skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The median product engineer should reason about applications as composites of high-level, functional Lego blocks where technical low-level details are invisible

This is a good way to get nonfunctioning product. Or at least a lot of frustrating meetings.

The thing is, "serverless" still has a server in it, it's just one that you don't own or control and instead lease by short timeslices. Mostly that doesn't matter, but the costs are really there.
In software, a server refers to an application that listens for requests from a client.

If you remember the olden days of web development, when CGI was king, the web applications didn't listen. Instead, a separate web server (e.g. Apache) called upon the application as a subprocess and communicated with it using system primitives like environment variables, stdin, and stdout.

Over time, we started moving away from the CGI model, moving the server process into the application itself. While often a fronting web server (e.g. nginx) would proxy the requests to the application, technically the application was able to stand on its own.

Serverless returns to the old CGI model, although not necessarily using the CGI protocol anymore, removing the server from the application. The application is less a server, hence the name.
Technical Cofounder here: I presume we're all living some parallel life. Forcing founders/investors/biz people to think it even 10% through was always really hard. It's like they have some kind of dopamine addiction that only NEW SHIT EVERY DAY can scratch. They live in a sort of dream world and simply cannot STAND being pulled back into reality.

One of the worst books ever published was that damn Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. The week after that was published literally everyone with a laptop was a demanding asshole with ridiculous ideas they now felt compelled to beat everyone else into because IT WORKED FOR STEVE AMIRITE!!!???
>Something I’m still having trouble believing is that complex workflows are going to move to e.g. AWS Lambda rather than stateless containers orchestrated by e.g. Amazon EKS. I think 0-1 it makes sense, but operating/scaling efficiently seems hard. […]

This isn't really saying anything about serverless though. The issue here is not with serverless but that Lambda wants you to break up your server into multiple smaller functions. Google cloud run[0] let's you simply upload a Dockerfile and it will run it for you and deal with scalling (including scaling to zero).

[0] https://cloud.google.com/run
No it's "left as an exercise to the reader" ;)

But seriously, it's not that hard. Change build options to generate 64-bit ELF, replace all 32-bit-wide parts (e.g. uint32_t, lw/sw instructions), and implement a slightly more complicated page table (e.g. Sv48).
No reading needed, just go there. 100% chance you can drive 30 minutes from wherever you live to find a neighborhood that used to be nice that is now in shambles. Go a bit further and you enter into ghost towns and places where the sole infrastructure for life is a single Walmart. Trailers with tires on the roof, cars with parts missing. It's all around you if you just pay attention to it.
A gaming PC is a PC that's marketed as a gaming PC. Lenovo obviously isn't marketing their Thinkpads as a device for gamers, even if they'd be happy to sell them one.

Legion isn't a single device. How many models under the Legion branding are there? Even if they sold a million and change, break that up amongst multiple formfactors and I'm sure the Steam Deck outsells any individual one of those devices.
From what I recall about that situation, they had a really stupid architecture that was using S3 as intermediate storage and processing video multiple times on multiple stages.

In fact, the solution still used serverless afaik: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcMm0aaqnnI

(take that u/UltraSane! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42506205)

It likely could have been solved by serverless too, by using local storage and having the pipeline condensed into a single action...

FD: I'm not a fan of serverless for production anything.
You are correct that this is an optimisation only available to H2+, but optimising to the H/1.x use-case is a use-case not worth optimising for—if one cared about web performance that much, they wouldn’t be running H1/.x in the first place.

Most connections on the web nowadays are over H2+: https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2024/http#http-version-ad...
Sway does what it sets out to do, and that's not a lot. That's why I consider it rather barebones. It relies on other tools to provide UI components that are standard in most normal desktop environments.
I find serverless to be a breeze, with zero sysadmin costs compared to setting up VPS, EC2, doing your own custom monitoring, etc. Each to their own, however.

And gateway+lambda is a near perfect "dumb crud" app, though it is not without a startup cost.
#HELLO-WORLD
The optimistic tone at the start of the article might just be a hallucinatory strawman set up.
But as a probably old dog, I fail to see the allure of these technologies(*).

When I read the copy trying to peddle them, to me it sounds quite like someone saying "Heey.. PSST! Wanna borrow 5000$ in cash, I can give it to you right now! Don't worry about 'interest rates', we'll get back to that LATER".

When I build stuff out of 'serverless', I find it rather difficult to figure out what my operation costs are going to be; I usually learn later through perusing the monthly bills.

I think the main two things I have appreciated(?),
is

(1) that I can publish/update functions on cloud in 1-5 seconds, whereas the older web services I also use, often take 30-120 SECONDS(not minutes, sorry) to 'flip around' for each publish.

(2) I can publish/deploy relatively small units of code with 'functions'.
But again, that is not quite accurate. It's more like 'I need to include less boilerplate' with some code to deploy it.. Because to do anything relevant, I more or less need to publish the same amount of domain/business-logic code as I used to with the older technologies.

Part from that, I mostly see downsides
- my 'function/serverless' code becomes very tied-to-vendor.
- testing a local dev setup is either impossible or convoluted, so I usually end up doing my dev work directly against cloud instances.

I'm probably just old dog, but I much prefer a dev environment that allows me to work on my own laptop, even if the TCP/IP cable is yanked.

Oh yeah, and spit on you too, YAML :-)
They found a curse to match the abomination of "coding in xml languages" of 20 years ago..
This puts into perfect perspective why, soon after sunset this time of year. Venus is low to the west, Mars is slightly higher but in the East, and Jupiter is nearly directly overhead
Serverless can be useful for very specific tasks, such as processing files you upload, things that should happen in the background, but if you already have a simple monolith web app, I don't see why going serverless just to go serverless will help you.

I do see its usefulness, but its not a one size fits all tool.
There is no good reason to build a distributed monolith. You can always think of/design your monolith as a collection of (micro-)services and get the best of both worlds.

I find FaaS best when needing to automate something completely unrelated to what goes in to serving the customer. Stuff like bots to report CWV metrics from DataDog to a Slack channel.
the pricing is different for the same amount of compute is that news for you? Lambda is priced an order of magnitude higher than fargate which is priced significantly higher than EC2. For small scale workloads your TCO might be lower with higher level abstraction.
I think they mean that light exposure has been causally linked to wakefulness, which I'm sure is a statistical thing and not an absolute thing, meaning your experience is still valid even though it's different. Your indignation made me chuckle though, I appreciate the tone.
When you put it in terms of total number of people...it does make sense. A lot of universities down here in Texas have a small town+ amount of students and faculty and they tend to have their own police departments and other services.
The special occasion is that their phase angles are all of a similar value so they are aligned next to each other. The phase angle describes the position in their respective orbit. If you imagine to look "down" upon the solar system, it would be the angle towards 12 o'clock.

It is rare because the further the planets are from the sun, the longer their orbit periods are. While Earth completes the circle in just a bit above 365 days, Neptune for example takes nearly 165 years to do a round trip. So it would take some time for the slower planets to meet again in the same region in the sky.
Federation: A foundational concept for digital sovereignty?
Show HN: AutoSERP.dev – Search the Web with AI
Hi fellow humans (and bots),

I recently found myself drowning in manual research on Google. While OpenAI’s ChatGPT Search feature showed promise, there’s no API for it and no indication that one is coming soon. Perplexity didn’t quite meet my needs either.

To solve this, I created a service that integrates Google search with ChatGPT. It uses headless browser automation and API requests to fetch search results and extract structured data from each page based on specific instructions.

This is an API-first solution, built for developers who want to programmatically automate search and data extraction in their own workflows.

You can also try it out directly using the search widget on the first page.
Marx is incredibly helpful in most things as long as you realize that he managed to identify the right problem (which I referenced by the quote), not necessarily the solution; and that his proposed solutions have never been properly tested, and that his ideas for the solution to the problem were -- just like Nietzsche's ideas -- bastardized by terrible people for their own gain.

You don't have to be a communist to realize that Marx was instrumental in giving us the labor movement, including unions which most people who haven't been indoctrinated over generations with red scare tactics will realize where good things and important mechanisms against overreach by the powerful.
> AI companion that teaches marketing through pair programming-style practice

This would be a better submission title. HN users like to learn

> Would love to hear how other technical folks approach [learning] marketing?

The generalized advice is typically don't spend money on marketing until you have users who love your product and inbound by word-of-mouth. That it's better to spend time early on working with fewer super users than trying to growth hack with marketing
Or maybe we just lack frameworks that provide the same developer experience but with transparent serverless deployment?
Show HN: AI-Based Observability (new startup launch)
Hey HN! We’re Ron and Michael from Obics (https://obics.io), an early-stage startup in the observability space. Below is our pitch and we’d love to hear your feedback. We also have an interactive sandbox at https://obics.io/sandbox-intro.

You might think the world doesn't need another observability solution. There are already great ones like DataDog, Elastic, and New Relic. But we’ve come to believe these tools give you suboptimal capabilities. Each modern application consists of many services and “big data”-scale telemetry, and in this landscape, there’s a huge benefit to analytics, event correlation, and advanced OLAP queries.

We think that:

1. There’s a need for an analytics solution for telemetry data (logs, metrics, traces). Once such a solution exists [with low barriers to entry], it could change how we approach production debugging.
2. The mainstream existing solutions can’t provide analytics because their underlying databases are optimized for storage, search/filtering, and basic aggregation.
3. Asking questions in natural language about telemetry data will be extremely useful—if it works well and reliably.

We’ve created a solution where you can get answers to questions like:

- Show me all logs from the last 5 traces where error X happened.
- Look at requests where there was an out-of-memory exception in the last day and break them down by data center.
- How much is the error rate increasing in service “MyService” when the CPU is over 70%?
- What were the most common cart items in sessions where the user added items to the cart but didn’t buy?

Here’s the Obics solution in simple terms:

- Save all telemetry data in a centralized columnar database that allows real-time analytics on big data. We chose ClickHouse.
- Allow ingestion from OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, cloud providers, etc., so you can keep it vendor-neutral.
- Train an AI model on your telemetry data.

And here’s why we think it will work well:

1. ClickHouse uses SQL, and LLMs are very good at generating SQL.
2. Since LLMs aren’t 100% reliable, you can’t just ask questions and get answers you can fully trust. But if the LLM generates an SQL query, you can verify it, making the solution as reliable as the query itself.
3. ClickHouse doesn’t require a lot of indexing, and it integrates with cheap blob storage like S3. In other words, customers can enjoy the best of both worlds: advanced analytics capabilities and lower pricing.

That’s basically it, looking forward to your comments. You can sign up for a free trial at https://obics.io/freetrial/. We’re also looking for design partners. Thanks.
There are a few platform abstractions. Quarkus, a Java framework, has Funqy, an extension that abstracts the differences between something like aws Lambda and Knative triggers, and feels quite easy to use.

https://quarkus.io/guides/funqy
Why would I care about serverless? I love managing and working with bare metal servers.
Lack of vendor-agnostic solutions, and ridiculous amounts of configuration. It explodes complexity.
PowerSchool hack exposes student, teacher data from 60M K-12 students
You don't seem to have properly read the previous comment or the article.

The question (not addressed in the article) is: is there in fact a gigantic, widespread problem of using cache-sniffing to fingerprint users?

We have always known that this was possible, yet continued to include cross site caching anyway because of the enormous benefits. Presumably something fairly major has recently happened in order for this functionality to be removed- if so what?
> but it's just going to be the same software

It does not have to be the same software. Its task is much simpler, and many situations where the normal software has to look for an optimal resolution can be handled by activating the hazard lights, stopping the car, and telling the passengers that the emergency stop is complete.
The Tsunami of Burnout Few See
Serverless doesn’t mean no-server. It means someone else’s server. Their system. Their rules. Their way or the highway. No thank you.
Man told he can't recover £598M of Bitcoin from tip
I agree the name isn't the best, but serverless as a hosting model has used the same definition for many years now.

They aren't your servers and the server processes running your code are only active temporarily, usually with auto-scaling features.
"although people getting older with more obligations was certainly a contributing factor as well"

there's always the next generation of young people. the question is: why aren't they as interested in raves than the generations before them?
Many of them were accountants. So the government was telling an accountant-type-person that your inferior math must be ignored for our superior math. Would you accept another SWE telling you that?
Antirez on Technical Blogging
Because statistically it’s going to fail and even if you do make some side income, it’s not going to substitute even for an entry level enterprise dev job.

Also, the time one poster was spending “selling potatoes online” (literally not trying to be funny), he would be better off, spending that time doing interview prep and job hopping making more money.

You can take these numbers for YC investments and draw your own conclusion.

https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-life-and-death-of-y-co...
I use in real life, albeit much less than on the internet because there are more costs to being a disagreeable prick in real life - so I have to say the same thing but ten times slower as I word it diplomatically.

No it doesn't make people like me but I get much more pleasure from disagreeing with and pushing against bad or wrongful things than being liked. Not saying that's good or bad, but that's how I am.
Someone who doesn't know the market well should give an insight as to what's selling the best. People know about the Steam Deck because it's popular. We're not talking about what's the best or what has passionate fans.
That almost conflicts with his line that "life is what happens when you’re busy building your startup".
Because tools like lambda are expensive
Because it locks us into a cloud provider
Because the architectures tend towards function explosion. Think CommonFuntions.java but all the calls are on the network. What could have been 2 containers and rabbitmq has become 50 lambdas and 51 sqs topics
Because distributed observability is hard
The ESB people became serverless function people and they brought their craziness with them. Im busy cleaning up what should be a fairly simple application but instead it has 300 lambdas.
All that said, serverless managed services like databases are useful.
I think that's true for smaller shops. Larger shops start building their developer experience over everything and you can make it work.

But that means you're not starting with serverless, and it's your pivot from the original monolith.
Show HN: Netpack – a bundler written in C#/.NET
This is a small experiment I've worked on during my winter vacation. I wanted to see if instead of using Rust / Go / Zig / whatever for development of web tools C#/.NET might be a viable alternative (esp. in terms of performance).

The answer is yes. Right now it's still feature incomplete (so generally I would not make this a too strong statement), but as of today it's faster than the tested competition (rspack, vite, esbuild).
IMO, the dev workflow is significantly worse, integration testing is harder and I don't see the value on "scale to zero", when the alternative is a $5/mo VPS.
Is my ad blocker acting up, or does this article about animal drawings have no illustrations of those animal drawings?

Edit: Can the person who downvoted me answer my question, instead of cancelling it?
As a senior dev, team lead and sometimes acting principal, I wonder what is the definitive role for CTO. I've seen several companies try to have CTO only to have no role for them.
I think the confusion is because Daub might have meant vegetarianism (the idea) instead of vegetarians (the people).
I've first hand encountered several situations with subtitles where it would have been ambiguous who was speaking without speaker annotations, despite the voices being distinctive, me being able to hear them clearly etc. Just think of a rapid exchange with neither speaker on-screen for more than two or three sentences and replies.

You can probably get 99% there without that for a lot of content, but I'd challenge the notion that this is somehow only important for hearing impaired viewers (or people just watching without clearly audible sound for other reasons).
With a Sqlite database at that.
Lovable incident report: Recovering from being taken down by GitHub
What's it like on the largest cruise ship?
It’s expensive. Even considering dev and ops hours.
Because it's more expensive for less performance with less control.

If it were 5% worse performance for 7% more cost, most people would probably not bat an eye.

When it can be 50% less performant for 200% more cost, eventually someone is going to say: sure there's overhead to owning that but I will be at a major competitive advantage if I can do it even just OK. And it turns out for most businesses doing it at the scale they need isn't all that difficult to get right.
>GPU boots first and then brings up the CPU.

IS that the reason for the full screen of colors before you see the boot sequence? Never thought about that.
That is a sadness.
you obviously have not heard a word i said.

btw spending time marketing yourself is much more effective than interview prep in my experience. i got every single one of my jobs because i know how to sell myself. all the jobs i've gotten did not include an algorithmic interview. i can only think of one algorithmic interview i've done in my career, and it was early in my career and helpful to learn my knowledge gaps as a mostly self-taught developer. i did not spend any time doing "interview prep" after that, but simply learned the CS fundamentals that i was bad at. that has helped me so far. not 1337 code or whatever the fuck.

but that doesn't matter. i work 4-6 hours a day selling my time at a high hourly rate. this gives me more free time to do all the things i want to do. i chill hard as fuck. walk 90 minutes a day, sell sweet potatoes on the internet, grow my food, write books, and work on my saas app.

i recommend doing this if you are like me. don't work a 9-5, unless you use it to help get you to this point.
> and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.

It is not uncommon to self-host everything except the outgoing sending. So you can mostly bring it all home without tackling sender reputation.

> Freshdesk. Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible.

This can be done. The knowledge base sounds like some of the easier things to migrate tbh.

Why the need to go to paper filing? Airgapped servers are a middle ground.

But I guess your deeper issue is one of organizational culture norms, not of technical limitations or challenges...

Which I hope can be encouraging. It's all doable if you (plural) actually want it.

One path is to start with setting up contingency systems. Continously sync all mail to your own infra so you can access mailboxes even if o365 is unavailable. Mirror the knowledge base. Forward ticket mails to a duplicate archive (obviously potential caveats around PII and security here).
who are "we"? good at what exactly?
The text color in the input field makes it very hard to see what you are typing. Not sure if that is intentional
I guess I'll just never understand how a ratio of weight/height can be anything other than a number.
They're useful in a small set of behaviors. If you have a particular job that is run infrequently but is burstable, it doesn't make sense to have a server hanging around for just that purpose.

My current employer standardized on serverless and for many things it works well enough, but from my standpoint it's just more expensive.
> You write that you can only think of games, some productivity software and legacy enterprise software as the reason for why your OS would matter. That sounds like you're a Linux user?

Or a windows user. Like myself as well.
Note that C++ has different rules than C. C has type changing stores that do not require memcpy for allocated storage (i.e. no declared type). Older compilers have plenty of bugs related to TBAA though. Newer versions of GCC should be ok.
Very common at larger state universities that have been around a long enough time to have a significant sports following.

It makes sense if you do the math.

Newer schools and smaller schools, typically not so much.

A lot of what we do in the US probably sounds batshit insane to outsiders so no worries about that and thanks for asking!
Sure, that's what HI version is for
2.5 GbE is too slow for my home lab. I want 10 GbE-T PoE++ without having to add a craptastic hat that has a lot of failures.

My network test boxes run 100 GbE of various flavors supported by E810-CQDA2.