[applfanboysbgon]

Why would massive increase in hardware cost pertain only to programmers? You do realise that programmers make up perhaps 1% of the people who buy hardware, which number in the billions?

Decrease in jobs doesn't necessarily relate only to software dev either. Translation and customer service are fields that are likely to suffer greatly, for example, and end consumers also suffer when those jobs are outsourced because LLMs do a shit job at both but for cheaper than a human does it. Their comment didn't read as pertaining to "our profession" at all to me.

[tptacek]

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.

[applfanboysbgon]

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.

[tptacek]

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.

[applfanboysbgon]

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.

---

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.

[jrflowers]

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.

[tptacek]

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.

[tptacek]

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

[jrflowers]

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.

[Capricorn2481]

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