cvwright

“Last Christmas” is definitely the worst. By far.

I have a PhD in CS, with peer reviewed publications on using cryptography, and all I learned in my studies is that it’s practically impossible to build a secure voting machine.

I even took a class from a professor who regularly testified to congress on the topic.

Paper ballots all the way.

They have done this since forever, even under the previous ownership. The “flavor” of the political content was different then, but it’s always been annoying. One of the worst features of the site.

This depends entirely on the neighbors

Lots of techies out in Bend though

Many years ago, I was a grad TA at a school that is now top 10 in the US. Based on that experience, I think everyone paying full freight at these schools is buying their grades. It was de facto impossible to fail any student for cheating, or to punish them in any real way.

Too bad too, since the half of undergrads who weren’t cheaters were the nicest, brightest, salt-of-the-earth people.

I think the uncomfortable question for many here is, why should the SWE at Google get paid any more than the SWE at the NY Times?

The world is not just stuff!

The problem with this perspective is that iOS is where the money is. Almost ALL the money.

So if western B2C companies have to pick just one platform to start with, it will almost always be iOS. This lets them then port that initial app to Android once they are established with western audiences, so they can also serve the (much larger, much less profitable) rest of the world.

Yeah we definitely wouldn’t want them chasing fads. Like, say, crypto currencies for example.

https://www.wired.com/story/signal-mobilecoin-cryptocurrency...

Especially when we import millions of low-skill / no-skill people every year to compete with the poor people who were born here.

Works great for the upper classes - keeps the price down for those fancy Michelin dinners.

And yet they had no problem springing into action to have him arrested on a weekend. Funny how that works.

Probably more that lots of kids will try super hard to be good at sports. Being good at school carries a certain level of stigma and lots of kids who could be “smart” choose to slack instead.

US Air buying American Airlines just to become American Airlines, is one of my (least) favorites

Clearly it's the E[l|r]on problem now

Then why do you care? If nobody is going to fork it anyway, what’s the benefit of being open source from the beginning?

According to the last 107 years of history, yes.

Making $10M ARR companies pay for the software that they use is not enshittification.

BSL code automatically converts to open source at a specified date. So probably several releases since then are now as open source as anything else in the world. And if not, then they will be soon - BSL allows a maximum 5 year delay.

I have about 30k lines of Swift in my app + Matrix sdk, all heavily using async/await. Plus another couple kloc in a Vapor API backend.

Swift async/await is quite nice.

The Actor stuff is IMO way oversold - reentrancy issues make it not actually useful for the things that they claim, like querying a database. It’s still a useful construct to have, you just need to be aware of what it does or doesn’t provide.

True, but we are living through an obesity epidemic, and it’s not just the rich people who are fat.

Ah, yes you do have to run a service of some kind to interface with Apple. For example the Matrix project provides Sygnal https://github.com/matrix-org/sygnal which the owner of a Matrix client can run on their own systems.

It's not super resource-intensive if you run it yourself, but I can imagine how a "buy vs build" decision for other apps could easily lead to a $$$ monthly subscription with a specialized 3rd party.

These prices make sense when you consider that the bulk of the cost of providing Zulip to you is not the cost of the compute and storage and bandwidth - those are fairly minimal.

It’s the cost of the developers who fix bugs and keep the product moving forward. Those cost a lot more, and you need them regardless of where your instance is hosted.

I don’t think Apple charges for APNS do they?

I have 500-600 users on my app and have never paid. Maybe it’s different at scale?

Also, that’s about half of what you’d pay for 11 users on most other group chat services.

From what I can tell, the average is about $8/user/month. And no, I don’t understand it. For my former employer, a large public university, these services would cost about $240k/month before any special discounts. For that price you could hire a whole team to build and run your own product. Make it make sense.

Your story supports the position that it's safer to take the FAANG job.

This guy found an underserved market opportunity, built something, got some success marketing it, and made a whopping total of $40k.

Meanwhile the FAANG guys are making that every two months, without all the risk.

That's not bad advice - you just managed to overcome a lot of real obstacles. Humble brag.

The community has been trained over many years to believe that anything FOSS is immediately trustworthy, and that anything non-FOSS is immediately untrustworthy.

This gets exploited all the time when companies use FOSS licenses to get traction, then pull the rug and switch to a more restrictive license once customers are locked in.

On the flip side, if a company tries to be honest from the beginning by using BSL (or similar) they get endless grief from religious zealots.

AGPL is the magic unicorn license that is just restrictive enough to protect you from your competitors, while still passing the FOSS religious purity test.

Many of them are going AGPL, including the one we're discussing. Also recently Minio and the Synapse Matrix server from Element.

It's not necessarily about being better. Sometimes a competitor can beat you just by being cheaper, or by being better connected.

One example is that the Matrix project recently took a budget hit when the core team apparently lost a big bid to a "large system integrator" who seems to have used their own open source code to bid against them.