.

So far it's been five years of minor flare ups once or twice a year lasting a week or two at a time. Goes away without intervention, doesn't seem to be getting progressively worse or more frequent at this point.

There's another universe I'm living in where I tried some treatment for it, and now I swear by it, running off to get it every time I feel a twinge -- after all, that first round of tendonitis was terrible, I could barely walk, it took several weeks to recover, and all those subsequent flare ups only lasted a week or two, and I can usually hobble through them without too much trouble.
by foresterre | 2025-10-17 10:57:54+00:00
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari called the farming of animals by humans "Nature's biggest fraud", which I always found to be an apt description.

It makes me wonder if humans are the only animals who "farm" other animals in some way (not on the same scale as humans do of course).

At the same time, it makes me wonder, "is being a parasitic animal socially better or worse than animals who farm fellow animals" ;).