Live data from Hacker News

Self-Host All the Things?

tedium.co

261–270 of 295 posts

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Yes, most people will tell you not to host your own email, because its too complicated/difficult to get your mail delivered reliably. A lot of this is FUD. Yes, email is a bit more difficult to get right than say, hosting a web app behind Nginx. It's an old protocol, with many "features" bolted on years later to combat spam. I'm not sure how email is easier to "hack," unless there is a zero day in Postfix or somet…

> DKIM records and proper signing of outgoing messages (DMARC records help too) I've read somewhere that spammers started to use DKIM (or was it DMARC?) records faster than the legitimate web-mail providers.

DKIM and DMARC are not anti-spam techniques per se. They are used to verify that the message is authentic, and that sender is authorized to send email on behalf of the domain.

If the sender is passing as an authorized sender (DMARC aligned), then the receiver has a pretty good indication the email is legit and that the sender was delegated to sent email on behalf of the domain. If the email is then classified as spam (based on its contents), then it is easier for the receiver to choose whether to adjust the reputation of the domain (in case of DMARC alignment), or the IP (if not aligned).

A DKIM signature and DMARC alignment is no guarantee that the email passes spam filters. The whole point of DMARC is to give the receiver as much information as possible to make a confident decision on the legitimacy of the email, and the reputability of a domain.

DMARC and DKIM works both ways, if you are sending legit email (not spam), it will improve your deliverability, but if you are in fact spamming then DMARC will reduce your deliverability (as it should).

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a protocol for crowd sourced annotation data. So an example app that uses it would go something like this: Suppose you have a food allergy, and you have a reaction to something in a restaurant. You want to leave a note on that menu item "contains allergen XYZ" but you don't want to write on that menu, you want to annotate all such menus. You'd take a picture, OCR happens, some algorithm thinks about line wrappin…

Wow, fascinating. Thank you for detailing that. Do you have somewhere to follow its development?

I'm tickled to that you're interested. "I have this cool idea involving algorithms on strings" isn't exactly everybody's favorite conversation.

Here's the old version, hardly even proves the concept: https://github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/gnize

Python was giving me trouble though, so I'm switching to Nim for performance reasons, and also because I can compile it to C, objective-C, and JavaScript for use by a wider variety of clients. It's just an empty shell right now but that project will end up here: https://github.com/gnize and hopefully soon.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had fun doing this until I had kids. I have a rack with 10gbe, ups, kubernetes a zfs storage server, multiple vlans, 4 unifi APs & locally hosted controller and all sorts of self-hosted stuff. My heart breaks slightly as I watch things slowly degrade and break down due to bit-rot and version creep, I now wish I had a synology, flat network and cloud everything possible. There are days when the kids can't watch a pa…

> I had fun doing this until I had kids. As i keep telling people, self hosting is fun as long as your user count is 1. When it grows beyond that, you suddenly have a SLA. I self hosted almost everything (e-mail is pointless from privay concerns), and when we had kids i moved to a dual Synology setup with a single proxmox server for running services. Fast forward some years and electricity suddenly costs about an arm…

> As i keep telling people, self hosting is fun as long as your user count is 1. When it grows beyond that, you suddenly have a SLA.

This is the principle I.T. departments fail to grasp.

> Kids also brings all sorts of devices with new and exiting exploits/vira...

Curiosity: while vira is arguably less wrong, hackers of a certain age would have expected viri or virii, which are more wrong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_form_of_words_ending_in...

From Tom Christiansen, of Perl fame:

http://www.ofb.net/~jlm/virus.html

// Meanwhile, in "Kids also brings" – I fully support what you did there!

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For procrastination you have to set yourself up for success. For instance, what if the alarm sent you the product page for the model of battery you need? You order them, silence the alarm, and when they show up you’re reminded you need to change them. Or if that’s a bad time, when the alarm goes off again. I think we’ve only begun to work out how alarms are the wrong solution to the problem and what we need are promp…

Do you have kids? It doesn't work that way. It will never be urgent enough to waste time even for setting up the alarm or prompt. People vastly overestimate free time when you have kids. They somehow manage to eat up every single minute.

Kids and a partner with health issues. My days are all chopped to hell. If there's a 5 hour window, everyone wants to put an event smack in the middle of it so I have an hour here and an hour there and any time I have 3 hours it's probably going to yard work. If it weren't for reminders or having tasks queued up things would be much, much worse.

It does get better in highschool, sometimes middle school. Once the idea of autonomy occurs to them they don't need or want you every fifteen minutes. Plus as another responder said, sometimes they want to see you doing things, and once in a while they want to help. Though it's cool when they do and then sad when they change their minds. There was a two week period where mixing compost was the most fun in the world and then they were no longer interested.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#265
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very cool, and interesting that Martin Kleppmann of DDIA is an author. I am glad to come across this - I was brainstorming such a manifesto, now I can use this as a resource. One local first that I recently switched to is migrating from ynab.com to my own Libre Calc spreadsheets. It took a few days to figure out all the formulas, but now I have even more control over how I track my budget.

Do you integrate your bank accounts/etc via API or do you pull the data into the sheet manually on some periodic basis? Second question - are you using your own categories or do you rely on bank/card? Asking as I’m sort of in the middle of the two. I keep a mostly complete spreadsheet of my expenses but that doesn’t account for things that I purchase regularly like groceries/Amazon/etc. Trying Copilot for a year righ…

Right now I have a sheet for each account that has columns for date, payee (i.e. the merchant), envelope (e.g. Groceries or Books etc.), memo, outflow, inflow and balance. And I enter the transactions manually. I enjoy that part actually since it keeps me mindful and I only have two accounts (checking and a credit card) that I frequently use.

Copilot looks very polished and handy. Though I have found that I really like the customized control that a spreadsheet gives me. Though I haven't used it, I could implement most of what I see in Copilot in my spreadsheet, and have already.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, fascinating. Thank you for detailing that. Do you have somewhere to follow its development?

I'm tickled to that you're interested. "I have this cool idea involving algorithms on strings" isn't exactly everybody's favorite conversation. Here's the old version, hardly even proves the concept: https://github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/gnize Python was giving me trouble though, so I'm switching to Nim for performance reasons, and also because I can compile it to C, objective-C, and JavaScript for use by a wider v…

> "I have this cool idea involving algorithms on strings" isn't exactly everybody's favorite conversation.

Haha yeah I get you. I wouldn't have expected it would be for me either but the approach and use case you shared is really cool. Thanks for the links. It will be neat to see the development in Nim, as well.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#267

I self host a lot, including some business related infrastructure for my home office (some employees also work from here). However services designed to be accessed by a wider public audience (eg; websites, emails, Nextcloud) are hosted on a rented dedi. As other comments have pointed out, kids suck up every minute of your life, and when the internet or Plex don't work I'll know about it real quick (DAAAAD!). The impo…

Thanks for sharing! Why rundeck when you are already using Nomad? Also what do you use to self update your containers within Nomad?

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#268
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, if people are marking your emails as spam frequently enough to get your IPs/domains blacklisted then it suggests the system is working as designed and you shouldn’t be sending whatever you’re sending to those people.

Nah, about 2% of my "Thank you for ordering, here is your receipt" mails also get marked as spam. Some number of people just smack the "spam" button for nearly everything that is automated, and those "spam" buttons seem to work on absolute numbers not percentages; so if you have a high number of people in the pool then you will be false flagged eventually. We had a very explicit double opt-in system, made it super ea…

I assume you have transactional and marketing emails coming from separate email addresses. If the email ecosystem made it easier for bulk senders, this would just shift the burden onto recipients.

Right now the common enemy of illegal spammers externalize the costs of their business onto email providers and users. For every dollar they take they impose 100x that in spam filtering costs. >99.9% of raw email traffic is spam.

Blame spammers who offer fake unsubscribe links. Or companies who violate CAN-SPAM by requiring login to unsubscribe instead of one click opt-out. Marking as spam always works.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#269
post #112

My experience has been that after having become comfortable with Nix, self-hosting is the path of least resistance for the majority of "mainstream" tooling where you can pick between paying for a SaaS or self-hosting. So nice to not have to deal with Docker containers to deploy (most things) anymore. I see a lot of people suggesting hosting on a VPS, but I feel that a Hetzner Auction box is often much better bang-for…

One of the main reasons I use Docker is being able to run the exact same Dockerfiles locally and in prod, with virtualisation taken care of automatically on e.g. Mac. Is Nix a viable alternative to that?

Again, just my experiences as a long-time DevOps person- you can build Dockerfiles on two different machines and get two entirely different results (ie. success vs failure), and especially on macOS, Docker performance is quite poor, even moreso when mounting directories from the host.

Nix on the other hand will produce the same result every time wherever I run it. This alone for me is enough reason to prefer it over Docker the majority of the time.

Re: Self-Host All the Things?

#270
Help me out here: I do a lot of this "self-hosting stuff," I have fiber internet.

And a whole lot of y'all talk about what feels like a TON of overkill. I still don't really get what kubernetes is (20 year Linux user) or the necessity of buying a "server" for this purpose.

I use (what is relatively old) a $200 office desktop from someones surplus (Dell Optiplex 900-something, I don't even remember because it's in the closet) and Ubuntu+Docker handles everything I throw at it, easy?

Post reply on HN