skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is only the case if you think of migrating as an all-or-nothing. The services that he did manage to migrate went quite smoothly. If he would get stuck with one or two services, was it still worth it to migrate the ones he did manage? If you think it has all been in vain, then yes - its a different takeaway. But obviously Martijn does things step by step and I imagine he is happy even with the progress he made.

In other words, the question is 'is it easy to migrate to a service for which decent alternatives exist', rather than 'do decent alternatives exist for every service you depend on?'

You takeaway depends on what question you are most concerned with.
There's a reason most concept cars don't make it to production.
Buy a cheap EV. Remove the antenna, privacy problem solved. Use your phone for satnav and streaming audio via bluetooth. Same as with a TV, you get it cheaper because they're expecting you to subscribe, so you don't and profit.
I get banned within 5 minutes when I browse Hermes or LV websites, fun stuff...
Some of the UI is what things are called and that also effects a chat UI.

GIMP has a plugin system and embeds python, this would be pretty easy to make.
If you don't have a static IP you could just rent a cheap VPS and host your mail server there or just use it as a gateway for your home server. No need to use Cloudflare.
Mullvad is based in Sweden which is part of the EU: https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy

Obviously, it goes without saying you should never trust something you can't verify, regardless of which country the VPN operator is based in.
Wow. This is absolutely fantastic! Great work! Congrats!

Do you know if there would be a way (in the future) to export existing image diagrams to this format / will there be an API. It would be very cool for archival purposes.
And will probably look like trash in 5 years due to the headliner drooping, fabric fraying, electronics crapping out, etc.

Also good luck getting any replacement parts down the road wherever you live.
This was one of the original internet memes. I remember my 9th grade computer graphics teacher showing it to us off some like 240p 15fps .mov file. It was 1999!
This has to require some central server. If the app is free, how are hosting fees payed?
I use Zoho for my personal email. They aren’t European but they aren’t American.

Crucially though it’s easy enough to migrate to another provider of self just by updating my mx records.
> It feels like there's a real opportunity here for European companies to step up and make a big play, but will they?

Big plays are possible only with big capital, and that isn't what happens in the EU tech market.

Lack of serious VCs is a problem on one hand, but to blame is also the EU Horizon program which will favor large established companies (which innovate very little), and the fact that the funding direction changes with hype cycles (in 2020 that was digital transformation, in 2024 it was AI and similar).
Yeah, I've done game programming and tried to make some on my own, but I'm just bad at art in general, and I've tried to get better a few times but my mental state makes it harder for me. Generally I've just used asset packs for my unfinished projects, or made ascii art games (dwarf fortress style), but I do enjoy hard-surface modelling sometimes. Floppy creatures are just hard to rig and animate and everything though, and I really suck at 2d art (though I do enjoy shader programming)

I have thought about trying to recruit one of my more artistic friends to make a game together, but then I'm bothering a whole other person to do a project that will never see the light of day haha
This is is not just problem for the owners but anyone else. All those cameras are privacy problem in general (sometimes used also with parked cars - like in case of Tesla).
How would you support E2E without the proxy? Not that the majority of people’s emails are truly E2E anyway on Proton, but still.
Telegram used to be very hands-off with messages, no matter how criminal, unless they were hurting Telegram itself (spam). Then its owner got arrested for having actual knowledge of criminal activity and still not stopping it. Now it cares about reports, bans criminals and reports them to the police. There are rumours it uses keyword scans to find things that are not reported. Remember it has your phone number which is linked to your ID card.
I'm in the hard-wired camp, but the people that defend the 'blank slate' idea, say it's just a good place for language skills to develop during the normal learning process. Both theories have holes.
I think its more that HTTP/3 only really gives marginal gains for most people.

Just as python3 had almost nothing for programmer over python2, apart from print needing brackets. Sure it was technically better, and allowed for future gains, but in practice, for the end user, there was no real reason to adopt it.

For devs outside of FAANG, there is no real reason to learn how to setup and implement http3
императрица
The model is the product
Apple needs a new asshole in charge
That’s the weirdest reason ever. If I were in Europe I could not work at all and put my kids through college.
For dns there is also dns0.eu, which I've been using without issues for a year (or more, since it popped up in the HN feed).
There have been many last eras of humanity of things. The last era of gas lighting (lighting powered by gas, not the manipulation tactic). The last era of information being passed down orally. The last era of monarchs. The last era of human computers. I understand that you are saying there are no last eras of anything so this can't be the last era of something, and that's incorrect.
I agree. My comment was not related to Proton in any way, only as a counter to the idea that e-mail is on the way out.

Yes, there are companies and services getting away from it but there's still a lot of sensitive information flowing through it.
> Yes, but nobody competes with AWS, Azure or GCP

Scaleway is positioned in the same space.
Why is IMAP/SMTP so important?

What exactly are people missing out on by Proton not having this support?
Not true regarding logs given mullvad is the only half-trustworthy vpn provider out there.
I know one thing for certain: The future ain't what it used to be.
The removal of hotkeys and icons from menus was an act of vandalism.

You used to be able to learn a program by simply running the mouse across the menus to see the hotkeys and icons too.
It really depends how much demand there is. It's a great next step but a lot of work - I was thinking about training a neural net to parse images / 3rd party diagrams into Cascii, but right now I need a break from my screen for a few weeks :)
VibeCodeFixers – Expert Developer Network
I've found Scaleway for AWS-style managed backend services fronted by Bunny (https://bunny.net/ - also EU-based & owned, but with global CDN DCs) works well! Bunny have nearly 30 DCs in Asia alone.
> For full persistence guarantees, our mean latency increases to 2582ns per record (600ns in-memory operation + 1982ns disk commit)

By the way, this set of numbers also makes you look stupid, and you should consider redoing those measurements. No disk out there has less than 10 microseconds of write latency, and the ones in the cloud are closer to 50 us. Citing 2 micros here makes your 600 ns number also look 10x too optimistic.

I would suggest taking this whole thread as less of an opportunity to do marketing "damage control" and more of an opportunity to get honest feedback about your engineering and measurement practices. From the outside, they don't look good.
Never. The government wants you to drive "an iPhone with wheels" because it comes with a convenient spying device. Means they don't need to put up a network of cameras to track you (some do anyway). It probably also bundles a remote kill switch just in case you offend some bureaucrat or just if you expend all your future energy ration. The suggestion to remove the antenna will probably make it fail a government "safety" inspection.
With LFS handling assets with Git shouldn't be a problem. From the sounds of it, the biggest problem they had here was not in the technology but GitLabs pricing which doesn't separate LFS storage. For example GitHub and BitBucket have separate pricing for LFS, both at more reasonable $.1/GB, i.e. five times cheaper than GitLab. If I'm reading it right Azure even offers LFS for free(!).

Technically I believe you can even have LFS hosted in different place than the repo itself, although I don't know if these commercial providers handle such case. But in theory you could host your git repo at gitlab.com and selfhost lfs if you want to penny pinch.
Clearly yes, you are misreading me.

If governments consider it acceptable or not has nothing to do with my opinion. Or yours.
Mailbox looks very solid, although I don't have long-term experience: https://mailbox.org

It provides email, online storage, video conferencing, calendar etc., all of it privacy-preserving by default. You explicitly don't have to provide any personal details.
Without GIMP using it any more releases is unlikely.
Do you see any prospects of increasing that €120k? Because that’s one of my biggest issues with Europe.
> I discovered that putting a man-in-the-middle proxy between my Apple TV and the world lets me decrypt HTTPS traffic

This surprised me quite a bit because normally that shouldn't work, but then that surprise was exchanged for a different one, when I learned later down that you can add CAs to the certificate store of an Apple TV.

Nice and thorough writeup, thanks for sharing. A good carousel through the entire stack involved.
Remote.com also compete in this space, and they have a pretty good UI and customer service.

Not cheap, but worth it for sure considering how much time they save you.
There are just far more people involved in Blender.
Decryption / encryption in email client.

If (more) email clients handled this you wouldn't need protonmail.
Why move away though? The cloud subsidizes for "free" a lot of powerful services that the average user can only dream of self-hosting.

And the price is what? Your browsing history? Personalized Ad's? Provided you don't AdBlock that is!

I like the symbiotic relationship. I do believe in safeguarding yourself from getting locked out of your life due to your Google acc getting banned but outside of that I see no harm in getting free service in exchange for data. It's a fair deal.
I thought fastmail was Australian..
I second that. Plus, there was no business critical workloads migration in place.
It sucks to say, but maybe the best solution is to pay Cloudflare or another fancy web security/CDN company to get rid of this problem for you?

Which is extremely dumb, but when the alternatives are “10x capacity just for stupid bots” or “hire a guy whose job it is to block LLMs”… maybe that’s cheapest? Yes, it sucks for the open web, but if it’s your livelihood I probably would consider it.

(Either that or make following robots.txt a legal requirement, but that feels also like stifling hobbyists that just want to scrape a page)
This is only true recently! Through most of history people lived and died with technology and culture nearly identical to that of their parents / grandparents. In terms of tech and cultural evolution, we are on the uptick of a hockey-stick growth.

It's absolutely accurate that `kids these days` have grown up in a different environment than `grownups these days` than the same demographics from 50, 100, 200, or 1000 years ago.
But that’s not how this works.

It takes decades to subjugate the local population by the invading force and some local resistance will remain for a long, long time.
Making yourself a subsided of Amazon was never wise. You exist as long as Amazon allows you to. It’s modern feudalism.
I find it really annoying when tradional hosters (indeed in NL and DE for instance) move to the grifting 'pay per use'; the same VPS that I could beat over the head for millions req/month for 5 euros, now costs, for the same usage, 50+ euros because suddenly i'm paying for the cpu, memory, disk, network etc that I use. It costs them $0 extra, so that's all profit. I had it a few time now ; you can recognise it either indeed if they get taken over by some large investment firm and/or when they start offering more and more 'cloud services' next to their VPSs; once they have the infrastructure up and running, they start screwing over people. Mind you, if the service was better, then maybe, but it's not; it's just vastly more expensive.
There are zero buttons on the center console. That car would never be considered as an option for me.
Interesting how for a (junior) dinosaur, like me, this was never a problem: I still run my mail, web, nextcloud, xmpp, forgejo, etc server on a former thin client under a cupboard. With a symmetrical fiber 1G connection it's been surprisingly reliable.

FAQ:

Yes, you can run self hosted mail.

Yes, it's complex.

No, it's not hard, but it takes time, as it is complex - if you want to understand it. If not, go for something like https://maddy.email/

Yes, I have a fixed IP address with a reverse DNS entry configured.

My ISP is zen.co.uk.

Yes, I have reverse DNS, DKIM, DMARC, SPF, even mta-sts.

No, I'm not switching from XMPP to Matrix - it's too server heavy, XMPP is more client oriented, which is my preference.

I know about the UK's online safecty act, I used https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/ra_my_self_hosted_single_user_... as a template to create mine. I think the act itself is basically useless and just paperwork, but something along it's ideas is actually needed.

I block many AI crawlers from accessing code and photos, as eg. Claude is so aggressive that it's code crawlers makes my system sluggish, and I have no will to let anyone use my photos beyond printing them for their wall as decoration.
How much of that budget goes to actual research versus 'seeding trials' designed to familiarize doctors with prescribing patterns?

When taxpayers fund the foundational research and patients pay premium prices, perhaps the real innovation isn't in the lab but in a business model where public investment yields private profit.

That's not risk-taking capitalism: that's having your cake, eating it too, and charging the baker.
https://european-alternatives.eu/category/email-providers

I myself use neither [0] but that's my nihilism defaulting on convenience.

[0] I've moved my own domain to iCloud+ custom domain offering.
Any social species must have a language. Ours is much more complex than what we've encountered in other animals. Our language developed because of its ease of transmission, its capability to convey complex concepts, and because we discovered writing. But there probably are a few qualitative biological differences between us and other species that are essential for the difference in language capacity. Those haven't evolved much, I suspect.
It's true that I can't find any reporting on Baidu Xinwen. I can definitely understand why, as there's a real risk of causing potentially unjustified panic (scientific reporting and literacy isn't great globally). More research is needed before action.

Fascinating that it's not a complete information blackout, but just disseminated on a need to know basis. It's kind of an interesting social contract really.
nextdns seems to be a US company, by French founders https://help.nextdns.io/t/y4hmv0n/who-is-behind-nextdns
Just to clarify - the subject selection tool my friend showed me was in Photoshop. And seeing as how masking/selection is such an important part of image editing, I think more efficient selection alone would be worth the subscription cost for anyone who frequently edits photos.
> so the rate of success is simply much higher rather than seeking the talent elsewhere

This is true to some extend, but I don’t want the riffraff that built AWS building the EU infrastructure. It works to some extend, but some consistency would be a very welcome addition.
Originally the lesson from this was don't be cheap when you only have one shot to do something lest you create pink chunks when you need pink mist or some other worse than the starting point type situation.

Now, well over 50yr later the most obvious lesson is how far the journalism profession has fallen when it comes to word choice.
I run Firefox on Linux and I rarely encounter Cloudflare captchas.
This is what happens when consumer protection government offices get trimmed down to save money. Everyone else got the Trump memo much earlier and already finished making their products a bit more user hostile... Roku is just late to the party.
> I want to support content creators, so to be fair, after a few months of blocking YouTube ads, I am now paying for YouTube Premium; Just because I can break something, doesn’t mean I need to.

Does paying for YouTube Premium support creators? (If so, how much, compared to say Patreon?)
Good rant!

The clever LLM scrapers sound a lot like residential traffic. How does the author know it's not? Behavior? Volume? Unlikely coincidence?

> random User-Agents that overlap with end-users and come from tens of thousands of IP addresses – mostly residential, in unrelated subnets, each one making no more than one HTTP request over any time period we tried to measure – actively and maliciously adapting and blending in with end-user traffic and avoiding attempts to characterize their behavior or block their traffic.
I am not OP but let me give you a Microsoft Office example.

For many years, Open Source and businesses tried to make a Microsoft Office competitor by mimicking Microsoft Office. Naturally, all clones were worse than the original.

Until Google changed the paradigm and rolled out Google Docs that had a unique feature of online collaboration.

Then was the turn of Microsoft to mimic collaboration features of Google Docs in Microsoft Office and be worse at it almost by definition.

Another example is S3.

For years, businesses tried to have POSIX-capable filesystems seamlessly scale in size and in availability. It took Amazon to roll out a simpler alternative that, by having a smaller set of features, enable so much sought properties of distributed file systems in an efficient and commercially viable way.

I think Hetzner Cloud is a sweet spot of a cloud. Instead of reimplementing AWS, EU should standardize of something like it.
> whole point of a library like requests is to make networking requests.

The whole point of requests is to make HTTP requests easy. HTTPLib was/is an arse to use.

as HTTP3 is really not that widely adopted, and where it is, has fallbacks to 1.1 whats the point?

Plus the people who are keen on HTTP3 also seem to be keen on async, https://github.com/aiortc/aioquic/tree/main/examples which even though it isn't seems to be overly complex and difficult to use. Contrast that to r.get(url)....
You can take several things from this.

yes, there is a lot of work going into battery technology at present. There is news most days.

It is true that most of the announcements relate to things that are one or more of: an incremental gain, not going to make it to production at all, or not production-ready this year. That's the nature of research. However, a percentage of them are actual.

"Five minute charging" is an actual milestone. As in, it is feature parity with ICE vehicles. Once you get to that charging speed, another increase in speed gives steeply diminishing returns, and other aspects of the experience become more important.
I would like you to explain specifically and concretely why you need this, without using any broad abstract ideas like "bots" or "fraud".

For example: "We were receiving 1000 spam and 100 legitimate comments per day even though we used hCaptcha on the comment form. When we disabled HTTP 1.1 on the comment endpoint, the spam stopped entirely, and we still received 95 legitimate comments per day." (in this scenario, I don't think it's necessary to further elaborate what counts as a "spam comment" if it's the usual type. If it's not the usual type then you will have to elaborate it.)
Biggest issue I have, is not solving all the dependency hell that is Python with its unversioned libraries, but supply chain attacks. Also regressions introduced by new versions all the time.

That is why for projects I resolve everything by hand, add all coarsely audited 3rd party libraries to ./lib/, and the main entry file then does this:

#!/usr/bin/env -S /bin/sh -c "_top_dir=\"\$(dirname \"\$(realpath -s \"\$0\")\")\"; cd \"\$_top_dir\"; exec \"\$_top_dir/python/install/bin/python3\" -W once::DeprecationWarning -X dev \"\$0\" \"\$@\""

import os

import sys

# Insert ./lib/ in front of search path

sys.path.insert(0, os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), "lib"))

...

I like the excellent standalone CPython by indygreg, now under astral-sh's github organization. Unpack as is into ./python/ and done. Because Arch Linux would just roll forward to whatever version is latest, introducing new warnings every month or two and havoc on any new major version.

Project is fully portable, copy anywhere that has glibc, run.
You might be interested in Peergos (lead here). It is E2EE, built on a P2P protocol (libp2p) and thus self hostable. We don't have onion routing yet though.

https://peergos.org
Use character composition. You then type those characters buy pressing compose key (I've set it to Caps Lock) and then sequence of characters. Much easier than switching keyboard layouts, and you can type other non-usual characters like °, µ, €

ø = Compose -> / -> o

é = Compose -> ' -> e

° = Compose -> o -> o

µ = Compose -> m -> u

€ = Compose -> = -> e

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key#Common_compose_com...

https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libX11/plain/nls/en_US...
> But it makes no overall difference to individual humans who are loading a web page or web app.

Navigating from my phone at 4g and my fiber connection has drastic differences.

Especially noticeable when on vacations or places with poor connections, TLS handshakes can take many, many, many, seconds..After the handshake and an established connection it's very different.
For encrypted mail, there is also tuta.com (previously Tutanota), Germany based
Alright, now that's pretty funny
And, the attention mechanism scales quadratically with context length. This is where all of the insane memory bandwidth requirements come from.
"Half of all people work for large companies which likely have..." and "Most companies have..." are two completely different statements.
Not allowing giant corporates to do bait and switches with impunity is not a revolution.
That's not the point in this discussion, IMO.

Besides which, we probably differ a great deal about "voluntarily giving." To me, it sounds like the defense of the mob. "These people gave us their money voluntarily. Ask them!"

> Chrome "collects" your physical address because

Because it reads your IP address and Wifi access point, and can compare that to a list of known ip addresses and access points, which they collect with their Maps cars.
File > Overwrite
I had a friend that said he'd never get a mobile phone, and he did hold out until maybe 2010. He eventually realized the world had changed.
From the same author about this very subject: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-european-cloud-ladder/
Sorry but this is cope. Why do you assume the build quality must be disastrously bad? In Australia where there is no tariff on Chinese EV's there are many Chinese vehicles on the road now -- this logically suggests an expansion of repair support will trickle into Australia also.

China is not just beating the U.S. on price, they are beating their manufacturers on quality and features. I'm not suggesting Toyota levels of reliability yet, but Tesla doesn't have a track record of reliability either. These Chinese EV's are easily as good as a Tesla, and better given advanced features like LIDAR that Elon cut from Tesla's.