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This is amazing. Well done. How long did it take to make?


Seconded. Great work.


Thanks! It's a byproduct of another project, so hard to say exactly. A few evenings.


I used to use Dropbox at work and also personally.

Work didn’t like it as Dropbox was new/unknown and eventually banned us from using it. This was about 15 years ago and the only way to share files between colleagues was to manually upload a file to their shared drive (through a browser) and then ask your colleague to go download it.

Works Dropbox was replaced by Microsoft. My personal Dropbox was replaced by Google Drive, and then by iCloud.

Nice to know Dropbox is still make lots of cash really. They started it all.


>They started it all.

Actually box.com was first (launched as box.net in 2005), and Dropbox was founded in 2007.


Box.net launched first, but they didn't introduce file synchronization, the core value proposition of Dropbox, until mid 2010.


I mean if we're going to get pedantic like that, then here is the classic Dropbox evaluation:

BrandonM on April 5, 2007 | parent | context | favorite | on: My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive

I have a few qualms with this app:

1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.

3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?


Everyone makes fun of #1 for good reason, but #2 and #3 were actually reasonable objections at the time.



Yes and quite frankly dropbox should have leverage their consumer brand to move into enterprise.


Does this play music you’ve downloaded in random order? How do you learn of new tracks? That’s where I like radio/Spotify - I get to hear new music.


- I create channels that play tracks in a defined order, on repeat, but with a duration of at least 80 hours (and ever-growing). Old-school album-based listening.

- I think learning of new stuff is twisted in the current environment. "New stuff" in the sense of radio/Spotify is mostly "same stuff as I know and like, but slightly different so it feels new". You don’t discover truly new stuff unless by actively searching for it. No radio or service is going to passively do that for you.


So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means my server is working, and that this site is being served by an iPad 2 from 2012, running iOS 6.1.3 and Insomnia to keep it connected to Wi-Fi.

When I pinged your domain it came back as CloudFlare. Did you mean

So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means this site is being served CloudFlare.

I jest. I imagine you did this to keep your IP address private? Just curious why it wasn't mentioned in the blog post? My original question was going to be if your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic).


> your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic)

Does your ISP have a problem when your computer/phone/etc does a cloud backup? Or when you torrent? Because both of those will max out your upload bandwidth much more than hosting a static website.

I think the concerns about ISPs complaining are extremely overblown on HN, but happy to be proven wrong.


I do use a VPN, but I have torrented many, many terabytes of, errr, Linux ISOs. I haven't ever gotten so much as a nastygram from Verizon, and I still appear to get pretty close to advertised speeds.


> I think the concerns about ISPs complaining are extremely overblown on HN, but happy to be proven wrong.

Look at your agreement with your ISP. They typically segment the market into consumer/business plans where running a server requires a business plan versus a consumer plan.


I have fiber in the east coast of the US with a national provider. They don’t care about uploading, at least up to 10-15 TB/month.


> your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic).

The page is like 30KB + that 3 MB image. The avg ~two hits per second that you get from a HN top position iirc (this is fairly old data though) is 6MB/s for a few hours, say 6 hours, that's 130GB. Unless it's hosted via a wireless uplink (4g/satellite/..), I don't think there's an ISP in the world that cares about using 130GB extra during a random month. Even in Belgium I think the caps were around twice that ten years ago


cloudflare is caching the image:

    ```
    accept-ranges: bytes
    age: 5397
    alt-svc: h3=":443"; ma=86400
    cache-control: max-age=14400
    cf-cache-status: HIT
    content-length: 3013598
    content-type: application/octet-stream
    date: Sat, 06 Sep 2025 23:14:32 GMT
    last-modified: Sat, 06 Sep 2025 21:44:35 GMT
    server: cloudflare
    vary: accept-encoding

    ```


wait, top billings on HN brings in 2 hits/sec of traffic? That is an unbelievably low number considering how many sites fall over under that pressure


Exactly. I think this shows two things quite nicely:

- Very few sites need to cope with more than a handful of hits per second. A regular DSL connection and desktop PC can host the vast majority of them; you don't need clouds if you don't want them. (Even under variable load: if you need 80% of the systems more than 40% of the time, scaling down is probably not worth the cloud premium)

- If a site can't handle HN, that's a software limitation. Compare Wordpress' insanely slow page generation to simple blog software that generates pages in 5 milliseconds, or even to hosting the blog as static HTML files. I'd not be surprised if you can serve Wikipedia's page text from like one Raspberry Pi 5 per country. Not that you'd want to do that for reliability and redundancy reasons, plus you have the constant stream of edits to process and templates to (re-)render. Media and blob hosting is also a separate beast. Thankfully, most sites are not in the top ten world's most popular websites and you get away with a lot


WordPress is a static host for the vast majority of users. The generation time is irrelevant. Almost by default, it will just cache the rendered page and always serve from the cache.


At one point I had two pages in the top spot on HN: https://mastodon.nu/@dmitriid/114852056319245427

- 20k peak unique visitors

- 162k peak requests

- 56 GB peak data but most of that data was cached by Cloudflare


That peak is a 24-hour cumulative value if I'm seeing it right?


Do you have stats for the peak requests / second?


Sadly, no :(

I'm currently on free cloudflare plan, and I don't think it shows rps. And it doesn't show stats more than 30 days back


Closer to 10 at peaks, but a lot of sites are just fragile.


I clicked and got a Cloudflare error page, said "I hope it isn't 'run a website'", and then visited the comments...


judging by the .ar ccTLD he's from Argentina, same as me.

First hand experience tells me local ISP's don't care, and/or don't know to care. they don't even serve piracy notices here (I believe most of latin america is like this) so they definitely won't be bothering with something like this


Well, it's telling me:

502

Browser Working

Cloudflare Working

odb.ar Host Error


Tunnel fell down, I suspect connection issue while I was sleeping. iPad was still running the server locally and unplugged from power.


iPad now resting as molten metal and glass in the corner of the room.


I actually delegated DNS to Cloudflare when nic.ar wouldn't take the localhost.run domain!


I’ve recently started using chatGPT to create images for me to print and colour with the kids. I really like the concept.

A couple of feedback points:

I cannot ‘swipe left/back’ on iPhone (safari) after viewing an image. Took me a while to find the cross in the top right.

I clicked the tags expecting to see a list of images for that tag.

There’s no way to view the Pro page after viewing an image that required Pro. Took time to find the page so I could view the pricing.

Not sure how it fits in legally, but I’d like categories like Disney, Animals, Cartoons etc,


I’ve recently become interested in hosting my own VPN, due to the amount of websites that require me to disable my VPN when visiting their site.

I imagine those websites block IP ranges of popular VPN providers.

Am I right in thinking that hosting my own VPN would resolve this issue?


Yep! It’s very easy: rent any cloud server, stick a WireGuard/OpenVPN/ShadowSocks container on it, download the config, and you’re done. Since you’re not interested in compute, you can probably use the tiniest cloud server available to save costs.

I pay approximately 50¢/month for such a setup, and you can probably do it for free forever if you decide to be slightly abusive about it. However, be aware that you don’t really gain any real privacy since you’re effectively just changing your IP address; a real VPN provides privacy by mixing your traffic with that of a bunch of other clients.

Some services will also block cloud ranges to prevent e.g. geoblock evasion, although you’ll see a lot less blocking compared to a real VPN service or Tor.


I'm interested in doing this, and also running ZNC because I still use IRC and need to run a bouncer, &c.


It's super easy with wg-easy: https://github.com/wg-easy/wg-easy


Thanks! I was unaware of this project until now.


Wasn’t this how penicillin was found? On some cantaloupe sent in by an average joe?


Not quite. Alexander Fleming was growing cultures of staph bacteria, went away for some time, and when he came back, found one petri dish had been contaminated with fungus, and that the fungus inhibited the growth of the bacteria. It seems to be unclear where the contamination came from, but the fungus itself was already known to science at the time.


The cantaloupe is how the US production process in vats got a massive efficiency kick because the mould on the cantaloupe released significantly more penicillin than the prior one. But, this was after the initial discovery.

It's in "Florey: The Man Who Made Penicillin" by Lennard Bickel


Some of your screenshots are cut off on mobile (iPhone/safari/portrait)


Hey thanks for letting me know!


I've been stung by one of these on my foot while surfing. It was painful. Painful enough for me to get out of the water and call it a day.

The man in the photograph with his limb covered must have had an awful day.


I was stung 25 years ago by a box jellyfish.

The suicidal tendacies petered out after only 24 months.


Excuse me of my question is unpleasant for you, but why do you have suicidal tendencies for 2 years? Is it objective property of box jellyfish venom (like some medicine can induce suicidal thoughts) or it is because it was painful for whole 24 months?


Box jellyfishes are on a different level. Jellyfish on steroids level of sting.


I know (fortunately from BBC documentaries and other sources, not from first-hand experience), but 24 months?


The pain of the sting made me want to kill myself to end it.


More than a bad day. We should assume that those marks left permanent scars.

I had spotted visible marks on a leg, five years after a mild encounter.


I was stung on the stomach and side ... It bent me over in the water then somehow I crawled up the beach and laid down.


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