MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is building a local tunnel using serverless technology a bad idea?
by hussachai | 2026-01-02 06:56:33+00:00
With serverless, the options are quite limited and the technology is well.. locked in. While some parts are portable, most are not. I use a binary protocol (Protobuf) over WebSocket. Yes, it'sslower than local tunnel services that operate at a lower level like TCP, but it's fast enough for most scenarios.

Scaling is a major challenge. Most serverless compute engines rely on an internal load balancer, and all instances are ephemeral. This means instance-to-instance communication is not possible. Scaling can be achieved through a message bus like Pub/Sub, but this introduces another problem. Requests and responses published to topics are replicated across all active instances, which is inefficient.

Other annoying limitations are that the compute process is bound to a request and ends immediately when the request completes. Another is the need to hack subscription leaks caused by the ephemeral nature of the instances (I really hate this).

Cons:

- Scaling is inefficient.

- WebSocket is stateful, which defeats the purpose of cost optimization for serverless. If a client stays connected, the cost can exceed that of running dedicated servers.

- Protocol and platform options are limited.

- Strong vendor lock-in.

Pros:

- Performance is good enough for most use cases.

- Scaling and infrastructure are fully managed.

- No usage means no cost, while the service remains available.

- Small usage is often free, as most cloud providers offer free tiers.

I think building this as a SaaS is a bad idea. It does not reduce costs, in fact it increases them, and it adds significant complexity. Running it as a SaaS is very likely not profitable in today market I assume.

That said, do you think any organization would be interested in an open source version? It is scalable, costs nothing to run aside from initial setup time, and can be more secure if they can properly manage network access. I am not even sure if anyone would be willing to pay a small fee for this.

Maybe I'm building trash. I'm asking here to find out if it could be someone's treasure.
by sjducb | 2026-01-02 06:57:05+00:00
The main reason why is to keep a handle on complexity.

When you’re in a project with a few million lines of code and 10 years of history it can get confusing.

Your data will have been handled by many different functions before it gets to you. If you do this with raw lists then the code gets very confusing. In one data structure customer name might be [4] and another structure might have it in [9]. Worse someone adds a new field in [5] then when two lists get concatenated name moves to [10] in downstream code which consumes the concatenated lists.
by dundarious | 2026-01-02 06:57:27+00:00
The court of public opinion is a really shitty court to apply to potentially criminal damage that occurred well outside the area of interest and knowledge for 99.99% of said public. The standards are shit, the outcomes are shit (bad idea when the ramifications are huge).

It clearly worked very poorly in the case of the recent "Russian drone interference" panic, many of which turned out to not even be drones, never mind Russian ones. https://www.dronewatch.eu/61-european-drone-sightings-analys...

Or the "UFOs" over Pennsylvania.
by realusername | 2026-01-02 06:57:50+00:00
I worked through the IE days and Safari definitely has a IE feeling that you can't shake off.

IE had a lot of browser features which officially were there but in practice didn't fully work.

I had issues with forms, zIndex, SVGs, backgrounds and localStorage with Safari. All of which I consider basic browser features which should always work.

Of course it's not as bad as IE but Safari is clearly lagging very far behind Chrome and Firefox
by apparent | 2026-01-02 06:58:58+00:00
I was like 20 when I learned about this trick. Before then I'd only driven a few vehicles, and I just knew which side of the car the gas tank opening was on. A friend mentioned it when we were going to fill up a car a borrowed car and I asked which side it was on.

I've since met many adults who were unaware of this trick. It's like the real-world analog of an insufficiently discoverable UI functionality.
by hulitu | 2026-01-02 06:59:08+00:00
> HP-UX hits end-of-life today

HP really looks like a company where ideas go to die (hello Google).
They aquired Apollo, killed it. They aquired Compaq, killed Alpha, sent VMS in a nursing home where it is still on life support, killed PA-RISC and, finally, they are killing now HP-UX.

Good that they got rid of Agilent, on time.
by ropable | 2026-01-02 06:59:48+00:00
Working fully remote during the COVID times taught me one thing quite well: that I am nowhere near the introvert I thought I was. Turns out that I really missed hanging out with friends in the same location (albeit a bit less often than some other people).

These days I treat active IRL socialisation similar to other health-promoting activities such as physical exercise. Even when it feels like a chore, it has a benefit. It's worth maintaining that practice, too; socialising in person is a skill like any other, which you can get better at.

Maintaining a good social circle is a bit like maintaining a garden. It rewards consistent low-level effort over a long period.
by moultano | 2026-01-02 07:00:33+00:00
I think most great parents didn't feel ready, and in some sense not feeling ready is evidence of the kind of conscientiousness that makes you a great parent. I think it is a valuable service to push people who want kids but aren't sure when to have them to have them earlier than they otherwise would. You never know how difficult it will be for you until you start trying.
by avidiax | 2026-01-02 07:00:55+00:00
I was previously at Uber. I can imagine that the culture at some of these companies is toxic enough that people may openly discuss or even brag about some of these things.

There is also a good chance that this person only has 2nd and 3rd hand information and much of the post is only partly true.

Re: 100% of tips going to the driver

I have heard that many of the services are required to at least pay minimum wage. Let's say that this is $20/hr. If they receive $15 in tips during that hour, the company reduces their wage to $5. Driver gets $20 for the hour, $15 in tips, $5 in wages. Yes, 100% of the tips goes to the driver. No, the driver isn't economically better off depending on your tip, unless you are a very generous tipper.

In California, there's AB578 [1], which makes that practice illegal. The poster's algorithm (set the wage before the tip, based on the predicted tip) seems like it might be an attempted workaround for that law. I think it adds credibility that the poster has insight on that algorithm, since they aren't claiming just the publicly known offsetting tactic.

[1] https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/1830894
by theshackleford | 2026-01-02 07:01:28+00:00
> At this point, the only valid excuses to stay on Windows, in my opinion

I didn’t see a performance increase moving to Linux for the vast majority of titles tested. Certainly not enough to outweigh the fact that I want EVERY game to work out of the box, and to never have to think if it will or won’t. And not all of my games did, and a not insignificant number needed serious tweaking to get working right.

I troubleshoot Linux issues all day long, I’ve zero interest in ever having to do it in my recreation time.

That’s a good enough reason for me to keep my windows box around.

I use Linux and OSX for everything that isn’t games, but windows functions just fine for me as a dumb console and I don’t seem to suffer any of these extreme and constant issues HN users seem to have with it from either a performance or reliability standpoint.
by another_twist | 2026-01-02 07:01:58+00:00
What about the claims though ? I dont see the point of getting hung up on just this and discrediting the rest of the story. Tbf this proves nothing without more confirmations however it might be possible to design client side A/B tests to catch this type of behaviour. Might be something NYT or some group with a well resourced investigative arm could pull off.
by withinboredom | 2026-01-02 07:02:31+00:00
Valgrind won’t show you leaks where you (or a GC) still holds a reference. This could mean you’re holding on to large chunks of memory that are still referenced in a closure or something. I don’t know what language or anything about your project, but if you’re using a GC language, make sure you disable GC when running with valgrind (a common mistake). You’ll see a ton of false positives that the GC would normally clean up for you, but some of those won’t be false positives.
by mjgs | 2026-01-02 07:04:40+00:00
Location: Europe / Asia, very flexible with working hours, can accommodate most timezones, experienced remote worker. Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes

Hi I’m Mark, a Web Developer, Consultant and Automation Engineer originally from the UK. I specialize in devops/system tools, workflow automation integrations, and NodeJS web development.

10+ years working in IT, experienced delivering large projects for Fortune 500 companies internationally, and working remotely.

Most recently I’ve been developing social media SaaS and statically generated (a.k.a Jamstack) websites, built using GitHub actions, deployed to Netlify, as well as OAuth 2.0 authenticated REST APIs, Typescript, React frontends. I have also been really getting into working with both cloud hosted (Gemini) and locally running (Ollama, Llama.cpp) LLMs in VSCode devcontainers.

Technologies:

NodeJS, Typescript, Perl, Python, Bash, Git, Express, Mocha, HTML/Javascript/CSS, ES2015-2020, OAuth 2.0, React, JQuery, Bootstrap, AWS, Digital Ocean, Netlify, Heroku, Podman, Docker, Lambda, Serverless, Message Queues, Stripe, Mailgun, Linux, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, Nginx, Letsencrypt, GitHub Actions, Gemini, Ollama.

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Résumé/CV: On request via email

Email: markjgsmith@gmail.com
by chvid | 2026-01-02 07:04:45+00:00
I am a China perma bull and a panda hugger but most of my money is in the US.

US capital is the completely dominant center of global capital and it will be so for decades to come. Ultimately this will flip too as China becomes the global economic center but I am not quite sure what it will look like and I don't assume the process of capital allocation will be exactly the same as it is today in the US-system (there may be more state directed investment, more bank lending, perhaps less public speculation, or even novel financial structures).

That said - Chinese stocks had a good year in 2025 and are currently on a run - and there is certainly a lot of value there.
by pembrook | 2026-01-02 07:05:18+00:00
The vast majority of billionaires don't get wealthy by 'gaming the system' and if that were the case and you simply could just game the system, why isn't there more of them?

Also, you still haven't explained how you're morally superior by being in the top 10% of global earners vs. the top .01%, while people are starving. Using your logic about how you think the world works, you've clearly gamed the system to take more for yourself.

Billionaires are subject to the exact same tax laws as you. What you're likely referring to is the discrepancy in taxation of capital gains vs. income and the use of debt to borrow against assets.

But you then have to contend with the fact pretty much every successful country in the world taxes capital less than income at a certain point. And nobody taxes debt. Why? Because it incentivizes risk taking and investment in businesses (a value multiplier) vs. the non-scalable activity of selling your hours as an employee past a certain point.

What you perceive as "immoral" activity (investment and entrepreneurship) is the risk-taking that makes the economy function and grow, which benefits everyone.

Even your perceived socialist utopia, the Nordics (where I live) taxes capital gains less than income. I think you may want to investigate whether this is a Chestertons fence before loudly shouting about remaking the world on an emotional impulse and calling me a bootlicker.
by ta-eleph-pants | 2026-01-02 07:05:19+00:00
> The emotionally manipulative things like “pay the rent”, “tip theft”

Those are accurate descriptions of what's going on.

> With all the modern corporate doublespeak trainings, there is 0 chance that something would be called “desperation score” in us business.

Not at all unrealistic. These are meant to be internal.

> (unions, your delivery guy homeless)

When was the last time you took an Uber? They don't smell that well, and it's a known fact _a lot_ of drivers live in their cars.

> Again, Instacart, for example, says that 100% of tip goes to driver. If it’s not, they just painting crazy big target on their backs.

This only means that the entire tip amount goes to the driver, which is accurate. It doesn't preclude their other sources of revenue from being reduced, as described by OP.

> but that one guy has exposure to all of that, I doubt it.

Very plausible he/she does. I worked for a similar company and as a software engineer of no particular rank I had access to everything, incl. code, documents describing features, cross-team meetings where those were discussed, etc. I also had friends across the teams who would talk about what they are working on all the time.
by whatever1 | 2026-01-02 07:05:39+00:00
Lyft is also a scam for the drivers. In a ride from the airport to home during rush hour (1h and 15 minutes drive) I got charged ~$140. The company was paying, so whatever.

During the ride I was chatting with the driver, and I was curious how much he was making from the ride.

At the end of the ride he showed me. $48 (before my tip). WTF.

From that he had to pay gas, maintenance and taxes.

How is this legal? What is the marginal cost for Lyft per mile driven? It must be close to zero. Insane.
by btilly | 2026-01-02 07:08:52+00:00
No, it can be both the government, and the people.

The government for all of the reasons you say.

The people because they have fallen for and accepted propaganda. Thereby leading them to support the government and its toxic narratives.

I base this opinion mostly on seeing how Russian propaganda has poisoned my mother-in-law's mind. Many media reports and various other sources have verified that she is not an isolated example, most Russians accept the same propaganda narratives.
by eastbound | 2026-01-02 07:09:18+00:00
It drives usage up! Seriously, I wonder whether this “Make things to annoy people” trend is a normal situation, or an emerging behavior due to our era, and whether it will be solved one day. Example: In 2003 all UX was abominable, programs were ugly and black and white and text and boring, then came the iPhone with the idea to hire designers for apps, it was entirely new and absolutely unseen before. It was necessary during the take off phase of our industry, but are we simply witnessing the regression to normal, with UX being driven by corporate suits?
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-01-02 07:09:30+00:00
For individuals, a person might ask "Why can't Rodney just behave himself" without accepting that Rodney is violently anti-social and likes to throw liquidy turds at everyone. And for species, a person might ask "Why can't spider monkeys just behave themselves" without accepting that spider monkeys are dumb animals and that's what they do.

But if I point out that this same thing applies to the Russians as a whole, then suddenly I'm racist.
by ryukoposting | 2026-01-02 07:10:21+00:00
I've lived in Silicon Valley for exactly 3 days now. Recently moved from the Midwest.

There are two kinds of people in San Jose: locals who are normal folks you'd find anywhere, and techies with the AI brainworm. People who are astonished by the natural beauty of this place, and people who are astonished by an office park because there are Apple and Nvidia logos on it. It's all incredibly weird and I don't like it much.
by jmward01 | 2026-01-02 07:11:18+00:00
I'm at the point where I want a pop-up for every time my phone wants to use location/camera/mic/contacts. Or at least more options to require this for individual system services/apps.

Also, while we are at it, why can't I disable network access entirely for some apps? If I have a game that doesn't need the internet then it doesn't need the internet and I don't want it to have access to the internet, ever. I have been putting my phone in airplane mode just to use some of the apps and not have them phone home. This is a clearly missing (intentionally not added?) privacy feature.
by solatic | 2026-01-02 07:11:58+00:00
For a "YAML" lockfile, you could probably write a much simpler and much more performant parser that throws out much of what makes YAML complicated, in particular, anchors, data type tags, all the ways of doing multi-line strings, all the weird unexpected type conversions (like yes/no converting to a boolean)... If the lockfile is never meant to be edited by human hands, only reviewed by human eyes, you can build a much simpler parser for something like:

version: "1"
dependencies:
foo:
version: "1.0"
lock: "sha-blabla"
by bilbo0s | 2026-01-02 07:13:31+00:00
I have to admit, I've never been persuaded by this western idea that if you get rid of Putin, everything will be better.

I'm not sure what part of Russian history, or contemporary Russian society, gives people confidence in this idea?

I'm not being anti-Russian here either. I feel the same way about our nation here in the US. Even if we were to rid ourselves of Trump for instance, we would still have serious issues with a large body of people who support Trump-like policies. A wise Europe would still be obliged to be on guard against us.

Every nation has belligerent elements. Russia is no different. While, say, Putin, may be an expression of that belligerent element, I'm unconvinced that he is the belligerent element itself. I think it's foolish, potentially fatal, to make that assumption.
by kderbe | 2026-01-02 07:13:32+00:00
Steve Burke from GamersNexus tested eight games from their benchmark suite on Linux last month. Although his conclusion was generally positive, there were problems with nearly every game:

- F1 2024 didn't load due to anti-cheat

- Dragon's Dogma 2 and Resident Evil 4 had non-functional raytracing

- Cyberpunk 2077 with raytracing on consistently crashes when reloading a save game

- Dying Light 2 occasionally freezes for a whole minute

- Starfield takes 25 minutes to compile shaders on first run, and framerates for Nvidia are halved compared to Windows

- Black Myth: Wukong judders badly on Nvidia cards

- Baldur's Gate 3 Linux build is a slideshow on Nvidia cards, and the Windows build fails for some AMD cards

If you research these games in discussion forums, you can find some configuration tweaks which might fix the issues. ProtonDB's rating is not a perfect indicator (BM:W is rated "platinum").

And while Steve says measurements from Linux and Windows are not directly comparable, I did so anyway and saw that Linux suffers a 10-30% drop in average FPS across the board when compared to Windows, depending on the game and video card.
by jacobrussell | 2026-01-02 07:13:43+00:00
I thought I would share this just because I found it interesting:

https://www.pangram.com/history/a22e7372-5970-4537-b511-0416...

Pangram is an interesting company and, to me, seems to be SOTA in AI detection. This came back as “Fully AI Generated.”

It has been interesting to read about the methodology. Still not sure how I feel about it!

Either way, as other comments have suggested, important to take things with a grain of salt as always.
by mulmboy | 2026-01-02 07:14:09+00:00
I'm well ware that they can be sycophantic, and I structure things to avoid that like asking "what do you think of this problem" and seeing the idea fall out rather than providing anything that would suggest it. In one of these two cases it took an idea that I had inkling of, fleshed it out, and expanded it to be much better than I had.

And I'm not bragging. I'm expressing awe, and humility that I am finding a machine can match me on things that I find quite difficult. Maybe those things aren't so difficult after all.

By steering I mean more steering to flesh out the context of the problem and to find relevant code and perform domain-specific research. Not steering toward a specific solution.
by somenameforme | 2026-01-02 07:15:11+00:00
The peace treaty will clarify that, but I think the more important thing is the establishment of a multipolar world order. That, in and of itself, can lead to conflict, but I also have some optimism that it might bring in a paradoxical peace in the same way that nuclear weapons did. The reason nukes have been good is because it makes it clear that war is unwinnable which effectively ended direct conflict between world powers. Yet of course proxy wars are alive and well with Ukraine being the king of them all. And the US may be unable to defeat Russia in this war, but it's also equally unlikely that Russia could defeat the US in a similar scenario. So, "The only winning move is not to play."

Of course this says nothing at all about relatively small regional conflicts, but in the grand scheme of things I'm far more concerned about WW3 than I am about these. That's not to understate the impact of what can (and is) happening in these sort of conflicts, but at the end of the day I don't think humanity will ever 'evolve' beyond war, and so in the mean time I think the goal should be to not end our species over something that will inevitably look like a pointless waste of life in a few decades. Keep in mind that WW1 was unironically called 'The War to End All Wars' before we started attaching an ordinal to it.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-01-02 07:15:11+00:00
>Russia did inquire about joining NATO multiple times, as far back as the 50s as the USSR,

But Russia never inquired in good faith. It was only ever sarcastically. And had it joined NATO (perhaps because the west was stupid, which it is), then right now we'd be in the pickle of trying to reconcile one NATO member invading another (likely) NATO member, and wondering what to do about it. Russia doesn't honor its treaties, neither according to the spirit of the law nor to the letter.

Now that there's no longer any point in hiding it, we should expand NATO to include everyone that is marginally adjacent to Russia. Japan, South Korea, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan. Hell, why not throw Taiwan in.
by BatteryMountain | 2026-01-02 07:15:15+00:00
To add to this, culture can be changed significantly in a short period. See how the USA has changed in the past 20 years, the culture has changed 2 or 3 times now with vastly different values & attitudes between each. What does each period have in common? Thick gobs of propaganda being push in every nook & cranny. And lack of critical thinking on the individual level. If country X wants to change, it is very possible, its just a matter of time, persistence & brain washing. Brain washing the youth is the easiest path, especially if in the opposite direction than what their parents/elderly want.
by Epa095 | 2026-01-02 07:15:31+00:00
I have some friends on the east coast of Canada playing in a indie band. They have experienced this many times, that the venue is sold out but then only 15-20 people show up. Supposedly a lot of these places have people buying annual access packages to support the venue, but don't end up going.

They have now started touring in Europe instead. Many cities with short distances, and people actually show up for the show. Much more rewarding to play with actuall audience.