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danielrhodes

2,755 karma · joined March 19, 2008

YC S08: Founder of Fliggo and Treehouse

Blog: http://drhod.es Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/danielrhodes

YC Badge: 0x43f54fe5ce1f8aaf134dba11ee94cdccb047b892

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danielrhodes··on The New York Times Launches a Strong Case Against Microsoft and OpenAI
Telling a lie is not illegal by itself. Telling a lie with the intent of harming someone, especially their reputation, is another story.
danielrhodes··on You Should Be Concerned About the Bill to Remove Section 230 Protections from AI
Says the person leaving a comment on a forum which would likely not exist due to legal risks without Section 230 protection. :-)

I agree transmission should receive extra protection. But there is no case where moderating every piece of content that flies across the internet is economical nor even feasible given the volume and how insanely difficult it is to create repeatable one-size fits all rules. However, given the amount of public discourse that exists online now, we would only see a chilling effect from changing these rules. It gets even harder when you think about something like Mastodon.

Is the current state of the world ideal? By no means. It wasn't ideal before either when media and public discourse was controlled and channeled by only a few entities. And we should expect to see evolutions in the future as well - we haven't found the happy place yet.

At the very least, it seems reasonable if large public platforms were required to be more transparent about their moderation efforts and rules so at least we can see what is behind the curtain. The lack thereof has created a lot of distrust.

danielrhodes··on FFmpeg lands CLI multi-threading as its "most complex refactoring" in decades
Isn't that delta partially based on the last keyframe? I guess it would be codec dependent, but my understanding is that keyframes are like a synchronization mechanism where the decoder catches up to where it should be in time.
danielrhodes··on Behavior belongs in the HTML
The way Tailwind is setup, we may as well bring back the <font> tag.
danielrhodes··on Ask HN: Is React Native still popular?
I’ve built a a couple apps in React Native over the past few years.

My reasoning for wanting to use React Native is primarily because I think the iOS ecosystem is a real mess right now. SwiftUI is not mature, and UIKit is antiquated compared to the needs of today. If you’re just starting out, the force multiplier you get from RN is almost too difficult to ignore.

1) Even in the last couple years, React Native has gotten much better. The performance gap is not noticeable anymore. In fact, in some cases I think it has been easier get better performance in RN than using native.

2) It does feel like there was a wave where tons of libraries were created and then abandoned. But overall there are lots of libraries which are good and well maintained.

3) Native is still better if you need really tight experiences, but this gap is also closing. Since you can easily drop down to native, this issue shouldn’t be a big deal.

danielrhodes··on Should you use a Lambda Monolith, a.k.a. Lambdalith, for your API?
I've used Lambda at some scale. I think Lambda is pretty great. You can really be batting far above your weight by utilizing AWS services. It's especially great and cost effective for spiky workloads, with the exception of a few services like DynamoDB. But there are trade offs that I learned. You might not see this with a small setup, but you definitely will the bigger you get.

A few that come to mind:

1) AWS services are not easy to develop with locally. This incentivizes a lot of testing in production, which in turn can slow down development speed and increase defects. Yes there are some wrapper libraries and helpers, but it's not 1:1. (This same thing applies to Cloudflare workers as well).

2) Lambdas have constraints such as execution time limits, and a lack of fine grained control over resource usage. This makes it hard to use things like long lived requests and web sockets. But it can also mean you could end up paying a lot more compared to a fixed price setup, such as an instance in EC2. The flip side is also true: it can be an incredibly good deal as well.

3) There's a lot of tooling and knowledge around Lambda which takes some time to learn. You have to be quite careful around things like DB connections, logging, concurrency, and so on. This overhead might ultimately make things more complicated than a more traditional setup.

4) There is a maximum package size for a lambda. When you include all your dependencies in NodeJS and so on, it can become very tricky to keep things under this size in even a medium sized code base. A larger size also effects your cold start time. There isn't a lot you can do to change this.

5) Lambda's easy integration with other AWS services is both a blessing and a curse. AWS is not cheap, and given how trivial it can be to add on services, it can require a considerable amount of time to reduce spend. Lambda's integration with non-AWS services is very hit or miss (e.g. Kafka). You only find this out by getting very burned.

6) If you require anything like C libraries, be prepared to spend a lot of time working on builds and deployment - or sometimes it just magically works. You are operating inside a somewhat opaque environment, and it can require a lot of fiddling. Additionally, using tools like CloudFormation do not scale very far, and can sometimes result in quite bad outcomes. This stuff can steal a lot of time.

7) There are hidden costs everywhere. For example: Are you being a good engineer and adding a lot of visibility by logging and using tools such as CloudWatch? Be prepared to pay an extraordinary amount relative to the value you get.

8) Using lambda as a processing pipeline? Easy to get started, hard to get reliable. AWS does not have good inexpensive tools to manage these well, and you can end up with a very leaky and expensive system.

9) You would be surprised at how many bugs and weird behaviors exist when these AWS systems play together. In some cases, the only recourse was to delete the entire stack and redeploy because something got stuck. That could be quite bad depending on the use case.

10) Using lambdas over data engineering tools (e.g. Kinesis Data Streams vs Spark) might actually be more complicated. You should hopefully be familiar with and have some experience in this these tools before making a decision when its time to build.

danielrhodes··on Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster?
In addition to what everybody else has said, I will add one more thing:

They don't go down when there's a big ticket sale. If you've ever used these alternative ticket sites, they will struggle under the load.

The reason it is hard is because there is a flood of people all hammering your site at once, all doing credit card transactions. There's bots. There's people hitting refresh constantly.

They are lame for a lot of reasons, but they don't suck in this department. And I imagine that is important for a lot of people.

danielrhodes··on Progress on No-GIL CPython
I don't think people use Python because it's fast. It gained momentum because it has good libraries for data science and ML. Other languages, including JS, are far faster at this point.

However, the reason to use JS in particular is because when you have a lot of I/O blocking calls (DB calls, web requests) it really is a lot faster. But if you do anything with numbers, JS is the wrong language - it's so limited here that it's almost laughable. Same with dates. That makes it a very bad choice for data science.

danielrhodes··on How Mastercard sells its ‘gold mine’ of transaction data
It’s an entirely different business?
danielrhodes··on Coffee grounds make concrete 30% stronger
Sounds similar to life insurance.
danielrhodes··on Coffee grounds make concrete 30% stronger
What types of activities does this apply to and where does it not apply? Just for the sake of argument, could this also apply to something like murder? i.e. if you wanted to murder somebody, you can do so only if you pay a super high fee otherwise go to prison. If you pay the fee, it must be worth it to you.
danielrhodes··on eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive
I think Notion/Office 365/Airtable scared them a lot.

Office 365: Regardless of how you feel about Microsoft products, this is actually a fully featured online version of Word, unlike Google Docs which has a subset of the features and layout.

Notion/Airtable: A good portion of the use cases for Google Docs/Sheets (at least in your run of the mill tech company) are better served by Notion in terms of better structure, components, templates, and so on. The hacks that I have seen people do to get around limitations in Google's suite of products just to do something fairly conventional is a shame.

danielrhodes··on eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive
Ultimately where this matters is if one party contests the validity of a contract. I'm not sure how it works in the EU, but in the US that would mean a court would ultimately make that decision. To that end, they could decide that two people agreeing in an email thread is enough. It's all about your risk appetite.

However, notice that Google has not said they are compliant with any regulation.

danielrhodes··on eSignature Beta for Google Docs and Google Drive
First this is a great idea. Finally there is some movement on making Google Docs better.

I haven't used the feature, but from reading the blog post it is sad to see how poorly Google executes on products, even at the beta stage.

Some context:

I've built such a product before and eSigs are more simple than they seem as long as you do a few things. 1) You need to verify somebody's identity. Sending them an email with the request is a valid way of doing this. 2) You need to make the final signed document easily accessible (e.g. emailing all parties a copy of the signed document. 3) You need to not obscure what the person is signing (they need to be able to easily see the entire document if they wish) 4) You need to make it possible for all parties to verify the validity of a signature, which is done with an audit trail appended to the back of the document. 5) Some types of contracts are not valid to be signed with eSign. 6) The parties need to agree to do business electronically, but this is mostly up to them.

You do not need to create fake wet signatures, cryptographically sign a document, or do encryption beyond what is necessary for normal compliance. Those are all UX or marketing features: they don't hurt, just that according to experts I have spoken to, they aren't a factor when going to court.

And then we have what Google is offering:

From the screenshots, I think it is only a fake wet signature. I'm not sure how valid that is.

Apparently you cannot ask for an eSignature from non-Gmail users right now. But how are you supposed to know they are Gmail users? Can Google not send people a simple email with a link? This alone makes the feature almost worthless, and for something that seems so trivial.

They also said they will only be adding an audit trail later this year. This is really sketchy because I believe it means you, nor anybody else can actually verify if it has been signed. Again, this is quite trivial: you store the audit trail in a database, and you append the log as pages onto the back of the PDF document.

danielrhodes··on Many people in finance, sales and management feel their jobs are pointless
You do need to know. That discovery likely happened without you being aware of it.

At some point you may need to buy a new washing machine. If you knew nothing about washing machines, you might have no information to work from.

However, maybe you saw an LG commercial at some point. So now when you walk into the store and see an LG washing machine, that recognition leads you to consider it. Maybe because of that commercial, you saw a feature. Now when you look at the Samsung washing machine and it doesn't have that feature, you consider that model to be lacking over the LG machine.

A personal anecdote here: Amazon now has so many different brands and sellers with product lines I've never heard of before. Their ratings have long since lost meaning. I often find it very difficult to decide on even simple purchases because I don't have enough information to know what is good.

danielrhodes··on Many people in finance, sales and management feel their jobs are pointless
These dollars are apparently well spent: You are aware these drinks exist and you consider them to be the market leader in these types of drinks.

> Aligned with what is actually best for the consumer

This is a classic straw man.

Who said it needs to be? They are simply educating you on the existence of their product. But marketing doesn't remove your agency to decide if you want to drink them or not, or whether that product is good for you. There are products that I am aware of due to marketing that serve no purpose to me, but I am not helplessly buying them anyways. I agree that in some scenarios (like we saw with cigarettes) this can go awry, and maybe advertising should be restricted for certain types of food. But in general, most products are not like this.

> You paid them with your attention and they helped you find solutions to your problems.

If Google didn't solve a problem for you, you would likely stop using it. You wouldn't continue to use Google simply to see their ads. Their advertisers would disappear if you weren't there, so first and foremost they must deliver a good product to you.

danielrhodes··on Many people in finance, sales and management feel their jobs are pointless
I don't see how these roles are useless.

Most people do not have a birds eye view that lets them see all the problem spaces and all the solutions. Marketing is increasing the likelihood you are aware there is a solution out there, and sales is the part where you become convinced the solution offered is the right one.

If you are in the lucky position where your company's solution is considered the standard and is widely known, marketing becomes all about maintaining that perception.

danielrhodes··on Got called to a professor’s office after a complaint his SPARC4 was running slow
I see this in a lot of software. Any software person wants to solve a problem, but their solution becomes a part of their own ego such that in their mind it is the cornerstone of the entire business, whether that's true or not. However, the person they're solving it for just wants to get something done - they don't want software in their way. The best software should is as invisible to the end user as possible.
danielrhodes··on Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions
Companies are not allowed to discriminate in their hiring. In other words, it is not legal to have affirmative action in a hiring decision (e.g. only hiring female candidates or only hiring black candidates).

To get around this, companies do a couple things to increase the likelihood of hiring an underrepresented person into a role:

1) They will quietly try to fill up their candidate pipelines with people who match the criteria they are looking for to increase the likelihood they wind up hiring a candidate who matches.

2) They will apply the "Rooney Rule" which says at least one person from an underrepresented minority group must be interviewed for a position before a hiring decision can be made.

danielrhodes··on We raised a bunch of money
I can understand how you might think investors mis-align the business with customers, but this isn't necessarily true.

First, businesses aren't in the business of leaving money on the table. That is fine for a non-profit, but ultimately they need to weigh money making with customer satisfaction and growth. It's crazy to think a business should not optimize here.

Second, you're conflating venture-funded consumer businesses with B2B businesses. Consumer businesses with venture funding are typically going to fuel growth/momentum by doing things which don't scale. But eventually push comes to shove. B2B business models are usually more transparent about what is a promotion and what is not. Consumer businesses don't always know how the business model is going to play out to even offer that transparency.

Third, if your business model is advertising and data is your moat, then when you give away your data via API to promote distribution, yes you run into an issue later on when you need to advertise or you have underinvested somewhere (in Reddit's case it was mobile). For Reddit or Twitter, these mobile apps were profiting off their users/data while taking on none of the costs (infrastructure, moderation, etc.), and limiting their means of monetizing themselves. You don't need an investor to tell you that isn't in your long term interest.

danielrhodes··on Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks
Is this even a question? 1000%

Emotional vulnerability and openness is predicated on trust. If you can't trust your partner to be there when you express yourself, then you have a serious problem. Trust is the cornerstone of any relationship.

danielrhodes··on Migrating from Supabase
Had a similar experience with Hasura. They have done some amazing things leveraging Postgres and GraphQL. But there were just too many things that got really questionable. Things like migrations becoming inconsistent with metadata, schema lock in, poor ability to do rate limiting, having to use stored procedures for everything, weird SQL that had performance issues, unexplained row level locking, and so on. Local development was a total mess.

Ultimately we were making architectural decisions to please Hasura, not because it was in the best interests of what or how we were building.

danielrhodes··on ChatGPT app for iOS
Honestly it would be great if PWAs worked better. It feels like it has been a half implemented solution. Not all features of Safari work inside a PWA, and it's unclear if you can now get push notifications. Having some access to device level features like you get with native through custom JS APIs would also be a huge win.

My understanding is that this might have been what Apple originally planned to do. However, the popularity of the App Store, IAP revenue, and the focus on services disincentivized them from pushing this route further.

danielrhodes··on ChatGPT app for iOS
My guess is OpenAI now has a case to ask Apple to remove these apps for trademark infringement and brand confusion. Obviously they can just rename themselves but keep the same functionality, but marketing themselves as ChatGPT is no longer going to fly.
danielrhodes··on ChatGPT app for iOS
What does E2E sync mean here? They already know what you wrote because you submitted it to them, similar to a Google search.
danielrhodes··on The AT protocol is the most obtuse crock of shit
Seems like Mastodon/ActivityPub and AT Protocol are solving for opposing problems. Maybe the compromise is a centralized service?
danielrhodes··on [dead]
This article conveyed almost no information.
danielrhodes··on Mike Perham, Creator of Sidekiq: From Employment to Independence
The Rails view layer used to be quite nice at its peak. Way better than many of the alternatives. That you could execute actual code inside a view was just magical.
danielrhodes··on Mike Perham, Creator of Sidekiq: From Employment to Independence
There seems to be an ever-present high-level of defensiveness from the Ruby community over JS/React. Rails has had a profound impact on web development, promoting fast starts and shipping quickly. Companies like Shopify and Twitter benefited greatly from this. But the framework is 18 years old. The web that it was created for has changed significantly.
danielrhodes··on Italy's ChatGPT ban attracts EU privacy regulators
I am not a lawyer, but this doesn’t seem strong at all.

How is it different than a person reading several books on a subject and giving a speech based on what they’ve learned? Obviously if the speech was repeating verbatim what was read, this would not be acceptable. But that is not the case here.

Likewise, should the authors of books a child learns to read with be able to claim copyright over all works and language the child produces afterwards simply because their material formed the basis for that child’s neural network related to reading and writing?

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