Hacker News

Top stories

Live mirror
30 storiesupdated just nowView source snapshot
  1. The Normalization of Inexplicable Failures (ihatethefuture.com)
    32comments
  2. In an $80 Motel Room, a Discovery to Shed Light on the Origins of Life (nytimes.com)
    32comments
  3. Ten Lines of Code That Changed My World (pixelambacht.nl)
    15comments
  4. Writing Efficient C++ Code (asawicki.info)
    26comments
  5. Replacing the old battery on rechargeable bike lights (jvns.ca)
    35comments
  6. Show HN: TinyAIArena watch AI agents battle it out (tinyaiarena.com)
    18comments
  7. There are no "rogue" AI agents (eoinhiggins.substack.com)
    47comments
  8. Walgit: A Git server that is one binary in front of an object store (github.com/rgodha24)
    4comments
  9. Flip Fluid on Flip Dots (mitxela.com)
    19comments
  10. Fakecloud: Local AWS cloud emulator for integration tests (fakecloud.dev)
    32comments
  11. The Cartesian Hand: In-Hand Manipulation with All-Linear Fingers (generalroboticslab.com)
    —discuss
  12. postmarketOS Rebrand: Nura (nura.eco)
    8comments
  13. Does Georgism work? Five years later (astralcodexten.com)
    388comments
  14. Go Concurrency Distilled (antonz.org)
    136comments
  15. Show HN: A CC0 museum of retro 3D tricks you can paste into a page (3d-retro.com)
    10comments
  16. Finally, A True Blue Rose Exists (sciencenews.org)
    29comments
  17. PipePipe: NewPipe hard fork implementing SponsorBlock (github.com/infinityloop1308)
    257comments
  18. Installing NeoVim caused original Vim undo files to be deleted (aresluna.org)
    231comments
  19. Rusty thoughts on "Parse, don't validate" (thegreenplace.net)
    17comments
  20. Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI (authorsguild.org)
    522comments
  21. The internet discovers TLA+. Now what? (reasonable.io)
    47comments
  22. Show HN: Reladraw – A diagram language where you decide where to place things (github.com/reladraw)
    101comments
  23. DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec) (arxiv.org)
    97comments
  24. OpenAI halts training of latest models as reports mount of AI agents going rogue (theguardian.com)
    45comments
  25. Biology might not be quantum, but its math is quantumlike (quantamagazine.org)
    47comments
  26. "As a Language Model": Chat Template Switches LLM Self-Referential Voice (arxiv.org)
    94comments
  27. A searchable library of forgotten public-domain film clips from 1915 onward (movingimagearchive.com)
    27comments
  28. 10 Tells of a Slop UI (hereticpleb.vercel.app)
    169comments
  29. An agent used DNS to reach an external chatbot (alignment.openai.com)
    151comments
  30. Exploding variance of means of exponentials: least-squares to the rescue (francisbach.com)
    —discuss

Floci: Locally emulating any cloud service

195 pointsby 1d agofloci.io
43 comments
1d agoHN ↗

Good work.

For us, floci-oci for object storage looks interesting. For everything else we have our own stack.

1d agoHN ↗

I just spilled my coffee; sorry for the trivial remark, but the name means 'pubic hairs' in Romanian. Apologies.. I thought it's better for you to know and ignore than not to (not quite a big population target for you, I imagine, anyway).

1d agoHN ↗

you got here before me, had a good laugh tho.

1d agoHN ↗

Do Greek people really say "Here comes the spunk!" when they're... you know?

1d agoHN ↗

Hahahaha, have never personally heard that.

17h agoHN ↗

Some do, others will even get upset if you don't. It's pretty funny imho, for some reason they never communicate these things ahead of time. We're not mind readers!!!

1d agoHN ↗

though not nearly as popular of an expression in that category as μαλάκας

1d agoHN ↗

Also it means gays (not in a flattering way) in italian if you just change a letter.

1d agoHN ↗

One of the later pages mentions that the name came from "cirrocumulus floccus", the cloud formation.

1d agoHN ↗

In this case it is misspelled.

The Latin word is "flocci", which means hairs of wool, and it was also used to denote an insignificant thing.

English normally preserves the double consonants of Latin, and in this case it has already done this in the English words derived from "floccus", e.g. "to flocculate" and "flocculent".

In clouds, it was used due to the resemblance of those clouds with curly sheep wool.

21h agoHN ↗

You mean like Flikr, sonarr, tumblr, Waze…?

10h agoHN ↗

I agree that the misspelling was probably intentional, but in this case, as others have pointed, it lead to some undesirable connotations in some languages.

Even the original Latin word would be a poor choice, because, as I have said above, it was also used to designate something that is insignificant, and such a meaning is undesirable for a company, product or service.

9h agoHN ↗

Which gives rise to the word floccinaucinihilipilification.

1d agoHN ↗

There was once a cloud conference in Brazil called ConaCloud. I'm guessing "cona" means something different in Brazilian Portuguese than it does in European Portuguese. In Portugal is a slang word for vagina.

21h agoHN ↗

As Coq (now Rcoq) found to their chagrin... I'm convinced half of the reason Lean has surpassed Coq in mindshare in formal mathematics was because it's impossible to not chuckle at the name sometimes.

18h agoHN ↗

It is also similar to an old Norse name: Floki.

1d agoHN ↗

Would someone be interested in this but intended for production? Im already running a whole bunch of cloudflare and AWS services in my own AWS fake and it works surprisingly well! :)

16h agoHN ↗

Could you tell us more about it? I'd love to hear about the use cases of cloudflare and AWS service combinations.

1d agoHN ↗

This looks very cool! Is this only intended for testing and development, or as a feasible way to migrante away from e.g., GCP as well?

I’m interested in something that would allow me to over time migrante away from a GCP project that uses many services today - e.g., Datastore, FileStorage etc.

1d agoHN ↗

Definitely not feasible to migrate off of actual cloud services using something like this.

1d agoHN ↗

The cool part of this is it’s an example of what’s possible with a community of users armed with AI.

Many users, (myself included), had need to test cloud stuff locally, but had no tool to do so. Localstack exists, but it started rug pulling the free tier and they didn’t support all the features.

Meanwhile, Floci makes it easy to write your own cloud compatible test suite, then implement the feature to match. I was able to get a good enough coverage on a few features created in a weekend on the $20 tier of Claude to make it useful to me, then others picked up the work to round it out.

It’s really cool to see it grow.

1d agoHN ↗

I’d love to see this for stuff like Stripe, Twilio, etc - they’ve got sandboxes but this would be a lot easier and faster.

18h agoHN ↗

vercel-labs/emulate [1], has stripe and twilio (their emulators are much more shallow generally like their AWS one can't really be compared to floci here, but i've made custom ones for stuff like emulating hardware devices (airplay/google play) with much success so you can basically extend their base framework with custom emulators or their own provided ones to your needs on a fork.

1. https://github.com/vercel-labs/emulate

for modelling and testing a CI software i was working on, i had to extend their github emulator in several places for example. but it was great to already have a working base.

1d agoHN ↗

I'm using fakecloud and it's dead simple to use. (like you said, aws only)

1d agoHN ↗

Most likely a false positive, but worth noting for the people who run the project: Malwarebytes currently flags the site as 'potentially unsafe' when trying to visit it - not sure what the best avenue for them to get that fixed beyond reaching out to Malwarebytes might be

1d agoHN ↗

This is awesome, hope to see it mature over the years!

1d agoHN ↗

Both localstack and floci live in this weird spot where for a lot of my applications, all the cloud-vendor specific stuff is abstracted out anyway. So the only time I need to touch the cloud is for testing the abstractions and do end to end testing. The abstractions can be tested against real cloud APIs as it is generally cheap to do and provides the highest fidelity results. End to end testing includes testing against a production-like environment, so again, more bang for your buck to just test against the cloud.

I’ve definitely reached for these local cloud tools from time to time, but in a well-architected piece of software, you aren’t getting that much value from them. Either you don’t have a hard cloud dependency, or you want a high fidelity test of a specific cloud dependency.

23h agoHN ↗

Local stubs for cloud services are a lifesaver when you're a one-person shop and don't want a surprise bill just to test a webhook path.

20h agoHN ↗

How on earth I never came across this before? ChatGPD does not know about this project either. Looks very, very promising!

19h agoHN ↗

I've looked into developing "digital twins" of APIs that I rely on, similar to the StrongDM pattern, but the models talk me out of it every time. The rationale is that there could be subtle differences or drift between the behavior of the real service and the mocked API. So you may think you're on solid ground, but once you switch to prod, you could see show-stopping differences.

I think if I was doing evals on the way an agent interacts with a service (e.g. Slack) the digital twin could make sense, but for rapid iteration or testing, it might not be what you want.

16h agoHN ↗

That makes sense for the "make sure this thing is working correctly" case but there's still "I want to run this thing locally and it requires this other thing". The second one you really only need the happy path to work and you can run your test from the first thing against it (contract test).

13h agoHN ↗

For a hot minute Eucalyptus https://www.eucalyptus.cloud was amazing - even matching aws bugs to keep compatibility. Wish it had rue support/resources to keep going. Maybe a viber will pick up and get it more up to date.

5h agoHN ↗

I was never happy with how heavy LocalStack was, so I'm going to try this for my next green field cloud app.

I think having such emulator being lightweight and quick to run becomes more important in AI coding/worktree-based workflows where it's important to pre-setup the worktree with dependencies and dependent services on local ports.