There's still Xata. And plenty of other options that support a Postgres compatible API like CockroachDB and Yugabyte.
The problem is there's so much sprawl in this postgres ecosystem that it seems like no one other than the hyperscalers is really able to reach a escape velocity...
Scale to 0 services. Might mean less money for Render but would be awesome. Gets a lot of side projects hosted on fly because if it.
Partnership with Neon would be great too, I run 6 dbs there for $69 with auto scaling (and scales to 0 too if needed for non-prod envs). Render would be 3-4x that price for those many dbs.
Lol more like, Perplexity has a terminal diagnosis.
Doing RAG using like.. prompt hacking and text embeddings + vector store when you have no access to the underlying model, nor ability to fine tune the generation for RAG, will fail. It will fail in an epic fashion compared to doing RAG the right way.
What do I mean by RAG the right way? The RAG term has been overloaded.
There's RAG that's just kind of bolted onto the LLM after it's been fine tuned for instruction following, and then there's RAG where the document/fact retrieval is a part of the LLM itself that is differentiated and optimized.
Almost everyone is doing the first "hacky" kind of RAG, but Meta published in 2020, the "correct" way to do RAG, where you include a neural retriever in the feedback loop.
Almost no one is doing this because it's more expensive (requires fine tuning the model), but will produce much better results than doing "bolted-on" RAG.
I'm not sure why the assumption of "will produce much better results". The fine tuning is not that predictable. Maybe some documents are remembered, maybe not. Maybe the document markers are preserved, maybe they fail. And adding anything new risks destroying existing data and is expensive.
Compare that to the vector + graph search, which is almost free to add to (if you're searching the internet, you're adding N documents per minute, not per days of training), repeatable, not affecting existing data. It would be cool to have a neural search, but how realistic is it without making it extremely fuzzy, forgetting and expensive?
Actually I disagree. I think the barrier to entry on a decent RAG system is very low. Embeddings have gotten so good, that retrieving chunks is going to be commoditized. Neural search was needed when embedding models were not good enough.
It's hard to tell how meaningful the reviews are. I have used AWS, GCP, DigialOcean, and Linode throughout my career. Every single one of these, through no fault of myself or my team, messed up and caused downtime. Like, you can get most SRE types in a room to laugh if you blurt out "us-east-1", because it's known to be so unreliable. And yet, it's where every Fortune 500 puts every service; we laugh about the reliability and it's literally powering the economy just fine.
So yes, a lot of people on HN complain about fly's reliability. fly posts to HN a lot and gives them the opportunity. Is it actually meaningful compared to the alternatives? It's very hard to tell.
First: this is 100% a "live by the sword, die by the sword" situation for us. We're as aware as anybody about our weird HN darling status (this is a post from two months ago, about an announcement from many months ago, that spent like 12 hours plastered to the front page; we have no idea why it hit today, and it actually stepped on another thing we wanted to post today so don't think we secretly orchestrated any of this!). We've allowed ourselves to be ultra-visible here, and threads like this are natural consequence.
Moreover: a lot of this criticism is well warranted! I can cough up a litany of mitigating factors (the guy who stored his database in ephemeral instance storage instead of a volume, for instance), but I mean, come on. The single most highly upvoted and trafficked thing we've ever written was a post a year ago owning up to reliability issues on the platform. People have definitely had issues!
A fun cop-out answer here is to note all the times people compare us to AWS or Cloudflare, as if we were a hyperscaler public cloud. More fun still is to search HN for stories about us-east-1. We certainly do that to self-sooth internally! And: also? If your only consideration for picking a place to host an application is platform reliability? You're hosting on AWS anyways. But it's still a cop-out.
So I guess I'd sum all this up as: we've picked a hard problem to work on. Things are mathematically guaranteed to go wrong even if we're perfect, and we are not that. People should take criticisms of us on these threads seriously. We do. This is a tough crowd (the threads, if not the vote scores on our blog post) and there's value in that. Over the last year, and through this upcoming year, staffing for infra reliability has been the single biggest driver of hiring at Fly.io, I think that's the right call, and I think the fact that we occasionally get mauled on threads is part of what enabled us to make that call.
(Ordinarily I'd shut up about this stuff and let the thread die out itself, but some dearly loved user of ours took a stand and said they'd never had any problems on us, which: you can imagine the "ohhhhh nooooooo" montage that took place in my brain when I read that someone had essentially dared the thread to come up with times when we'd sucked for some user, so I guess all bets are off. Go easy on Xe, though: they really are just an ultra-helpful uncynical person, and kind of walked into a buzzsaw here).
I also don't know why HN is so upset about people willing to help out in the threads. The way I see it is, if you talk about your product on HN, inevitably someone will remember they have a support inquiry while HN is open, and ask it there instead of over email. Since employees are probably reading HN, they are naturally going to want to answer or say they escalated there. I don't think it's some sort of scam, just what any reasonable person would do.
It's become a YC cliche, that the way to get support for any issue is to get a complaint upvoted to the top of a thread. People used to talk about "Collison installs", which are real-use product demos that are so slick your company founder (in this case Stripe's 'pc) can just wander around installing your product for people to evangelize it; there should be another Collison term for decisively resolving customer support issues by having the founder drop into a thread, and I think that's the vibe people are reacting to here.
ok possibly not alone, maybe the issues happened before I started using them extensively. I've had ~no downtime that affects me in 7 months.
I do wish they had some features I need, but their support and responses are top notch. And I've lost much less hair and time than I would going full-blown AWS or another cloud provider.
To be fair most hosting providers come with plenty of public complaints about downtime. The big ones do way better, the best one is AWS, then GC and last Azure. They cost stupid money though.
Digital ocean has been terrible for me, some regions just go down every month and I lose thousands of requests, increasing my churn rate.
Fly.io had tons of weird issues but it got better in the last months. It's still very incomplete in terms of functionality and figuring out how to deploy the first time is a massive pain.
My plan is to add Hetzner and load balance with bunnycdn across DO and H
Actually here is a good example: Cloudflare. Sure people complain a ton about privacy but I haven't seen a single complaint about the reliability of Cloudflare Workers or similar product in the dozens of threads I've seen on HN
this is what I thought, until once I spent two days to publish a new, trivial code change to my Fly.io hosted API — it just wouldn't update! And every time I tried to re-publish it'd give me a slightly different error.
When it works, it's brilliant. The problem is that it hasn't worked too well in the last few months.
It seems to be a non-issue to me. From my attorney a few months back:
"We follow the practice of major law firms in the venture space and do not include a spousal consent for the 83(b) election in community property states. We also confirmed with our tax counsel, and they confirmed our approach is advisable."
No one should lose sleep over it. Spouse didn't sign off on a $500 payment to buy restricted stock (early startup stock), so IRS will come down heavily on you for material harm --- will not stand in court!
In other words, there are nine states, however that statistic is nearly meaningless. CA and TX alone count for about a quarter of the nation's population; altogether probably a third of the population is domiciled in community property jurisdictions.
Also, the states of Tennessee and South Dakota have passed elective Community
Property Laws, so even your "less than 10" statistic is not unquestionably accurate.
Sure, but notably not the majority. It's predominantly a west / southwest thing. So GP's advice should caution that that specific legal advice doesn't apply to most people in the US.
NOT loving the excessive vibrations on the phone. It increases my anxiety somehow... I'd remove it honestly or make it 10% of what it is in certain cases only.
I might be alone in this, but we've been trained for vibrations to mean something. Vibrating the phone on every line or response from ChatGPT seems excessive to me (and a battery drain as well!).
