MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Anyone here self-hosting databases and needing advanced features?
by SirusCodes | 2025-12-04 16:56:24+00:00
My friends and I are trying to understand whether a particular niche actually exists or if we’re imagining a problem that most people have already solved another way.

We’re specifically looking for people/teams who:

1. Self-host their own database (e.g., Postgres)

2. Manage it by SSH-ing into the machine and/or running automation scripts

3. Still need more advanced features: PITR, PgBouncer, observability, replication, etc.

We’re building a tool that provisions and manages database instances/clusters over SSH. Think “supercharged self-hosted DB automation,” but without requiring Kubernetes, Docker orchestration, or a full-stack PaaS. Essentially: managed Postgres-like ergonomics, but for people who want to stay on their own servers.

Right now, we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place:

1. On one side, we don’t see any product like this, except Crunchy Postgres, which is very enterprise-focused.

2. On the other, we’re not sure whether the lack of products means the market doesn’t want this, or whether engineers are just stuck doing everything manually because there isn't a lightweight option.

Current alternatives we see:

1. Kubernetes Operators – powerful, but require committing to K8s.

2. Crunchy Postgres – great, but very enterprise-oriented.

3. Full-stack deployment platforms (Coolify, Dokploy, etc.) – nice UX, but limited when you need PITR, PgBouncer, logical/physical replication, deep monitoring, etc.

4. Fully self-managed – which means a lot of SSH, scripts, cron jobs, custom backups, and playing “accidental DBA.”

We’re trying to figure out:

• Do engineers actually want a tool that handles advanced DB lifecycle management over SSH?

• Or is the expectation that if you need these advanced features, you should either use a cloud-managed DB or Kubernetes Database operators?

• If you are self-hosting databases today, how painful is the operational overhead? What does your workflow look like?

We’d love to hear from anyone who fits (or used to fit) into this category, or anyone with strong opinions on whether this is a real problem. Happy to share more details if people are interested, but mostly trying to validate whether this is a rabbit hole worth continuing down.
by AwkwardPanda | 2025-12-04 16:56:50+00:00
Thank you.

There are many learnings:

1. The most unexpected thing that I learned was the absolute nightmare it is to set up subscriptions.

I initially thought it would be a simple task. I started off with writing APIs and webhooks for Play store and App store.

But then as I got into the specifics things got complicated very quickly.

The combinations of subscriptions (monthly/yearly, AI and non-AI), cancellations, cross device subscription sync, how to handle trials, how to manage subscription states of users, and then when users upgrade, that's another few cases to handle.

There were just too many cases to handle.

I then just used a third-party provider (RevenueCat). They have handled all the complexities beautifully.

2. Supabase self-host is another nightmare in itself. Just the sheer amount of configs needs (through the .env file) is insane. They have intentionally made it so difficult to configure.

3. Setting up SMTP and sending emails is actually a very tiring and cumbersome process. AWS SES is just too much work. Mainly the domain reputation (emails always landing in spam) and also there are not many providers that give a generous trial.
by jMyles | 2025-12-04 16:57:06+00:00
I want something that seems so very simple:

* A web-of-trust social media, where I can instantly see, about any account, all of the chains of separation between us, in order to verify and validate the humanity and social connection of another person.

Presently, twitter (and even moreso, reddit) are just so overrun by bots whose job seems to be to muddy all waters with short-shrift, low-effort takes, but expressed in way more words than are necessary.

I don't mind (in fact, I love) long-form posts like were common in the old reddit, but that are thoughtful and perhaps radical (in the same of addressing the root of the subject). Today's reddit is almost as bad as twitter. I'm kinda ready to get off both of them, but I'd like to still have daily engagement on topics that challenge me / my worldviews.
by kettlecorn | 2025-12-04 16:57:41+00:00
My criticism of X is primarily rooted in 2 things: the massive degradation of my experience using the platform and a distrust that Musk wouldn't use the platform to manipulate public opinion to achieve political goals.

On the first point the simplest thing is I used to report people who use overt slurs or anti-semitic language. When Musk took over it started taking months for them to follow up and the response was simply to lock the account until they deleted the offending tweet. Eventually when I would report those people X just switched to saying they weren't breaking the rules. Now the replies of tons of seemingly normal posts that get lots of visibility are full of vile people trying to derail conversation with racism or anti-semitism.

Another big problem is the way that blue-check accounts are boosted has incentivized every account to act like click-bait all the time. Whenever a post gets semi-viral the blue-check replies are artificially lifted to the top and most of them are totally worthless because the commenters are just trying to 'grab space' so people click their profile and follow them. It used to be that if big accounts posted something interesting you might see a bunch of interesting follow up replies. Now it's spammers at the top and then racists / crazies mixed in with more thoughtful replies if you scroll down a few pages past the blue-checks. It used to be that the algorithmic feed would surface me all sorts of interesting and novel work from people across the tech world but now there's a whole category of people trying to make every single Tweet viral enough to get payouts.

And then there's Musk himself. He's ordered the algorithm to be manipulated to boost himself more. He's clearly expressed discontent when the algorithm doesn't work the way he wants, he's meddled heavily in the platform's AI bot to make it say things Musk prefers, and he's been rather unscrupulous chasing his political goals. I think it's not unlikely he'd use the platform to guide public opinion, perhaps even using AI to do it discretely and intelligently. I view that as a significant risk.

So the platform has gone from something that's highly useful to me, and a place I greatly enjoyed, to something that more often than not wastes my time and exposes me to people that disturb me. And on top of all that I think contributing to the platform may empower someone who I deeply distrust to manipulate public opinion towards their political goals.
by bja | 2025-12-04 16:57:46+00:00
This is amazing, and at first glance it is going to solve many of my problems. I see offers to start a free trial but nothing about pricing. The sign up page doesn't work well with my password manager, I imagine you need to add auto fill hints to the textboxes, looks like your using flutter, so add these to each textbox you want to autofill: https://api.flutter.dev/flutter/material/TextField/autofillH..., it should also work with mobile

When I sign up, I get an error when confirming my email: This site can’t be reached The webpage at https://api.onlyrecipeapp.com/?code=XXX

Good work, looks very promising.
by TheCondor | 2025-12-04 16:58:25+00:00
The Jag XK platform had 45+ year run. I'd bet that as long as the 911 is made, it'll have an inline 6 and to someone's thinking it will be the same platform as the air-cooled version from 1964.

Engine architectures tend to last unless they are bad. They can do a lot on one also, the Toyota GR platform started out as a fairly vanilla V-6 but it has variations with GDI and variations with turbochargers and has been used a lot of different vehicles. A lot of different variations with different levels of compressions and such. It's basically the block and cylinders configuration.

I'll shout out the K-series though, it's a shockingly good platform. Lots of little details have been thought through, it's relatively simple, inexpensive and reliable and maybe one of the easiest engines to work on. If you were new to cars and wanted to start wrenching, the K-series is a pretty good place to start. It can take boost and make power and has lots of aftermarket support. I know civics aren't everyones cup of tea and it's not a big V-8, but I've yet to meet an engineer that isn't at least slightly impressed by the k-series.
by silisili | 2025-12-04 16:58:26+00:00
This happened at a place where I worked years ago, but not as 'on purpose.' We were a large company where most pieces depended on other pieces, and everything was fine - until a new CEO came in who started holding the numbers of each BU under a microscope. This led to each department trying to bill other departments as an enterprise customer, who then retaliated, which then led to internal departments threatening to go to competitors who charged less for the same service. Kinda stupid how that all works - on paper it would have made a few departments look better if they used a bottom barrel competitor, but in reality the company would have bled millions of dollars as a whole...all because one rather large BU wanted to goose its numbers.
by mihaic | 2025-12-04 16:58:46+00:00
> "Defeatism" is yet another shibboleth for people who refuse to accept reality.

Sometimes you'd be right, as some people use this as a shield to do whatever naive thing they want, and build sand castles. But I don't think this is the case here. Society needs some level of potentially useless effort, otherwise the things that are barealy possible are never attempted because they are so close to the line.

There's also plenty of causes for which people can mobilize themselves, we don't all need to jump on the ones that are highly likely to succeed.
by hackingonempty | 2025-12-04 16:58:52+00:00
The Java hype was totally unprecedented and probably never repeated. The CEO of a big tech company was on network TV promoting a programming language. I heard stories on NPR in the car. My mother called me to ask me "about this Java thing." Java was everywhere and going to be in everything.

In was accompanied by a huge and successful push into universities to make it the standard didactic programming language. Even MIT switched from Scheme to Java.
by paganel | 2025-12-04 16:58:56+00:00
> Pure greed would have a strong incentive to understand what the market is actually demanding in order to maximize profits.

Not necessarily, just look at this clip [1] from Margin Call, an excellent movie on the GFC. As Jeremy Irons is saying in that clip, the market (as usually understood in classical economy, with producers making things for clients/customers to purchase) is of no importance to today's market economy, almost all that matters, at the hundreds of billions - multi-trillion dollars-levels, is for your company "to play the music" as best as the other (necessarily very big) market participants, "nothing more, nothing less" (again, to quote Irons in that movie).

There's nothing in it about "making what people/customers want" and all that, which is regarded as accessory, that is if it is taken into consideration at all. As another poster is mentioning in this thread, this is all the direct result of the financialization of much of the Western economy, this is how things work at this level, given these (financiliazed) inputs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOYi4NzxlhE
by anonymous908213 | 2025-12-04 16:59:04+00:00
It's really not that fuzzy.

> The FSFE's mission, as I understand it, is to support and promote free software. But as far as I know, Twitter has never been a friend of free software, nor has it been supportive of other related values the article mentions, like 'privacy', 'transparency', 'autonomy', 'data protection', etc. It has always been a non-free, centralised network which cared about profit more than user rights, and engagement more than fostering civil discourse.

Indeed, and FSFE writes:

> The platform never aligned with our values

> a space we were never comfortable joining, yet one that was once important for reaching members of society who were not active in our preferred spaces for interaction

And then says in no unclear terms what changed:

> Since Elon Musk acquired the social network [...] the FSFE has been closely monitoring the developments of this proprietary platform

> Over time, it has become increasingly hostile, with misinformation, harassment, and hate speech more visible than ever.

> an algorithm that prioritises hatred, polarisation, and sensationalism, alongside growing privacy and data protection concerns, has led us to the decision to part ways with this platform.

You cherry-picked two words "direction and climate" from the article and criticised them for taking an ambiguous political stance, but there is nothing ambiguous about the actual announcement and they clarify their exact motivation for leaving multiple times.
by AwkwardPanda | 2025-12-04 16:59:28+00:00
Thank you for the feedback. Will definitely release an update by tomorrow for this.

Regarding selection of text, that has been a problem with flutter. I will find a way to make it selectable.

There is an alternative. You can share the recipe or click print. There you would be able to select it.

Or, you could share the recipe and it would be copied to your clipboard.

I know that is not exactly what you want, but it will solve the purpose for now.

I'll fix it soon. Apologies.
by skrebbel | 2025-12-04 16:59:33+00:00
In large C++ codebases of mediocre quality (the example I'm referring to is a manufacturer of large complex machines), yes.

People would compile their local unit locally, of course (a "unit" would be a bunch of files grouped together in some hopefully-logical way). But they wouldn't be 100% sure it compiled correctly when integrated with the larger codebase until the nightly build ran. So like if you didn't change the .h files you were pretty sure to be in the clear, but if you did, you had to be careful and worse-case-scenario do a 1-day-per-step edit-compile-test loop for a week or so. I'm not entirely sure how they managed to keep these compile failures from hurting other teams, but they didn't always (I think they had some sort of a layered build server setup, not too dissimilar from how GH Actions can do nightlies of a "what if this PR were merged with main now").

Visual Studio 6 itself was pretty OK actually. Like the UI was very limited (but therefore also fast enough), but compiling smallish projects went fine. In fact it was known to be a pretty fast compiler, I didn't mean to suggest that VC++6 implies overnight builds. They just coincided. In fact better-structured big-ish C++ projects (pimpl pattern anyone?) could probably recompile pretty quickly on the computers of the day.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-04 17:00:42+00:00
So, as the author of not one but two operating systems (one of which I've recently published, another will likely never see daylight): I've never felt the need for 'async/await' at the OS kernel level. And above that it is essentially all applications, and there almost everything has a runtime, usually in the form of a standard library.

I agree with you that writing Erlang in Erlang today is not feasible for the runtime performance matter, less so for maintainability (which I've found to be excellent for anything I ever did in Erlang, probably better than any other language I've used).

And effectively it is maintainability that we are talking about here because that is where this particular pattern makes life considerably harder. It is hard enough to reason about async code 20 minutes after you wrote it, much harder still if you have to get into a code base that you did not write or if you have to dig in six months (or a decade) later to solve some problem.

I get your gripe about the term systems language, but we can just delineate it in a descriptive way so we are not constrained by terminology that ill fits the various uses cases. Low level language or runtime-free language would be fine as well (the 'no true Scotsmen of systems languages ;) ).

But in the end this is about the actor model, not about Erlang per se, that is just one particular example and I don't see any reason why the actor model could not be a first class citizen in a systems oriented language, you could choose to use it or not and if you did that would have certain consequences just like using async/await have all kinds of consequences, and most likely when writing low level OS code you would not be using that anyway.
by mfranco123 | 2025-12-04 17:01:05+00:00
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by GMoromisato | 2025-12-04 17:01:27+00:00
There are downsides to this approach, however.

If your team is not critical, at least in the eyes of upper-management, then you'll be first on the chopping block in the next downturn.

But if you are critical--say, running critical but unsexy infrastructure--then it's all downside risk with no upside. If things work, they ignore you, but if they mess up, you get the blame and the spotlight.

As with any business/career advice, there are no silver bullets, only trade-offs.
by Gormo | 2025-12-04 17:01:43+00:00
That's a really bizarre and oddly Platonist take on things. Your grandfather was viewing laws of nature as rules imposed onto reality by some outside force, and which therefore need some "mechanism" to be in place to "enforce" them.

But I think a more reasonable understanding of natural laws is that they're our attempt to describe the cause-and-effect patterns observable within reality itself. They're not being enforced, they're simply manifest.

Construing "nothing can exist" as a rule that has to be enforced, and not just the absence of any patterns of causality that would produce something that exists, seems to be an error. It actually seems to be a more sophisticated version of reifying the concept of "nothing" such that "nothing exists" would be interpreted as describing the positive existence of an entity called "nothing" rather than merely describing the absence of any such entities within the context.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-04 17:01:50+00:00
Hmmm.

"transparent leadership. In my book, a good leader

coaches people"

So ... why does coaching people require transparent leadership?

I think people can be sneaky and secretive; or transparent. Both can easily be used for coaching and training and teaching people. The other points have a similar issue in my opinion. The article is more like a "feel-good" statement - people subscribe to "be nice and kind". But are all leaders nice and kind? Are evil and mean leaders automatically incompetent and ineffective? I think the analysis part should be decoupled from ethics in regards to "xyz beats abc". One has to define what the goal is.

For instance, some CEO firing 50% of the people will be critisized by many - but greedy shareholders may get more money that way, so for them they may prefer a CEO that is mean-spirited here. That same mean-spirited CEO could be an awesome family guy and super-friendly with his close reallife friends and family, but when it comes to the company, he is ruthless. And so on and so forth.
by iamnothere | 2025-12-04 17:01:55+00:00
We, the people who build and operate the internet as well as the tech that enables it, collectively choose to maintain a free and open internet for the benefit of all free people.

Maybe with enough effort you can force the internet to fracture into a centralized TV-style internet and a “shadow” free internet, but you’ll probably kill the economy in the process. Regardless, you’ll never stamp out those of us who will maintain the free internet over whatever channels we can find.
by rm_-rf_slash | 2025-12-04 17:02:06+00:00
AI research has always been a series of occasional great leaps between slogs of iterative improvements, from Turing and Rosenblatt to AlexNet and GPT-3. The LLM era will result in a few things becoming invisible architecture* we stop appreciating and then the next big leap starts the hype cycle anew.

*Think toll booths (“exact change only!”) replaced by automated license plate readers in just the span of a decade. Hardly noticeable now.
by h2zizzle | 2025-12-04 17:02:15+00:00
I thought we pretty explicitly bailed out most of the incumbents. A few were allowed to be sacrificed, but most of the risk wasn't realized, and instead rolled into new positions that diffused it across the economy. 2008's "correction" should have seen the end of most of our investment banks and auto manufacturers. Say what you want to about them (and I have no particular love for either), but Tesla and Bitcoin are ghosts of the timeline where those two sectors had to rebuild themselves from scratch. There should have been more, and Goldman Sachs and GM et al. should not currently exist.
by unethical_ban | 2025-12-04 17:02:37+00:00
I love Proxmox as a virtual server manager - I can't imagine running anything else as a base for a homelab. Free, powerful, VMs or CTs operating quickly, graphical shell for administration, well documented and used, ZFS is a first class citizen.

I've kind of wanted to build a three node cluster with some low end stuff to expand my knowledge of it. Now they have a datacenter controller. I'd need to build twice the nodes.

Question: Does anyone know large businesses that utilize proxmox for datacenter operations?
by waffletower | 2025-12-04 17:02:44+00:00
I think it is incredibly healthy to be critical and perhaps even a tinge cynical about the intentions of companies developing and productizing large language models (AI). However, the argument here completely ignores the evolving ecosystem of open weight models. Yes, the prominent companies developing frontier models are attempting to build markets and moats where possible, and the capital cloud investments are incredibly centralized. But even in 2025 the choice is there, with your own capital investment (RTX, MacBook etc.), for completely private and decentralized AI. You can also choose your own cloud too -- Cloudflare just acquired Replicate. If enough continue to participate in the open weight ecosystem, this centralization need not be totalitarian.
by stickfigure | 2025-12-04 17:02:52+00:00
No, the main reason people don't accept AI is that it isn't very good[1] at the things they want to accomplish.

Everyone I know accepts AI for the things it is good at, and rejects it for things it sucks at. The dividing line varies by task and the skill of the operator (both "how good at persuading the AI" and "how easy would it be to just do the job by hand").

In some companies the problem is management layers with thin understanding trying to force AI into the organization because they read some article in CIO Magazine. In other companies (like Microsoft) I suspect the problem is that they're forcing the org to eat their own dogfood and the dogfood kinda sucks.

[1] Yet.