YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Big Tech ruined the cloud, so we're renaming ours

129 points 2sf5 1 hour ago 41 comments

mococa 30 minutes ago | parent

Only the cloud they ruined? :-)

robbiet480 29 minutes ago | parent

The Verge also has an interview with Paulus about this https://www.theverge.com/tech/1003936/home-assistant-says-bi...

voidnullvalue 29 minutes ago | parent

Nabu Kasa keeps ignoring the elephant in the room of security and permissions. They have no native ability to set user groups and permissions. I guess it doesn't sell cloud subscriptions. I cant keep my children from affecting devices they shouldn't. I ended up replacing my automation with mqtt

alerighi 25 minutes ago | parent

That is something not required in a domestic setting, that is what HomeAssistant is designed for. I don't know why your children needs to have access to HA (or the internet afterall).

voidnullvalue 24 minutes ago | parent

Ok so i am wrong to want interface panels to control things with Home Assistant because I have kids?

peterclary 16 minutes ago | parent

You can choose whether to make a user an admin, and you can specify certain dashboards to be admin only. My wall panels are all logged in with a non-admin user specific to that panel, set to show only what I want anyone to access.

Some of us in the family are logged into dashboards on our phones with different users, which update depending on which room we are in.

If you want to gate access to certain functionality on a dashboard designed for a common area, you would need to route to a different dashboard upon providing some kind of authorisation, e.g. an onscreen PIN pad.

Happy to discuss.

pessimizer 20 minutes ago | parent

> That is something not required in a domestic setting

We didn't know you'd declared this. I hope there are temporary solutions available while your declaration is communicated to everybody else.

phoghed 19 minutes ago | parent

I'll send you $1 in a crypto coin of your choice if you can think of one good use case that would benefit from this

montjoy 23 minutes ago | parent

This is false. https://developers.home-assistant.io/docs/auth_permissions/

voidnullvalue 17 minutes ago | parent

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/wth-no-rbac-role-based...

This thread is relevant. Their permissions system is just on entities, and isn't a real EBAC system.

hobofan 14 minutes ago | parent

I'm usually not one to jump quickly to that, but that's a joke of a permission system.

bmurphy1976 11 minutes ago | parent

Is it really an Elephant in the Room situation? Are there upvoted ticket/issues or community threads asking for it? I don't really know, it's an honest question.

As somebody with a pretty extensive Home Assistant based home automation system AND kids, I've never once felt the need for this. I can certainly see the utility of it, but Home Assistant is already complicated enough. I'd prefer effort be spent improving the UX, simplifying the system, improving reliability and adding more (optional) integrations.

Aurornis 10 minutes ago | parent

I think they're reading their audience and making the correct product choice.

Home Assistant users are the power users of the home automation world, but even among their user base I think the number of users who would use a full set of groups and permissions controls in their home is very small.

This is a feature that would take a lot of engineering effort and only make the product more complicated for most of their users. The part of their user base that did use it would probably never be happy because they wanted something even more specific.

Their basic permissions and control structure covers most of the common use cases. Going further would be 100X more work for something that would only be used by a very small minority of users.

papercruncher 4 minutes ago | parent

What about giving different agents varying sets of tightly scoped permissions? Is there a good way to achieve that today? If not, it might warrant the effort down the road

cogman10 2 minutes ago | parent

Basically the only people I could imagine that'd actually want a complex user permission group is someone with 1 or more Airbnbs that wants to have an overarching view of their properties but also wants to give "guest" access.

frantathefranta 6 minutes ago | parent

Their ethos is that Home Assistant should be deployed in a non-complicated way and that many things that "IT people" want to do with HA are not actually necessary. I can't find the source but I recall frenck (one of the lead devs) explaining that people ask him about stuff like setting up HA using Terraform and he just wonders why someone would want that.

bitpush 28 minutes ago | parent

Unless they have their own data centers, they are still hosting it on top of AWS or something.

I get that they are trying to market this but it is a bit disingenuous.

adrithmetiqa 23 minutes ago | parent

Sadly way overpriced for what you get. You can achieve the same for free with a Cloudflare tunnel. It’s great that this service supports the development of home assistant but the pricing is just silly.

sho_hn 13 minutes ago | parent

I think the "supporting HA development" argument is really not a bad one. HA is so much better than anything else by such a wide margin.

nickspacek 11 minutes ago | parent

I didn't realize Cloudflare also offered:

- Offsite Backups

- Voice control (Alexa & Google Home)

- Voice Processing (STT/TTS)

- Better media streaming (video/audio)

In addition to dedicated support, as part of their free Cloudflare tunnels.

Sorry for being snarky, but given the tone/point of the announcement is anti-big tech it's funny to complain that the pricing is so high compared to big tech.

Taken on its own, for the price of a nice coffee a month you also support Home Assistant development and get something in exchange. Pretty good value.

yurishimo 22 minutes ago | parent

The post mentions bare metal so it’s possible they found a partner to collocate with in a few of the big regions globally.

Regardless, they also call out that what they offer is only an enhancement and if you use it as the only way to access your smarthome then you are not really using the software as intended.

We will see in 12 months if the migration was worth it. Nabu Casa is starting to push harder into B2C so we shall see if the product can keep up with the demand.

sho_hn 16 minutes ago | parent

What "migration"? This is just a rename.

tw04 20 minutes ago | parent

You’re missing the point entirely. Some other home automation platforms require a cloud/subscription to function at all. It has nothing to do with running on AWS or Azure or insert hyperscaler.

Link is completely optional and does not affect the functionality of home assistant. You can run completely offline without a subscription of any kind on your own hardware if you so choose.

micromacrofoot 17 minutes ago | parent

At a glance it looks like they're using OVH servers for the relays, so they're on dedicated bare metal

TwoNineA 28 minutes ago | parent

(H)ome (A)ssistant (L)ink.

Might as well add 9000 at the end of it.

soperj 21 minutes ago | parent

this is just the first iteration.

maxrmk 27 minutes ago | parent

What was the cloud before big tech?

a_paddy 24 minutes ago | parent

Someone else's computer

paimapi 26 minutes ago | parent

I'll wait for someone to do a network call audit before I trust something like this

I've been working on a small project running mitmproxy on a lot of 'privacy-focused' baby-tracking apps and only one of the ones I've tested doesn't send back a bevy of analytics data (none of which they openly promise to anonymize)

some of the worst culprits had things like the Facebook SDK and Google Ads installed and sending data in spite of literally promising not to generate an Ad ID and three (Baby+, Nanit, and Pregnancy+) straight up had Microsoft Clarity sending data (ie basically screen recordings and full input logs)

Jimpulse 19 minutes ago | parent

Which one didn't send back a ton of analytics?

Also, surprised with Nanit, Microsoft Clarity was found on the phone app?

With the whole LG fiasco I wouldn't be surprised if the camera itself was doing network fingerprinting and data collection.

ahknight 12 minutes ago | parent

This has been around for years. It's just a rename. The code is open source and you or anyone else can go look at it (and many have).

echelon 18 minutes ago | parent

We're going to take back the internet and own tech forever.

I know I have a few anti-AI haters on HN, but hear me out. I'm currently using Opus 5.5 to create 100% pure-Rust, immediate mode rendering, open source implementations of Adobe's entire suite:

https://github.com/storytold/photocraft (Photoshop)

https://github.com/storytold/vectorcraft (Illustrator)

https://github.com/storytold/filmcraft (Premiere)

https://github.com/storytold/lightcraft (Lightroom)

https://github.com/storytold/printcraft (Acrobat Pro)

https://github.com/storytold/effectcraft (After Effects)

https://github.com/storytold/designcraft (InDesign)

I got bit by the dark pattern "cancellation fee" one too many times.

AI lets us take back tech and set the clock back to the pre-shitty era.

We'll replace Google Search, we'll build our own smartphones, we'll build better infra. We'll remove all the ads and de-enshittify the entire tech world.

Big tech sowed the seeds of their own commodification with AI. It's all going to come down now that we can rebuild everything without toiling for years to even get close to scaling software capability moats.

The internet is going to reset to 1990-2004 (pre-facebook / "web 2.0" era). The indie web era. Everything is going to be reborn as open source.

We're going to own it all.

jmward01 17 minutes ago | parent

Rebranding is the right thing and way over due. I honestly hadn't checked them out before but this has made me read through the site a bit. I am intrigued by their privacy claims. I will definitely be looking into them more if those claims hold up.

benabus 15 minutes ago | parent

I feel like Cloud means something now, and as part of the general lexicon, it's okay to use it for what it means. At this point, Cloud kind of means that it's a service hosted somewhere on the Internet, that you don't control directly, usually that you pay for. Sounds like they're still doing that.

Changing the name to distance yourself from AWS and Google Cloud is fine, but "Link" doesn't really tell you anything about where it's hosted or that you still have to pay for it. In fact, by announcing this change with the specific goal of distancing yourself from Big Tech it kind of implies that you're no longer a paid service that happens in some remote data center.

But whatevs. Words don't actually mean anything anymore anyway.

pkulak 13 minutes ago | parent

Guys, you don't have to use it. That's the _entire_ point. Every comment in here is some version of "But it's still a cloud". Sure. But if the entire thing can be replaced with a Tailscale free account, or a Cloudflare tunnel, or a port forward at your router (in descending order of "should you do it"), is it really the same thing? Hence the name change.

sho_hn 11 minutes ago | parent

Link/Cloud gets you some more things than just the Remote Access part.

Nabu Casa also hosts e.g. STT/TTS services for a HA to use. Again this is easy to replace with something else and entirely optional to begin with, but since I trust Nabu Casa more than, say, Google and don't have the hardware for local models I like to use them.

aenis 11 minutes ago | parent

Huh? I am using cloud compute for 15 years now, I haven't noticed anything being 'ruined' about it. You pay some people money and they run your workloads, it mostly works, same as with local compute.

Not sure why they dramatise it so much. Want a corporate rebrand, have at it. The like changing things, I get that.

plpbs 10 minutes ago | parent

Oh the glory of virtue signaling...

tamimio 7 minutes ago | parent

I loved it! 4 years ago I built a platform for robotics and one portion of it was a cloud side, we got into the discussion what kinda name to have, silly names catchy names etc., but eventually after none was selected, I went with the “XYZ link” name, because indeed the actual function was a link between operator and a robot in the field, and I think it also fits home assistant as well. Love HA been using it for around 2years now and integrating everything into it!

sneak 3 minutes ago | parent

> For example, there were times when Paulus, founder of Home Assistant and President of the Open Home Foundation, was on stage saying “don’t buy products that require the cloud to work,” then in the next breath having to explain how Home Assistant Cloud is different, despite the name. That created unnecessary friction.

You can’t install Home Assistant without DockerHub, and it fetches all sorts of stuff from cloud hosters during use.

HA is offline first, but they don’t really take privacy or data hygiene seriously; it shouldn’t talk to the internet at all until and unless you configure it to do something that needs internet. That isn’t the case today, you can’t even install it without internet.

4gotunameagain 2 minutes ago | parent

Given the predatory pricing model the "cloud" has become, this makes perfect sense.

Azure and AWS have become practically a racket. I haven't seen a single "cloud native" company yet that is not leaking hundreds of thousands of dollars per month to the US digital monopolists.

Cloud capitalism at its finest..