MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rolandog | 2025-11-26 09:12:28+00:00
I can't help but think of these wild and free (of regulation) markets as a capitalistic jungle of sorts: "These troll farms are the resting place of one of Capitalism's most resourceful predators: the Artificial Scarcity Hype Schemer. These capitalist pack hunters are cunning; they collaborate with the Treacherous Influencer to create what is known as an influencer-driven pump-and-dump trend scam. First, they use sophisticated techniques like algorithms to lead potential victims towards the Influencers who will help the Schemer to isolate, dazzle and confuse their prey. After the Influencer has gained their trust, the Schemer can swoop in and use strategies such as spambots, fake trends and disinformation in order to peer-pressure impressionable minds so they both get a chance at gnawing at the victims pockets. Having gotten their way, the cycle begins anew: the Influencer begins drawing future victims into a false sense of security, and the Schemer starts devising a ne w set of scams."
by mrtksn | 2025-11-26 09:13:24+00:00
IIRC, when the cloud services were taking over the argument was that it’s much cheaper to pay for the AWS than paying engineers to handle the servers. This was also a popular argument for running an unoptimized code(i.e. it’s much cheaper to run two servers instead of making your code twice as fast).

Since the industry has matured now, there must be a lot of opportunity to optimize code and run it on bare metal to make systems dramatically faster and dramatically cheaper.

If you think about it, the algorithms that we run to deliver products are actually not that complicated and most of the code is about accommodating developers with layers upon layers of abstraction.
by n4r9 | 2025-11-26 09:13:52+00:00
I suspect that this is really about liability. When AWS goes down you can just throw up your hands, everyone's in the same boat. If your own server goes down you worry that your customers doubt your competence.

It's actually kinda frustrating - as an industry we're accepting worse outcomes due to misperceptions. That's how the free market goes sometimes.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-11-26 09:14:10+00:00
I'm surprised that neither the author, nor any of the commenters mentioned Zen Browser (a Firefox fork), which is another decent alternative.

I'm also disappointed that the author chose Vivaldi, which uses Blink, and is therfore still influenced by Google (for instance, see how even Vivaldi ultimately succumbed to Manifest V3).

Using Blink isn't good for web diversity. Support the underdogs, boycott Blink.
by takeshi_sakamo | 2025-11-26 09:15:00+00:00
For context: ArcOS is not a prompt, not an agent, and not a persona.

It is an OS-level model of cognition: - executes reasoning deterministically - preserves user-specific cognitive identity - aligns every conclusion with the Value Core - uses natural language as executable code

The release includes: - Japanese source whitepaper - English technical translation - English optimized edition (ArcOS-EN) for international readers

The ultimate goal is to explore what a "cognitive OS" can become when it runs alongside humans as a second, stable reasoning system.

Happy to discuss design, implications, or limitations.
by KurSix | 2025-11-26 09:15:01+00:00
The chess analogy is fundamentally flawed. In chess you don't have to maintain your moves - you make a move, and it's done. In engineering code isn't the end of the game, it's the start of a liability.

Code is read 10x more often than it is written. A programmer's primary job isn't "making the computer do X," but "explaining to other programmers (and their future self) why the computer should do X." AI generates syntax, but it lacks intent.

Refusing to accept such code isn't snobbery or fear. It's a refusal to take ownership of an asset that has lost its documentation regarding provenance and meaning
by bzzzt | 2025-11-26 09:15:46+00:00
Doesn't really matter if you're using an old Spring version with the old Java version. Spring offers enterprise support for Spring framework 5 which still supports Java 8.

But organizations still using Java 8 will most likely use some kind of Java Enterprise application server with vendor support. IBM will support Websphere with Java 8 until at least 2030 and maybe longer if customers keep paying. I'd guess Oracle has a similar policy.
by spwa4 | 2025-11-26 09:16:29+00:00
Exactly. The whole promise behind cloud was "you don't need an ops team". Now go check for yourself if that's true: go to your favorite jobs portal and search for AWS, or to include Azure and Github sysadmins search for "devops engineer". And for laughs search for "IAM engineer", which is a job only about managing permissions for users (not deciding about permissions, JUST managing them and fixing problems, nothing more. And frankly, the cloud is to blame: figuring out correct permissions now requires teams of PhDs to do correctly on infuriating web interfaces. I used to think Active Directory permissions were bad. I was wrong. The job portals show: no corporate department should ever go without a team of IAM engineers who are totally not really sysadmins)

What do you get for this? A redundant database without support (because while AWS support really tries so hard to help that I feel bad saying this, they don't get time to debug stuff, and redundant databases are complicated whether or not you use the cloud). You also get S3 distributed storage, and serverless (which is kind of CGI, except using docker and AWS markups to make one of most efficient stateless ways to run code on the web really expensive). Btw: for all of these better open source versions are available as a helm chart, with effectively the same amount of support.

You can use vercel to get out from under this, but that only works for small companies' "I need a small website" needs. It cannot do the integration that any even medium sized company requires.

Oh, and you get Amazon TLA, which is another brilliant amazon invention: during the time it takes you to write a devops script Amazon TLA comes up with another three-letter AWS service that you now have to use, because one of the devs wants it on his resume, is 2x as expensive as anything else, doesn't solve any problem and you now have to learn. It's all about using AI for maximizing uselessness.

And you'll do all this on Amazon's patented 1994-styled webpages because even claude code doesn't understand the AWS CLI. And the GCP and Azure ones are somehow worse (their websites look a lot nicer though, I'll readily admit that. But they're not significantly more functional)

Conclusion: while cloud has changed the job of sysadmin somewhat, there is no real difference, other than a massive price increase. Cloud is now so expensive that, for a single month's cloud services, you can buy hardware and put it on your desk. As the youtube points out, even an 8GB M1 mac mini, even a chinese mini-pc with AMD, runs docker far better than the (now reduced to 2GB memory) standard cloud images.
by metalman | 2025-11-26 09:17:12+00:00
well put

another aspects is that security theater is always (absolutely), connected to privacy violations(share with our partners), and advertisng of things unrelated to the alleged sevice, that crowd out functionality. the issue is that the detrimental effects outwiegh any possible benifits to the point that the internet and technology are on the way to becoming liabilitys to users....and turning into personalised electrotechno drug
by austinjp | 2025-11-26 09:17:27+00:00
From the link:

"Color.io will be winding down over the coming weeks and the online service will fully shut down on December 31, 2025. Until then, everything will continue to run as usual, and Pro users will receive access to a downloadable offline version they can keep using indefinitely... I want to be transparent about why this is happening. Color.io isn’t shutting down because it's struggling. But after 10+ years of running everything alone, I’ve reached a point where I need to grow in ways that aren’t possible as a solo builder. I have an opportunity to work alongside a company whose products have shaped and inspired me, to work on creative tooling at a scale I could never reach on my own. This is an opportunity to work with people I admire, on tools that will reach far beyond what I could build alone."

I'm not a customer, I've never heard of color.io before. It looks like a professional product, and appears to have an audience. So I'm curious about why the owner isn't selling it or open-sourcing it. I appreciate the transparency in the post, but it seems an odd decision. I'm sure it's more complicated than I'm imagining.

Any more detail? Is color.io a competitor to the owner's new opportunity?
by jmaker | 2025-11-26 09:17:41+00:00
Absolutely. I believe what I wanted to convey is that there are trade-offs in every decision that you can make. Maybe that’s even the point of a decision in the first place.

This in turn means that you always have several options, and more importantly you can invent a new way to enjoy the experience you hope to get from that interaction at a café in your mind, maybe a scene from your past or from a movie, which you’re no longer as likely to experience on average.

That said, I’ve got a favorite café where I used to spend time frequently. But their service deteriorated. And the magic is gone. So I moved on with my expectations.

Back to the analogy with the hyperscalers. I had bad experience with Azure and GCP, I’ve experienced the trade-offs of DigitalOcean and Linode and Hetzner, and of running on-premises clusters. It turned out, I’m the most comfortable with the trade-offs that AWS imposes.
Show HN: How to Quickly and Free Remove TikTok Video Watermarks
by passioner | 2025-11-26 09:18:02+00:00
I love revisiting some of my favorite TikTok videos — they never fail to make me laugh. But the moving watermarks always get in the way.

I wanted a fast, free solution to clean them up. After some trial and error, I found an online tool that does exactly that: just paste or upload your video, click remove, and download — no login, no downloads, no hassle.
by qcnguy | 2025-11-26 09:18:56+00:00
https://x.com/MillennialWoes/status/1893134391322308918

Apparently "not a serious person" is the new insult of choice with you guys, huh. What a ridiculous reply.

Of course they should be cut. The slogan of the winning party for the last decade was America First. They ran on that platform. Broadcasting and teaching on a different continent isn't putting America First. There's your reason.

The insistence on not understanding obvious stuff is such a tiresome attribute.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-26 09:19:24+00:00
The more you try to look into the LLM internals, the more similarities you find. Humanlike concepts, language-invariant circuits, abstract thinking, world models.

Mechanistic interpretability is struggling, of course. But what it found in the last 5 years is still enough to dispel a lot of the "LLMs are merely X" and "LLMs can't Y" myths - if you are up to date on the relevant research.

It's not just the outputs. The process is somewhat similar too. LLMs and humans both implement abstract thinking of some kind - much like calculators and arithmometers both implement addition.
by wltr | 2025-11-26 09:19:33+00:00
And in my option is finally good enough for me to switch from macOS and to recommend Gnome to others. Not everyone likes that Gnome 2 (wasn’t bad, I must admit, but I don’t like it) and especially Gnome 3 was. I quite enjoy modern Gnome, and whilst there are some minor inconveniences I’d prefer being different, I can live with that for the sake of overall simplicity.
by hollowturtle | 2025-11-26 09:20:05+00:00
I sympathize with your comment and imagine the overflowing downvotes as soon you openly critic the web/css/javascript and their people doing the standard. I watched tons of videos and read a lot on mdn about css grid, I don't touch it for a while I need to go back at it again... After tables/floats/abs positioning eventually convoluted flex we should have stopped and review what the heck people were doing on w3c, it's artificial complexity we don't deserve that
by hn_throw2025 | 2025-11-26 09:20:06+00:00
I’m not in the US, and glad to no longer be in the EU.

My point is that there is zero chance of this unpopular legislation being repealed once the EU have forced it through.

I would rather take my chances in a sovereign parliamentary democracy. I know the UK has draconian anti privacy laws on the statute books and have retained a lot of EU rules by default. But we still cling to the belief that parliaments cannot bind the hands of future parliaments, and we expect manifestos to be published and debated prior to elections. A lot of this has been pushed to the background while the UK has been governed by incompetent untrustworthy technocrats cut from the same cloth as the Eurocrats they yearn to be, but a political tsunami is on the way. You can feel it. The globalist establishment will rage against it as ghastly Populism, but I see it as a renaissance of Democracy. It gives me hope that unpopular laws can be amended or repealed.
by myrmidon | 2025-11-26 09:20:44+00:00
Another limitation that I see right now is that for "economic impact" you want the things to have initiative and some agency, and there is well-justified hesitancy in providing that even where possible.

Having a bunch of smart developers that are not allowed to do anything on their own and have to be prompted for every single action is not too advantageous if everyone is human, either ;)
by qcnguy | 2025-11-26 09:20:51+00:00
> And if it is in Botswana, you have to then actually ask "what is this mission, and is this in the interests of the USA taxpayer?", which needs specialists.

Specialists in what? Asking whether something is in the interests of the taxpayer? Data analysis? If so, then such specialists would have to be found in an independent organization without conflicts of interest for any specific mission, aligned with the interests of the taxpayer, and they would need to be recruited from the part of the political spectrum that cares about waste in government. In other words, you'd need a group that looks like DOGE.
by Meekro | 2025-11-26 09:20:54+00:00
When you're a solo SaaS developer/company owner, the dedicated server option really shines. I get a 10x lower price and no downsides that I've ever seen.

"But are your database backups okay?" Yeah, I coded the backup.sh script and confirmed that it works. The daily job will kick up a warning if it ever fails to run.

"But don't you need to learn Linux stuff to configure it?" Yeah, but I already know that stuff, and even if I didn't, it's probably easier to learn than AWS's interfaces.

"But what if it breaks and you have to debug it?" Good luck debugging an AWS lambda job that won't run or something; your own hardware is way more transparent than someone else's cloud.

"But don't you need reproducible configurations checked into git?" I have a setup.sh script that starts with a vanilla Ubuntu LTS box, and transforms it into a fully-working setup with everything deployed. That's the reproducible config. When it's time to upgrade to the next LTS release (every 4 years or so), I just provision a new machine and run that script again. It'll probably fail on first try because some ubuntu package name changed slightly, but that's a 5-minute fix.

"But what about scaling?" One of my crazy-fast dedicated machines is equal to ~10 of your slow-ass VPSes. If my product is so successful that this isn't enough, that's a good problem to have. Maybe a second dedicated machine, plus a load balancer, would be enough? If my product gets so popular that I'm thinking about hundreds of dedicated machines, then hopefully I have a team to help me with that.
by whstl | 2025-11-26 09:20:56+00:00
> you need to have two servers on two locations for georedundancy

You also absolutely need this with EC2 instances, which is what the comparison was about. So no, it's not unfair.

If you're using an AWS service built on top of EC2, Fargate, or anything else, you WILL see the same costs (on top of the extremely expensive Ops engineer you hire to do it, of course).

> need to pay for the premises and their physical security, too [...] plus the electricity bill

...and all of this is included in the Hetzner service.

Once again comments conflating "dedicated server" with "co-location".
by briyishscigi | 2025-11-26 09:21:16+00:00
It took me 50 years, but I’ve finally started watching and rewatching classic and great old sci-fi, fantasy, thrillers, and just good TV like: Space 1999, Blake’s 7, Outer Limits, Twilight Zone, Doctor Who (even Disney+ specials), Jabberwocky, Darkstar (the beach ball- a classic!), Wild Wild West (especially first season), Amazing Stories, The Ray Bradbury Theater (Drew Barrymore was in it!), IT Crowd (the Internet sits atop Big Ben), Black Books (secure door), It Came From Outer Soace, The Magnetic Monster (which actually is about radiation and theoretical “unipolar magnetism” physics which I didn’t know was a real concern then), and others.
by MangoToupe | 2025-11-26 09:21:52+00:00
> Who cares what the intent was? The people who put it in the ground are dead, and so are their children, and their children. The only living people who care are the ones digging it up.

There are many conceptions of humanity that hold the dead in equal (or indeed greater) esteem than the living. Just because you consider the dead to have vanished does not mean others agree.
by modo_mario | 2025-11-26 09:22:08+00:00
Because it hasn't been in the places where it was measured adequately with a similar makeup. And typically it's not even close. You can find papers on this from the netherlands (look up borderless welfare state, university of amsterdam), denmark, etc Certain demographic historically brought in to work(morocco, etc) cost on average few hundreds of thousands. This mostly trough abysmal employment statistics (the majority of non eu migrant women here in brussels is neither working nor looking for work, among men it's still >30%) and lower income employment which also costs the country on average. And this is despite a whole hosts of internationals that come in for the higher paying jobs at the international companies, etc.
by qcnguy | 2025-11-26 09:23:16+00:00
There was just the longest federal shutdown in history exactly because the Republicans were trying to control healthcare spending. You can't claim they aren't trying to touch the big ticket items.

They theorize that the ICE funding will be net revenue positive in the end.

They've also done big tax rises (tariffs), again, partly to try and get the debt under control.

You can't claim DOGE is somehow inconsistent or they're chickening out of fights over spending. They are doing what they can within the party allocations the voters gave them.
by tiew9Vii | 2025-11-26 09:23:21+00:00
> When your cheap dedicated server goes down and your admin is on holiday and you have hundreds of angry customers calling you, you'll get it.

Or when you need to post on Hackernews to get support from your cloud provider as locked out of your account, being ignored and the only way to get access is try to create as much noise as possible it gets spotted.

Or your cloud provider wipes your account and you are a $135B pension fund [1]

Or your cloud portfolio is so big you need a "platform" team of multiple devops/developer staff to build wrappers around/package up your cloud provider for you and your platform team is now the bottleneck.

Cloud is useful but it's not as pain free as everyone says when comparing with managing your own, it still costs money and work. Having worked on several cloud transformations they've all cost more and taken more effort than expected. A large proportion have also been canned/postponed/re-evaluated due to cost/size/time/complexity.

Unless you are a big spender with dedicated technical account manager, your support is likely to be as bad as a no name budget VPS provider.

Both cloud and traditional hosting have their merits and place.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-acciden...
by whstl | 2025-11-26 09:23:47+00:00
I'm not calling anyone dumb. It is fine to not have experience with Hetzner or to have only with AWS. It's fine for someone to not know how to cook at home.

About people who work with it, I'm just alluding to the famous quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it".
by n4r9 | 2025-11-26 09:24:12+00:00
The point I'm making is that we don't see people dying from malnutrition because they generally end up in hospital rather than dying. However, I also just saw that the article I linked excludes children below the age of 18.

This article is not free to access but focuses on children: https://www.jandonline.org/article/S2212-2672(22)00315-X/abs...

It found around 6.4% of child hospital admissions were diagnosed with malnutrition in 2019.

This other article says there were around 1.6 million child hospital admissions in 2019, suggesting around 100k cases of malnutrition in hospital admissions: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10616761/

Some of that will be due to newborn feeding difficulties, e.g. babies with tongue-tie or a challenging latch. But most parents will usually find a way to feed their baby before it gets to the hospitalisation stage.
by oersted | 2025-11-26 09:24:14+00:00
That’s fair enough but that’s a luxury position, if costs are not concern to you then there’s not much point in discussing the merits of different methods to manage infrastructure efficiently.

And yes of course such costs are nothing if you are thinking of $300K just on a couple sysadmins. But this is just a bizarre bubble in a handful of small areas in the US and I am not sure how it can stay like that for much longer in this era of remote work.

We built a whole business with $100K in seed and a few government grants. I have worked with quite a few world-class senior engineers happily making 40K-70K.
by kshivendu | 2025-11-26 09:24:27+00:00
My article is an architecture breakdown of how Exa AI built web search that's better than Google — and what is the bare minimum cost to build web scale search today with napkin math.

Please check it out if you're curious about: - How modern AI search engines like Exa, Perplexity, and Parallel Web Systems operate under the hood. - Learning napkin math style estimation (technique popularized by legends like Jeff Dean) - How vector compression tricks like matryoshka embeddings + binary quantization change the economics of billion scale search

Please take my estimates with a grain of salt since my goal is to just get in the right ballpark. Also feel free to comment/DM if you see any wrong or suboptimal assumptions :)
by tarsinge | 2025-11-26 09:24:33+00:00
> The AI is useless crowd truly makes me scratch my head.

I think it's because, past autocomplete, for AI to be useful professionally you need to already have a lot of background and experience in what you are using it for, in addition to engineering and project management to keep the scope on track. While demos with agents are impressive in practice autonomy is not there they need strong guidance, so it only works as very smart assistant. What you are describing is very representative of this.

If you don't have that level of seniority then you'll struggle to get value from AI because it'll be hard to guide and keep on track, also spotting and navigating errors and wrong thinking paths. You cannot use it as an assistant, only takes what it says at face value, and given it'll randomly be wrong it makes it useless.
by RyanHamilton | 2025-11-26 09:24:44+00:00
I would agree it's both. Ideally we would make many games restricted access and most games games less addictive. At this stage the only viable plan I can think of is for parents to join a cult or cult like group where the parents are dedicated to restricted screen time and enforcing outdoor play. One parent alone can't make it happen. Maybe the quakers were onto something. :)