This is cool. I wish Signal had a bot API like telegram's.
I wish WhatsApp did... hopefully it goes the way of BBM and a more developer friendly platform becomes the norm among normies.
Hmmm no, Meta is making money from businesses using their API.
Telegram Serverless
51–60 of 114 posts
Re: Telegram Serverless
#52It looks like they are making their own cloud, with such a little team?
Also we should be using Matrix but it doesn't have half of the features (no channels, no mini apps etc).
Also I wonder whether compiling JS to native code is worth the hassle or not. In browser, it would slow down page load, but here you need to compile only on deploy.
Re: Telegram Serverless
#53[deleted]
Re: Telegram Serverless
#54I thought this was about P2P messaging (without servers, hence server "less"), but no, obviously "serverless" on HN has to mean "run code on someone else's servers"..
Re: Telegram Serverless
#55This is off-topic, but I was kind of surprised to see this page written by Claude. I guess I shouldn't really be surprised, but I somehow didn't expect it.
Out of curiosity - how did you figure this out? I cannot find any hints about that. Was it the language used?
Re: Telegram Serverless
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity - how did you figure this out? I cannot find any hints about that. Was it the language used?
"it doesn't silently go unnoticed", "would be silently inert", "instead of silently overwriting", "you can never silently overwrite" The biggest tell for me is overuse of the term "silently". "quietly" is another one you often see from Claude in particular. Models love adverbs for whatever reason, whereas a human writer would use them in moderation for emphasis or prefer terms like "by accident".
In my experience, "silently overwrite" appeared regularly in technical writing long before LLMs were a thing, because it's a useful concept to be able to point at. "Silently go unnoticed" is kind of redundant, though.
Re: Telegram Serverless
#57Emphasis mine: > Each invocation runs in a lightweight V8 isolate, close to Telegram's own systems, so calls to the Bot API and your database are quick and reliable. Telegram’s servers are distributed worldwide. I understand that the calls to the Bot API may be quick because the serverless code would be propagated to the edge, but how does it handle an SQLite DB? Is that also replicated to guarantee quick access from…
My first guess would be replicaton isn't that critical, because a user would mostly interact with an instance that's nearby, and this instance has their data. But the page mentions: > Games and Tools — including leaderboards, quizzes and more. A leaderboard that's globally consistent, huh, that's not trivial. Maybe they just propagate the SQL commands to all their servers...
"My first guess would be replicaton isn't that critical, because a user would mostly interact with an instance that's nearby, and this instance has their data. But the page mentions"
Apparently not
"Each account is associated with a DC upon registration and does not change with the user’s phone number or geographic location. Users cannot freely choose a DC—if connected to the wrong DC, the server returns an error message, requiring the client to connect to the correct DC associated with the account."
according to this source: https://dev.moe/en/3025
Also on the frontpage now:
Re: Telegram Serverless
#58A few questions and if someone knows please help: 1) storage limits? 2) can access the internet? If so: bandwidth limits? Thanks!
The post doesn't say anything about runtime resource limits, which I agree is a strange omission given the architecture they've chosen. I suppose someone could try building a bot that uses more and more resources, and see when it stops working.
There's a section about making HTTP requests (https://core.telegram.org/bots/serverless#http), which mentions "two constraints: * Response content is textual (binary payloads aren't supported). * The total response is capped at 32 MB. That cap covers the whole response — streaming with res.body lets you process a large body incrementally, but it does not raise the limit." Unclear whether the 32 MB limit is per outgoing request, or shared among all outgoing requests made by a single handler invocation. Also unclear what other limits apply. Non-HTTP protocols presumably are not available.
Re: Telegram Serverless
#59What are the quotas like execution time, storage etc?
Thinking about using this to run my Plex server
I suppose tunneling over Telegram isn't really more ridiculous than tunneling over DNS. Indeed, someone seems to have tried it: https://github.com/PiMaker/Teletun
Re: Telegram Serverless
#60I don't see anything about pricing.
sounds free to me
But will it stay free, once enough people invested in it?
Telegram engaged in a bit shady crypto stuff, and let scammer bots roam freely. Also there are perks, if someones troll/harass/spam and scam groups and enough people report them, they get temporary or permanently restricted - unless they pay money to Telegram. Then they are free to troll again.