The massive increase in hardware costs we're talking about here are Hetzner servers. Normal people don't acquire any kind of server space. Apple is now shipping the Macbook Neo, one of their better laptops ever, at mid-hundreds of dollars.

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applfanboysbgon 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Normal people don't acquire server space, but they do interact with things hosted on servers. We are going to see a proliferation of small services shutting down and other services raising their prices as a natural consequence of hardware going up 4x. Of course, it's not just Hetzner hardware going up, but virtually all consumer computation.

Apple has always placed a >5x markup on their hardware that well-to-do consumers would pay for brand name and status culture reasons. That they released a 'budget' option (for their standards) does not counteract the fact that the entire bottom of the consumer hardware market is now rising to Apple prices.

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tptacek 19 hours ago | parent [-]

What's the thing that relies on servers that got 4x more expensive for consumers? I think this is something you want to be true more than it's something that is true.

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applfanboysbgon 19 hours ago | parent [-]

I didn't make that exact claim, and I also spoke of future tense "will be". Obviously, the budget prices just raised. You can see some anecdotes here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48545965

...which I will throw in my anecdote to, that I will have to shut down some hobby servers I was hosting because I can't afford to host them at these prices. Not right away because the current price is grandfathered in, but probably sometime soon, and this has the immediate chilling effect that I won't be starting any new hobby servers.

For paid services, hosting is not 100% of their costs nor are they priced at-cost, so there is no reason to believe they will go up exactly 4x to match hardware costs, but it's inevitable that if the hosting line item has gone up 4x, various services will find the need to raise their prices.

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rate-limited, so:

> Hobby servers are things programmers run. The premise of this thread is that things can be bad for programmers without being "bad".

I am not hosting services for programmers. There are thousands of non-programmers who interact with the servers I host. You seem extremely fixated on this weird idea that you can relate everything back to programmers suffering and that everything is fine if this only sucks for programmers.

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tptacek 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Hobby servers are things programmers run. The premise of this thread is that things can be bad for programmers without being "bad".

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jrflowers 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

tptacek is arguing that he, specifically, does not care about the Hetzner price increase. Anything outside of that (eg the cost spike in consumer computing https://www.trendforce.com/presscenter/news/20260310-12959.h...) isn’t relevant. There’s no point in making an argument about the material reality of things here because he’s objectively right that he, personally, does not care about it.

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tptacek 17 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm thinking more about, like, my next door neighbors, who also don't care that my interlocutor had to turn off one of their hobby servers. That's OK, though, because they also think a Macbook Neo would cost $119 without the Apple tax, so I think we're at an impasse.

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sieve 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are people running sites hosting old religious texts and hymns and a hundred other things that have nothing to do with programmers. A 4x jump in the bill for someone on limited income not gaining anything from it is not trivial. It results in the disappearance of a site that will not come back.

	▲	tptacek 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Hosting costs for "sites hosting old religious texts and hymns" have not gone up by 4x. Computationally light hosting has gotten cheaper, not more expensive.

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jrflowers 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I am trying to parse this post because it sort of reads like “My neighbors are dumb and we care about the same things” but I can’t figure out why someone would write that

How did we get from you saying that you didn’t understand the post that you responded to to neighbor chat in so few posts

	▲	tptacek 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My argument is straightforward, but like any argument on a message board things get tangled after back-and-forths and rebuttals. It's that costs for things programmers care about are obviously increasing, and some of those costs are specifically due to AI and not to general supply chain fuckiness. But things can be bad for programmers but better (or not meaningfully worse) for everyone else.

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jrflowers 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If we’re going to define what’s good for the general public based on a single arbitrary product from a company of our choosing, the Steam Deck just got a $300 price increase for the same hardware.

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Capricorn2481 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It literally has 8gb of RAM. It's a great laptop, but its value is specifically in how much it can do with cheaper parts using their infrastructure.

I don't know what rock you're living under, but literally everyone is walking into stores looking for computers, or computer parts, and leaving with nothing, because all GPUs, RAM, and SSDs are triple in price. I don't know where you got the idea that this only affects servers.

What do you think precipitated Hetzner price increases? It was ram tripling for everybody