orkon

I seem to experience troubles like that with any kind of Bluetooth devices. E.g., sometimes they don't connect or disconnect or lag. At this point, I am suspicious of the entire Bluetooth technology. The same is with WiFi actually: it does work well most of the time but sometimes it does not (for whatever reasons, bugs? changes in environment?).

One popular tech site in Russian was invite-only for a very long time: https://habr.com I remember you could get in by someone inviting you or if you wrote a good guest post (there was a separate area for this kind of guest posts and no one could see who the author is). I got impression that invite-only system worked quite well as the site was known for high-quality content and discussions.

Yes, it was from this book I believe. Also found this http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/RP03-... where it seems like retail prices where relatively stable at that time.

I think I have read somewhere that inflation in the end of the 17th - first half of 18th century was almost zero or there was even a deflation. I may be wrong. Maybe someone has a good source?

If I'd drive a car, which is a dangerous thing on its own, I'd be for minimizing the risks of harming someone or myself. My current mitigation of this risk is not driving a car at all.

The API gateway quotas look broken for me. I raised the limit to 5000 keys but it looks like the standard limit of 500 applies. Which is strange because I have more than 500 API keys...

Then the search engine itself would be probably thrown away :-D

I kind of agree, and I think nowadays it's hard to promote a product on the Internet or even get noticed without putting a lot of effort. When the Internet was smaller, I guess it's been easier.

Off-topic: the author's product seems similar to my open source tool https://github.com/justcomments/newsletter-cli which allows sending emails via AWS SES

yeah, similar, but with 'O'-sound instead 'A'

I also found the following sentence strange:

> That belief is partly why many Irish, Italian and Polish immigrants who came to America in the early 20th century whitened their children's names to avoid persecution and increase their chances of social mobility.

> Tim Machuga is a software engineer who also knows what it's like to be black for a minute. He is a white man with an African name.

A typical Eastern European last name to me.

I wonder what does my first name (Oleksii) sound like to folks in the US?

Could this crisis be an instance of induced demand? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

If spending time on Facebook is work, why is my employer not happy?

So you are saying, basically, if there was Unix why do we have Windows since no one asked for it.

On the positive side, running your own website or a forum is now easier than ever. I think more people should do it.

I feel the entire post is missing the two main points:

1) No one would bother creating these free services if they could not draw massive revenue streams out of it. If the returns disappear, it'd all be shut down.

2) If you create content on an online platform, you get paid in emotions you feel, the popularity you might get or the money you get through your own advertising if you are popular. If you contribute the data, you also benefit from a better service which is free.

P.S. I am thinking of building an RSS reader app with the built-in discussions. If it sounds interesting, please fill out a survey https://forms.gle/9V85Eb8PZnBXKaFr6

It's not yet ready to be shared in the form of screenshots. It will be a simple layout with the feeds list in a collapsible menu on the left-hand side and the list of posts on the right-hand side. When you navigate to post details, you will see the post content with media content if available. In addition to it, there will be a discussion section for each post. I'd like to have keyboard navigation in the app, and I don't plan to invest time in native apps. Instead, I'd like to utilize PWA features to make the web app easy to use on mobiles too.

Actually, I am working an RSS reader app with built-in discussions and Google Reader was a great inspiration for me. I still use RSS readers as a primary way of aggregating content. Leave your email if it'd like to be notified once I have a beta version: https://forms.gle/Xp47FqQXKwcJakSW8

I think comments provide value everywhere where there is a community. If you don't have a community around your website and only random strangers visit it, it won't offer considerable value. Although I cannot say that I have a community around my blog, I occasionally get useful comments with clarifying questions and additional information which helps me improve my content.

Cool! Did you consider the pay-per-use model instead of a fixed monthly subscription?

When did you start working on Commento?

Cool project! I am also creating a similar product https://just-comments.com/ It's great to see so many alternatives to be created recently.

I match the model, not the price. I don't think you can make a profit from people who pay and don't use. Such people typically don't subscribe.

Generally, the project is none-free and low-margin and that is what makes it interesting. There are plenty of dead and alive open source projects offering comments which you can use.

Thanks for the questions!

1. I wanted to build an embedded comment system which is not monetized by selling user data or serving ads and which has a fair pricing model. By "fair" I mean that you pay what you consume without non-transparent pricing plans where some features are only available for certain plans. I have found no such system myself, so I started building it.

2. It's unlikely that I will run out of the money and the service will cease to exist because it's a side project for me and it is self-funding. You buy credits upfront, and this pays the bills for the service. It's hosted by AWS and has no fixed recurring costs for me.

3. The minimal amount of credits you can purchase is 500k or $7.5. The transaction fees are already included in the price.

4. There is no moderation interface at the moment. As an administrator, you get email notifications for every comment you receive. The email contains a link where you can hide the comment if you don't like it.

5. Regarding the stack, I have answered below. If you have specific questions, feel free to ask.

Could you share the project you are working on? And what's your vision?

Thanks, I will fix the broken links :-)

The tech is completely hosted on AWS, and it is entirely "serverless". So the core is using the API Gateway + Lambda + DynamoDB. Additionally, I use Kinesis Firehose + S3 to process internally generated data such as billing events. Athena helps me to query the data if needed.

Basically, the scalability & high availability is entirely provided by AWS and the pricing model matches almost 1-to-1 the pricing by AWS.

If you have any specific questions about the tech, I can answer them.

The computations can get a bit complicated. Basically, one pageview costs $0.000015. So if you have a thousand pageviews, it's $0.015.

On the pricing page (https://just-comments.com/pricing.html) I have an example of 20000 pageviews per month and it costs $0.3 per month.

It would be cool if you could add a "Deploy to Heroku" button or similar. Or at least screenshots. I think it would be nice to see how the UI looks like.

Thanks for the link to your system. Is there a demo instance somewhere?

Yeah, emails are quite expensive. AWS itself charges $100 per 1 million plus additional infrastructure to manage subscriptions + email validation & dealing with bounces.

Therefore, email notifications are an optional feature. I hope in the future push notifications will be supported much better by the browsers so that it won't make sense to use emails.

Hi, a direct link to the demo page https://just-comments.com/demo.html

I am looking for the feedback and users because I think the project is quite ready for real usage. Thanks!