I saw Penske Truck Leasing trailers on fire at Kentucky Truck on WHAS"s helicopter footage from last night. 15 years ago, I'd be there once a week doing parts runs from the PTL branch off Newburg. The security cam footage of the plane rolling from Kentucky Truck was insane. Thanks for working the scene. That smoke looked incredibly toxic.
A fascinating investor. I just finished re-reading Microserfs. The buzzwords may have changed between 1993 and 2025, but the human behaviors certainly have not.
And then, 20 years later, I meet a kid on the local playground who claims to be the son of one of the Cloudflare co-founders or CTO. I was thinking, wait, isn't JGC in Britain, not Boise? Even though the kid was visibly disappointed that I'm bearish on nVidia and LLMs, he strained my understanding of how puts work in stock trading. So that amusing conversation, sporadically interrupted by loading and unloading my toddler from the swingset, encouraged me to get more familiar with the broader investment market, beyond the simple kid invest products I've been working on the past four years. So thanks for that proverbial push on the swings, Cloudflare kid!
He hacked up the firmware of a dotmatrix printer to send it commands from his Atari 2600 or 80286 Compaq to make music. "Sound is generated by the print head pins striking the paper and the sound is picked up by a tie-clip mic on the print head. By adjusting the frequency of the printing process in software, different pitches can be played (with about a two octave range.)"
This makes me tired. I know it's supposed to be humorous self deprecation, but it's soul crushing to see the pseudo real-time thought process behind the fantastically over-engineered setups from my day jobs. All for someone's humble blog?
Obligatory HN footnote: My blog costs $6 a month to serve HTML from digital ocean. Landing in the top five links a few times on HN didn't make the Linux load blip much past 0.20. GoAccess analyzes nginx traffic logs for free, if you want to know what countries are scraping your pages.
A lot of places I've worked at never gave me the chance nor opportunity to use all the fanciful technologies we read about so often. Building your own blog was often the only outlet to explore them.
Cloudflare pages is better overall because it’s trivially easy to integrate with DNS for your custom domain/cloudflare workers, and handles staged changes better IMO. You can point it at a GitHub repo so unless you have a complex build it’s easy to setup.
Unfortunately IME it’s not a super well-polished product though (I can’t for the life of me get their CLI “wrangler” to login to a headless machine, and their HTTP APIs are not documented well enough to use for non-git file sources, so I can’t get it to work in my not-so-special dev environment setup). So it’s only better if you can get it to work, although that’s something you’ll probably figure out in the first 5-10m of using it.
But cloudflare has a growing monopoly on internet traffic that is worse for the internet than privacy busting laws that are passed. If you are a technologist worried about the distributed nature of the web, you should avoid it.
GitHub Pages is pretty bad for static content with its universal
Cache-Control: max-age=600
that can’t be changed. Your assets should have much longer expiry and hopefully be immutable. Just get a server, it’s cheap and you can do proper cache control and you’re not beholden to your Microsoft overlord.
With long expiry/immutable assets, only the HTML needs to be refetched from the server on refreshes or subsequent visits, instead of everything after merely ten minutes. On slow and/or high latency networks the difference can be huge. And you don’t even need to intentionally refresh — mobile browsers have been evicting background tabs since the dawn of time, and Chrome brought this behavior to desktop a while ago to save RAM (on by default).
By refetch I mean re-requested, which can return 304 responses. You still have to do a roundtrip for each resource in that case, and many websites (including static ones) have this waterfall of requests where html includes scripts and scripts include other scripts, especially now that some geniuses are pushing adoption of native esm imports instead of bundling. The roundtrips add up, and good luck if your link is unreliable in addition to being high latency. Compare that to proper caching where a refresh doesn’t request anything except maybe the html. I have experienced the web on such a link and it’s a shitshow.
Ok. I don't think this is a big deal for the vast majority of blogs, like mine, that are hosted on GH pages. It's just HTML and some photos that are unique per post. But I also don't see why GH would put the number so low.
Because they have this one max-time for everything, from things that should be refetched frequently (html, unversioned scripts and stylesheets, etc.) to things that should be immutable (versioned scripts and stylesheets, images, etc.). They don’t understand your website. You do, and you can set exactly the right headers for the best user experience. Btw you can set the right headers with Netlify and Vercel as well.
I'm not confident a "cheap server" (like a $5/mo DO droplet) would be able to withstand being on the front page of HN, but I am pretty confident a GH pages page could withstand being on the front page of HN.
I had a blog article of mine on the HN front page a few years ago and the nginx serving static pages from an ultra cheap VPS didn't even break a sweat.
Or cloudflare pages. As far as I can tell static content is served at no cost and dynamic requests have very generous free limits (something like 100k requests/day)
i love gp. this one almost didn't fit on it because I wanted to serve a small db file to the client rather pay for remote. Luckily I was able to keep it under their pretty generous file limit.
The main downside of GitHub pages is that they don't support running your own Jekyll plugins from _plugins; sometimes it's just a lot easier to write a bit of Ruby code. That said, you can just generate stuff locally and push the result, but that's the main reason I've been using Netlify.
You mean run Jekyll and deploy "manually"? That should work, yeah; didn't think of that actually. But the standard "GitHub Pages" deploy won't work with custom Ruby.
The difficulty with the "sold your soul" meme is that preserving your soul is a moving target. I've got some Oracle free tier instances. They get deployed with nixos-rebuild, same as anything else. The main difference between them and any other virtual server provider is when I've got to do something that requires logging in to the overwrought web interface, it's slightly less friendly than other providers (the IP config is a bit weird, too).
Using an offering from a specific company is not selling your soul. Selling your soul entails adopting something in a way that you become reliant upon it, giving whomever controls it leverage over you. The chief one these days is using Proprietary Software 2.0, and especially writing significant code that ends up inextricably wed to it. That can include the Oracle Cloud API, but it also includes every other lock-in-hopeful proprietary service API, including all of these "easy" and "free tier" offerings from not-yet-openly-associated-with-evil SaaS "startups".
So in short if you're choosing between some proprietary solution that offers "free" hosting (eg Heroku, Github pages, anything "serverless", etc) and Oracle free tier that gives you bog standard VMs on which you can run common libre software, choose the Oracle free tier route and don't think twice. If Oracle engages in "altering the deal", then the most you'll be on the hook for is $5/mo at a different provider rather than having to completely redo your setup.
Oracle cloud is suspiciously good. They also claim not to do the AWS thing: if you exceed the free limits, they'll just shut you down rather than bill you absurd amounts of money. I guess that's reserved for the Java and DB billing divisions.
Their free tier gives you quite a lot of disk. The catch is being capped at 10Mbit, which can be mitigated by .. Cloudflare!
Tangential, is there a single provider which does (Python) app platform (web, cron, workers) and hosted Postgres plan costing 10 usd a month? A VPS still seems most compelling option for me.
I did that for years but have recently switched to Cloudflare Pages. Cost are negligible either way, but Cloudflare auto publishing straight from a GitHub webhook out of my repo is slightly fewer components.
I think humans are tinkerers. Given a choice between utilitarian productivity and tinkering, unless it's a life or a death situation, people will go ham on the tinkering. Especially for such low risk things as one's personal blogs.
Now what is maybe a bit strange is companies like Vercel having massive valuations because of this. I said in another comment somewhere does anyone actually use them beyond the free or low cost tiers?
serving static files via nginx is easy on the compute. I'm serving something a tiny bit more complex (instructions at http://funky.nondeterministic.computer) and the $5 DO droplet couldn't keep up. I had to upgrade to a $12/mo server to keep up.
Ah, Lars-Christian! No one wants to talk to you in real life about your blog because you're in Norway. If you lived here in the United States, you'd have a perpetual string of very interesting conversations about your personal website because Americans are all about technology and hearing how any of us peons are fighting the power, man.
At least, I think that's what my wife's reaction is before she leaves the room to find a book to read. And my friends who think a blog is just part of my weird, personal brand, like using a phone with a keyboard.
You apparently have no idea about Norway. Norway was the very first internet country, because of its vast coastline and enormous distances. Schoolkids had internet remote classrooms since the 90ies.
Everybody there is online, and blogs are widely read. Much more than in the US.
Or Operation: Inner Space. It used the file system to generate sectors to visit to clear viruses from your EXEs, and collecting non-contaminated EXEs to use as currency.
It works great with Windows' backwards compatibility, but modern filesystems have so many thousands of directories the game is now impossible to complete.
Was the reason for the Shazam office in Rancho Bernardo, San Diego because you were originally from San Diego before moving to England? Lawn Love rented a suite above theirs from 2014-2018. The Shazam mobile app devs working out of that office were quiet and kept to themselves, even after the acquisition. We never heard any celebratory champagne!
>The Millennials were largely spared from the carnage because all but the last few years of them were beyond puberty when the phone-based childhood swept in.
Every generation thinks its suffering is unique and worse than those before it. Read Douglas Coupland's early 90s novels (Generation X and Microserfs) to see how Gen X fared in contrast to their parents. Watch Eden of the East to see how middle-Millenials struggled with the rising concept of the NEET (in Japan, the US, and western Europe alike) as our Gen X and Baby Boomer parents couldn't understand the difference in economic and life circumstances between being 23 in 1980 and being 23 in 2008.
Smartphones and social media are accelerating the decline, but there's evidence collected over the past ~60 years that points to a trend of diminishing quality of life. A great non-fiction economics-oriented book on the US version of this is The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War by Robert Gordon. (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147727/th...)
Every recent generation has felt like they have it harder than their parents, and it is usually brushed off as just hindsight bias. But I feel like we don’t look at it enough that maybe things have actually gotten worse overall (for those of us in relatively rich countries).
I think a lot of things have gotten better in the last ~60 years, especially medicine, in terms of improving the lives of people. But some things, especially community related, have definitely gotten worse. And maybe those things are more important to our health than we’ve given credit to.
