News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Friday February 21, 2025 @02:01PM (#43131494)
For the hundreds of people reading this article right now - you might be amused to know that you're accessing it from a mac mini on my desk:

https://www.contraption.co/a-mini-data-center/

(The CPU load from this is pretty negligible).

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by asdfman123 on Friday February 21, 2025 @02:50PM (#43132108)
What is HackerNews but a system to stress test everyone's hobby websites?
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by atum47 on Friday February 21, 2025 @06:22PM (#43134334)
Every time I share a project I provide two links, one for my vps and another one for GitHub pages. Usually my projects run on the client, so I have never experienced the hug of death myself.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by ash-ali on Friday February 21, 2025 @09:49PM (#43135606)
I absolutely love this comment <3
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by mey on Friday February 21, 2025 @11:30PM (#43136128)
Before this Digg, before that Slashdot.

What else am I missing?

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by pjmlp on Saturday February 22, 2025 @02:48AM (#43137046)
Before we were all on USENET, some lucky ones were on Compuserve and AOL, and BBSs were limited by phone lines, not really anything to test loads.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by DeathArrow on Saturday February 22, 2025 @03:17AM (#43137200)
>Before this Digg, before that Slashdot.

>What else am I missing?

You are missing Reddit.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by vram22 on Saturday February 22, 2025 @03:41AM (#43137306)
/u/seddit
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by stevekemp on Saturday February 22, 2025 @03:38AM (#43137291)
Kuro5hin was pretty big, back in the day. But /. was the biggie, along with need to know. We get the term slashdotted from there, after all.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by f4stjack on Saturday February 22, 2025 @07:38AM (#43138472)
Holy… I still miss kuro5hin. Wonder what is rusty doing nowadays.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by durkie on Saturday February 22, 2025 @08:19AM (#43138755)
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by f4stjack on Saturday February 22, 2025 @10:12AM (#43139630)
thank you!
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by tomhoward on Saturday February 22, 2025 @09:06PM (#43145597)
Oh man, the most helpful article I’ve ever read about depression and burnout was on Kuro5hin. Luckily it’s been preserved on Wikibooks:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Demystifying_Depression

Still holds up well two decades later.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by besus on Saturday February 22, 2025 @09:11AM (#43139070)
Fark
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by entropie on Saturday February 22, 2025 @11:42AM (#43140521)
del.icio.us

anyone?

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by mannycalavera42 on Saturday February 22, 2025 @04:35PM (#43143494)
yup!!! I've replaced it with https://pinboard.in/popular/ now but it's not the same
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by no_wizard on Saturday February 22, 2025 @03:33PM (#43142922)
There was a time where Reddit was good for discovery as well
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by bluGill on Friday February 21, 2025 @02:21PM (#43131739)
back in my day kid we used to serve far more users from 40mhz CPUs. The only interesting part is that today you can get pipes fast enough to do this in your house, while back then dialup was all we could afford ($1000/month to get into the 1 megabit/second range, ISDN and DSL came soon after and were nice).

Of course back then we didn't use dynamic anything, a static web page worked.

Now get off my lawn!

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by vidarh on Friday February 21, 2025 @03:24PM (#43132510)
My first company website was served of a 120MHz Pentium that also served as the login server where 5 of us ran our X clients (with the X servers on 486's with 16MB RAM)...

And it wasn't static: We because peoples connections were mostly so slow, we used a CGI that shelled out to ping to estimate connection speed, and return either a static image (if you were on a dialup) or a fancy animated gif if you were on anything faster.

(the ping-test was obviously not reliable - if you were visiting from somewhere with high latency, you'd get the low bandwidth version too, no matter how high your throughput was - but that was rare enough; it worked surprisingly well)

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by JohnBooty on Saturday February 22, 2025 @12:31PM (#43141057)
I love that so much. You just don't see wacky solutions like this any more. I guess it's a good thing, but this career has gotten a hell of a lot less fun and interesting.
[dead]
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by rbanffy on Saturday February 22, 2025 @10:12AM (#43139639)
We need something that’s small, cheap, plugs into a power outlet (or a PoE port), and lets anyone serve their personal little node of their distributed social network.

I started thinking about that around an implementation that could run under Google’s App Engine free tier, but never completed it.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by larodi on Saturday February 22, 2025 @11:11AM (#43140210)
Everyone moved too fast into the future, and this is perhaps not that good. The whole ASCII and 90s/cyberpunk nostalgia is being a major cue.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by trinix912 on Friday February 21, 2025 @02:23PM (#43131751)
I like that you're pointing out application longevity in the linked article. It seems that new SaaS apps appear and disappear daily as cloud hosting isn't cheap (especially for indie hackers). I'd much rather sign up for an app that I knew wouldn't randomly disappear in a couple of months when the cloud bills surpass the profits.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by cultofmetatron on Friday February 21, 2025 @03:17PM (#43132422)
I took a startup from zero to 100k MRR as of last month over the last 5 years. I can tell you that cloud billing is the least of your concerns if you pay even the cursory attention to writing good queries and adding indexes in the right places. The real issue is the number of developers who never bother to learn how to structure data in a database for their use case. properly done, you can easily support thousands of paying users on a single write server.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by giantrobot on Saturday February 22, 2025 @12:54AM (#43136450)
What? No no, to be fast you need the whole database only in RAM! And SQL is hard so just make it a giant KV store. Schemas are also hard so all values are just amorphous JSON blobs. Might as well store images in the database too. Since it's RAM it'll be so fast!

/s

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by goosejuice on Saturday February 22, 2025 @12:56AM (#43136458)
A bit hand wavy. It obviously depends on the business and what "least of concerns" entails.

In most cases businesses justify the cost of managed databases for less risk of downtime. A HA postgres server on crunchy can cost over $500/mo for a measly 4vCPU.

I would agree that it's the least of concerns but for a different reason. Spending all your time optimizing for optimal performance (assuming sensible indexing for what you have) by continuously redesigning your DB structure when you don't even know what your company will be doing next year isn't worth the time for a few hundred a month you might save.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by DeathArrow on Saturday February 22, 2025 @03:24AM (#43137236)
I use CQRS with /dev/null for writes and /dev/random for reads. It's web scale, it's cheap and it's fast.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by nlitened on Saturday February 22, 2025 @03:40AM (#43137300)
> I can tell you that cloud billing is the least of your concerns if you pay even the cursory attention to writing good queries and adding indexes in the right places.

I read this as "in building your startup, you should be paranoid about team members never making mistakes". I really try to read otherwise, but can't.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by tempest_ on Friday February 21, 2025 @02:16PM (#43131671)
Presumably CF is doing most of the work if the page doesnt actually change all that much?
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Friday February 21, 2025 @02:51PM (#43132123)
Yeah, but there's Plausible Analytics self-hosted on the mac mini that's getting more of the load right now.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by boogieup on Friday February 21, 2025 @10:10PM (#43135716)
Nobody's actually doing work because serving web pages is cheap.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by fmbb on Saturday February 22, 2025 @08:05AM (#43138661)
Is it really cheap through ruby?
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by kevincox on Saturday February 22, 2025 @04:11PM (#43143267)
It does look like the main article isn't actually cached by Cloudflare. But most of the assets are. So it is definitely helping but not taking the entire load.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by peterhunt on Friday February 21, 2025 @02:53PM (#43132147)
Now do it without Cloudflare :)
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Friday February 21, 2025 @02:57PM (#43132208)
Perhaps some day.

My shorter-term goal is to switch my home internet to Starlink, so that all requests bounce off a satellite before landing at my desk.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by nofunsir on Friday February 21, 2025 @03:11PM (#43132359)
Except Starlink uses CGNAT, which means you need some external SSHD port forwarding at least.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by nemothekid on Friday February 21, 2025 @03:22PM (#43132477)
He could keep using Cloudflare Tunnel, but then he's still using Cloudflare
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by Eikon on Friday February 21, 2025 @03:05PM (#43132296)
Trivial, even for a high traffic website to be served from a fiber connection.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Friday February 21, 2025 @05:06PM (#43133644)
If only my part of SF had fiber service. #1 city for tech, but I still have to rely on Comcast.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by Eikon on Friday February 21, 2025 @05:12PM (#43133691)
Sounds weird to read that from Western Europe where even the most rural places have fiber!

I understand that the USA is big, but no fiber in SF?

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by jnathsf on Friday February 21, 2025 @07:23PM (#43134802)
we have fiber in half of SF via Sonic - where there are overhead wires. The other half of SF has its utilities underground making economics more difficult.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by fragmede on Friday February 21, 2025 @07:25PM (#43134812)
https://bestneighborhood.org/fiber-tv-and-internet-san-franc... has a detailed map, by provider, if you wanna dig into the gory details, but there is fiber, just not everywhere.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Friday February 21, 2025 @06:55PM (#43134610)
Not where I am
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by boogieup on Friday February 21, 2025 @10:12PM (#43135728)
American government doesn't work for its own people. This is by design.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by what on Saturday February 22, 2025 @01:00AM (#43136473)
What?
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by ekianjo on Saturday February 22, 2025 @01:21AM (#43136570)
> where even the most rural places have fiber!

No need for the hyperbole. I know for a fact that you don't get fiber in the remote countryside of France

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by xp84 on Saturday February 22, 2025 @01:27AM (#43136600)
SF is mostly served by AT&T, who abandoned any pretense of upgrading their decrepit copper 20 years ago, and Comcast, whose motto is “whatcha gonna do, go get DSL?”

AT&T has put fiber out in little patches, but only in deals with a guaranteed immediate ROI, so it would mean brand new buildings, where they know everyone will sign up, or deals like my old apartment, where they got their service included in the HOA fee, so 100% adoption rate guaranteed! AT&T loves not competing for business.

Sure, others have been able to painstakingly roll out fiber in some places, but it costs millions of dollars to string fiber on each street and to get it to buildings.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by unclebucknasty on Saturday February 22, 2025 @03:07AM (#43137151)
Lived in an older neighborhood in Georgia a couple years back. A new neighborhood across the street had it (AT&T), but we didn't.

Caught an AT&T tech in the field one day, and he claimed that if 8 (or 10—memory's a little fuzzy) people in the neighborhood requested it, they'd bring it in.

I never did test it, but thought it interesting that they'd do it for that low a number. Of course, it may have been because it was already in the area.

Still, may be worth the ask for those who don't already have it.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by deaddodo on Saturday February 22, 2025 @10:22AM (#43139762)
In the US, it’s not about money or demand. The more entrenched cities (especially in California, for some historic reasons/legislation) tend to have a much more difficult time getting fiber installed. It all comes down to bureaucracy and NIMBYism.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by bcoates on Saturday February 22, 2025 @09:24PM (#43145744)
It's just SF, there's fiber-to-the-pole or better in most of the LA area, even if the only last-foot service is DSL or cable
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by deaddodo on Sunday February 23, 2025 @11:57PM (#43155953)
Sure, but it took much longer for it to roll out in LA than it should have, and even then (as you pointed out) the furthest they could get was the pole in most cases. FTH is mostly reserved to the more suburban areas (the Valleys) and the independent cities.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by alabastervlog on Friday February 21, 2025 @07:28PM (#43134830)
Computers are stupid good at serving files over http.

I’ve served (much) greater-than-HN traffic from a machine probably weaker than that mini. A good bit of it dynamic. You just gotta let actual web servers (apache2 in that case) serve real files as much as possible, and use memory cache to keep db load under control.

I’m not even that good. Sites fall over largely because nobody even tried to make them efficient.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by boogieup on Friday February 21, 2025 @10:11PM (#43135723)
And nobody knows how stuff works at the web server level anymore... The C10K problem was solved a long time ago. Now it's just embarrassing.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by xp84 on Saturday February 22, 2025 @01:23AM (#43136578)
I’m reminded of a site I was called in to help rescue during the pandemic. It was a site that was getting a lot higher traffic (maybe 2-3x) than they were used to, a Rails app on Heroku. These guys were forced to upgrade to the highest postgres that Heroku offered - which was either $5k or $10k a month, I forget - for not that many concurrent users. Turns out that just hitting a random piece of content page (a GET) triggered so many writes that it was just overwhelming the DB when they got that much traffic. They were smart developers too, just nobody ever told them that a very cacheable GET on a resource shouldn’t have blocking activities other than what’s needed, or trigger any high-priority DB writes.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by dingi on Friday February 21, 2025 @03:39PM (#43132687)
Been using a setup following this for quite a while. Nginx reverse proxy on a cheap VPS with a wireguard tunnel to home.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by mmcnl on Friday February 21, 2025 @05:36PM (#43133911)
I wrote a blog post that generated a lot of traffic on HackerNews last year when it briefly was on #1 here. My blog was (and still is) hosted on a 9-year old Dell Latitude E7250 with Intel Core i5-6300U processor. The server held up fine with ~350 concurrent readers at its peak. It was actually my fiber router that had trouble keeping up. But even though things got a bit slow, it held up fine, without Cloudflare or anything fancy.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by jonwinstanley on Friday February 21, 2025 @02:45PM (#43132036)
Weirdly, that tower in the photo is also on the front page of HN right now

https://vincentwoo.com/3d/sutro_tower/

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Friday February 21, 2025 @02:50PM (#43132109)
Ah - I took that photo on the way to Mount Olympus Park, which is one of my favorite little parks in SF. It has an interesting history:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Olympus_(San_Francisco)

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by jonwinstanley on Friday February 21, 2025 @06:16PM (#43134290)
Nice!
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by TomK32 on Friday February 21, 2025 @02:35PM (#43131911)
It's fun to host at home, I run docker on alpine VMs on two proxmox machines. Yeah, different docker machines for each user or use-case look complicated but it works fine and I can mount nfs or samba mounts as needed. Only thing I have on the cloud is a small hetzner server which I mostly use as a nginx proxy and iptables is great for that minecraft VM.

Why did you go for Cloudfare tunnel instead of wireguard?

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by nemothekid on Friday February 21, 2025 @03:23PM (#43132494)
Cloudflare Tunnel provides you a publicly routable address for free. With wireguard you would still need a VM somewhere, and if you are hosting your own VM, then whats the point?
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by dingi on Friday February 21, 2025 @03:42PM (#43132710)
But you are using someone else’s VM. You just don’t pay for it.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by boogieup on Friday February 21, 2025 @10:10PM (#43135718)
Not making Cloudflare more of a central point of failure for the internet? We hosted web pages before they MITM'd the entire web.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by october8140 on Friday February 21, 2025 @10:37PM (#43135854)
I like how they have amazing great free services and people are upset so many people use it.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by adamrezich on Saturday February 22, 2025 @05:36AM (#43137817)
That's what we all said about various Google products many years ago, too.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by october8140 on Monday February 24, 2025 @04:43AM (#43157613)
Then you just switch to something else. What’s the problem? You’re not locked in.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by giantrobot on Saturday February 22, 2025 @01:19AM (#43136561)
> We hosted web pages before they MITM'd the entire web.

We also hosted web pages before the average script kiddie could run tens of Gbps DDoS on sites for the lolz. And before ISPs used CGNAT making direct inbound connections impossible.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by miyuru on Saturday February 22, 2025 @11:50AM (#43140594)
Public IPv4 address exhausted and NAT happened.

Even having IPv6 is not a proper solution because of laggy ISPs(currently reaching ~50%) and the even the ISPs who deploy, do not deploy it properly. (dynamic prefixes or inbound blocked IPv6)

Add to the mix that lot of people does not understand IPv6, internet became more centralized and will keep doing so for the foreseeable future.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by TomK32 on Saturday February 22, 2025 @03:13AM (#43137178)
It's a small cost of $4.50/month and allows me a lot more control. In regards to wireguard, that one VM I pay for is the central wireguard node for all sorts of devices that I use, allowing me to securely access home services when I'm not at home. There are services you don't want to expose directly via a Cloudfare Tunnel.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by rapind on Friday February 21, 2025 @02:16PM (#43131664)
Pretty cool. Wouldn't work for me as my ISP is horrendously unreliable (Rogers in Canada, I swear they bounce their network nightly), but I might consider colocating a mac mini at a datacenter.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by _vaporwave_ on Friday February 21, 2025 @02:17PM (#43131686)
Very cool! Do you have a contingency in place for things like power outages?
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Friday February 21, 2025 @02:52PM (#43132131)
Not really . . . Cloudflare Always Online, mostly.

I had 2m35s of downtime due to power outages this week.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by firecall on Saturday February 22, 2025 @10:22AM (#43139759)
A MacBook Air solves this problem very nicely!

Not only does is have a built in UPS, but also comes with a screen, keyboard and trackpad for you need to do admin tasks physically att the console!

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Saturday February 22, 2025 @03:34PM (#43142934)
Yeah, I had considered this! But, then I'd need a UPS on my modem and wifi, and at that point it seemed overkill.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by firecall on Saturday February 22, 2025 @05:34PM (#43143966)
Yes, totally.

Although you could use a backup USB cellular modem, plugged directly into the Mac!

At some I imagine I'll inherit or acquire a cheap older M1 Macbook Air, which will be perfect!

I also have whole home battery backup and solar, so I technically have a UPS for everything!

Where I live the power tends to go out from time to time!

I monkeyed around with cheap ex-lease Dell Micro PCs with Intel 8th Gen to 11th Gen CPUs. But they not as performant as I'd like, and once you've experienced modern CPUs like Apple's M series, you dont really want to go back!

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by k4runa on Friday February 21, 2025 @02:05PM (#43131537)
Nice
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by bmelton on Friday February 21, 2025 @09:42PM (#43135569)
I've been thinking about that article for the past week so much that I've been looking at $250 Ryzen 7 5700U 16/512/2.5G Ace Magician NUCs to move some of my properties to. They're known to be shipping spyware on their Windows machines, but my thought was that I'd get 3 of them, clear them out with Debian, and set them up as a k8s cluster and have enough horsepower to handle postgres at scale.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by ww520 on Friday February 21, 2025 @10:02PM (#43135682)
Get NUC, or one of those refurbished Dell or HP mini PCs. They have plenty of CPU power, consume very little idle power, and friendly to Linux.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by xp84 on Saturday February 22, 2025 @01:16AM (#43136541)
I have been wildly happy with my EliteDesk mini pcs. Mine are the “G5” generation which cost like $60-150 on eBay with varying specs, obviously newer generations have better specs but for my “homelab” needs these have been great. I even put a discrete GPU ($60) in my AMD one for a great little Minecraft machine for playing with the kid.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by beAbU on Saturday February 22, 2025 @04:00AM (#43137394)
I have a g5 elitedesk small form factor (about the size of a largr cereal box, not a book) pc, thats been runnimg my by media server and torrent download services for years now. It has a plucky little 10th gen i3 or something, and it has been more than enough. Can real time transcode 4K movies! Dead quiet and sips electricity. Uptime is on average about 8-10 months.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Friday February 21, 2025 @09:43PM (#43135575)
Glad it resonated with you!

If you're considering k8s, take a look at Kamal (also from DHH): https://kamal-deploy.org/

I think it makes more sense for small clusters.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by bmelton on Saturday February 22, 2025 @08:25AM (#43138784)
It probably does! Kamal/MRSK has been on the roadmap for awhile. I have deliberately endeavored to keep the existing k8s setup as minimal as possible, and it's still grown to almost unruly. That said, it works well enough across the (surprisingly power efficient) Dell C1100s in the basement, so it'd take a migration to justify, which is of course the last thing you can justify this with.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by antonvs on Saturday February 22, 2025 @02:18PM (#43142145)
Which k8s distribution are you using? I’ve been using k3s on everything from individual home machines or cloud VMs, to small on-premise customer clusters for customers who don’t already have their own k8s clusters.

I don’t find it approaching unruliness, quite the opposite really.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by bmelton on Sunday February 23, 2025 @11:03AM (#43150222)
Vanilla, CNCF. K3S is tempting.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by your_challenger on Friday February 21, 2025 @10:01PM (#43135680)
Is cloudflare tunnels really this free to support thousands of internet requests?

I run a windows server at my office where we connect to it using RDP from multiple locations. If I could instead buy the hardware and use cloudflare tunnels to let my team RDP to it then it would save me a lot of money. I could recoup my hardware cost in less than a year. Would this be possible?

(I wouldn't mind paying for cloudflare tunnels / zero trust. It just should be much smaller than the monthly payment I make to Microsoft)

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by nemothekid on Friday February 21, 2025 @10:09PM (#43135713)
I used Cloudflare Tunnels for a project that had hundreds of tunnels did roughly 10GB/day of traffic entirely for free. The project has since moved to Cloudflare Enterprise, where the project pays the opposite of free, but was completely expected as the project grew.

I'm pretty sure Tunnels supports RDP and if you don't use a ton of bandwidth (probably under a 1TB/mo), Cloudflare probably won't bother you.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Friday February 21, 2025 @10:20PM (#43135772)
Yup. Cloudflare's typical proxy already handles massive amounts of traffic, so I expect that the marginal cost of this reverse proxy isn't that high.

I do think Cloudflare has proven itself to be very developer/indie-friendly. One of the only tech unicorns that really doesn't impose its morality on customers.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by boogieup on Friday February 21, 2025 @10:09PM (#43135710)
That makes sense, because serving a web page to a few hundred people is not a computationally expensive problem. :3
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Friday February 21, 2025 @10:21PM (#43135781)
I self-host analytics on the box (Plausible), which is using more resources than the website. There are a few apps on there, too.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by ekianjo on Saturday February 22, 2025 @01:22AM (#43136575)
Plausible is hardy compute intensive
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by aurareturn on Friday February 21, 2025 @10:11PM (#43135719)
That's amazing. Mac Mini is very efficient and is a great little home server. Idles at 3-4w total for the entire machine. Plus, the M4 is a beast of a CPU. It might even be possible to serve a small LLM model like a 3b model on it over the internet.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Friday February 21, 2025 @10:18PM (#43135760)
Yeah, the mac minis can have up to 64GB of ram which would support some usable models. However, I accidentally got one with 24gb of ram, and my apps already use 12gbs. So, perhaps I'll get a second box just for LLMs!
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by aurareturn on Friday February 21, 2025 @10:24PM (#43135793)
A small model like 1B or 3B should be ok with 16GB. I was thinking in the name of savings, you can just use the same machine.

It's a cool project. I might do it too. I have an M4 Mini sitting on my desk that I got for $550.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by adamtaylor_13 on Friday February 21, 2025 @11:02PM (#43135983)
I actually read that blog post too last week (or the week before?) and I’m genuinely considering this.

Render is crazy expensive for blog sites and hobby apps.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Saturday February 22, 2025 @01:01AM (#43136476)
Here's the core scripts I use for the mac mini. They're a bit raw, but hopefully useful:

https://gist.github.com/philipithomas/ed57890dc2f928658d2c90...

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by shadowangel on Saturday February 22, 2025 @01:25AM (#43136590)
I was using an old Samsung s8, with a USBc ethernet adaptor it was more then capable serving allot of requests.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by AlchemistCamp on Friday February 21, 2025 @11:06PM (#43136006)
A mac mini is pretty beefy for hosting a blog!

I’ve had a number of database-driven sites hosted on $5/month VPS that have been on the front page here with minimal cpu or memory load.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Saturday February 22, 2025 @12:59AM (#43136468)
It's hosting a variety of apps - blog (Ghost), plausible analytics, metabase, and soon 3 Rails apps. It's unfortunately running Postgres, MySQL, and Clickhouse.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by fsndz on Saturday February 22, 2025 @02:00AM (#43136766)
the article is AI-generated isn't it ?
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Saturday February 22, 2025 @02:24AM (#43136901)
Nope
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by fsndz on Saturday February 22, 2025 @03:04AM (#43137134)
Lol, by just reading I knew it was. Then I used an AI detection tool and it says 100% sure it is AI-generated. You know how hard it is to get 100% sure it is AI-generated ?
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by berdario on Saturday February 22, 2025 @06:58AM (#43138212)
Most "AI detection tools" are just the equivalent of a Magic 8 ball.

In fact, most of them are just implemented by feeding an LLM the text, and asking "is it AI generated?". You cannot trust that answer any more than any other LLM hallucination. LLMs don't have a magic ability to recognise their own output.

Even if your "detection tool" was using exactly the same model, at the same exact version... unless the generation was done with 0 temperature, you just wouldn't be able to confirm that the tool would actually generate the same text that you suspect of being LLM-generated. And even then, you'd need to know exactly the input tokens (including the prompt) used.

Currently, the only solution is watermarking, like what Deepmind created:

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/watermarking-ai-genera...

but even that, it requires cooperation from all the LLM vendors. There's always going to be one (maybe self-hosted) LLM out there which won't play ball.

If you're going to accuse someone of pushing LLM-generated content, don't hide behind "computer said so", not without clearly qualifying what kind of detection technique and which "detection tool" you used.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by fsndz on Saturday February 22, 2025 @09:48AM (#43139353)
I am starting to believe this is a lie spread by AI companies because if AI-slop starts to be detected at scale, it kills their primary use case. True, AI detection tools are not perfect, like any classification algo, they don't have a 100% accuracy. But it does not mean they are useless. They give useful probabilities. If AI detectors are so wrong, how do you explain that passing AI generated text on gptzero and it gets it all the time, same when I pass human written content it recognises it as such almost 99% of the time.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by titmouse on Saturday February 22, 2025 @11:13AM (#43140233)
It's the false positives that make it useless. Even if it's generally very good at detecting AI, the fact that it can and does throw false positives (and pretty frequently) means that nothing it says means anything.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by fsndz on Saturday February 22, 2025 @04:24PM (#43143401)
lol with that kind of reasoning, nobody should use statistics or any kind of machine learning model...
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by foldr on Sunday February 23, 2025 @05:43AM (#43148361)
That’s actually not a bad rule of thumb!
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by berdario on Sunday February 23, 2025 @11:25AM (#43150474)
> They give useful probabilities

Yes, compared to an all-or-nothing approach, it's better to be upfront about the uncertainty, especially if the tool surfaces the probability by-sentence.

But how are those probabilities computed? You mention gptzero, but https://gptzero.me/technology doesn't clarify at all how it works. They link papers using GPTZero (i.e. from other researchers), e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.13606

And these very same papers highlight how everything is still unknown

> Despite their wide use and support of non-English languages, the extent of their zero- shot multilingual and cross-lingual proficiency in detecting MGT remains unknown. The training methodologies, weight parameters, and the spe- cific data used for these detectors remain undis- closed.

GPTZero seems to be better than some of the alternatives, but other discussions here on HN when it was launched highlight all of the false positives and false negatives it yielded:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34556681

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34859348

But all of that is pretty old, there have been a couple of posts in the last year about it, but both are about the business, rather than the quality of the tool itself.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...

So, to check if now it's any better I tried it myself: I got it to yield a false negative (50% human and 50% AI rating, for a text which was wholly AI-generated), and I haven't got it to yield a false positive.

But all of this is just anecdotal evidence, I haven't run a rigorous study.

For sure, if some competent people believe that the tool won't generate false positives, I'll be mindful of it and (In the rare cases in which I write a long posts/blog articles, etc.) I'll check that it doesn't erroneously flag what I write.

It's bittersweet: if a tool that can be relied upon really exist, that would be good news. But if that tool is closed source (just like ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) that doesn't inspire confidence. What if the closed source detection tool will suddenly start erroneously flagging a subset of human texts which it didn't before?

At least, even with the closed source LLMs, we have a bunch of papers that explain their mechanism. I hope that GPTZero will be more forthcoming about the way it works.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by tim333 on Saturday February 22, 2025 @09:03AM (#43139018)
You can kind of tell it's not AI when it gets beyond the generic stuff and on to say

>Today I'm working on Chroma Cloud, designed for exploring and managing large datasets, and Next.js powers its advanced interactions and data loading requirements.

which is unlikely to have been written by an LLM.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by fsndz on Saturday February 22, 2025 @09:44AM (#43139327)
you can inject personal stuff to make it feel original, but huge chunks are still AI-generated. Just get the first 4/5 paragraphs and paste in gptzero
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by tim333 on Saturday February 22, 2025 @10:23AM (#43139764)
Well on the one hand you have gptzero saying it's in the style of AI which I don't count as reliable and on the other you have the author saying it's not which I weight higher.

And it mostly makes too much sense apart from "most drivers don't know how many gears their car has" which has me thinking huh? It's usually written on the shifter.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Saturday February 22, 2025 @03:34PM (#43142932)
I stand by that statement :-)
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by peteforde on Thursday February 27, 2025 @01:00PM (#43196745)
I do worry that the thought process involving feeding everything you consume into an AI powered "AI detector" is a slippery slope to a dystopian hell of one's own making.

You don't have to extrapolate too many iterations before you start arguing that you can't trust you're living in base reality.

My take on both issues is that even if you're right, the choice is whether to spend your life in a state of cynical paranoia, or not.

If you figure out the consciousness equivalent of Ctrl-Shift-Esc, please report back.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by psnehanshu on Saturday February 22, 2025 @02:26AM (#43136911)
I see you're serving a GTS certificate. Does GCP allow you to download TLS certificates? I honestly didn't know. I thought just like AWS, you get them only when using their services like load balancers, app runners etc.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by yla92 on Saturday February 22, 2025 @03:11AM (#43137167)
Not OP but the site sits behind Cloudflare and Cloudflare uses Google Trust GTS and LetsEncrypt for Edge certificates.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/reference/certificate-...

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by dakiol on Saturday February 22, 2025 @05:10AM (#43137693)
How much does it cost to keep the mac mini on for a month? I’ve been thinking doing the same.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Saturday February 22, 2025 @03:32PM (#43142918)
Not sure - I could hook up an energy monitor and run some math. But, I don't think the marginal internet cost or electricity cost are really much.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by renegade-otter on Saturday February 22, 2025 @05:17AM (#43137741)
Hosting from home is fun, I guess, but it actually was a money-saving exercise before the cloud. I've done it.

Now, however, what is the point? To learn server config? I am running my blog with GitHub pages. A couple of posts made it to the top of HN, and I never had to worry.

Always bewilders me when some sites here go down under load. I mean, where are they hosting it that a static page in 2020s has performance issues?

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by mattgreenrocks on Saturday February 22, 2025 @08:20AM (#43138760)
Love all the projects you have going. Do you use a template for the landing pages? Or DIY? They look great!
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Saturday February 22, 2025 @12:28PM (#43141022)
Thanks! Postcard was made with some help of TailwindUI.com. Booklet's homepage is based on a Webflow template: https://webflow.com/templates/html/gather-saas-website-templ...
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by raitom on Saturday February 22, 2025 @11:23AM (#43140335)
What kind of Mac mini do you use (cpu and ram)? I’m really interested in making the same thing but I’m not sure if the base M4 mini is enough with just 16gb of ram.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by jon-wood on Saturday February 22, 2025 @12:27PM (#43141010)
Depends what you're doing. If it's literally just serving up some static web pages though that is hilariously over specified, you're going to be constrained by your internet connection long before that Mac Mini starts breaking a sweat.
Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by philip1209 on Saturday February 22, 2025 @12:31PM (#43141052)
I have the m4 pro with 24gb of ram. I wish I had increased the ram to 64gb - I'm at 50% utilization already.

The CPU is more powerful than I need. I didn't pass 8% utilization in the last 24 hours as HN slammed the box.

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by firefoxd on Saturday February 22, 2025 @12:34PM (#43141083)
I've tried to do so with a $9 pocket pc, but ended up frying it by accidently short-circuiting it.

I wrote a visualizer for the traffic that I think people will appreciate [1]. I will post it next month once I add it on github. It was fun to watch an article that went #1 on HN.

[1]: https://ibb.co/cXT3VNDR

Re:Why Ruby on Rails still matters by cl0ckt0wer on Saturday February 22, 2025 @04:28PM (#43143431)
Do mac minis have ECC ram?