270 karma · joined August 21, 2021
One suggestion/correction: "Your only way to track message flow is with extensive and expressive logging.", you can do distributed tracing. It not a silver bullet, nor does it replace a proper debugger, but it's better than following logs. You can use a number of distributed tracing SaaS's, but you still have to do at least some manual instrumentation in your code to add additional info.
Good luck. And I'm not saying you're wrong or anything, just that it won't be easy. Look at what happened in Canada when they increased capital tax rate few weeks ago. It was a ton of articles and opinion pieces about how it will destroy the economy and innovation. You try taxing more in US and it will likely be an even harder push back given the larger ultra-high net worth population.
I replied to your serverless comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40054222 Very interested in what more you have to say, if you're interesting in discussing it more.
In North America there were and are a number of companies that operate or operated (pre-layoffs etc, ZIRP free money RIP) on a 4 day work week. You can search "4 day companies" and you'll find a list. Some companies still operate on a 4 day week, so it wasn't necessarily a ZIRP-era only thing.
US congress or someone in government proposed a 32 hour work week -- unlikely to be passed of course or get any traction any time soon.
But in general, there's growing mainstream sentiment towards trying and exploring shorter work weeks.
If AI/AI-enabled-capitalists doesn't enslave us, those grandiose promised AI productivity gains may push sentiment further in that direction.
So "moving towards" is a fair description.
Severance is a slow burn, but the show gets really good at the end of season 1. I highly recommend you give it another chance and watch til the end. IMO, it got better and better every episode until world class level episode in the final 2, 3 episodes of the season.
Its among my favorite shows of all time.
If anything the risk is for the employee. But if companies stop trying to be Google and stick to their actual level of prestige, employees wouldn't have to do a multi week/month interviewing marathon just to get a foot in the door, and it balances out, easy to get your foot in another door.
I don't know if it's cargo culting, ego, or what, but non of the hiring practices so many companies carry out make sense. Pick top 10 resumes, spend 2h interviewing each, offer 3 month trial or at-will hire/fire your top pick. Saved you 50-100k in recruiter costs.
I say this because Interest Rates will be most likely lower than what they're at right now, which will cause money to flow into companies through VC and public investment.
Just a guess though, could easily be wrong. Keep an eye on startup investment and public ipo activity as a potential indicator of things.
It's uncanny how relevant this quote is 50 years later.
But is this about MongoDB trying to deter forks? Are there any live MongoDB fork? Hasn't the MongoDB hype train derailed a long time ago?
MongoDB is mentioned in the footer, in greyed text. MongoDB benefits from Terraform vs OpenTofu tensions how?
Do you run or work for a DB company? Because your comment sounds like a PR campaign by that logic.
I wonder how viable this fork will end up being. To contrast with the recent Redis debacle, Redis is by some measure a completed piece of software, as suggested by the Redict fork. But with the moving target of the Cloud, is Terraform in a similar bucket? Will there be enough support behind this fork 5 years from now? And by support I don't mean is some big tech company's logo displayed on the website - are there multiple contributors or is it some random person in Nebraska doing what they can during evenings and weekends?
Might be an unfair comparison, but I'm reminded of the Reddit API uproar last year. It did what exactly? Reddit IPO'd, got their cake, the people who threw up their arms got what? Some maybe left, others just quietly returned to their corners of Reddit and continued using it? Will these large publicity forks end up being healthy and viable or end up open-source abandonware that once promised the world?
To be clear, I'm all for competition, FOSS, and all the stuff. I just genuinely worry about big bang, high publicity stuff. Is it big bang and then a quiet whimper, or a self sustaining entity for the long term?
I just am weary of the sustainability of these business models long term and how they'll live up to such lofty goals and expectations. Too often we've seen great things become less great overtime as other revenue extraction means are introduced to the overall detriment of what make that thing so great.
No, not at all. But to focus majority of the time focusing on greatness and downplaying the consequences will skew the public perception. If you're skewing perception then you, as a society, aren't fully understanding the implications of what's happening (eg social media in 2010 vs social media in 2020s, mental health, people quiting, etc).
> If a politician says "go get a job, don't leach off the government and tax payers" and is so out of context, may be the political system and electing such a politician is a problem, and you ought to improve the society than asking Microsoft to think about the jobless...
Yup, there's definitely a issue with current political systems. The system is likely going to resist change and I'm not foolish enough to think it will change much any time soon given the current trajectory. Obvious this varies country to country.
> I do agree with you and hate the trope that is "we make the world a better place" or using the word - sustainable and green color to things that cannot possibly be either.
That's all I was highlighting. It's all grandiose promises of sunshine and rainbows as one may naively assume if you take any AI "thought leader" at their literal word. I'm not going to quote any of them, but the clip this post links to has a number of direct quotes from them about what great planet scale problems AI will solve.
I wasn't proposing any solution, but trying to highlight the naivety of assuming AI will usher in an era of greatness for _all_.
It would be great if you could get all the benefits and humanity could live on this planet, and maybe others, for millions of years in prosperity and greatness, but the systemic underlying issues will continue to persist even into this next era.
Is there a way to minimize the negatives that will inevitably playout? Those AI leaders aren't talking a lot about that, only vague suggestions or passing mentions, and then back to "we're going to use AI to make the world a better place"
Which begs the question, how is The Browser Company going to live up to the 550 million dollar valuation? I'm not fluent in VC-speak, but I think the math is something like this: you need $R in revenue annually to be valued at $V, where the difference between R and V is some multiple M, usually 10-50ish. Let's say 50, so R = $550/50 = $11 million/yr in revenue or a more conservative 20 multiple, R = $550/20 = $27.5 million/yr in revenue.
If they charge $10/month, then they need ~91k users, that gets them to $11 million in revenue from users directly. If they need to hit 27.5 million, then they need ~229k users paying $10 month.
Not the worst investment after you do the math, maybe it's theoretically a sustainable business.
But startups don't raise money at these numbers to become sustainable ten-million dollar-per-year businesses. Investors want that unicorn status most of the time. At that point, I don't know if the math makes sense because to be a unicorn you need like $50-100+ million in revenue per year. That's easily 3x or more users, you're approaching 500k-1 million monthly active users.
That's a lot of users for something Apple, Samsung, Mozilla and Google give away for free on all OSs already.
Edit: I just looked up their funding raising information. 137 million raised, and they're series A/B'ish right now. That's a lot of money, they definitely have big ambitions.
"I don't want to live in a world where someone else is making the world a better place better than we are." - some VC probably
Anyway, try applying to a job today or even pre-pandemic. Unless you went to a top school, are in the right geographic region (West Coast US, or NY area), or you have strong network connections, you're going to be going through a ridiculous number of job applications, then a non-nonsensical number of interview rounds, and maybe you'll get an offer.
Alternatively you spend 3-6 or more months studying leetcode and planet-scale system design, because random startups, banks, insurance companies also wants people who are only the of the best and pay "competitive salary".
The number of places that rejected me for trivial reasons is insane. I can only imagine what people entering the industry right now have to face, it can't be any better than it was.
After reading the title I was 99% sure it would've been an Electron app, nice to see it's actually native. Good work.
If page load times mattered, then i wouldn't have written what I did above
It's a huge mess. You _can_ make beautiful, simple, elegant and useful things with web tech, but the number of people who care enough to do so are so so few.
Making good stuff doesn't matter anymore.
They could've improved the styling so things were nicely formatted and easy to read, but they went above and beyond (in a bad way).