Arqu

I somehow keep being fascinated by people think they're ripped off. I mean sure, Spotify is making a decent buck out of it, but it's not like the artists are doing it for free.

There's much more to the whole process. Firs to earn something per play there need to be ads that finance it. Then imagine the technical hurdle and cost to host such a platform (ie Spotify cut) and then you actually being worth a damn as an artist.

1M views might seem like a lot, but actually its quite a limited resource for serving ads. The other thing here is that most artists wouldn't have a single view if it wasn't for one or the other distributor. Basically, the barrier is so low to entry and the risk is dispersed across a million other artists so you all get a very diluted value per view. But at least you get value per view. Otherwise, it would have been an all or nothing business, like it used to be. It's the same effect the app stores had for software devs.

In essence, you get low fees because those funds pay for the distribution and risk that is dispersed. The general pay scale is a hockey stick with the last couple % making the majority of the money.

Since you even got the opportunity to get in front of an audience, use it wisely as you need to pump those numbers up. It's a numbers game and your numbers are too low. You need double-digit millions to make a good living off of it. And that's just what it takes. It's not easy, not everyone will make it above the fold, for whatever reason life, luck, marketing...

I work closely in the space of providing time series databases as managed solutions. I can say that I am very happy to see this recent development of new tsd's and this with timescale is a huge bump to the industry/segment. Everybody currently measures some analytics and mostly user data and there is so much abuse with it, yet there is so much more you can measure and do and it is still very early stage. Farms, industrial applications, IoT and so much more. I'd love to just measure temperature and wind speed at unprecedented resolution.

Yeah, I would love that. Don't think that will happen any time soon unless legally obliged to.

That works for "us" HN geeks. The consumer market is all about convenience, and the monent the custoners have to go through some hoops a new company will pop up that will do it as a service which they then trust for doing it properly. And while I'm all for decentralizing power, I'd rather have 1 accountable company or a couple of them handle this compared to a bunch of small independent ones consodering they are less auditable and more open to skewing the system. Maybe something like the W3 consortium but we know how that turned out...

I'm working on https://www.datagekko.com. It's a passion project of mine that came from a scratch your own itch situation. Working on it for the past 6 years or so a couple hours every day on average (spent a ton of time). As it matured I decided to push it from a hobby project to a product. Super close to launching it, but constantly keep delaying it as I always have something to improve.

Learned a ton on it and literally helped me shape my career in the past 5 years.

A short description would be a large scale metrics/telemetry system. But I'm aiming to make it available for small-scale use as well so that small guys (like me) can leverage those benefits.

Depends how you do it. Having a sane communication model/interface between the services allows you to test it in two ways: 1) You test the internal structure with unit tests 2) You test changes to the API contract with E2E tests Both are fairly straightforward once you set it up properly.

Same goes for the monolith, assuming you do your work on following somethink like the SOLID principle, it is easy to test piece by piece. The only thing here is that the interface contracts are internal to the codebase vs external to other codebases. (You might argue the last point actually forces you to write a more coherent API contract in both situations)

So the consensus is to do things well from the start. IMHO both have their merits but strongly depend on the usecase. There is no one size fits all. A lot of thought has to go into both options to make them really effective. Otherwise it's just garbage in garbage out.

By far my favorite is Depth First Search (DFS). It's almost a bread and butter algorithm for a lot of problems (at least for quick tests) with only a couple lines long in its recursive form. Some example usage: - combinations - permutations - generating sequences - exploring tree structures - finding paths - solving pretty much any search space problem and much more. It's not the most efficient for the large majority of these cases but it allows you to throw 10-15 lines of code to quickly test an idea before actually working on it.

I am literally waiting for the Pixelbook 2 to replace my MacBook Pro (Touchbar) as it's been rotting away with failing speakers and keyboard getting progressively worse over time. This is my 3rd with a decade long history of using the devices. However, repairs are just too inaccessible. I don't have the luxury to wait a month for a third party authorized repair shop to do its magic so I can continue working. My best experience was with the 2011 model which I upgraded myself. Everything after was just a worse experience.

For what it's worth, it's still work in progress (not really profitable, but getting there). I've been working on it for more than 5 years now for about 2 hours a day on average, steady. Basically, I spend my "hobby time" working on it. Evenings, weekends, late nights, wherever I can squeeze some spare time in. Sometimes it gets hard and frustrating as you would like to push more but don't have the luxury of going full time on it just yet.

It gets easier to balance with time as you learn how and when to squeeze in some time to work on it while still maintaining a normal life with job, family and friends.

I would beg to differ. I've owned owned a total of 4 higher end and one entry level Mercedes between me and my closer family members. Litterally for the first couple years the only maintnence is the general stuff like oil, filters and occasionally the breaking pads. And we all drive a significant mileage per year over various terrains. The actual cost of running it is lower for premium cars than it is for others. Disclaimer though after about 6-7 years of heavier use repairs do start comming up and they can be costly but that is to be expected if you want to run for another half decade or so. The only difference between the more expensive models is that once you hit this period the prices are proportionately higher. Though this excludes sports and ultra premium cars.

They are so nicely tuned and set up to last for a long time. Chains instead of rubber, higher quality parts and well tested engines really do work miracles. And I expect to see very similar paterns for electric cars as they are all pretty much premium segment anyways. We just need a bit more time for the TCO to ve a good metric.

Sources: owned and driven a lot of cars from the very low end to the very high end with a lot of in between.

I'm currently in the business of doing exactly this. My 5c is that though we keep an eye out for new tech on this scene, usually the impact is very minimal in terms of customers.

There is a lot more value in a managed offering than there is just by doing it yourself. A few top points are: - No DevOps - Reduced cost due to scale - Minimal engineering time spent - Long term reliability

Usually, there are two buckets of people - those who want to do it themselves anyways so the service is not really what they want, and those who just want to make it simple to them and reduce the cost of development and ownership, especially if it's not core to their business. There is a large value to anything if it just provides convenience and nothing else.

I strongly disagree. Initially, I've been reluctant to do so myself, however, once I read a bit more of it, it's actually fairly simple for simple things and just a bit more complex for very complex stuff. It's no harder or more involved than setting up a VM on your own. The cost is also pretty much the same for small scale as you basically have free k8s masters by now.

Also if you host a bunch of side projects, it's actually better in terms of resource utilization and separation of projects, it dynamically schedules pods based on resource requests across the nodes it has at hand so you can host several projects fully separate on a single or a handful of nodes depending on requirements.

It is interesting to see that most people only pay for some large brand name services, would love to see more people paying for SaaS solutions from smaller businesses/startups and for more technical resons (I guess SME's would better qualify for this than individuals)

As for my spending I guess I also fall short of the above point: Play Music - music streaming, Netflix - chill, Github - Private repos, GSuite - mostly emails, GDrive - storage, Namecheap - Domains, Google Cloud and AWS - cloud stuff, Asana - side project management, AdWords - side project marketing

I was hoping to see something of a more flexible pricing like per 100 MB provisioned based on the far fetched assumption that it is not just a managed redis(like?) offering but a fully abstracted managed redis service where you are just charged by GB/s used as with lots of other services.

This just boils down to the same cost as self hosting minus the self hosting hassle. So not too bad as its just easier to use + no vendor lock in since it is redis compatible at a similar price point.

Email predates google, however I don't thing the services would be anything alike without the bigger players. Initialy email was just a communication tool, however it quickly evolved to be sold as a feature on various hosting provides or was "thrown in" a more general package just to be feature par in attempt to bring in more people to use the service. This is not really directly related to online ads, however just shows that it's comercialized one way or another.

Open street map is a great example, along with wikipedia and numerous open source projects which are either backed by some foundations or collect donations and membership fees. The broader scope here is that while this is a better approach for the world, as long as there is the possibility to earn a buck on some service, there will be a comercial version of it. Guess capitalism just works that way.

That is also a good view on it. I would like it the most if online marketing was flipped - no networks but the media agencies have to serve related content and make ad deals based on those, hence much less cross marketing crap. However I see also why businesses don't do it as the conversions would probably be much lower with that approach. Also I think the auto industry, since you mentioned it, is closer to this approach as they condition users from a young age to pick a brand they like.

That's true, and I generally dislike them, thus I run an ad blocker and some limits on JS. However I have a bit of a broader view on the topic. For one instance, we wouldn't have many of the things we have without the economic backbone of the internet - ads. Google Maps - No, E Mail services - No and many more as they are just to drive user engagement to serve more ads or to lock you into the rest of their ecosystems hence Android and iOS and their integrations with the services. However I don't mind at all some higher quality marketing like technical blogs with some real value + a plug for their service on how it solves the problem, and similar sponsored content. There is almost always to sides to both stories.

Personally, even with the recent news, I'm still having mixed feeling about the whole ordeal.

On one side I'm not against using/collecting data for the purpose of better content (=better engagement) or more targeted ads (still better than looking at ads that have nothing to do with me). Though I am for it to be anonymized (ie separating the personal data from the generic things like names from items bought) however that is pretty much useless from the moment you enter your name anywhere as they can basically fingerprint the data and match it up to you anyways.

On the flipside of this, I don't like the direction this all is going - sure I like tailored content, but at what point do we reach a threshold where people are just shoved content down their throat since they cant find stuff outside these mechanisms to broaden their view and interests.

More related to this topic, as long as the data is there, someone will analyze it, and socioeconomic targeting has been done for a while already (you don't market 8K curved suround sound TVs to 90 year olds) this is just a step up. However I'm a bit scared of when we reach the tipping point on content in terms of targeting: what we might want to see vs what it might want us to see.

I have a completely other sentiment from the top post, and a good part of my friends circle as well. I work as a developer and the business model is much clearer to me. The thing is to distinguish a service and a product. Buying a game, I expect a 1 off purchase and to own it. However if I want to have access to all the games in existance for a flat monthly fee like 50$ per month, thats a completely different story, and there's strong reasoning behind it. To run a service it perpetualy costs money so one off doesn't cut it. Either you have to pay an upfront cost of the lifetime value (which would be way to expensive) or you have to keep buying "DLCs" since the cost so far doesn't cover the furhter development.

Also Dropbox and services alike might be cheaper to host for yourself, like many other things in life - car repair or home improvements, but that only cuts it if you are savvy enough in that particular trade. Thats the first part where it adds value - it simplifies things a lot. The second part is the ecosystem of integrations and sharing, and this goes to many other services as well. I usualy host my own for a large majority of services since its low volume use a free or small instance on any cloud provider does the work, however I still have Netflix, GSuite, Drive, Play Music and a range of others since they give to me more value than just doing it myself or are not worth the time effort.

Also as a software engineer by trade I really hope more people start understanding that if you want baddass apps and games which constantly update and run on online servers, it has to cost money perpetually and you have to either pay for a subscription, look at ads, or have a freemium type of model to support the cost and eventually earn a couple bucks.

There has to be some limit to how low they can go cost wise in delivering crap. Also as it becomes harder to get big bucks, people will shift to other lines of crap work.

GDPR in my mind influences this indirectly in the long run. It's not like it will kill fake news the week after.

Depends how you look at it. You are an employee in the media space, I guess you're in an ok situation but also not swimming in cash. However I thought more in the line of media companies and solopreneurs.

Everybody seems to be joining the race to the bottom by delivering more questionable content for 2 more clicks per day instead of relevant articles and real journalism. Also not to step on anyones toes, this obviously doesn't apply to every individual, however a large majority seems to be doing it. This also makes it hard for the good guys to prevail I guess.

I think this goes for all the mainstream social networks. They are just echo chambers where people feed their ego on the ego of others. In the past 4 years I've been cutting down on all this crap, not because I couldn't handle it, but because it provides 0 value to me and only consumes time. Still got all the accounts but dont use them. Cut out snapchat, twitter, facebook, instagram and like 20 news portals. Currently only look at HN to keep up to date and sometimes open Reddit. No games no nothing on the phone. Entertainment is at home or out with friends.

I think this is a blade with two edges. I use to fast once a year and when the body slows down its great for homing on on singular tasks and getting stuff done as everything else is just too much to spend any energy on. However solving complex problems or creative work is usually done in the morning when Im still fresh and able to go outside of the box. In the end it just boils down to what you're trying to get done.

I completely disagree with this. Firstly, the media currently are too lucrative for my taste and thats why we have everyone being a journalist and publisher. By cutting down on the easy money, only those worth surviving will probably stand. This will seriously cut down on more than just ads, ie fake news and unverified sources. An alternative I'd love to see is sponsored articles as the main source of income for these. Let the corporations have to pay bigger bucks to have their posts published. This will hopefully reduce the clutter, force the media outlets to provide quality content to keep a certain level of trust and quality to attract businesses as well as a good targeted audience.

Personally I'd live to have most media completely in the dark about visitors to solely speculate on the quality of their own content. Only metric they need is daily visitor count. Everything else can be shaped by type and quality of content. A great example is HN where we have a very targeted audience due to the content it serves. It obviously also has some sponsored articles but also the indirect benefits it has on new startups and so on. Just treat it as TV marketing and not a per person customized monetization strategy.

Currently I use namecheap for their simplicity and speed yet they have all the options if you need them. Tried GoDaddy and went away screaming since they have some super shady practices. Willing to try Google Domains since I use GCP a lot but its not available to me as of now.

This is a very sad day since their work marked my childhood and I'll always cherris anything they ever touched. The very emotion and story they encapsulate is purely breadth taking. Princess Mononoke, Howls moving castle, Laputa, Spirited away are probably going to stay my all time favourites.

The author states that he didnt bother with support (luckily he had a local copy) so here are my 2 cents

I've been in the exact same spot under very similar circumstances. What I can add is that the github support was great, we got it resolved within the working day.

The repo was "deleted" to free up the private repos of my colleague but we didnt know that the fork on my account would go down with it. Its been probably a couple months till we got back to it and noticed the issue. They managed to recover the repo and unblock my fork. I just did a fresh repo and moved everything over.

While it is odd behavior, if its really bad they will probably manage to get you back on your feet.

Also Im not affiliated with github in any way just have some repos from student days over there. If it matters im on gitlab and google repos

I work for a rather large company that works with audio and video and we used Opus but have since switched to a Dolby based audio stack as it offers much better sound quality, reduced transmission bitrate and is generally more robust. However this needs a direct involvement with Dolby and not just of the shelf stuff.

Not sure why people claim they lost everything, on the bottom of the page it says: Things to Know

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