Admittedly I got my money's worth, for about 3 EUR for the very basic plan of 250 GB storage, I get upload speeds of about 6-9 MB/s and download speeds of about 25 MB/s, which is okay for what I'm trying to do. That said, it doesn't seem like there's a way to create additional users with access to only specific buckets not all of them for the same service and the overall offering does feel a bit jank (e.g. when you don't have an active service, you can't log into Contabo at all and while their Object Storage site is nice, the regular VPS one feels functional but dated).
What I'm saying is that when it comes to budget options, Hetzner will probably do great, since they have a good track record and it's not like there are that many other alternatives out there!
Of course, I could have also gone with just self-hosting with MinIO, Garage or SeaweedFS, as long as the VPS that I'd get would also have enough storage. It's nice that there are self-hosted options, too, I almost dread when I see bespoke object storage solutions at work, either developed before S3 was a thing or because the devs just didn't know or had a case of NIH, so I have to look at how a bunch of blobs are passed through servlets and serialized/deserialized, as well as deal with custom metadata and permission mechanisms.
> People who work with it all the time, don't even think about it past the first week.
I think SQL is often quite awkward, at least when you look at people exploring alternatives, like https://prql-lang.org/
Not just “the standard” variety, but also all of the vendor specific varieties that you’ll use in practice (MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle, SQL Server etc.) and how the features offered by each differ, how the support for custom types differs, how the procedural languages differ, the actual experience of using them, seemingly half baked error messages when compared to most imperative languages, varying support for getting the query optimiser to do what you want (e.g. hints), query plans that aren’t pleasant to stare at, often no support for automated analysis of how things are running and suggestions for indices (e.g. Oracle had that sort of feature, it is sometimes helpful, but the automatically generated indices are or at least last I checked were treated as their own special thing and you couldn’t easily delete them). Even things like varying support for working with geospatial data, JSON or time series data.
Not just that, but also the tooling (or the lack of it) - good luck debugging the execution of stored procedures in your DB or placing breakpoints in there, good luck hooking up observability/tracing solutions as easily as you would for your back end, good luck debugging why your database link calls take 100x longer when executed through JDBC in your app but not in the developer tooling.
Not that ORMs or NoSQL make everything much better, you’d just trade one set of annoyances for another, especially when you end up trying to generate dynamic SQL with the likes of myBatis XML mappers. Don’t get me started on people over fetching or ending up with N+1 problems with most ORMs, or executing bunches of queries against the DB just to retrieve some data that you might as well get in one go with a well crafted DB view. Not that you can’t make your DB schema a mess as well with a liberal application of EAV or OTLT (or just attempting to make polymorphic links).
I think SQL as a language makes sense, but PRQL often feels more sensible. I feel like the current RDBMSes out there are very powerful, but that there are also aspects about them (and the differences between the ones you’ll use) that absolutely suck. It feels like where back end languages are getting progressively better DX, databases instead gave us… CTEs? Some syntactic sugar for JSON in PostgreSQL? Feels like they move painfully slow.
For what it's worth, that's why I welcome every new tool or attempt at improving things, even if they won't replace the usual enterprise stacks of having some RDBMS, a JDBC/ODB/whatever driver and probably an ORM on the back end.
They might be really good for specific tasks, but someone else will also need to maintain the setups, which will make things harder when most of the folks in the job market have experience with the various Linux distros, but finding BSD experience might be a tad more difficult.
I am personally on board with using the various BSDs when it makes sense (though maybe just pick FreeBSD and stick with it, as opposed to fragmenting the install base, the same way how I've settled on Ubuntu LTS wherever possible; it's not ideal but it works), except the thing is that most job ads and such call for Linux experience in particular, same with tooling like Kubernetes and OCI/Docker containers and such. Ergo, that's where most of my time goes, I want to remain employable and also produce solutions that will be understandable to most people, instead of getting my DMs pinged whenever someone is confused by what they're seeing.
> I have zero intention of moving away from IDEA and nothing I've seen so far is good enough to make me want to switch. I really with there was more of "bringing AI into your existing tools/workflows" instead of "here is a new tool with AI baked in".
For this, either GitHub Copilot or their own AI plugin seem to work nicely.
Because of this, and the fact that every additional IDE/tool you have to support also means similar development work, most companies out there will probably lean in the direction of either a web based UI, a CLI, or their own spin of VS Code or something similar.
Snarky tone aside, there are different audiences. For example, I primarily work with web dev and some DevOps and I can tell you that the state of both can be pretty dire. Maybe not as much in my particular case, as in general.
Some examples to illustrate the point: supply chain risks and an ever increasing amount of dependencies (look at your average React project, though this applies to most stacks), overly abstracted frameworks (how many CPU cycles Spring Boot and others burn and how many hoops you have to jump through to get thigns done), patterns that mess up the DBs ability to optimize queries sometimes (EAV, OTLT, trying to create polymorphic foreign keys), inefficient data fetching (sometimes ORMs, sometimes N+1), bad security practices (committed secrets, anyone? bad usage of OAuth2 or OIDC?), overly complex tooling, especially the likes of Kubernetes when you have a DevOps team of one part time dev, overly complex application architectures where you have more more services than developers (not even teams). That's before you even get into the utter mess of long term projects that have been touched by dozens of developers over the years and the whole sector sometimes feeling like wild west, as opposed to "real engineering".
However, the difference here is that I wouldn't overwhelm anyone who might give me money with rants about this stuff and would navigate around those issues and risks as best I can, to ship something useful at the end of the day. Same with having constructive discussions about any of those aspects in a circle of technical individuals, on how to make things better.
Calling the whole concept a "scam" doesn't do anyone any good, when I already derive value from the LLMs, as do many others. Look at https://www.cursor.com/ for example and consider where we might be in 10-20 years. Not AGI, but maybe good auto-complete, codegen and reasoning about entire codebases, even if they're hundreds of thousands of lines long. Tooling that would make anyone using it more productive than those who don't. Unless the funding dries up and the status quo is restored.
I think at its core it's not that there isn't value or future value, but currently there is an assertion, maybe some blind faith, that it's inevitable that a future version will deliver a free lunch for society.
I think the testimonies often repeated by coders that use these code completion tools is that "it saved me X amount of time on this one problem I had, therefore it's great value". The issue is that these all fall into a research of n=1 test subjects. It's only useful information for the subject. It appears we don't realize in these moments that when we use those examples, even to ourselves, we are users reviewing a product, as opposed to validating if our workflow is not just different but objectively better.
The truth lies in the aggregate data of the quality and crucially the speed by which fixes and requirements are being implemented at scale across code bases.
Admittedly, a lot of code is being generated, so I don't think I can say everyone hates it, but until someone can do some real research on this, all we have are product reviews.
> I think at its core it's not that there isn't value or future value, but currently there is an assertion, maybe some blind faith, that it's inevitable that a future version will deliver a free lunch for society.
Except in the case of "AI" we get new releases that seem somewhat impressive and therefore extend the duration for which the inflated expectations can survive. For what it's worth, stuff like this is impressive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693087 (I fed my homepage/blog into it and the results were good, both when it came to the generated content and the quality of speech)
> The truth lies in the aggregate data of the quality and crucially the speed by which fixes and requirements are being implemented at scale across code bases.
Honestly? I think we'll never get that, the same way I cannot convincingly answer "How long will implementing functionality X in application Y with the tech stack Z for developer W take?"
We can't even estimate tasks properly and don't have metrics for specific parts of the work (how much creating a front end takes, how much for a back end API, how much for the schema and DB migrations, how much for connecting everything, adding validations, adding audit, fixing bugs etc.) because in practice nobody splits them up in change management systems like Jira so far, nor are any time tracking solutions sophisticated enough to figure those out and also track how much of the total time is just procrastination or attending to other matters (uncomfortable questions would get asked them, way too metrics would be optimized for).
So the best we can hope for is some vague "It helps me with boilerplate and repeatable code which is most of my enterprise CRUD system by X% and as a result something that would take me Y weeks now takes me Z weeks, based on these specific cases." Get enough of those empirical data points and it starts to look like something useful.
I think lots of borderline scams and/or bad products based on overblown products will get funded but in a decade we'll probably have mostly those sticking around that have actual utility.
The top comment of your HN link is exactly the issue at hand
> don't know what I would use a podcast like this for, but the fact that something like this can be created without human intervention in just a few minutes is jaw dropping
AI has recently gotten good at doing stuff that seems like it should be useful, but the limitations aren’t obvious. Self driving cars, LLM’s, Stable Diffusion etc are awesome tech demos as long as you pick the best output.
The issue is the real world cares a lot more about the worst outcomes. Driving better than 99% of people 24/7 for 6 months and then really fucking up is indistinguishable from being a bad driver. Code generation happens to fit really well because of how people test and debug code not because it’s useful unsupervised.
Currently balancing supervision effort vs time saved depends a great deal on the specific domain and very little about how well the AI has been trained, that’s what is going to kill this hype cycle. Investing an extra 100 Billion training the next generation of LLM isn’t going to move the needles that matter.
> Lithuania refused because of the dangerous nature of the cargo. If 20,000 tons of ammonium nitrate were to detonate, it would obliterate the center of any port city — the blast would be equal to a third of the 1945 Hiroshima bomb. That would be a repeat of the devastating explosion of the same substance in Beirut in 2020, although Ruby is carrying seven times more ammonium nitrate.
You should've quoted the next paragraph too. There would be no need for it if the danger of fertilizer was enough to justify the refusal.
"While Lithuanian authorities announced there was no evidence of malicious intent against the country’s national security, they noted that when dealing with Russia, or other unfriendly international actors, states should always be cautious."
And then the article goes on trying to justify that by saying that Russia has set on fire an IKEA warehouse (wat?) and is jamming GPS. Sure, this means that Russia is going to murder tens of thousands civilians by detonating its ship with fertilizer.
> On 4 August 2020, a large amount of ammonium nitrate stored at the Port of Beirut in the capital city of Lebanon exploded, causing at least 218 deaths, 7,000 injuries, and US$15 billion in property damage, as well as leaving an estimated 300,000 people homeless. A cargo of 2,750 tonnes of the substance (equivalent to around 1.1 kilotons of TNT) had been stored in a warehouse without proper safety measures for the previous six years after having been confiscated by Lebanese authorities from the abandoned ship MV Rhosus.
This ship carries considerably more. You can critique the framing and language used if you want, but I doubt many officials would be happy to take that risk.
"Norway’s Maritime Authority told the BBC the vessel was inspected by DNV Group to ensure it met safety and environmental standards.
The group found damage to its hull, propeller and rudder, but the Ruby was still deemed “seaworthy”.
As a precaution, DNV Group, and the Maltese flag registry, insisted that a tug escort the vessel for the remainder of its journey.
The ship was bound for Klaipeda, in Lithuania, according to ship tracking firm MarineTraffic.
But despite being deemed seaworthy, the ship was denied entry to Klaipeda. Algis Latakas, the port authority's chief executive, told the BBC that this was "because of its cargo"." [0]
Sadly, despite being pretty great (doing deduplicated and compressed incremental backups across a bunch of nodes, allowing browsing the backups and restoring them also being easy), the project is more or less abandoned: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/issues/518
Nowadays it's mostly just rsync and some compression for archives, sometimes just putting them in an S3 compatible store, or using whatever the VPS provider gives me. I'm not really happy with either approach, they feel insufficient.
It's not like there aren't other options out there: UrBackup, Bacula, Duplicati, BorgBackup, restic, Kopia and others, it's just that I haven't had the time or energy to truly dive into them and compare them all, to make the decision of what I should move to.
> The worst thing about this, to me, is that Windows Mail client, the one they're discontinuing, is a fantastic piece of software. It's simple, lean, capable, and elegantly designed. It's perfect for a novice computer user to check their email on.
Even if I personally use Thunderbird, I'm very much inclined to agree! It's a very usable!
That said, I'm kind of partial to the idea of just running something like Roundcube and figuring out a way to have a desktop wrapper around it, e.g. the same way how an app like Mattermost/Slack/Discord can work either in the web or locally. While the resource usage would be like the typical Electron app's, at the same time I like having a consistent UI experience wherever I am more and more, especially with self-hosted software when possible.
Edit: actually wasn't too hard to do this with Electron, however might need to find a webmail that has good support for multiple mailboxes. RainLoop seems to support multiple accounts, but has a dropdown for switching users, not sure how I feel about using the Nextcloud Mail app which has the UI I'd like (a list of accounts to the side, alongside the folders for each), but would couple things to Nextcloud.
Because I'm too risk averse to try high risk and high reward pursuits like starting my own company, or doing moonshot projects. Imagine the aversion people have to starting projects from scratch in a stack that they don't know and apply that to bookkeeping, laws and regulations, billing, marketing and other aspects that aren't focused purely on code.
I'm also the kind of person that doesn't want to sell snake oil by being a charming salesman, in contrast to the droves of borderline-scammers out there making projects to extract money from people who don't know any better (also applies even to many early access games, many of the crypto projects, the various lifestyle gurus etc.), in addition to knowing that many of the things I could built have already been built by others and built well.
At the same time, I'm not brilliant enough (e.g. an outlier) to have breakthrough successes and not focused enough to achieve greater success through sheer effort, which would make me sacrifice my health, time and relationships. Having a stable 9-5 where I still do good work might be better in that way rather than working 80 hour weeks for a company that might still go under in the end, survivorship bias in regards to success stories should probably be kept in memory.
In other words, I wasn't lucky enough to born with great inheritance or to be at the right place in the right time and other forms of success do somewhat elude me for now. Not that having employment, health, quality of life and good relationships isn't success in of itself, just not the kind that people glorify and chase.
That said, in regards to most things, people who are good at a craft have failed more times than others have even tried. Unless they're in a regulated sector, then they might just be in jail.
I will say that it's still immensely cool to see when the stars align and people who are smart and hard working enough end up in the right place at the right time and we get awesome stuff like entire industries starting up (e.g. how VR is getting more mainstream, to some degree the whole LLM thing, the rise of ARM processors etc., advances in graphics with the likes of Unreal Engine, programming languages like Go filling in all sorts of niches, people getting up and making engines like Godot; not that all of it is focused on money, but it's still cool). Neither someone's innate abilities, nor hard work, nor luck should be discounted.
It isn't fair (sic) calling it risk aversity when the odds of walking away with a not bad outcome are against you. For everyday people risky business means potentially losing everything including sanity and peace of mind.
Admittedly I got my money's worth, for about 3 EUR for the very basic plan of 250 GB storage, I get upload speeds of about 6-9 MB/s and download speeds of about 25 MB/s, which is okay for what I'm trying to do. That said, it doesn't seem like there's a way to create additional users with access to only specific buckets not all of them for the same service and the overall offering does feel a bit jank (e.g. when you don't have an active service, you can't log into Contabo at all and while their Object Storage site is nice, the regular VPS one feels functional but dated).
What I'm saying is that when it comes to budget options, Hetzner will probably do great, since they have a good track record and it's not like there are that many other alternatives out there!
Of course, I could have also gone with just self-hosting with MinIO, Garage or SeaweedFS, as long as the VPS that I'd get would also have enough storage. It's nice that there are self-hosted options, too, I almost dread when I see bespoke object storage solutions at work, either developed before S3 was a thing or because the devs just didn't know or had a case of NIH, so I have to look at how a bunch of blobs are passed through servlets and serialized/deserialized, as well as deal with custom metadata and permission mechanisms.
reply