I've read several reports from customers saying that their customer service is really bad. Difficult to know with online reviews of course. Does anyone have positive stories to share? I am looking at Australian hosts specifically and Hetzner doesn't have any data centers here.
We use them heavily for test boxes and running experiments. Standard off-the-shelf machines are provisioned almost instantly, and never had any problems.
More custom stuff (eg 100Gb/s NICs) takes a bit longer, but they've always been super responsive and quick to sort out any issues!
The price / performance you get from something like their AX162 is just crazy, although unfortunately with the whole RAM / NVMe shortage the setup fee has gone up quite a lot.
Using them for production for years, never dissapointed.
What you should be aware of is their new exploration of s3 storage. I mean, the s3 works and everything but it's still too eaely - the servers are kind of slow and sometimes fail to upload/download. They are still tuning out the storage architecture. The api key management is kind of too primitive (although much more headache free than configuring aws), and the online file browser is lacking
But for vps servers - they are battletested veterans
From what I am seeing, no one is feeling coy simply because of the cost savings that management is able to show the higher-ups and shareholders. At that level, there's very little understanding of anything technical and outages or bugs will simply get a "we've asked our technical resources to work on it". But every one understands that spending $50 when you were spending $100 is a great achievement. That's if you stop and not think about any downsides. Said management will then take the bonuses and disappear before the explosions start with their resume glowing about all the cost savings and team leadership achievements. I've experienced this first hand very recently.
Of all the looming tipping points whereby humans could destroy the fabric of their existence, this one has to be the stupidest. And therefore the most likely.
There really ought to be a class of professionals like forensic accountants who can show up in a corrupted organization and do a post mortem on their management of technical debt
As someone who's been commissioned many times before to work on or salvage "rescue projects" with huge amounts of tech debt, I welcome that day. Still not there yet though I am starting to feel the vibes shifting.
This isn't anything new of course. Previously it was with projects built by looking for the cheapest bidder and letting them loose on an ill-defined problem. And you can just imagine what kind of code that produced. Except the scale is much larger.
My favorite example of this was a project that simply stopped working due to the amount of bugs generated from layers upon layers of bad code that was never addressed. That took around 2 years of work to undo. Roughly 6 months to un-break all the functionality and 6 more months to clean up the core and then start building on top.
Are you not worried that the sibling comment is right and the solution to this will be "more AI" in the future? So instead of hiring a team of human experts to cleanup, management might just dump more money into some specialized AI refactoring platform or hire a single AI coordinator... Or maybe they skip to rebuild using AI faster, because AI is good at greenfield. Then they only need a specialized migration AI to automate the regular switchovers.
I used to be unconcerned, but I admit to be a little frightened of the future now.
Well, in general worrying about the future is not useful. Regardless of what you think, it is always uncertain. I specifically stay away from taking part in such speculative threads here on HN.
What's interesting to me though is that very similar promises were being made about AI in the 80s. Then came the "AI Winter" after the hype cycle and promises got very far from reality. Generative AI is the current cycle and who knows, maybe it can fulfill all the promises and hype. Or maybe not.
There's a lot of irrationality currently and until that settles down, it is difficult to see what is real and useful and what is smoke and mirrors.
I'm aware of that particular chapter of history, my master's thesis was on conversational interfaces. I don't think the potential of the algorithms (and hardware) back then was in any way comparable to what's currently going on. There is definitely a hype cycle going on right now, but I'm nearly convinced it will actually leave many things changed even after it plays out.
Funny thing is that meanwhile (today) I've actually been on an emergency consulting project where a PO/PM kind of guy vibecoded some app that made it into production. The thing works, but a cursory audit laid open the expected flaws (like logic duplication, dead code, missing branches). So that's another point for our profession still being required in the near future.
I would encourage you to write about it as well. It seems interesting and unconventional.
I used to tinker a lot with my systems but as I gotten older and my time became more limited, I've abandoned a lot of it and now favor "getting things done". Though I still tinker a lot with my systems and have my workflow and system setup, it is no longer at the level of re-compiling the kernel with my specific optimization sort of thing, if that makes sense. I am now paid to "tinker" with my clients' systems but I stay away from the unconventional there, if I can.
I did reach a point where describing systems is useful at least as a way of documenting them. I keep on circling around nixos but haven't taken the plunge yet. It feels like containerfiles are an easier approach but they(at least docker does) sort of feel designed around describing application environments as opposed to full system environments. So your approach is intriguing.
> It feels like containerfiles are an easier approach but they(at least docker does) sort of feel designed around describing application environments as opposed to full system environments.
They absolutely are! I actually originally just wanted a base container image for running services on my hosts that a.) I could produce a full source code listing for and b.) have full visibility over the BoM, and realized I could just ‘FROM scratch’ & pull in gentoo’s stage3 to basically achieve that. That also happens to be the first thing you do in a new gentoo chroot, and I realized that pretty much every step in the gentoo install media that you run after (installing software, building the kernel, setting up users, etc) could also be run in the container. What are containers if not “portable executable chroots” after all? My first version of this build system was literally to then copy / on the container to a mounted disk I manually formatted. Writing to disk is actually the most unnatural part of this whole setup since no one really has a good solution for doing this without using the kernel; I used to format and mount devices directly in a privileged container but now I just boot a qemu VM in an unprivileged container and do it in an initramfs since I was already building those manually too. I found while iterating on this that all of the advantages you get from Containerfiles (portability, repeatability, caching, minimal host runtime, etc) naturally translated over to the OS builder project, and since I like deploying services as containers anyways there’s a high degree of reuse going on vs needing separate tools and paradigms everywhere.
I’ll definitely write it up and post it to HN at some point, trying to compact the whole project in just that blurb felt painful.
I recently had to pay the "Microsoft tax" to Lenovo. Which felt more like an unfair punishment rather than a tax since your taxes are meant to fund public services. I kept on thinking that this feels like it should be illegal. I don't use Windows for my work. My servers all run Linux, my clients servers all run Linux and I have no need for it so why am I being forced to pay?
I keep a Windows virtual machine for software that doesn't run on Linux but my use of that over the years has declined dramatically.
To me, the earlier versions of Windows 10 were somewhat OK when they're stripped down. But Windows 11 is bloated beyond belief. And shoving AI functionality in it is going to make things worse.
Not the person you're replying to but I am confused by your comment. What would you do? You'd try and meditate. If that doesn't work, you distract yourself with something else. The mind whirling keeping you up at night is rarely a productive thing, speaking from experience.
I hope my comment doesn't come off as dismissive but learning to meditate is practicing to "let it go". It isn't a switch. You're teaching your mind not to get "too attached" to anything you consider unwholesome.
No, your tone is fine, and thanks for that. A whirling mind is not often productive but it can make great leaps forward. It can also be paranoid, dangerous and self-destructive.
I was trying to make the point that self- help easy fixes are not always successful. I spent decades actively learning to sleep. It works most of the time. It is good to learn. I use a mindfulness sleep meditation most nights. I also learnt from sleep hygiene that going to bed early is normally a big mistake for me, precluding much of the 'go to bed earlier, get up and exercise' advice.
I have also hit periods in my life where I simply couldn't mediate for weeks on end despite regular practice over a decade. I was mentally ill. No routine or hacks was going to get me to exercise. I needed therapy (EMDR) and rest, and when I got really self-destructive I needed sleep medication (useful only for a very short time). The 'hack' people just made me feel bad about myself for being unable to get a grip.
That is what I want people to see, exercise is only useful if you are well enough to do it. If you are not well enough to shave, then don't beat yourself up for not getting exercise. Put a pin in it, and do it later.
My latest illness was (psycho-somatically) interfering with my cortisol levels, and it made any exercise crippling. I couldn't recover. I didn't get the boost. I beat myself up about not being able, and it made me worse.
Exercise and therapy rather than exercise or therapy might be better advice.
There are community-contributed relay servers that you can use. Check out the syncthing website, they explain how all of this works. It's a very good piece of software.
Interesting to read. It would be more interesting to know if lowering those levels had a positive effect on their cardiac event outcomes over a few years. I thought it was unclear that lowering those levels makes a difference.
Interesting and unsurprising. Until there are some meaningful consequences and fines for companies that treat data security so lightly then nothing will improve and customers will have to deal with the effects.
I once received notice from a business letting me know that my medical data has been stolen. The letter was quite evasive and carefully worded but I understood that someone walked in and grabbed an external hard drive that had all the medical data on it, unencrypted. This is one of the larger medical businesses in Victoria by the way. Included with my medical information is my identity information that can be used maliciously. This is happening frequently here with big names being reported but many smaller names going unnoticed.
The problem is the amount of information that organisations are asking for and are lax in protecting. Making the so-called "identity theft" a big risk.
I can also share that I've been in meetings with clients where security and privacy advice wasn't welcome and brushed off as being unimportant. There's been some welcome moves by the federal government somewhat recently to get businesses to treat this issue seriously but so far it's only in the form of advice and I can tell you the advice wasn't the thing that was lacking.
edit: Oh and the notice that my data was stolen came a few months after it happened, from memory.
That's a huge topic but I would say implement a hobby project and learn by doing. Pick something you're interested in and start writing code to exercise the theoretical concepts.
A small piece of advice is to make sure you're motivated before diving in. Debugging a race condition, just as an example, can be quite involved and consume a lot of your time and energy to even reproduce.
I started by writing a user interface that handled they keyboard events in a thread and communicated to the main thread using a message queue.
IMO that's a good easy first step :)
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