MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stacktrace | 2025-11-26 08:57:18+00:00
Exactly. AWS has its own quirks and frustrations, sure but at the end of the day, I’m not using AWS just for raw compute. I’m paying for the entire ecosystem around it: security and access management, S3, Lambda, networking, monitoring, reliability guarantees, and a hundred little things that quietly keep the lights on.

People can have different opinions on this, of course, but personally, if I have a choice, I'd rather not be juggling both product development and the infrastructure headaches that come with running everything myself. That trade-off isn’t worth it for me.
by seanhunter | 2025-11-26 08:57:49+00:00
As a concrete example, say I have a (very naive and bad) password-checker that works like this pseudocode:

> for i = 1 to len(real_password) { > if entered_password[i] != real_password[i] { > return FAILURE > } > } > > return SUCCESS

OK now an alert attacker with the ability to very accurately record the time it takes to check the password can determine the length at least of the real password, because the time complexity of this check is O(length of the real password), and they could also gradually determine the password itself because the check would take longer as the attacker got each successive character correct.

Taking this general idea and expanding it, there are lots of places where the timing of branches of code can leak information about some secret, so in cryptographic code in particular, it’s often beneficial to be able to ensure that two branches (the success and failure branches in the above) take exactly the same amount of time so the timing doesn’t leak information. So to fix the above you would probably want to do two things. Firstly set a boolean to failure and still continue the checking to ensure the “return failure quickly” problem doesn’t leak information and also change your password check to check against a fixed-width hash or something so the length of the password itself wasn’t a factor.

The problem is lots of performance optimizations (pipelining, branch prediction etc) work specifically against this goal- they aim to take branches quickly in the happy path of the code because normally that’s what you want to ensure optimal performance.

So say instead of the above I do

> bool status = SUCCESS > for i = 1 to hash_length { > if hash_of_entered_password[i] != hash_of_real_password[i] { > status = FAILURE > } > } > > return status

…I don’t want the optimizer to realize that when status becomes FAILURE it can never become SUCCESS again and the loop doesn’t do anything else so just return early. I want it to actually run the pointless comparison of the rest of the hash so the timing is exactly the same each time.

But now my check is constant time but I’ve shifted the burden onto the person who writes the hash function. That has to run in constant time or my check will once again leak. So in general people want the ability to tell the compiler that they want a particular piece of code to run in constant time. At the moment, in the general case I think you have to break into inline assembly to achieve this.
by CapricornNoble | 2025-11-26 08:57:57+00:00
I dunno, I would think AT LEAST Jackie Chan is a household name due to the Rush Hour movies, and for anyone who grew up watching Hong Kong action flicks, they'd probably also know Jet Li at least, and Donnie Yen, Michelle Yeoh, and maybe Bolo Yeung and Sammo Hung too.
by Antibabelic | 2025-11-26 08:58:47+00:00
They are doing "the same thing" only from the point of view of function, which only makes sense from the point of view of the thing utilizing this function (e.g. a clerical worker that needs to add numbers quickly).

Otherwise, if "the parts are all different, and the construction isn't even remotely similar", how can the thing they're doing be "the same"? More importantly, how is it possible to make useful inferences about one based on the other if that's the case?
by remus | 2025-11-26 09:00:04+00:00
Me too, but it's worth remembering that's not the case for everyone. Some people want to have a little chat with the person at the counter, sit down for 5 mins in the corner of the cafe and eat their croissant. 5 euro can be a good price if that's what you want, and it doesn't matter if the lidl croissant is free, it will still be disappointing to the person who wants the extras.
by jonathanstrange | 2025-11-26 09:00:22+00:00
This is always an unfair comparison because for any realistic comparison you need to have two servers on two locations for georedundancy and need to pay for the premises and their physical security, too. For example, you need to pay for security locks with access log and a commercial security company, or you have to pay for co-location in a datacenter.

When you add up all these costs plus the electricity bill, I wager that many cloud providers are on the cheaper side due to the economy of scale. I'd be interested in such a more detailed comparison for various locations / setups vs cloud providers.

What almost never goes into this discussion, however, is the expertise and infrastructure you lose when you put your servers into the cloud. Your own servers and their infrastructure are MOAT that can be sold as various products if needed. In contrast, relying on a cloud provider is mostly an additional dependency.
by tempestn | 2025-11-26 09:00:43+00:00
There's a distinction between just saying it's more expensive and saying it's slower at the same price. Compared to well spec'ed and administered dedicated servers, it's basically impossible to get the same performance from AWS (or other cloud services) at any price. Yes, there are advantages, scaling being the greatest one. But you won't get the same raw speed you can achieve with fast storage and processing in a single machine (or a tight network) through cloud services—probably at all, but certainly not for anywhere near the same price.

And if you are willing to pay, you can significantly over-provision dedicated servers, solving much of the scaling problem as well.
by zkmon | 2025-11-26 09:00:44+00:00
About the 1-to-1 mapping of elements across infinite sets: what guarantees us that this mapping operation can be extended to infinite sets?

I can say it can not be extended or applied, because the operation can not be "completed". This is not because it takes infinite time. It is because we can't define completion of the operation, even if it is a snapshot imagination.
by leibnitz27 | 2025-11-26 09:00:51+00:00
< disclaimer - I wrote CFR, which is one of the original set of 'modern' java decompilers >

Generic erasure is a giant pain in the rear. C# doesn't do this. You don't actually keep any information about generics in the bytecode, however some of the metadata is present. BUT IT COULD BE FULL OF LIES.

There's also a huge amount of syntactic sugar in later java versions - take for example switch expressions.

https://www.benf.org/other/cfr/switch_expressions.html

and OH MY GOD FINALLY

https://www.benf.org/other/cfr/finally.html
by peanut-walrus | 2025-11-26 09:01:13+00:00
It makes sense to think about price in the context of your business. If your entire infra cost is a rounding error on your balance sheet, of course you would pick the provider with the best features and availability guarantees (choose IBM/AWS). If your infra cost makes up a significant percentage of your operating expenses, you will start spending engineering effort to lower the cost.

That's why AWS can get away with charging the prices they do, even though it is expensive, for most companies it is not expensive enough to make it worth their while to look for cheaper alternatives.
by mgaunard | 2025-11-26 09:01:18+00:00
Elasticity is very expensive, in practice people only use it for one-off jobs, preferably using the cheaper unreliable "spot" instances (meaning the job must support being partially re-run to recover, which implies a complex job splitting and batching platform).

For traditional, always-on servers, you should reserve them for 3 years. You still have the ability to scale up, just not down. You can always go hybrid if you don't know what your baseline usage is.
by KurSix | 2025-11-26 09:01:28+00:00
This is a perfect real-world illustration of Brandolini's law: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

The guy spent 5 minutes prompting, while Oсaml maintainers spent hours of their time politely dissecting the mess. Open Source will lose this war unless it changes the rules of engagement for contributions
by jmaker | 2025-11-26 09:01:46+00:00
I’ve come to believe that such comparisons usually come from people who don’t understand the trade-offs of AWS in production.

Each project has certainly its own requirements. If you have the manpower and a backup plan with blue/green for every infrastructure component, then absolutely harness that cost margin of yours. If it’s at a break even when you factor in specialist continuity - training folks so nothing’s down if your hardware breaks, then AWS wins.

If your project can tolerate downtime and your SREs may sleep at night, then you might profit less from the several niners HA SLOs that AWS guarantees.

It’s very hard and costly to replicate what AWS gives you if you have requirements close to enterprise levels. Also, the usual argument goes - when you’re a startup you’ll be happy to trade CAPEX for OPEX.

For an average hobby project maybe not the best option.

As for latency, you can get just as good. Major exchanges run their matching engines in AWS DCs, you can co-locate.
by nolok | 2025-11-26 09:01:48+00:00
The tech giants have a lot of cash-flow to burn, and at this point it's better for their investors that they do rather than admit it was a loss or the stock value would fall.

It might be a huge pile of cards but this time they have the coffers for it, if/when it falls it will be from one of the fake it till you make it companies like openai that are built on promises (and frankly their revenue numbers are no where near their promised spend so they seem dependant on more and more deals)
by ksynwa | 2025-11-26 09:02:47+00:00
If you read the source, the concerns around poisoning are more sober than fear of wrongthink. Here is how firefox translated it for me:

> It leads to real-world risks. Data pollution can also pose a range of real-world risks, particularly in the areas of financial markets, public safety and health care.In the financial field, outlaws use AI to fabricate false information, causing data pollution, which may cause abnormal fluctuations in stock prices, and constitute a new type of market manipulation risk; in the field of public safety, data pollution is easy to disturb public perception, mislead public opinion, and induce social panic; in the field of medical and health, data pollution may cause models to generate wrong diagnosis and treatment suggestions, which not only endangers the safety of patients, but also aggravates the spread of pseudoscience.
by scrollaway | 2025-11-26 09:02:51+00:00
So the founder is going to work at a company they want to work at, and I’m guessing as part of the hiring agreement he had to wind down his activities on or shut down the project…

For his sake I hope he doesn’t end up regretting it when the job isn’t as rewarding as he thought, or he gets laid off after a few months and doesn’t have a project to go back to.

I don’t have enough context to really judge I am sure, but this is a story that happens often enough for me to already think he’s making a massive mistake.
by Hetzner_OL | 2025-11-26 09:03:41+00:00
Hi OP, just chiming in here because you mentioned us at Hetzner and I saw your post. I also wasn't sure if the comment from nurettin below was meant to be "NextCloud" instead of "owncloud"...? NextCloud and Dropbox have some very similar use cases. We have a line of NextCloud-based products (Storage Shares). Maybe it would be worth trying out. --Katie
by adamcharnock | 2025-11-26 09:03:45+00:00
This is exactly true, and is something we have built our business around. In fact, I just kicked-off a multi-TiB Postgres migration for one of our clients this morning. We're moving them out of Supabase and onto a bare-metal multi-AZ Postgresql cluster in Hetzner.

I'm going to say what I always say here - for so many SME's the hyperscaler cloud provider has been the safe default choice. But as time goes on a few things can begin to happen. Firstly, the bills grow in both size and variability, so CFOs start to look increasingly askance at the situation. Secondly, so many technical issues start to arise that would simply vanish on fixed-size bare-metal (and the new issues that arise are well addressed by existing tooling). So the DevOps team can find themselves firefighting while the backlog keeps growing.

The problem really is one of skills and staffing. The people who have both the skills and desire actually implement and maintain the above tend to be the greying-beards who were installing RedHat 6 in their bedrooms as teenagers (myself included). And there are increasingly few of us who are not either in management and/or employed by the cloud providers.

So if companies can find the staff and the risk appetite, they can go right ahead and realise something like a 90% saving on their current spend. But that is unusual for an SME.

So we started Lithus[0] to do this for SMEs. We _only_ offer a 50% saving, not 90%. But take on all the risk and staffing issues. We don't charge for the migration, and the billing cycle only starts once migration is complete. And we provide a fixed number of engineering days per month included. So you get a complete Kubernetes cluster with open source tooling, and a bunch of RedHat-6-installing greying-beards to use however you need. /pitch

[0] https://lithus.eu
by TeMPOraL | 2025-11-26 09:04:41+00:00
I have a different perspective. The Trifecta is a bad model because it makes people think this is just another cybersecurity challenge, solvable with careful engineering. But it's not.

It cannot be solved this way because it's a people problem - LLMs are like people, not like classical programs, and that's fundamental. That's what they're made to be, that's why they're useful. The problems we're discussing are variations of principal/agent problem, with LLM being the savant but extremely naive agent. There is no probable, verifiable solution here, not any more than when talking about human employees, contractors, friends.
by noir_lord | 2025-11-26 09:04:43+00:00
Which is an awesome capability, if you need it.

I suspect that if you broke projects on AWS down by the numbers, the vast majority don't needed it.

There are other benefits to using AWS (and drawbacks) bit "easy scaling" isn't just premature optimisation because if you build something to do something it's never going to do that's not optimisation it's simply waste.
by jiggawatts | 2025-11-26 09:05:40+00:00
> Odds are, your project won't scale past a scale of 10,000 to 100,000.

That may be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I agree in general that most apps don't need fancy scaling features, but apps that can't scale... won't... and hence "don't need scaling features".

> You won't ever run into the problems of scale in this app, and single-file databases have unique advantages when your scale is small.

I saw a customer start off with essentially a single small warehouse selling I dunno... widgets or something... and then the corporation grew and grew to a multi-national shipping and logistic corporation. They were saddled with an obscure proprietary database that worked like SQLite and had incredibly difficult to overcome technical challenges. They couldn't just migrate off, because that would have needed a massive many-year long total rewrite of their app.

For one performance issue we were seriously trying to convince them to use phase-change cooling on frequency-optimized server CPUs like a gamer overclocking their rig because that was the only way to eke out just enough performance to ensure their overnight backups didn't run into the morning busy time.

That's just not an issue with SQL Server or any similar standard client-server database engine.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-11-26 09:05:54+00:00
> We are Svelte based, so it's frustrating for us to have to drag in React for libraries like this

To be fair, chosing Svelte over React explicitly means that - if the React installed/userbase is 10-50x as big, you will be frustrated with this a lot. But in the end I don't get the frustration, in the end react is not a framework and you can render any component into a single HTML node that is part of your Svelte system. If the external library is encapsulated well, you shouldn't even notice that is react based.
by zimpenfish | 2025-11-26 09:06:10+00:00
> I noticed this morning there was a new version of the YouTube app on my Apple TV.

Damn it, I still appear to be on 4.51.08/web_20251117_11_RC00 with no indication that there's a new version. Not looking forward to any updates...

> The ONLY way to see the full title is to start watching the video.

I sometimes wonder if YouTube is a weird kink cult that gets off on people complaining about the ridiculously user-hostile decisions they make. Because it's either that or they're an evil troll cult that aims to make life just that little bit less pleasant for as many people as possible.
by Ekaros | 2025-11-26 09:06:22+00:00
I think it is probably both. There is separate cultures and groups. And then there is trends. All happening on handful of platforms. Trends can travel between groups when they come big enough. So in that sense it is centralized. On other hand outside trends things can stay inside sub-cultures.

So there is larger centralized culture that reacts to trends like Labubus or Dubai Chocolate. And then there are smaller niche communities that don't really go outside their own.
by adrian_b | 2025-11-26 09:07:20+00:00
AFAIK, carbon fiber flywheels that are levitated in vacuum and that exceed the energy density of the metallic flywheels have already been made and used in certain experiments, even if I am not aware of any such flywheel being available commercially.

There was also some research for using such flywheels for energy recovery in very heavy vehicles with electric motors, e.g. tanks with a turbo-electric generator, but the use in a vehicle has obvious difficulties. Even if the flywheels are paired, to avoid influencing the mobility of the vehicle, that still causes high internal stresses in the case holding the pair of flywheels when the vehicle rotates, which can lead to fatigue failures.
by wink | 2025-11-26 09:08:13+00:00
Every team I have worked on so far, if using AWS you had 50-100% of the developers with the knowledge and credentials (and usually the confidence) to troubleshoot/just fix it/replace it.

Every team with dedicated hardware in a data center it was generally 1-2 people who would have fixed stuff quickly, no matter the size of the company (small ones, of course - so 10-50 devs). And that's with available replacement hardware.

I'm not even one of the "cloud is so great" people - but it you're generally doing software it's actually a lot less friction.

And while the ratio of cost difference may sound bad, it's generally not. Unless we're talkign huge scale, you can buy a lot of AWS crap for the yearly salary of a single person.
by oliwarner | 2025-11-26 09:08:46+00:00
> If I just had google this would've been a 2 week project easily.

But you'd know something new by the end of it.

So many are so fast to skip the human experience element of life that they're turning themselves into mere prompt generators, happy to regurgitate others' knowledge without feeling or understanding.

For this, you might not care to gain meaningful experience, and as a conscious choice, that's fine. But there are an increasing number of developer and developer adjacent people who reach for the LLM first. Who don't understand "their" contributions to projects.

The haters are those of us who have to deal with this slop, and the sloppy people submitting it without thought, care or understanding.
by zimpenfish | 2025-11-26 09:08:53+00:00
> If you have an iPhone you can input with that, including paste.

That popping up on your phone is not 100% reliable, though, and even more hilariously, when using it with YouTube, it'll sometimes just take the first handful of characters and drop the text input box on the phone. Oh, how we laughed.

(this may be a generic Apple TV problem but it's something I've only noticed on the YouTube app)
by Tanoc | 2025-11-26 09:09:01+00:00
My father might've been onto something in my childhood then. He'd specifically kick me out of the house if he knew it was day I'd be inside playing videogames. Rainy day, snow day, school holiday, missed the bus, whatever the reason. He did this the first time when I was ten and then again when I was fourteen, which were two periods where I struggled with making friends because we had moved.

I compare this to my neighbour's daughter who is now about the same age I was when my dad would kick me out of the house, and said neighbour's daughter never goes anywhere without her parents. She's somewhat socially maladjusted and doesn't know how to get along with other kids her age outside of sports, and I believe this is because she's not around other kids outside of school except for basketball practice or matches she's in. She wasn't like this a few years ago. It's alarming how such an athletic child can spend so much time inside the house doing... Whatever sedentary activities.
by TheCapeGreek | 2025-11-26 09:09:04+00:00
There's odd and end features that some people prefer with Premium. E.g. offline downloads to watch when you're out of signal, background play, etc.

And they don't want to go through alternative workarounds to do so.

For me, it's actually just being able to easily share premium with other users in my household, so that I don't have to have my ears blasted with ads when they open YT on the TV. Less effort than playing around with things like pihole and hoping it doesn't break other things.
by oersted | 2025-11-26 09:09:36+00:00
After 8 years operating like this, I have had approximately the same number of critical outages in standard Cloud as with these providers.

One included a whole OVH building burning down with our server in it, and recovery was faster than the recent AWS and Cloudflare outages. We felt less impotent and we could do more to mitigate the situation.

If you want to, these providers also offer VMs, object storage and other virtualized services for way cheaper with similar guarantees, they are not stuck in the last century.

And I don’t know how people are using cloud, but most config issues happen above the VM/Docker/Kubernetes level, which is the same wether you are on cloud or not. Even fully managed database deployments or serverless backends are not really that much simpler or less error-prone than deploying the containers yourself. Actually the complexity of Cloud is often a worse minefield of footguns, with their myriad artificial quirks and limitations. Often dealing with the true complexities of the underlying open-source technologies they are reselling ends up being easier and more predictable.

This fearmongering is really weakening us as an industry. Just try it, it is not as complex or dangerous as they claim.
by Asooka | 2025-11-26 09:10:21+00:00
There really ought to be a subset of C that lets you write portable assembly. One where only a defined set of optimisations are allowed and required to be performed, "inline" means always inline, the "register" and "auto" keywords have their original meanings, every stack variable is allocated unless otherwise indicated, every expression has defined evaluation order, every read/write from/to an address is carried out, nothing is ever reordered, and undefined behaviour is switched to machine-specific behaviour. Currently if you need that level of control, your only option is writing it in assembly, which gets painful when you need to support multiple architectures, or want fancy features like autocomplete or structs and functions.