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The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-07-20/the-bewildering-phenomenon-of-declining-quality.html
134•geox•3h ago•170 comments

Async I/O on Linux in databases

https://blog.canoozie.net/async-i-o-on-linux-and-durability/
78•jtregunna•5h ago•21 comments

The Big LLM Architecture Comparison

https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/the-big-llm-architecture-comparison
81•mdp2021•4h ago•3 comments

I'm betting against AI agents in 2025, despite building them

https://utkarshkanwat.com/writing/betting-against-agents/
92•Dachande663•2h ago•43 comments

Hungary's oldest library is fighting to save books from a beetle infestation

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/14/nx-s1-5467062/hungary-library-books-beetles
136•smollett•3d ago•15 comments

Show HN: MCP server for Blender that builds 3D scenes via natural language

https://blender-mcp-psi.vercel.app/
40•prono•5h ago•8 comments

Show HN: ggc – A terminal-based Git CLI written in Go

https://github.com/bmf-san/ggc
15•bmf-san•3d ago•7 comments

Make Your Own Backup System – Part 1: Strategy Before Scripts

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/07/18/make-your-own-backup-system-part-1-strategy-before-scripts/
281•Bogdanp•16h ago•90 comments

Death by AI

https://davebarry.substack.com/p/death-by-ai
361•ano-ther•21h ago•141 comments

I tried vibe coding in BASIC and it didn't go well

https://www.goto10retro.com/p/vibe-coding-in-basic
106•ibobev•4d ago•120 comments

Nobody knows how to build with AI yet

https://worksonmymachine.substack.com/p/nobody-knows-how-to-build-with-ai
399•Stwerner•19h ago•316 comments

Local LLMs versus offline Wikipedia

https://evanhahn.com/local-llms-versus-offline-wikipedia/
267•EvanHahn•18h ago•151 comments

Beyond Meat fights for survival

https://foodinstitute.com/focus/beyond-meat-fights-for-survival/
100•airstrike•11h ago•213 comments

How the 'Minecraft' Score Became Big Business for Its Composer

https://www.billboard.com/pro/how-minecraft-score-became-big-business-for-composer/
6•tunapizza•3d ago•1 comments

How to run an Arduino for years on a battery (2021)

https://makecademy.com/arduino-battery
63•thunderbong•3d ago•18 comments

Borg – Deduplicating archiver with compression and encryption

https://www.borgbackup.org/
69•rubyn00bie•9h ago•23 comments

Mushroom learns to crawl after being given robot body (2024)

https://www.the-independent.com/tech/robot-mushroom-biohybrid-robotics-cornell-b2610411.html
131•Anon84•3d ago•36 comments

Roman Roads Research Association (UK)

https://www.romanroads.org/index.html
14•countrymile•5h ago•3 comments

Will the Fear of Being Confused for AI Mean That We Will Now Write Differently?

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/06/will-the-fear-of-being-confused-for-ai-mean-that-we-will-now-write-differently.html
15•bryanrasmussen•5h ago•33 comments

What were the earliest laws like?

https://worldhistory.substack.com/p/what-were-the-earliest-laws-really
84•crescit_eundo•4d ago•32 comments

Matterport walkthrough of the original Microsoft Building 3

https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=SZSV6vjcf4L
44•uticus•3d ago•27 comments

AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?

https://www.economist.com/business/2025/07/14/ai-is-killing-the-web-can-anything-save-it
42•edward•2h ago•47 comments

Open-Source BCI Platform with Mobile SDK for Rapid Neurotech Prototyping

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202507.1198/v1
13•GaredFagsss•3d ago•1 comments

Ring introducing new feature to allow police to live-stream access to cameras

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/amazon-ring-cashes-techno-authoritarianism-and-mass-surveillance
286•xoa•13h ago•132 comments

Robot metabolism: Toward machines that can grow by consuming other machines

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu6897
3•XzetaU8•3h ago•0 comments

Rethinking CLI interfaces for AI

https://www.notcheckmark.com/2025/07/rethinking-cli-interfaces-for-ai/
169•Bogdanp•18h ago•74 comments

The curious case of the Unix workstation layout

https://thejpster.org.uk/blog/blog-2025-07-19/
93•ingve•19h ago•39 comments

“Bypassing” specialization in Rust

https://oakchris1955.eu/posts/bypassing_specialization/
37•todsacerdoti•3d ago•16 comments

Piano Keys

https://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath043.htm
58•gametorch•4d ago•58 comments

How we tracked down a Go 1.24 memory regression

https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/go-memory-regression/
176•gandem•2d ago•10 comments
Open in hackernews

Borg – Deduplicating archiver with compression and encryption

https://www.borgbackup.org/
69•rubyn00bie•9h ago

Comments

creamyhorror•5h ago
I remember using Borg Backup before eventually switching to Duplicati. It's been a while.
Snild•5h ago
I currently use borg, and have never heard of Duplicati. What made you switch?
racked•2h ago
I've had an awful experience with Duplicati. Unstable, incomplete, hell to install natively on Linux. This was 5 years ago and development in Duplicati seemed slow back then. Not sure how the situation is now.
creamyhorror•45m ago
Interesting to hear. I use Duplicati on Windows and it's been fine, though I haven't extensively used its features.
toenail•5h ago
Last time I checked the deduplication only works per host when backups are encrypted, which makes sense. Anyway, borg is one of the three backup systems I use, it's alright.
arendtio•2h ago
Which are the others?
guerby•1h ago
https://kopia.io/
toenail•30m ago
backuppc and a shell script using rsync, for backups to usb sticks
ElectronBadger•5h ago
I using it with via Vorta (https://vorta.borgbase.com) frontend. My favorite backup solution so far.
Kudos•2h ago
Pika Backup (https://apps.gnome.org/PikaBackup/) pointed at https://borgbase.com is my choice.
blablabla123•4h ago
I once met the Borg author at a conference, pretty chill guy. He said that when people file bugs because of data corruption, it's because his tool found the underlying disk to be broken. Sounds quite reliable although I'm mostly fine with tar...
vrighter•3h ago
I used to work on backup software. I lost count of the number of times this happened to us with our clients too
thangngoc89•4h ago
I switched to restic (https://restic.net/) and the backrest webui (https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest) for Windows support. Files are deduplicated across machines with good compression support.
sureglymop•2h ago
I also use restic and do backups to append-only rest-servers in multiple locations.

I also back up multiple hosts to the same repository, which actually results in insane storage space savings. One thing I'm missing though is being able to specify multiple repositories for one snapshot such that I have consistency across the multiple backup locations. For now the snapshots just have different ids.

rollcat•2h ago
I've been using it for ~10 years at work and at home. Fantastic software.
kachapopopow•2h ago
Restic is far better both in terms of usability and packaging (borgmatic pretty much is a requirement for usability). Have used both extensively, you can argue that borg can just be scripted instead and is a lot more versitile, but I had a much better experience with restic in terms of setup and forget. I am not scared that restic will break, with borg I did.

Also not sure why this was posted, did a new version release or something?

mekster•2h ago
How is the performance for both?

Last time I used restic a few years ago, it choked on not so large data set with high memory usage. I read Borg doesn't choke like that.

homebrewer•31m ago
Depends on what you consider large; I looked at one of the machines (at random), and it backups about two terabytes of data spread across about a million files. Most of them aren't changing day to day. I ran another backup, and restic rescanned them & created a snapshot in exactly 35 seconds, using ~800 MiB of RAM at peak and about 600 on average.

The files are on HDD, and the machine doesn't have a lot of RAM, looking at high I/O wait times and low CPU load overall, I'm pretty sure the bottleneck is in loading filesystem metadata off disk.

I wouldn't backup billions of files or petabytes of data with either restic or borg; stick to ZFS for anything of this scale.

I don't remember what the initial scan time was (it was many years ago), but it wasn't unreasonable — pretty sure the bottleneck also was in disk I/O.

kmarc•1h ago
> you can argue that borg can just be scripted

And that's what I did myself. Organically it grew to ~200 lines, but it sits in the background (created a systemd unit for it, too) and does its job. I also use rclone to store the encrypted backups in an AWS S3 bucket

I so much forget about it that sometimes I have to remind myself to test it out if it still works (it does).

                           Original size      Compressed size    Deduplicated size
    All archives:                2.20 TB              1.49 TB             52.97 GB
sunaookami•1h ago
Love borg, use it to backup all my servers and laptop to a Hetzner Storage Box. Always impressed with the deduplication stats!
stevekemp•1h ago
Same story here, using Borg with a Hetzner storage box to give me offsite backups.

Cheap, reliable, and almost trouble-free.

AnonC•1h ago
I’ve been looking at this project occasionally for more than four years. The development of version 2.0 started sometime in April 2022 (IIRC) and there’s still no release candidate yet. I’m guessing that it’ll be finished in a year from now.

What are the current recommendations here to do periodic backups of a NAS with lower (not lowest) costs for about 1 TB of data (mostly personal photos and videos), ease of use and robustness that one can depend on (I know this sounds like a “pick two” situation)? I also want the backup to be completely private.

homebrewer•53m ago
You definitely should have checksumming in some form, even if compression and deduplication are worthless in this particular use case, so either use ZFS on both the sending and the receiving side (most efficient, but probably will force you to redo the NAS), or stick to restic.

I've been mostly using restic over the past five years to backup two dozen servers + several desktops (one of them Windows), no problems so far, and it's been very stable in both senses of the word (absence of bugs & unchanging API — both "technical" and "user-facing").

https://github.com/restic/restic

The important thing is to run periodic scrubs with full data read to check that your data can actually be restored (I do it once a week; once a month is probably the upper limit).

  restic check --read-data ...
Some suggestions for the receiver unless you want to go for your own hardware:

https://www.rsync.net/signup/order.html?code=experts

https://www.borgbase.com

(the code is NOT a referral, it's their own internal thingy that cuts the price in half)