RowanH

Kiwi checking in - was a thing here as well.

Blows my mind what we all do now would have been absolute voodoo magic by comparison.

If we had gone back in a time machine and shown HDR 4k video upload, available to stream all around the world off peoples phones, live chat alongside, across devices / platforms.

I think they would have an aneurysm.

You're welcome ! Best wishes for your business :)

> My wife and I have a profitable business here in SF that would be perfect as a startup

Keep doing what you're doing.

Being VC funded shouldn't be the holy grail - the holy grail is having a business you enjoy doing, that's making you the life you want.

For some the life you want is pitching, raising, getting the kudos of the big numbers, onto the next raise etc.

For some the life you want is the complete opposite and bootstrapping it.

For some it's just all about the technical aspect, coding the next crazy thing.

There's no wrong or right answer in how you get to the 'happy place'.

You know in your heart of hearts what drives you, and what you'll be happy doing.

Me : I'd been with the money men for a period of years and it's super stressful, board reporting, projections, market analysis etc.

Now I've got my little B2B SaaS startup that's blended a life long passion with my software chops, and our clients love us, we get to work with the absolutely best people in our industry, we're making a difference in their lives, and they in turn pay us money.

It's hard, rewarding, graft. At the end of the week when the money lands in stripe (for me..) there's nothing artificial, there's no projections, there's no-one to pay back, it's a 100% value exchange of 'heres my(our) hardwork, here's a product and you're giving me money for it'.

Sure - could I potentially have gone the VC route (maybe!). Would it be different, hell yes. Would I (probably) earn more ultimately 5 years down the line (sure?). That 5 years would be very, very different...

This is starting to happen in New Zealand - either increased rates or simply no coverage. For different reasons - flood & slip events.

Re-insurance rates have gone through the roof through 3-4 weather events over the past 2 years. No signs of slowing down...

I think this line is (a) most accurate and (b) rings true to your list

"as is always the case with earthquakes, everyone will just have to wait and see what happens"

Oh well, off to watch a B-Grade disaster movie then ..

While (I don't even need to read it) yes it's more than likely clickbait, but having any car where the backup mechanical door releases in all seats of the car aren't blindingly obvious is an incredibly stupid design decision. For some Tesla models the rear door releases have actual manuals on how to release (https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-AAD769C...)

In a proper accident, where power is likely cut, and the occupants are disoriented (anyone who's been in a rollover will know this), the last thing you want to be is fumbling around trying to get out of the car.

I don't understand how they got approved in NZ. If you were to scratch build a car here with the same door release, you'd fail certification.

I can totally see some uninformed staff member contributing what they're paying for things, and landing their employer in deep, deep, trouble with their suppliers.

I've found in competitive price analysis there's some companies that do very, very, well at hiding their pricing. If they've worked that hard, that long, to protect/hide pricing they're not going to take it lying down.

This. Imagine my suprise growing up on NZ Marmite, to open a jar of British Marmite and go 'wtf is that slightly gooey stuff'.

There's 3 very distinct camps in NZ. Love Marmite - what's wrong with you Vegemite people Love Vegemite - what's wrong with you Marmite people None of the above - what's wrong with the lot of you

:)

The 'American Dream' is very similar in a lot of the OECD nations.

NZ'er checking in. Late 40's - a good portion/most of my peer group bought houses in their mid 20's to 30's. Now the same age range can't unless they've got mega inehitances or very, very, good jobs.

Ditto UK/Australia/Canada etc.

All countries to a greater or lesser degree have the same cost of living crisis (arguably NZ is one of the worst at the moment).

I guess there's degrees of lock-in. I.e. using some parts of AWS you know push comes to shove you could write a different alternative/use a different library. It's a bunch of building blocks. There's various alternatives out there for components.

Without reading too much of Partykit + Cloudflare, if you base your whole architecture on the way one company works and perhaps the pricing is too good to be true, you're setting yourself up for a rude shock in future.

Everytime I've looked at Cloudflare's pricing I've gone "that's bonkers cheap" for what you're getting, which sets off alarm bells that once a PE company gets their hands on it, it's not going to be that cheap any more.

Christchurch quake had 10's of thousands of aftershocks. A few people I know were rattled to the point they were shell shocked and just had to leave town - every tremor triggering off "could this be it" all over again.

There's actually some interesting visuals that illustrate this showing the difference in ground velocity between the two earthquakes :

2010 Quake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA5m5PZ5p8E

2011 Quake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJW7tkTwqXo

And a good explanation vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaA1nxYVi6k

The VPN (much like Meta's) is doing some root cert trickery to filter content that is deemed inappropriate or potentially inappropriate. This appeared to be controlled by a Company A in another country that undoubtedly contracted to Y religion to be their central point of content filtering globally.

So, member of the church? you get this VPN on your phone, (not sure whether phone was supplied by the church, but certainly this VPN was on it) VPN is effectively content filtering and blocking content.

I had our app whitelisted by that central company (literally raised a ticket with them, next day magically fixed).

It's not corporate level it was/is religious group level (of which this particular org I'm guessing largely employed staff from that religion). They are well known within our country to be quite insular.

It certainly seemed for all intents and purposes if you were a member of _____ group (wider than the company) you had the vpn on your device, and it was filtering content. I've found other reports in other countries of that happening with the same group.

So it's not corporate content filtering, it's personal content filtering and our app got caught up in it (and approved).

It certainly made my skin crawl for anyone in that religion. That means the central filtering service could be reading messages. Not sure if they're that sophisticated but certainly they didn't want people to see random images/videos.

So this one time, I had a bug report at a client site. The business was largely a member of _______ religion. Our images wouldn't load in the app, but did on the website. How odd I thought, that doesn't make sense! Luckily I was able to be physically present, so I hopped down with laptop in tow, ssh'd into the server and started tailing logs....

Sure enough all the API requests for data were coming through, but whenever a request for image happened - nothing would hit the servers.

What the heck I thought to myself?

I said to the client 'that can't be, that's almost impossible....the only way that's possible is if the SSL traffic is decrypted, inspected, and images blocked from being requested, which, is a MITM attack".

He redirected me to his IT provider. I phoned them up, and explained the situation.

"Ahh so they're _____"

Me: "So what does that have to do with the price of fish?"

Them : "Content filtering..., you need to talk to ____"

Sure as the day is long, the content filter was a VPN all members of ____ had to have on their mobile devices (I don't know how widespread this is, whether it was just this business, or the entire ____ )

I applied to have our system approved, it was, and just like magic the next day photos started coming through.

I'm guessing basically it detected any .jpg/.mp4 etc URL's in https requests and flagged it up and blocked them from being requested. You can be sure on those devices the VPN would have been somehow locked in with device management, and there's no way on gods green earth they were getting at Facebook/insta etc.

So, it's not just meta. That really hammered home how seamless it can be to end users that they really can't trust what's actually happening on their devices.

Yes and no. We have a lot of temp workers (students/under 30's) who come for the adventure, get sick of living in a van and going home again after their working holiday is done.

Some other people are willing to justify it (eg coming from the bay area). But I think the reality once they get here is different - about 3-4 years ago I was running a software co that was recruiting a bit of overseas people for the skills we needed, we started to get a few that would leave the country after they realised 'maybe the grass isn't greener'

catch 22 - if the housing market drops significantly, the country will be very close to going bankrupt, so all they can do is let air out as slowly as humanly possible.

A full on crash would be ugly. No matter what part of society you live in (well maybe except the 0.1%).

Labour did a pump and dump on immigration to make the books look a (tiny) bit better). National well, yes..

Kiwi checking in ... crossing fingers we're not about to enter the crash stage, but certainly the contrast in the past 2-3 years from property just flying out the door (low interest rates) to now (high-ish interest rates, lots of low rate mortgages rolling over) are very stark. Auction clearance rates are well, well down. Lots of houses getting passed in at auction which would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

Still having massive migration numbers which may stave off a full crash as ultimately there is an element of supply and demand - very very hard to get rentals.

I bet the Apple apps have much, much, better background activity/services support. Doing "background" uploads is nothing short of painful compared to Android.

While we never want to compete with core Apple apps, we're constantly having to say 'sorry that's the restrictions running on Apple' with background support.

(our usecase is we have a B2B app that has visual progress reports - so we'll have the same people on a team - the Android ones get their progress reports uploaded instantly, the iOS ones 'sorry keep your phone open'.)

Exactly - you can have thoughts all day long. Everyone can dream up ideas. Hell, world peace tomorrow is a great one.

Executing them on the otherhand, that's hard, and well - it's is the only thing that matters.

It's just what are the odds of 10% of a billion vs 100% of a million.

Without any statistics at all to back this comment, I bet there are a magnitures more software companies out there that have made people 100% of a million, vs 10% of a billon. You're talking such a small pool (which might seem large in HN terms) when in reality there's an incredible number of small software companies globally.

Of course not discouraging anyone from shooting for the moon.

New Zealand is going bananas, we had a series of weather events that massively drew down on insurance, 6-18months later everyone's getting whacked with big increases. Furthermore insurance companies are starting to take the position of 'we won't insure x/y/z strips of land - too risky' (where councils really shouldn't have allowed building in the first place)

Times are going to get interesting..

In NZ - ditto growing up had the milk delivery service. Now it was a long distance memory until we moved to a smaller town/city. To our surprise one of the independent milk companies had a delivery service and up until a few months ago there was a glass bottle based delivery service of proper milk (the kind with thick fat/cream on the top..). Absolutely magic.

Alas cost of living took hold and they stopped the service, so sadly off to the store for the milk now. They didn't even put up an option of 'we can't afford to keep this going, so how much would you pay extra for it'

I bet they would have been surprised what people would illogically pay to have their milk and eggs delivered...

Went to Bali many years ago. GoJek App - you could get almost anything done on it. Order in food, get your medicines, go book a taxi - you name it, it did it. The convenience was fantastic. While everyone was all up in arms about Uber, this was next level. Probably not super slick to the nth degree, but hellishly functional...

Rookie move having the cat on the desk while ssh'd into prod...

I provide software to car restoration industry. Absolutely this … modern cars are becoming paperweights much quicker than their previous generations. Now are they safer/quieter/more efficient, absolutely ! Are they in landfill less than 10 years, absolutely…

While not open source have a look at dhtlmx gantt, after starting to integrate it you’ll come to realise the sheer amount of work to get a Gantt chart working how you mostly expect it to. There’s just so many little features that you need to implement it’s mind boggling.

It really depends on a bunch of factors, if you've capped out your total addressable market, and/or there's no fat to cut out of the business (i.e. potential is limited) lots of competitors etc, then a low valuation is reasonable.

But if you're growing, have big upside, and can be a rollup or been operating quite inefficiently 4x would be ridiculously low.

Yeah so in an ERP platform, you (well the client) needs to pay for a feature they want to be built ontop of the platform. It may have additional tables/data structures added into the ERP system or outside of it. Sure an ERP might have say an "Field Service Module" add-on you can get. But if you're a Spa Pool shop, there might be a whole bunch of things you do spa pool specific, eg taking water chemistry measurements. With an ERP system to add say a 'chemistry tracker add-on', you're very unlikely to find one off the shelf, so you need to customise the ERP system to do it. By the end of having an ERP system that works for your Spa Pool Empire you've blown $100'000's to $millions.

The alternative is some scrappy startup does a SaaS platform for Spa Pool shops and builds the features natively. Not being hamstrung by the ERP platform, so no compromises - no UI's that look like an ugly duckling. And of course they learn every new spa pool shop that comes onboard, adapts and improves.

Eventually the SaaS software startup will become the Spa Pool system of choice, and will come up against the ERP platforms in sales pitches.

One will be ready to go for a Spa Pool shop, the other will have a team of consultants wanting to do requirements gathering....

That's the problem with ERPs, when a vertical/niche has got dedicated software, the ERPs almost always look inferior*

* Upto a certain business size/throughput/specialised requirements, then Mega Spa Pool corp is okay paying millions to have their own ERP team.

The problems with ERP is (1) in order to be a big player you have to cater for so many use cases it starts becoming a glorified development tool without any room for providing actual ROI to the vertical that wants to buy it. (2) it's very, very easy to fall into the trap of saying "well, process x is really no different in industry y, we can adapt the ERP system". In reality there's so many nuances that the platform becomes compromise.

Vertical specific software provides so much more value as you can build things unencumbered by the engine/data structures/way things work.

I've found our niche - ERP's would be hopelessly expensive so save for top tier OE companies no one uses it. In weeks we can develop and roll out features & functionality that our clients just lap up that you would never in a million years build into an ERP platform, but is intrinsic to the delivery of our clients products.

It was inconceivable to me 2 years ago, but now I've had very real discussions with some companies where they're looking at our software going "wow... you're going to give mid tier players better functionality that we could only dream of from our ERP systems.."

Basically ERP platforms are "jack of all trades, master of none".

In my former life we did vertical specific software for the window and door industry. Every time we heard from a prospect "oh we're looking at __some ERP platform__ to do configuration of W&D", we'd immediately list dozens of reasons why they would fail, and fail hard.. countless untold money to consulting teams has been burned learning those lessons.