skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Sendune – The Email Platform for Anyone Using AWS SES
Just over two months ago, we shared our open source HTML email designer here and it very quickly hit the front-page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007403.

Here's some backstory.

The open source email designer was the foundation and core part of an internal tool we started way back in 2014 to help our clients leverage the reliability and cost benefits of Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). In 2018 we made this tool public - calling it 'Send With SES'. In 2024 we renamed it SENDUNE (https://sendune.com/). This was partly to avoid infringing on the word "SES".

If you are a startup, (or any tech-based company for that matter), chances are your entire tech stack is on AWS but you are not using AWS SES. Instead you use a third party email service like Mailchimp or SendGrid. Why is that the case? AWS SES has the same reliability and deliverability as any other email service. And it comes at a price point too good to ignore. So why does SES not have 'top-of-mind' recall when it comes to email.

There are a few reasons we know of;

- AWS SES is hard to get started with. You need to get out of the sandbox first.
- There's pages and pages of documentation to deal with.
- There's no contact/subscriber management.
- You cannot design email templates.
- Expensive add-ons (delivery dashboard/virtual deliverability manager).

Is there a way to overcomes these hurdles? YES. That's where SENDUNE comes in.

SENDUNE abstracts away all the complexity of sending emails with AWS SES. What you get is a highly reliable way to deliver all your transactional and marketing emails at a fraction of the cost. We have clients who have created email templates for signups and password resets many years ago and haven't touched them since. It is that reliable.

SENDUNE offers a market-leading free plan, and the paid plan costs a lot lesser than any alternative. To be clear, this is not a price play. Email is the basic plumbing of the internet. It's a 'solved problem' and should not be expensive. Every email service provider in this line of business has become a 'rent-seeker', locking you in and charging you more as your subscriber base grows, while providing no additional value.

A small team of four full-stackers keep SENDUNE up and running. Most of us have been wrangling code for the last 15 years or so. More than knowing what to do, we know what not to do - a perk of having donkey's years behind us. This helps us keep server costs significantly low even while still meeting 99.95% uptime SLA's.

We do not carry the burden of venture capital. We have no growth targets or milestones to hit, which gives us immense independence to run SENDUNE in a way that puts our users first. We believe this is the main reason SENDUNE has survived for so long, and we intend to keep it that way.

Will be here for a while. AMA.
Is "fake" the right word?

I was under the impression that the generic "news"/"information" on many sites is purchased (or otherwise obtained through some kind of business relationship) from some other organization.

And I just don't get this perspective from the article:

"For some unfathomable reason, CNN agreed to a deal. What the fuck CNN? You’re CN fucking N. What in god’s name convinced you this was a good idea? And you already had a ramped up affiliate program. I say again: what the fuck CNN?"

I guess I can't figure out what the problem is supposed to be here. I don't think there's necessarily a problem with fleshing out a site with generic content. I would guess CNN has an agreement with the content provider on the general character of content, and can surely opt out of things they don't want to be associated with.

FWIW, I opened "CNN underscored money" and at the top of the page it says:

"Content is created by CNN Underscored’s team of editors who work independently from the CNN Newsroom. CNN earns a commission from partner links on the site but the reporting here is always independent and objective." (plus there's an "advertiser disclosure" link but I didn't click on it).

I just don't get what the problem is here.
Looks like it is all different news, so what is problem here?
I’ve noticed that certain companies become too big to fail, and then they just start breaking the rules.

For instance, Experian stole my credit card number once. The fraud department at my national megabank said that Experian was responsible for over half their case load.

You’d think that the credit card processing networks would have blocked the Experian payment processing account at that point. I think they would have blocked pretty much any other company on earth.
For me, Llama is definitely not good enough yet. At least, the one I can host isn't.
Priceless! <3
> unbiased factual reporting

I don't think that has ever existed, but the closest I've found is Wikipedia. It is surprisingly detailed, particularly on current events.
Their definition of CRPG seems really broad. I have never seen handheld games like pokemon included in that.
https://archive.ph/kpetx
also genocides aren't committed by people in offices ...
Everyone who uses the web visually scans pages to hone in directly on where they think the content is. The question isn't whether or not whoever added that disclaimer meant for it to be visually ignored (they did), the question is whether they did eye-tracking testing to make sure it's ignored (yea, probably).

The disclaimer is disingenuous, because they're trading on the idea people will ignore it, while they can turn around and say everyone is in group of people who not only read the text, but also understand what "independently from the CNN newsroom" is a euphemism for.
If you find yourself in Washington DC, I highly recommend a visit to the International Spy Museum. Its one of the few attractions in DC you need to pay for but worth the ticket price.

(Spoiler Alert)

At the end, there's mural or placard that says something like: Most exhibits in this museum are here because of failure. The best spies are the ones you never hear of.
Europe ESIM (30 Countries)
Mullenweg is a well-practiced interviewee. He’s been cozied up to influencers and podcasters for a long time. He’s an expert in the art of PR and spin. Keep this in mind when trying to understand the situation through his one-sided interpretation.

Anything Matt says publicly should be viewed in contrast to the texts he was sending to WP Engine. It’s clear that his public spin on the situation didn’t match the dirty games he was playing with them via text and via actions with the WordPress services.

I think he’s getting a lot of benefit of the doubt from people who have seen his name across the Internet for years, but getting a peak behind the curtain at his texts really shattered any ideas I had about how trustworthy he is.
Not a bad use, though I argue being able to do that critique yourself has a compounding effect over time that is worthwhile.
Also make sure you take those same youtubers as what they are; raw, independent, and with less accountability than larger platforms insofaras accuracy of content. That isn't to say a smaller creators/channels are bad or not worth while, but being aware of context as you consume is important. We've unfortunately stopped caring about accuracy or accountability in many instances.
What? Reading my comment just in case, most other compression schemes are "only seekable with an additional index", thus not seekable in general.
Both Richard Hipp and Salvatore Sanfillipo came out of the Tcl community. SQLite was originally just a Tcl extension (and may I say, SQLite's Tcl binding is a dream to use). In a nutshell, they were already using Tcl because they found it useful.
It works on hacker news and reddit too, for almost any subject.
Facilities aside, I hear talent is a massive bottleneck. Especially in the US.
I expect to see more and more written on this topic as we fall deeper into late stage capitalism.

Open source is how software developers are conditioned and socialized into participating in their own exploitation under capitalism.
I already have a B&W laser for documents. The color printer needs to print color.
What criteria do you use when calling regime a terrorist regime?
The overuse of the words "engage" and "engagement" makes me feel like this is not good. Overall use of language has a propagandistic feel, or like it's aimed at some group that has a different and very specific vocabulary.
But WPEngine is toeing the line especially precariously.

The company is called WPEngine, sure, but their tagline says "Most trusted WordPress platform". Their plans are named "Essential WordPress", "Core WordPress", etc. Are those products they're selling, or just descriptions? There's enough gray area there to attract a lawyer's attention, which Mullenweg is clearly using to his advantage.
> the inside track of WordPress is a mess right now

Well, far as I know, WP has always been a mess ;)

> Matt Mullenweg, one of the co-founders of the WordPress project

Wasn't it forked from 2/cafelog? Anyway, Automattic is also holder of the .blog TLD so better don't mess with Matt I guess ..,
My guess is this investment was contingent on OpenAI going "for-profit".
>"For some unfathomable reason, CNN agreed to a deal. What the fuck CNN? You’re CN fucking N. What in god’s name convinced you this was a good idea? And you already had a ramped up affiliate program. I say again: what the fuck CNN?"

Anytime I hear outrage rhetoric i lose all interest in the author's words.

Its like they have completely forgotten what relativity is.
Ah! Here's the set of axioms: the Tcl Dodekalogue. https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Dodekalogue?R=0&O=Dodecalogue...
Milking old established brands such as Telegraph, Guardian and the likes with affiliate and sponsored content has been going on for ages in the UK.
Fairly standard greenfield projects seem to be the absolute best scenario for an LLM. It is impressive, but that's not what most professional software development work is, in my experience. Even once I know what specifically to code I spend much more time ensuring that code will be consistent and maintainable with the rest of the project than with just getting it to work. So far I haven't found LLMs to be all that good at that sort of work.
Who are these confused consumers? The people who don’t know much anything about Wordpress except that they want it will end up at Wordpress.com. You have to go out of your way to find alternative hosting providers like WP Engine.

The “confused consumers” thing feels like a manufactured justification for whatever this spat is.
And many European countries can't sell e.g. Everclear. The key bit of my statement was 'arbitrarily low'.
My general problem in all of this is Zuckerberg's reputation and trying to fit that into the character of FB (sigh okay fine "Meta") - "if you need any info on people just ask, they trust me, dumb fucks" - and storing passwords elsewhere https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19453359 and buying up of competition and then lying about it (violating the stipulation from Whatsapp to not share data with Facebook)
Beautiful stuff, glad to see that Underrail also made it into the book. Underrail is probably the best Fallout-like game.
The government can do #1 just fine.
> there was no algorithm that could detect a high-quality review from a spam one.

I really hope for them it does exist because otherwise Google is screwed.
Uno Platform 5.4: Perf Improvements and 290 Issues closed
The idea that robots displace workers has been around for more than half a century, but nothing has ever come out of it. As it turns out, the problems a robot faces when, say laying bricks, are prohibitively complex to solve. A human bricklayer is better in every single dimension. And even if you manage to build an extremely sophisticated robot bricklayer, it will consume vast amounts of energy, is not repairable by a typical construction company, requires expensive spare parts, and costs a ridiculous amount of money.

Why on earth would anyone invest in that when you have an infinite amount of human work available?
don't forget "We need to talk about X"
People interested in this stuff should check out;

1) Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA by Edward Jay Epstein - https://archive.org/details/Deception-TheInvisibleWarBetween...

2) Brainwashing: The Science of Thought Control by Kathleen Taylor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing:_The_Science_of_T...

3) Yuri Bezmenov's lectures (available on Youtube) on "Subversion Model/Psychological Warfare" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Bezmenov and https://bigthink.com/the-present/yuri-bezmenov/

Caution: If you go down this rabbit-hole it will seriously alter your perception of "Reality" itself and you can end-up endlessly second-guessing/triple-guessing etc. everything you experience and think about.
Except if it involves robots or Starcraft, because I like those. But I also like poker, which Sleepybrett seems opposed to.
Let's say books are free like they should be. What about water? Housing? (Public) Transportation?
Yes, exactly. You can package up your entire scripted application, plus all resources, into a single executable, and distribute that single file.
> You never should have. Large amounts of work, even stuff by major authors, is ghostwritten.

I'm reminded of 'Under The Silver Lake' with this reference. Strange film, but that plotline stuck with me.
> In fact one of the core reasons transformers gained so much traction is because they scale so well.

> If nothing really changes in 3-5 years, then I'd call it a flop

Transformers have been used for what 6 years now? Will you in 6 years say "I'll decide if they don't change the world in another 6 years?"
PSA: With RCS now on iOS, be careful when renaming group chats
I do not have to be willing to take out a gun for the ban, and neither does a cop. Cessation of easy online gambling would be enough for some high proportion of the problem. All that takes is the court shutting the company down and serving a cease and desist to their website. You may claim this requires a gun but as far as I know that's never been the case.
If cash were invented today, it would be illegal.
I don’t need to use an LLM for coding because my projects where I would need an LLM don’t include things already existing that would be a waste of time no matter how efficiently I could do it.

Furthermore it is an application of principles but the application was done a long time ago by someone else, not the LLM and not you. As you claimed you did none of the work, only went in and tweak these applied principles.

I’ll tell you what slows me down and why I don’t need an LLM. I had a task to migrate some legacy code from one platform to another, I made the PRs, added some tests, and prepared the deploy files as instructed in the READMEs of the platform I was migrating to. This took me 3-4 days. It then took 26 days to get the code deployed because 5 people are gate keepers of Helm charts and AWS policies.

Software development isn’t slow because I had to read docs and understand what I’m building, it is slow because we’ve enabled AWS to create red tape and gatekeepers. Your LLM doesn’t speed up that process.

> They're super useful and improving every month - you don't have to take my word for it.

And each month that goes by that you continue to invest, your value decreases and you will be out of a job. As you have demonstrated, you don’t need to know how to build a UI library or even that your UI library you “generated” is just a reskin of something else. If it’s so simple and amazing that you don’t need to know anything, why would I keep you around?

Here’s a fun anecdote, sometimes I pair with my manager when working through something pretty causally. I need to rubber duck an idea or am stuck on finding the documentation for a construct. My manager will often take my problem and chat with an LLM for a few minutes. Every time I end up finding the answer before he finishes his chat. Most of the time his solution is often wrong because by nature LLMs are scrambling the possible results to make it look like a unique solution.

Congrats on impressing yourself that LLM can be a slightly accurate code generator. How does paying a company to do something TabNine was doing years ago make me money? What will you do with all your free time generate more useless dependencies?
Show HN: Open-source Docker image to run Chrome browsers in your cloud
If you’ve ever worked with web scraping or automation using Puppeteer or Playwright, you know that running Chrome can be tricky. While headless mode (Chrome with no display) often works, some page elements only render in headed mode, forcing you to run Chrome with a display. This usually means bloating your Dockerfile with complex dependencies like xvfb. Updating your server or Lambda container to handle this can increase costs and lead to dependency hell.

The Solution:

I’ve built a streamlined solution—a Docker image that runs Chrome with all its necessary dependencies and exposes a FastAPI interface. This decouples the browser logic from your main codebase, letting you focus on scraping or automation without worrying about the underlying setup.

The container exposes a WebSocket endpoint at ws://localhost:8000/ws, allowing you to connect Playwright or Puppeteer over Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP). For example:

browser = await pw.chromium.connect_over_cdp('ws://localhost:8000/ws')

Each connection to the WebSocket spins up a new Chrome session in headed mode, and you can run multiple sessions concurrently.

Unlike other solutions, Finic is fully open-source (Apache 2.0 licensed). You can try it by pulling the official Docker image or cloning the repo at Finic on GitHub (https://github.com/finic-ai/finic) and running `docker-compose up --build`.

This approach simplifies handling Chrome for scraping, saves on cloud costs, and keeps your setup clean. Give it a try!
Wow, about Yao:

"In fact, it might be better said that Yao is meant to be:

As powerful as C,
As flexible as Lisp,
As easy as Python,
As provable as Ada/SPARK,
More reliable than Rust,
With the time semantics of HAL/S."

Even if I don't really believe in this incredible statement, I'm really curious to see what can be the result.
Honestly, what do you expect these people to call their services?

“Essential Blog Hosting Service using a Commonly Used Open Source Software That We Cannot Name”?
the disclaimer is at the top of every page, and OP here is pretending his sleuthing anything other than an (idealogically/politically motivated?) disingenuous hit piece.

"look at the HTML it catches the lie!" - meanwhile, the 'lie' also exposed in clear text in a banner across the top of page. 1337 h4xing indeed.
His reasoning:

> Ruby on Rails is a form of technical debt
Get a color laser. MFC 3770. Never worry about being able to print again.
Frequently line managers have 10x the responsibility but get 10% more pay. If anybody deserves a union it is them.
Fictitious Play Algorithm
Targeting civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, places of worship, water supplies, food supply lines, etc for the purposes of instilling fear in a civilian population to push a particular stance.
Brat Generator – Chrome Extension
A lot of communication isn't about "established facts/research"; it's about someone's experience. For example, if a human writes about their experience of using a product, perhaps a drug, or writes what they think about a book or a film, then I might be interested in reading that. When they write using their own words I get some insight into how they think and what sort of person they are. I have very little interest in reading an AI-generated text with similar "content".
Well known stratagem : https://changingminds.org/disciplines/warfare/36_strategems/...
AI already is. And a human is not likely going to beat AI at its own game. Humans are slow. AI is fast.

Companies need to leverage AI for defense and red teaming. AI vs AI is how this is going to go.
While this blog post is a very balanced take and definitely not a knee-jerk reaction, I disagree with some of the biases pointed out. Sure, WP Engine advertises itself contributing back on their home page. But, rightfully so? Yeah, they don't contribute back as much as Matt or anyone would like to, but, they still contribute back, right?

Next, one of the author's arguments is that WP Engine doesn't stop others as advertising itself as the "Wordpress Engine". Sure, but this same parallel can be drawn towards Wordpress.org itself. The homepage of Wordpress.org SCREAMS open-source. But, is it really though? It is an ecosystem around a centralised (plugin) repository controlled by one person/entity. That's not truly open source. Today WP Engine is blocked because they upset the overlords. Tomorrow, it could be anyone of us.

Also, the whole argument made on the official blog post was WP Engine customising the admin panels, branding and other components to change the experience of Wordpress as they see fit. Isn't that the point of open source? In the same spirit, I can also argue that Automattic doesn't really provide 100% open source Wordpress' experience either - It has many walled features across different price points.

If Wordpress is truly open source and if Matt's concerns are really around the spirit of open source, the fair thing that he/his company should have done is released the whole source code that powers the entire Wordpress.com eco-system including their backend systems on how they handle billing and scale. But, you know what? That will never happen, because that is their competitive advantage.

As someone who handles multi-million visitor sites on Wordpress, I can tell you this - the whole Wordpress eco-system thrives because the code is bad and it just won't scale - both performance wise and development wise as your content grows. The entire competitive advantage of Wordpress.com is actually masking this bad code and scaling difficulty behind a pretty interface. I would love to see them open source that. Of course, that won't happen.

This is just one entity abusing another with their power. I am in no way supporting WP Engine (they seem sleazy and I would never host any of my client sites with them). But, there are plenty of people they could have gone after - how about Kinsta? They do the same thing.

This was just a personal attack. You simply can't sugar-coat that.
While understandable, implementing it is however far from easy.
The accusation that WPE is responsible for there not being redundancy in API access to WordPress.org services is absurd. If AWS rents me a server running Windows, there's not an expectation that they run their own update servers and app store.

Automattic cut off API access for users who hosted on WPE. Let that be very clear: Automattic's position is that you can install WordPress on any server and get updates and plugins, so long as it's not WPE's servers. This is Automattic trying to extract rent from the people hosting the servers and preinstalling the software.
Thats like asking someone to not write "lol" when they can write "laughed out loud". Get on with the times, old man.
Perfect Output

What I expect it means: What You See Is What You Get to the extreme. Absolutely predictable printing.

What HP, instead, thinks: What the actual fuck.
That's right. I wrote and maintain a bunch of small things, because they're useful to me and I hope they can be useful to others too. The most popular is probably iciff. I haven't released anything in a bit over a year because it's essentially done. People don't bug me about it, and if they did I'd ignore them. If you told me some large company was getting a lot of value out of it that would be fine with me: the whole reason it's public is so people can use it.
The prize is very underwhelming. If they really want people to spend effort on it, they need to make the prize worth it.
I'm not sure that's the entirely the case, given that, when I was a kid, you couldn't buy non-distilled beverages at the grocery store either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_beverage_control_sta...
Saying no still takes time and in a popular project I'm sure it's exhausting.

You're free to not respond or read requests at all.