MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Multi-cloud cost visibility with latency rings and GDP data
by sschotten | 2026-01-21 18:07:55+00:00
Cloud billing is opaque by design. Each provider gives you an invoice optimized for their revenue recognition, not your capacity planning.

Run workloads across AWS, GCP, and Azure and you get three different billing models, three different SKU taxonomies, three different ways of saying "compute." Finance reconciles spreadsheets. Engineering guesses. Workload placement happens on hope.

I needed one view: footprint, cost, trend, forecast. Across vendors. Without paying $50k/year for a FinOps platform.

THE STACK

FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification) normalizes cloud billing across providers. Ingest into TimescaleDB hypertable — handles millions of line items, months of data in gigabytes. Hasura for instant GraphQL endpoints. deck.gl for WebGL-accelerated visualization.

$50/month infrastructure. Few hours setup. Non-intrusive — just an API token for the FOCUS endpoint.

WHAT MADE IT USEFUL

Cost data alone doesn't tell you where to run things. So I added business context.

Bureau of Economic Analysis + Census integration: Direct API pulls for population and GDP by metro region. Auto-refreshed.

Latency Rings: Pick a region, set a threshold — say, 50ms. The viz shows how many people this workload can serve under that latency, and their GDP profile.

Now the question isn't "which region is cheapest?" It's "how many people can we serve under X ms, what's their economic value, and what does it cost?"

us-east-1 isn't the default because it's best. It's the default because nobody did the math. This does the math.

There's a "Reload data" button to flush from FOCUS APIs. Goal is 15-minute granularity — catch misuse on the fly, not in next month's invoice.

WHERE FOCUS FALLS SHORT

Commitment attribution — RIs and savings plans don't map cleanly to workloads. Tag hygiene — garbage in, garbage out. Network and egress — still a mess across providers.

---

The question that used to take a meeting: "How much are we spending in us-west-2 and how many users are we serving top-notch service?"

Drill down on the region, click a few buttons. Five seconds. Answer.

Demo: https://ure.us/atlas

I spent a few hours on this to solve a specific need. Turned out cooler than expected.

If there's interest, I'll open-source it — ingestion scripts, TimescaleDB schema, Hasura config, BEA/Census integration, latency ring logic, deck.gl dashboard.

Let me know.
by palmotea | 2026-01-21 18:08:31+00:00
> At this point I just hope enough of our economy remains functioning so I can eat, and that the orange dumbass doesn't nuke someone and kick off the end of the world.

Take a look at this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/opinion/trump-presidentia...:

> Instead of comparing what is happening under Trump with the situations in Hungary, Turkey and Russia, Goldstone argued that conditions in the United States are,

>> ironically, more like what happened in Venezuela, where after a century of reasonably prosperous democratic government, decades of elite self-serving neglect of popular welfare led to the election of Hugo Chávez with a mandate to get rid of the old elites and create a populist dictatorship.

>> I find that decades-long trends in the U.S. — stagnating wages for non-college-educated males, sharply declining social mobility, fierce political polarization among the elites and a government sinking deeper and deeper into debt — are earmarks of countries heading into revolutionary upheaval.

>> Just as the French monarchy, despite being the richest and archetypal monarchy, collapsed in the late 18th century because of popular immiseration, elite conflicts and state debts, so the U.S. today, despite being the richest and archetypal democratic republic, is seeing its institutions come under attack today for a similar set of conditions.

Trump is a symptom, not the cause. But a lot of people really want you to focus on him, to deflect the blame from themselves hopefully return to their prior "self-serving neglect of popular welfare."
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-21 18:08:42+00:00
By cowboys I mean the people starting businesses left right and center and just collapsing them when they don't get the desired result straight away. E.g. US venture capitalism. I think it's a really good thing that we don't have that here in Europe. Sure it prevents the googles and metas but those would never have made it that big here anyway because we regulate big businesses before they become uncontrollable. And now that we are breaking off ties with the US we will have to build our own anyway, just with sustainable and fair business models.

Sure we can get society to pick up the tab but the problem is that those cowboys are even more incentivised to be risky then. There should be a penalty for them when it goes wrong.
by blitzar | 2026-01-21 18:09:08+00:00
https://www.nbim.no/en/investments/all-investments/

I make it only 1.5 trillion equities - they run about a 70 / 30 split stocks to bonds.

They could easily trim up their $50bn of Nvidia or their $50bn of Microsoft or their $40bn of Apple etc and put it to better use.
by godelski | 2026-01-21 18:09:31+00:00
> Why does this imply that they're "abusive"

It doesn't. You read wrong.

> While I've also fallen into the trap of thinking "I'm so special because I work in computing" before

I'm not saying scaling is unique to CS, you did.

You said that the demographic is so small that Steam shouldn't care about the abuse. That it is an acceptable level.

I said it is a mistake to think that a small percentage is a small number and to focus on the actual number. Instead of asking yourself if 0.01% is an acceptable level of abuse, ask yourself if 3k people is an acceptable number of people being abused.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-01-21 18:09:39+00:00
> It's even difficult and expensive to _stop_ an LLC and dissolve it.

In my experience this is at least as important. Everyone focuses on the process of creating companies, which is now relatively streamlined in many European countries.

The real, massive difference between the US and EU is how hard it is to shutdown a company and the legal implications of that. I was shocked at how unreasonably slow and painful it can be to shutdown a company in Europe the first time I did it. Many countries effectively treat it as a criminal proceeding. Sometimes startups just fail, that is the nature of startups.

In the US shutting down a company is almost as easy as creating one.
by amluto | 2026-01-21 18:09:42+00:00
My pet peeve is that the entire TPM design assumes that, at any given time, all running software has exactly one privilege level.

It’s not hard to protect an FDE key in a way that one must compromise both the TPM and the OS to recover it [0]. What is very awkward is protecting it such that a random user in the system who recovers the sealed secret (via a side channel or simply booting into a different OS and reading it) cannot ask the TPM to decrypt it. Or protecting one user’s TPM-wrapped SSH key from another user.

I have some kludgey ideas for how to do this, and maybe I’ll write them up some day.

[0] Seal a random secret to the TPM and wrap the actual key, in software, with the sealed secret. Compromising the TPM gets the wrapping key but not the wrapped key.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-21 18:10:05+00:00
The closest thing I know of is Igalia has a project trying to port https://wpewebkit.org/ to Android https://github.com/Igalia/wpe-android and they have a minibrowser example apk in the releases of the current state (but I wouldn't call it a Chrome drop in replacement or anything at the moment - just the closest thing I know on Android).
by dugidugout | 2026-01-21 18:10:16+00:00
They mean to distinguish intuition, which draws on experience and can only be reflected on, from experience, which deals in actionable heuristics. Any appeal to intuition you make will fall on experiential advice when pressed. Intuition _works_ here, but if you mean to share your wisdom, you must translate it through experience, which is the actual concept we communicate through.
by scoofy | 2026-01-21 18:10:28+00:00
>Why would you want to see a booth showing artworks that weren't even created by the person in front of you but by an AI?

I'd suggest people learn about Andy Warhol's factory where they mass produced "art." Art is obsessed with "thing-ness," that is, being able to hold and own the artistic object. It's why people without record players buy vinyl that they listen to on spotify. And the way I see it, the main problem with AI art is that (1) it's all digital, and (2) there hasn't been an artist willing to develop a model themselves in order to create unique pieces that exist in the real world.

Don't get me wrong, I think the visual arts are going through a shift that will rival the advent of the photograph, but we are at the birth of this new period. I think it's fair to say that we are in the "this is bad" period before new art movements using the technology start to emerge (e.g. photography), as well as art movements that move away from the medium (e.g. modern art). Art has always been in conflict between being about the idea and being about the skill to bring that idea to life.

https://guyhepner.com/news/318-andy-warhol-inside-the-factor...

https://www.thecollector.com/how-photography-transformed-art...
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-21 18:10:33+00:00
Not really - it is going to show the world what alternatives people are pursuing as a strategy. Where they put their money will cause others to do the same. And the more people do it, the safer those new assets become. That will cause even more people to make the move.

Note that China has been selling US treasuries for months now (https://www.barrons.com/articles/china-sells-treasuries-9-st...) and there are signs that India has been quietly selling large amounts too. So it feels like the start of something much bigger, a total decoupling from the US due to its unstable politics, foreign policy, and quickly accumulating debt (Trump has added $5 trillion already and may add much more).
by marcprux | 2026-01-21 18:10:42+00:00
Well, you're running both the iOS development tools (Xcode, iOS Simulator), plus the Android development tools (Gradle, Android emulator, and maybe Android Studio too). These add up.

16GB might be possible, though.

(Skip itself doesn't take much memory. If you run it headlessly as a SwiftPM plugin, you wouldn't need nearly that much.)
by intended | 2026-01-21 18:11:18+00:00
What you are asking for is … likely fundamentally impossible due to how the definitions and tech is set up.

There’s a certain physics to how communities end up behaving online. For example, in heterogenous communities, topics like Politics and Religion will always generate a high volume of flame wars, unless strongly moderated.

The underlying rule is that on topics with low barriers to entry, and no way to test accuracy or establish expertise, you cannot achieve fact based consensus effectively.

Since there are scant physical limits, online arguments can continue forever, creating a perfect engine for unending polarization and zealotry.

If you want to see actual discussion on this topic, it would require people to agree to certain rules of debate, which automatically will filter out a decent chunk of users.
by irishcoffee | 2026-01-21 18:11:25+00:00
If the US paid $8B towards it debt every _day_ it would take over thirteen _years_ (completely ignoring interest accumulation, which isn't realistic) to pay off $38T in debt.

I don't see how this is huge in context, it is indeed symbolic.

Please don't get me wrong here, I am neither advocating the selling or not selling of US bonds. This specific sale just isn't statically significant in a vacuum. If this precipitates a snowball effect of bond-selling, completely different story.
by tzs | 2026-01-21 18:11:30+00:00
> Reference the British Airways flight 5390 accident where the pilot got sucked 3/4 the way out the cockpit window and slammed against the side of the fuselage while a flight attendant clung to his feet and the co-pilot safely landed.

That incident led to a major change in how aircraft windows were designed. Instead of being fitted from the outside they were changed to being fitted from the inside.

When fitted from the outside the job of the fasteners is to keep the cabin pressure from blowing the window out when the plane is high up and the outside pressure is low. When the plane is on the ground gravity will keep the window in place and the fastener isn't doing much.

Botch installing the fasteners and you don't find out about until the window blows out at high altitude, like on that flight.

When fitted from the inside the job of the fasteners is to keep the window from falling in due to gravity when the plane is on the ground or at low altitude. At higher altitudes the cabin pressure pushes the window firmly into the frame and the fasteners aren't doing much.

Botch installing the fasteners and the window falls in on the ground or at low altitude which is a lot easier to deal with then a window blowing out at high altitude.
by Bender | 2026-01-21 18:11:35+00:00
do you actually feel that protest after ICE killing an american citizen is driven by somebody paying foe it?

In my opinion there is almost always money involved. People need incentives to put their lives and their families lives at risk when they would otherwise not be involved living multiple states away and would otherwise not be impacted such as by ICE in this case. There will be exceptions but I suspect those are a minority that may involve mental health, loneliness, attention seeking, virtue-signalling, roped in by emotion triggering videos, etc... I suspect one motivation would be to radicalize people when their paid rioters are told to do things that could risk an agent using bad judgement and someone gets hurt.
by huntergemmer | 2026-01-21 18:12:30+00:00
Thanks - and great question about direction. My current thinking: Focus on performance-first primitives for the core library. The goal is "make fast charts easy" not "make every chart possible." There are already great libraries for infinite customization (D3, Observable Plot) - but they struggle at scale.

That said, the ECharts-style declarative API is intentionally designed to be "batteries included" for common cases. So it's a balance: the primitives are fast, but you get sensible defaults for the 80% use case without configuring everything. Double y-axis is a great example - that's on the roadmap because it's so common in finance and IoT dashboards. Same with annotations, reference lines, etc. Haven't read the Grammar of Graphics book but it's been on my list - I'll bump it up. And d3-shape is a great reference for the path generation patterns. Thanks for the pointers!

Question: What chart types or customization would be most valuable for your use cases?
by switz | 2026-01-21 18:13:13+00:00
I’ve had a lot of success rendering svg charts via Airbnb’s visx on top of React Server Components, then sprinkling in interactivity with client components. Worth looking into if you want that balance.

It’s more low level than a full charting library, but most of it can run natively on the server with zero config.

I’ve always found performance to be kind of a drag with server side dom implementations.
by Nextgrid | 2026-01-21 18:13:34+00:00
The TPM needs a way to authenticate your Java application, since the TPM otherwise does not know whether it's actually talking to your application or something pretending to be it.

This means you generally need an authenticated boot chain (via PCR measurements) and then have your Java app "seal" the key material to that.

It's not a problem with the TPM per-se, it's no different if you were using an external smartcard or HSM - the HSM still needs to ensure it's talking to the right app and not an impersonator (and if you use keypair authentication for that, then your app must store the keypair somewhere - you've just moved the authentication problem elsewhere).
by palmotea | 2026-01-21 18:13:39+00:00
> 12 weeks of paid family leave? More solar power? Only government run prisons? Buying into Medicare at 55? Free in state tuition for families earning less than 125k?

> That's what Gemini lists as her most progressive positions.

Actually what happened was Hilary Clinton was an unlikable and a champion of neoliberal technocracy, with maybe a bit of frosting on top and a side of entitlement.

It's worth remembering that, while much of the HN crowd loves neoliberal technocracy, it's not working for a lot of folks, often in ways that the statistics-obsessed nerds are blind to.

It's a damning indictment of Democrats that they've lost to Trump, twice. You'd think with all their scary warnings about fascism, they wouldn't have rested on their laurels and catered to their base as much as they have.
by zja | 2026-01-21 18:13:45+00:00
> This architecture has a variety of advantages including increased security, no need for patching, fast upgrades and recovery.

SmartOS was developed by Joyent for their cloud computing product, it's primary use case isn't desktop computing. I think the advantages mentioned above were probably a bigger factor than the disk space. I would also guess that PXE would be the standard way to boot in a datacenter, not USB.
by AlexandrB | 2026-01-21 18:14:10+00:00
I think the danger with political discussion is that the expression of an idea is as important as the idea itself. This means that to have a productive political discussion you either need:

1. Very very high verbal skills so that each person can communicate their idea in a way that doesn't leave (much) room for interpretation or a bad-faith reading.

2. A community that "steelmans" each-other's ideas and consistently chooses the best-faith interpretation of what the other person is saying.

(1) is impossible in a forum that accepts folks from a range of backgrounds and abilities. (2) is generally impossible in a public forum on the internet. Even if everyone on Hacker News stuck to this principle, outsiders would not. You'd get posts on reddit about how "Hacker News is a haven for Nazis". Or posts on X about how "Communists are invading the tech community" and ultimately a lot of bad press for Y Combinator that I'm sure they'd rather not have.
by bigyabai | 2026-01-21 18:14:12+00:00
Speaking purely on the software preferences, all of those feel like nice-to-haves. I like a well-tuned HiG and widget library as much as the next guy, but the majority of macOS's features are bloat to me. What am I supposed to do with Stage Manager or AppleTV+? Why is Safari allowed to send me notifications begging the user to boot it up and try the new features? Why does the Settings app show a persistent notification when I log out of iCloud?

There was a point in my life when I also thought I needed those creature comforts. Now I've spent 7 years without dailying macOS and I really don't miss it one bit. You could give me a $0.00 Apple Silicon M6 Ultra laptop with 4 days of battery life, and I'd probably still be reaching for my Thinkpad if I wanted to get work done. As a development OS, macOS is borderline intolerable.
by jyoung789 | 2026-01-21 18:14:16+00:00
>cue the other commenters telling me my experience isn’t real, or I’m misunderstanding how other people can recall stuff like getting married and or the birth of their kids when I can’t

I am much more on the hyperphantasia side of mental imagery but I am constantly astounded at how poorly visual imagery is conveyed as well as the difficulty in conveying the experience of mental imagery intuitively. Similarly it amazes me when people with mental imagery simply cant conceive that there are people without it.

Looking at a test such as this one (https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq), the best descriptor for the most vivid mental imagery is:

>Perfectly clear and as vivid as normal vision

I have always felt that comparing mental imagery to normal vision kind of misses the mark. For the common question people ask, where they say "imagine an apple sitting on the table of front of you" or something similar, where aphantasics simply can't conceptualize what that means, I have seen people say something similar to "Its like photo shopping an apple on top of what your eyes are seeing".

This, to me, sounds more like hallucination rather than mental imagery and I think completely misses the mark for explaining what mental imagery is like to people who don't experience it. For me at least, mental imagery is much more like having some space inside my head disconnected from the physical reality in front of me. So when someone says to 'picture an apple on the desk in front of you', what I experience is that a perfect replica to my surroundings is created in this non-physical space and in that space, there is an apple on my desk. Bare in mind, this is completely detached from what I am literally seeing with my eyes. I could picture an apple on my desk rolling off and onto the ground, and follow that path with my eyes in the physical space in front of me. Really though, I am imagining how this scenario plays out in the non-physical space in my mind, and mapping the motion data of the apple back into reality and using my eyes to see where it 'would be'.

I think what really becomes difficult in conveying mental imagery to people with aphantasia is that they completely lack the conceptualization that you can have all the qualia of a physical space represented to you without it being actually connected to your literal experiences of your surroundings and the space they take up. Like explaining color to the blind, or how some colors are warm and others are cold to a blind person, language fails to adequately transcend the difference in mental facilities. It seems much easier however to go imagine the experience of the blind as a sited person, much like a 3 dimensional creature could imagine the experience of a 2 dimensional one but not a 4 dimensional one.
by aldousd666 | 2026-01-21 18:14:21+00:00
In the 1980's, computer software was sold in catalogs and magazines. Users had either of three platforms: A Macintosh, a PC-Compatible (probably x86), or a Commodore/Amiga. So these are the three categories were there to help you order the correct version of oregon trail. They were really a name for the operating systems, not the specifics of the hardware, at least back then they were.
by Someone | 2026-01-21 18:14:22+00:00
> For those who don't know: The original definition of a metre is 1/40 000 000th of a full circle of longitude of Earth.

That’s incorrect. It’s “one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle through Paris” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre). Different fraction, and much better defined (different circles of longitude may have different lengths)

> That was considered not accurate enough, so it was redefined as the length of a certain metallic bar kept in Paris.

I can’t find a reference, but I think it at least partially was a matter of practicality, not of accuracy. It’s not simple to measure that 10,000 km distance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_measurement_of_Delambre_an...: The arc measurement of Delambre and Méchain was a geodetic survey carried out by Jean-Baptiste Delambre and Pierre Méchain in 1792–1798 to measure an arc section of the Paris meridian between Dunkirk and Barcelona. This arc measurement served as the basis for the original definition of the metre.)
by tomjakubowski | 2026-01-21 18:14:32+00:00
> I've always been a bit skeptical of JS charting libs that want to bring the entire data to the client and do the rendering there

The computer on my desk only costs me the electric power to run it, and there's 0 network latency between it and the monitor on which I'm viewing charts. If I am visualizing some data and I want to rapidly iterate on the visualization or interact with it, there's no more ideal place for the data to reside than right there. DDR5 and GPUs will be cheap again, some day.