skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Audioscrape: Building in Rust When Everyone Said I Shouldn't
I'm excited to share my journey of bootstrapping Audioscrape, a podcast exploration platform, built entirely in Rust. Despite conventional wisdom suggesting RoR, Python, or TypeScript for rapid MVP development, I chose Rust to challenge myself technically and optimize for low operational costs. The result? A performant application running on a $7/month VM, demonstrating that you can launch lean and scale efficiently.

Why Rust for a Bootstrapped MVP?

Cost-Efficiency: Minimal resource usage translates to lower hosting costs, crucial for bootstrapping.

Performance: Efficient handling of audio processing and web serving, allowing for growth without immediate infrastructure scaling.

Learning Investment: Deepening expertise in a language with growing demand, potentially opening future opportunities.

Proving a Point: Demonstrating Rust's viability for rapid development in web applications.

Project Overview:

Audioscrape aggregates podcast RSS feeds, transcribes episodes, and provides an interactive interface for exploring and discussing podcast content. It's a full-stack Rust application, leveraging various crates from the ecosystem.

Technical Stack:

Backend: Axum (async web framework)

Database: SQLite with SQLx for type-safe queries

Authentication: OAuth2

Image Processing: For social media previews

HTML Templating: Askama

Async Runtime: Tokio

Development Approach:

4k LoC in a single main.rs file (plus HTML templates)

Rapid iteration using Neovim for navigation

Lean development: No external services beyond the VM

Key Features:

Transcription Browsing: Read along with your favorite podcasts or quickly scan for topics of interest.

Segment Highlighting: Share and discuss specific moments from episodes.

Community Interaction: Upvote, comment on, and bookmark your favorite segments.

Advanced Search: Find relevant content across multiple podcasts and episodes.

Person Profiles: Explore appearances of specific guests or hosts across different shows.

Challenges and Learnings:

Overcoming the learning curve of Rust's ownership model

Efficient transcriptions and speaker detection

Managing all aspects solo: Development, design, and operations

Future Plans:

API for third-party integrations

WebAssembly for client-side processing

Scaling strategies for larger datasets (search)

Personalized content delivery

Metrics and Goals:

Current Users: 500 (last 7 days)

MRR: $0

Cost per User: Less than $0.01 (thanks to efficient resource use)

Next Milestone: Add paid features to pay the bills + reduce cost per episode page creation

Questions for the HN Community:

Has anyone else bootstrapped using Rust? What were your experiences?

How do you balance technical debt vs. shipping features in a solo project?

What strategies have worked for you in marketing such technical products?

I'm bootstrapping this project and would greatly appreciate any feedback, especially from those who've launched similar technical products or used unconventional tech stacks for MVPs. Check out Audioscrape at www.audioscrape.com and let me know your thoughts!
Has anyone seen these in person? I might have to try and grow some to see what they do.
> "One class per file".

Wait. What? Neither Java nor Rust limit class/struct per file. You must mean public class per file.

As a fellow Java dev, no it doesn't look like Java at all. Maybe it looks a bit like Kotlin, but only superficially.

I wrote Rust on and off for 5 years, by that time you internalize the borrow checker.
> crafting language that convinces listeners that a real, caring person exists behind the words.

I'd take a doctor with a poor bedside manner over this any day of the week. I honestly can't think of a faster way of utterly destroying any trust or confidence than by tricking people into thinking they're talking to a real person rather than a machine.
Everyone is thinking the same thing reading that headline.
In a stroke of comedic genius the link still says "bodies" instead of "people".
> The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++.

And 30 years later they show few signs of letting go.
Just like The Fonz.
Well. In this case it's almost a labeling thing. You could make an exception for this (maintained) release candidate if in your judgement incomplete documentation (basically rust doc stubs for a significant percentage of the libraries) was (not) a blocker.

In some places we were told to never use libraries that weren't 1.0 - obviously that would be bonkers in the rust world. In these things you really have to use your own judgement...

I don't feel like their decision to make documentation a release blocker shows disrespect for the users. They were repeatedly clear that it was safe to use and feature complete.
They did note the shift from a single man project to a foundation governance took longer than expected and was part of the release as well, but, you know, non-code stuff like that also takes longer.
Money and Legitimacy
People seem to have this misconception that "cloud computing" is some kind of magic bullet that guarantees 100% durability. News flash, your data is still being stored on physical hard drives, in some data center. If the building burns down in a fire, of course your data will be gone, the hard drives are hosed, it's not magic. You really have no one to be mad at other than yourself...
You need to have battery bank, which many people don't do in places where there is net metering. I've put off installing batteries because currently the utility pays me for power. Unfortunately, this means when the power is out the grid disconnect flips and the solar power goes nowhere. I'll get batteries some day.
Dirty brainwashing ad tricks sneak into Congress, no surprise: “If you are pro-crypto, we will help you, and if you are anti we will tear you apart.”
I've read this a few times over the years and I think the argument is sound. But I wonder if it is sound in the same way this statement is:

"It is better to go picking blueberries before they are fully ripe, that way you won't have much competition."
> Learning Investment: Deepening expertise in a language with growing demand, potentially opening future opportunities.

If it's just you, then that reason alone justifies it.
So, I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but this announcement has extremely suspicious timing.

You see, I host a cloud storage service on Hetzner. I have 12 PETABYTES of user data stored there. The data is spread over 120 of their SX type storage servers. Last week Hetzner sent me an email saying they were closing my account for an unknown reason. I have repeatedly been asking about the reason of this sudden closure, but they won't tell me. Meanwhile I have a huge problem, because I need to move 12 PB to a different hosting provider, and they only gave me until the end of November. That's an almost impossible deadline for setting up such a large storage cluster. Especially considering that Hetzner's 1 Gbps port speed makes it impossible to transfer the data in less than three weeks.

Don't trust Hetzner, guys. They screwed me over real bad here, and it seems like they will be taking the hardware that I have been renting there for 10 years for themselves now. This is incredibly scummy behaviour.
Yes, but it’s quite common to use “micro” to mean “small” in some technical fields. Example: Microprocessor
I think should have a dig.

While it’s not perfect, I know a few other people people who do “set up lots of data structures, including in libraries, then make use of the fact multiprocessing uses fork to duplicate them”. While fork always has sharp edges, it’s also long been clearly documented that’s the behavior on Linux.
Empirically, it seems Worse is Better appear to have been correct many many times.
Yeah, it's not a bad idea, but a dentist visit is a stressful time for a lot of people - trying to learn a new way of representing information is probably a lot to ask of people getting a root canal.

I know that if my dentist told me, "ok, one dot means yes, two dots means no, three dots means pain, four dots means you had a nice weekend..." I'd just tell them I'll suffer through it quietly and raise my hand or grunt if I need to urgently communicate something.
Duckdb is different, though. Not having tried SQ but it seems like a better tool for quick declarative data-munges/parsing/etc, while Duckdb is more of a real project tool with real SQL.

https://duckdb.org/docs/api/cli/
This is cool, congrats on launching!

How is it different from Puter AI, which offers auth + free inference?

https://docs.puter.com/AI/chat/
Anatomy of Embedded Elixir
More like Clear Channel / iHeartMedia bought all of them and turned them into the “the greatest hits of the 80s, 90s, and today!” I listen to NPR sometimes, and KEXP plays good music, and I can also stream both of them. I haven’t listened to commercial FM radio in many years because it’s absolutely awful in the US.

I’m the one who said it’s weird we single out cars to have AM radios, but my wife actually listens to live sports on AM during her work commute. If I had to pick exactly one of FM or AM to have in our car, it’d be AM without a second thought.
Browser Based AI Video Upscaler
I wrote some AI Upscaling Neural Networks from Anime4K in WebGPU, turned it both into an open source SDK (websr.dev) and a free tool to upscale videos. Nowhere near as good as well known AI Upscaling models like ESRGan, but ESRGAN would never in a million years work on a chromebook at 30fps
Yup first thing I thought. That pathetic piece of crap conceived in basically 15 days (not kidding)... BUT it is what we have on the front-end for web apps so there's that. JavaScript is the mediocre turd I love to hate.
The problem is that it is massively skewed in favor of the company hiring.

First of all you need to fight through the annoying drop downs of Workday (which have 0 accessibility).

Then you need to write a cover letter, because for some reason that's mandatory a lot of times.

Then you get an email with a CodeSignals / LeetCode pre-interview.

So all in all I'm in it for about 1 hour already before I am even considered as part of the pile.
I've done a fair bit of TIG, a little bit of SMAW.

Are we talking about welding with basically reduced mains current? AC? SMAW and TIG both require current well in excess of what you can get out of a wall without tripping a breaker. I think for welding 14ga mild steel I was running at minimum 80A on the machine, but more like 130A with the foot pedal. Are you talking light gauge like as in spot welding territory?
Thanks for the feedback! We are building prompt templates right now. Besides the security benefits you mentioned, this can also enable developers to tweak prompts without redeployment, run A/B tests, and evaluate different models. It's an incredibly powerful tool!
haha! This starts out as free 100GB of storage. Evolves into an AI Start-Up company that magically promises to be the best assistant ever, now that it has scraped your life into it's LLM.

#kidding, but also highly sus of anyone giving anything away for free--that's not this world now. #investmentbros
I'll never understand the obsession with LISP. My guess is it just appeals to a certain type of person, sort of academic in my view. I'm not convinced that LISP was ever the-right-thing. The author didn't express anything about LISP vs C except to assert that C was a 50% solution and LISP was better.

I agree though that for practical purposes, practical solutions are just going to be more successful.
"The best book I've ever read was Atlas Shrugged in 8th grade. Changed my life."

Not because I remember anything about it, or believe anything it espouses, or even like it all that much, but because it's a useful filter for obnoxious people in meatspace.

If someone I don't know too well asks me what my favorite book is, I say Atlas Shrugged. If they react inappropriately, I'll be cordial and treat them with respect, but I don't want to be friends. If they're way too supportive - the same rule applies.

If they're critical in a way I can appreciate, then I know they can either tolerate ideas they hate or have the social accumen to not go too hard in the paint early on in a relationahip. Really, I'm just looking for people who won't jump down my throat on a faux pas.

Later on in the relationship I'll tell them my actual favorite book, "A Canticle for Leibowitz", or "Neuromancer", or "The Dying Earth" (my opinion changes based on my mood).
I wouldn't say "new". This has been a thing for decades. While the companies who are the top spenders may have changed, Silicon Valley tech as a whole has been pretty aggressively represented for some time.
Cats – A simple alternative to APRS and telemetry systems
And mediaset has never ever transmitted a football match, right?

-_-'

The current government has done other laws in that sense. Which incidentally allow blocking any website.
Cost >$200,000. So no, this will be the first electric car for approximately 0 people.
Toctou: Time-of-Check Time-of-Use
Credbull Rolls Out Up $500M Fund with Fixed High Yield on Plume Network
Worse is Better is Worse: https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf

Same author (name is an anagram).
I feel like we're seeing a bit of push-back today against worse-is-better in the area of languages. Rust in particular feels more like the MIT approach, albeit with an escape hatch via the explicit keyword "unsafe." Its type system is very thoroughly specified and correct as opposed to C's YOLO typing.
> Not everyone is in so much of a hurry that a week or so of travel by sea is not an option, and that could reduce emissions. Or is it that the economics do not work out?

Speaking as an American, most people here don't have the luxury of taking a week off for a leisurely cruise to a destination.

I'm also not sure just how much a ship sailing across the ocean or a sea compares to an airplane traveling the same distance. I wouldn't be surprised if they were comparable.
I've always felt the "verbosity" is a feature.

Verbosity is in the eye of the beholder; To me, it's the verbosity of error handling that makes the algorithm clear. Of course I recognize with others that opinion probably changes depending on whether the person reading a given bit of code views error handling as part of the algorithm.
Congrats! I do the same but not every week... I have a bursts of weeks where I do this for a couple of days

I can't agree more with what you write!

Keep going!!!
Encarta 95 was one of the greatest pieces of software history created in my opinion. I know I would spend hours playing the adventure game in it, swapping between the map and articles to answer all the questions.

There's been some attempts at replicating it with Wikipedia, but I think why it was so popular was because most of the time you were playing it because someone was on the phone, so you weren't allowed online. It was one of the other programs you'd throw up like Space Pinball, the old school screensavers, MS Paint, or even Microsoft Bob to just 'play around' on the computer.
Why communism?
I love the sentiment, but the real issue is one of incentives and not ability. The problem crawlers have more than enough technical ability to minimize their impact. They just don't have a reason to care right now.
National bird of Ukraine
Yeah, valid point there. I almost called it quits a couple of times myself.

By the end it was obvious that King was writing from a place that is uncomfortably familiar on a personal level. "Christ, I'm so tired of this project. If I were less conscientious, I could just walk away from it. Let's chop out some features and link in some third-party libraries so we can ship it already."
JavaScript really illustrates the ultimate path-dependence of evolution. It got widely deployed during a boom time and therefore we are stuck with it forever.
This pops to mind:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hi5sd3WEh0c
The EU (and the US, and others for that matter) should increase the compulsory warranty from 2 years to 5 years.

Not only it would reduce e-waste, but it would also disincentivize the lowest-margin, sweat shop production.
We've been using Hetzner for years for Pirsch [0] now, and so far we had a great experience. I migrated all of our data from AWS S3 to their new object storage without issues. We only use it for user pictures and small files (white-labeling logos and such).

This is one of the rare cases where AWS is actually cheaper for us. It's probably more worth it if you have a lot of data. The only thing we're missing now is SES, and then we've fully migrated away from AWS :)

[0] https://pirsch.io
AT&T, Verizon reportedly hacked to target US govt wiretapping platform
Laws are not mechanical. "Technicalities" are rarer than you might think.
I find it fascinating how pretty much all opinion from people lower on the socioeconomic ladder gets dismissed as "they're just jealous".

In my experience, that's not often the truth of the matter.
1000 Users in ~10 Days
It's a software problem too. To have the same capabilities my phone did when it was new a few years ago, I have to find 3rd party play store backups to get apps with the right SDK to install. The bootloader isn't unlockable. Samsung won't provide updates. Google is actively hostile to providing apps which work (both not hosting the working versions and abusing things like their power over the signing keys to quickly deprecate old Android SDKs).
I'm still on a M1 max pro, and it was a massive increase. Night and day.
This[0] is the Docker Python using Debian Bookworm, so as soon as 3.13.0 (not the release candidate I've linked to) is released, there will be an image.

Otherwise, there's always the excellent `pyenv` to use, including this person's docker-pyenv project [1]

[0] https://hub.docker.com/layers/library/python/3.13.0rc3-slim-...
[1] https://github.com/tzenderman/docker-pyenv?tab=readme-ov-fil...
That's an unfortunate naming clash. This "sq" (sq.io) predates the sequoia "sq" by several years I believe.
It's basically the FREE POINT square on the bingo card at this point. When someone builds a cool robot that they don't know what to do with, it's inevitably for SAR. I've worked on a couple of them myself.
Literal goalpost in a game of football of course. Or soccer if you are an American.
Hetzner is well known and beloved in Europe for a decade or two, so it didn't really start out of nowhere. Maybe you (and most of HN) became aware of them, when they opened their American datacenters in 2021 & 2022, and became a viable option for people outside of Europe.
God damn it, I clicked it as soon as I saw "cats", but it has nothing to do with cats :|
You can’t trust lengths in any protocol or format.
> Sanctions absolutely cost the wealthy lots of money. It maybe doesn’t impact their quality of life but does cost them a lot of money, and we know how much they like money.

So? Sanctions have accomplished very, very little. Is the Ukraine War over now because how much Russian elites "like money?" Oh wait, Ukraine is still losing.

The fantasy of sanctions is that "they like money" so much that they can be controlled like puppets by using it. It's a lie.

In reality, they're a tactic whose effectiveness is vastly overstated because of unwillingness to take real action, for various reasons. They do have an effect, but it's limited, short-term, and circumventable.
Terrible assumption; I’ve driven all over the place. It just strikes me as odd that feds want to say a car must have AM and it’s not the driver’s responsibility to provide one themselves.

I’m not far from places where you’re legally required to use tire chains in bad weather. You have to provide your own.
Define what's important for you to know, or can make you money.
Then select a few reliable sources that will deliver that info to you.

You could set up a Google Alert to have the news delivered to you in your inbox. There are probably other services like that as well.

Just make sure you select the right settings (language, sources etc).

Or select a few trustworthy newsletters on topics that matter to you. If you find that you are not reading them (not enough time), then unsubscribe.
Italy's hierarchy of power:

Football League SERIE A (Soccer for the US friends)

Government
A pseudonym you mean?
Tools of the master etc. etc.
> Could it be unrestricted use of birth control and all the xenoestrogens in our food and on our clothing and in our air?

No. /s

You can make birth control without hormones.
> See the Alibaba breakup or the recently implemented antimonopoly laws as examples

An argument could be made that any increase in competition is a side-effect, rather than the main goal, of their antimonopoly changes. Until China explains the full Jack Ma story, anything alibaba-related will be seen as political driven, rather than economic.
The Doing Deficit: How Deliberate Action Outperforms Passive Learning
The author is discussing their experience at Tufts
Same Russian propaganda as before.

> However, Washington's efforts to isolate Moscow have failed. On the contrary, Russia is forging stronger ties in states in Asia, Africa, and other world regions. Just as 25 years ago, the Russian government is ready to engage in a dialogue on equal terms with anyone who is willing to reciprocate.
Sure, leaky gut as a diagnosis is a misapplication for the science. What is real is varying permeability of the intestinal lining in all humans.
I think it's Minio.
Or he's just aware that publicity equals money and he wants to sell more art. If he wins, he'll be famous, will probably get extremely rich and will also feel morally vindicated in calling the art "his". If he loses, he'll still be infamous and somewhat rich. It's a win win for everything except integrity.
WebOS was so good. If it had stuck around, I’d likely be using it instead of iOS.
Hubble weighs 11 tons, well within the capacity to LEO of a single $70M reusable Falcon 9 launch (probably around half that cost for SpaceX).

I wonder how expensive a telescope like this would be today, both the design and actual manufacturing, and whether it would be feasible for SpaceX to shut up all the "Starlink satellites are blocking my view of the sky" complaints by launching a Hubble-equivalent space telescope (not more capable, just more modern and presumably much cheaper) and then giving out observation time on it.

Of course, it would not be easily maintainable given we no longer have the space shuttle, but if the majority of the cost was development, the manufacturing + launch costs today might make replacement cheaper than on-orbit repairs.

https://www.space.com/15892-hubble-space-telescope.html claims "Getting Hubble developed and launched cost $1.5 billion".
I've been wondering how Iridium costs are tallied.

Recently had two calls with an Iridium phone, one sent and one received, about 1 minute each. T-Mobile charged me $50 for those.

I found it very odd - it seemed like Iridium was somehow passing the call fees onto me, but I can't be sure because the T-Mobile rep I chatted with was unable to comprehend the situation (I suspect I was talking to an LLM, but it ultimately gave me a $30 rebate at least).
The healthcare thing in the US is overblown by the number of young high school educated kids on social media.

The reality is that if you are a halfway competent worker, and you move to a populated area, you can pretty easily find a job with health insurance. I work in manufacturing and all the manufacturers offer health care to all their full time workers. The bar for those jobs is basically "Have a pulse, show up to work, and be able to build a 10 yr old level Lego set". Pay is usually $17-22/hr, day one no experience.

Just don't pick the $30/month healthcare option. That's how people who "work full time with insurance" end up with that "here is my $50,000 bill for falling off a ladder, thanks America".

If you can stomach the $200 to $250/month plans, you will get better healthcare than anywhere in Europe.
Convert YouTube Videos to MP3
Yet another surprise. I wish CA lawmakers would stop operating in the dark.