Top all-time · #5218
S2
Company blog · s2.dev/blog · on HN as shikharsystemsdata
S2 is the company blog at s2.dev, writing about systems and data. Since 2024, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 54 times, most often “Distributed AI Agents”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-07, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link S2 blog posts that show its durable streams service in use: terminal session streaming, local text-to-speech, and distributed AI agents. The comments point to them as examples of building on S2.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
S2 is the serverless API for durable streams: unlimited, real-time, built for AI agents and event streaming. Append, read from any point, or follow live.
Most-linked posts?
- Distributed AI Agents3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-02-23
- Multi-player, serverless, durable terminals3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-06-11
- Behind y-s2: serverless multiplayer rooms3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-09-30
- Keeping Time on a Stream3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-05-14
- Deterministic simulation testing for async Rust3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-04-03
- Replicated KV store in Rust using a shared log service2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-01-10
- Serverless API for streaming data backed by object storage2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-12-21
- IoT project using thermal sensors to monitor spaces2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-01-31
- Serving Local AI on My Jetson Through Durable Streams2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-07-01
- Introducing S22 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-12-20
What Hacker News says?
We do deterministic simulation testing https://s2.dev/blog/dst https://s2.dev/blog/linearizability We have also adopted Antithesis for a more thorough DST environment, and plan to do more with it. One day we will engage Kyle to Jepsen, too. I'm not sure when though.
Comment linking /blog/linearizability
on “Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1”Submitted Introducing S2 as a story · 372 points
HN discussionIf you are looking for a serverless alternative to JetStream, check out https://s2.dev Pros: unlimited streams with the durability of object storage – JetStream can only do a few K topics Cons: no consumer groups yet, it's on the agenda
Comment linking /
on “Jepsen: NATS 2.12.1”Submitted Deterministic simulation testing for async Rust as a story · 107 points
HN discussion(Founder) Yes we should create a video, thanks for the feedback. In the meantime, checkout this quickstart which will have to streaming Star Wars with the S2 CLI and give you a pretty good sense of things https://s2.dev/docs/quickstart#get-started-with-the-cli (You will have to apply to join the preview, but we are approving quickly)
Comment linking /docs/quickstart
on “Introducing S2”Submitted IoT project using thermal sensors to monitor spaces as a story · 20 points
HN discussion(Founder) I thought you were joking but coming back it could well be serious :) When we say stream, we really mean The Log that Jay Kreps has a famous blog about https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha... We say stream because we would rather not be confused with "logs" as in application logs, but rather associate with the world of streaming data where this primitive is very relevant. We don't m…
Comment linking /docs/quickstart
on “Introducing S2”Submitted Multi-Player Durable Stream Playground as a story · 9 points
HN discussion(Founder) Yes, we will charge less for private connectivity. Pricing is transparent https://s2.dev/pricing - free during preview.
Comment linking /pricing
on “Introducing S2”Submitted Linearizability testing S2 with deterministic simulation as a story · 7 points
HN discussion(Founder) We will be using authenticated encryption with per-basin (our term for bucket) or per-stream keys, but we don't have this yet. This is noted on https://s2.dev/docs/security#encryption
Comment linking /docs/security
on “Introducing S2”Submitted Multi-player, serverless, durable terminals as a story · 6 points
HN discussion(Founder) Besides simple API, - Unlimited streams. Current cloud systems limit to a few thousand. With dedicated clusters, few hundred K? If you want a stream per user, you are now dealing with multiple clusters. - Elastic throughput per stream (i.e. a partition in Kafka) to 125 MiBps append / 500 MiBps realtime read / unlimited in aggregate for catching up. Current systems will have you at tens. And we may grow tha…
Comment linking /docs/stream
on “Introducing S2”Submitted DST for Async Rust as a story · 6 points
HN discussion(S2 Team member) As we move forward, a Java/Kotlin and a Python SDK are on our list. There is a Rust sdk and a CLI available ( https://s2.dev/docs/quickstart ) . Rust felt as a good starting point for us as our core service is also written in it.
Comment linking /docs/quickstart
on “Introducing S2”Submitted S2 – Streams as a cloud storage primitive as a story · 6 points
HN discussion(Founder) There is a table on the landing page https://s2.dev/ which hopefully gives a nice overview :) It's like S3, but for streams. Cheap appends, and instead of dealing with blocks of data and byte ranges, you work with records. S2 takes care of ordering records, and letting you read from anywhere in the stream. This is an alternative to systems like Kafka which don't do great at giving a serverless experience.
Comment linking /
on “Introducing S2”Submitted Behind y-s2: serverless multiplayer rooms as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI'm a huge fan of Asciinema, and this is awesome work. Regarding the live streaming feature, I hacked a similar thing on top of s2.dev streams[1] (disclaimer: I am a co-founder), which could alleviate the need for a relay in this architecture[2]. Naturally showing off `btop` was the highlight for me as well :-D. [1]: https://s2.dev/blog/s2-term [2]: https://docs.asciinema.org/manual/server/streaming/#architec...
Comment linking /blog/s2-term
on “Asciinema CLI 3.0 rewritten in Rust, adds live streaming, upgrades file format”Submitted Keeping Time on a Stream as a story · 5 points
HN discussionWe have had interest in using our serverless stream API ( https://s2.dev/ ) to power sync engines. Very excited about these kinds of use cases, email in profile if anyone wants to chat.
Comment linking /
on “Sync Engines Are the Future”Submitted Behind y-s2: serverless multiplayer rooms as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThis post makes a great case for how universal logs are in data systems. It was strange to me that there was no log-as-service with the qualities that make it suitable for building higher-level systems like durable execution: conditional appends (as called out by the post!), support very large numbers of logs, allow pushing high throughputs with strict ordering, and just generally provide a simple serverless experie…
Comment linking /blog/kv-store
on “Every System is a Log: Avoiding coordination in distributed applications”Submitted Linearizability testing S2 with deterministic simulation as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYou might like what we are building with https://s2.dev :)
Comment linking /
on “Why was Apache Kafka created?”Submitted Stream per Agent Session as a story · 4 points
HN discussionindeed, we wanted to build an example for a quickstart to showcase "data in motion" and starwars seemed like a perfect fit, the OG had IP blocks in place which made it really difficult to use, so we thought of finding some OSS project that we could self-host and after a lot of searching we found "ascii-movie" (our patch: https://github.com/s2-streamstore/ascii-movie ) and the end result was just as similar to towel.…
Comment linking /docs/quickstart
on “Fun with Telnet (2024)”Submitted Fast IoT data pipeline for infrared monitoring as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMight as well share one URL for HN to play with, so here’s one https://s2.dev/playground?token=Oq4AAAAAAABodAPA46wzu2bBlbU7...
Comment linking /playground?token=Oq4AAAAAAABodAPA46wzu2bBlbU75kVC3r%2FKVZm6yqWa9jns&stream=session%2Ffad9a8fd
on “Multi-Player Durable Stream Playground”Submitted Replicated KV store in Rust using a shared log service as a story · 4 points
HN discussion