dgudkov

Google and Facebook have attributes of "virtual" governments. Similarly to an IRL government, they provide to citizens identity, protection of assets, and policing. From that perspective, their ad-based monetization is indirect taxation.

Substack bundling is inevitable as subscription-based blogging matures. It's just a matter of time until we start seeing offers "Subscribe to top authors A, B, and C, for only $X/mo".

I guess every public internet policy should now include a clause such as "We reserve the right to not do any business with you if we don't like you, regardless of any other provision of the policy".

At least, it will be honest.

PS. Variations may include: "...if we don't like you OR we don't like anyone you like...".

Then it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that such nefarious people have already infiltrated Facebook and other tech giants. And they are not amateurs. Given the extraordinary value of access to the information possessed by the big tech corporations, we can expect a level of sophistication that would be on par with Cold War-era espionage.

It seems like employees are becoming the weakest link in cloud security. If Google will be breached one day, most probably it will happen not because of a technical vulnerability, but due to employee sabotage.

I'm pretty sure that at exactly this moment somewhere someone criminal is already analyzing organization structures, employee profiles, internal security policies and tools of the cloud giants.

Twitter could've been so much better if people could post into different channels instead of dumping everything into one feed. Humans are multi-faceted beings and their communication is multi-faceted too. Not supporting it in communication software is just poor abstraction.

I want to be able to choose which facet of a person I'm interested in, and which not. Instead, Twitter proposes the "all or nothing" approach. Either you follow everything, or nothing. No wonder we have strong social polarization and social bubbles.

>costing Canada billions

Sometimes you can't have both principles and profit at the same time.

Why do you need VC having such growth rate? Get a loan. If you're at least 95% sure that your business will work out (and the growth rate strongly indicates that) why would you want to pay with equity?

It's hard to see the VCs as victims of commoditization because the VCs commoditize it themselves. They hunt for cash-starved startups by sending out tons of rubber-stamped emails without having any clue about what the recipients do and what makes them special.

Many Canadian banks allow sending wire transfers online. For instance, with RBC you can send up to CAD 10K equivalent online for a CAD 15-20 fee. The UI is rather simple and they even have 2FA for transfers. RBC also has the more advanced RBC Express for online banking but I don't know much about it.

However, it's still worse than TransferWise. If a wire transfer is sent via RBC online, the actual amount received by the recipient is frequently $25-27 less which is supposedly due to some random routing fee (it's not possible to specify an intermediary bank in RBC online). As a result, the total cost of a wire transfer ends up being CAD 45-50. In TransferWise a wire transfer costs C$6 to send and the received amount is always the same as the sent. The UI is simple, and the support is helpful (never had problems with them).

When you see a chart* with a non zero-based Y-axis you can be sure that the article that includes the chart either has an agenda or tries to sensationalize things.

* Note: there are few exceptions where the absolute value is not important, only the fluctuations are, e.g. stock charts.

>Text is the oldest and most stable communication technology.

I disagree. Drawing pictures is the oldest communication technology. Pictures evolved into text eventually. Characters in early texts frequently are just small pictures. Understanding pictures is easier than understanding text because of smaller cognitive load.

Text helps with 2 things: condensing information and manipulating abstractions that don't have an unambiguous visual representation (such as hope or price). But it comes at the price of needing to learn the alphabet and dictionary and apply them to mentally decode what is otherwise just a cryptic drawing.

Text may be more efficient in some cases, but say it's better universally is moot. For instance, texts are very bad for representing non-linear, concurrent workflows. Pictures are way more better in this case.

>Text is the most efficient communication technology.

It heavily depends on what you're going to communicate. For a blog post, text may be better. In other cases, a picture may be worth a thousand of words.

The article may have good points, but it's full of poor statements.

That's a mystery to me. I'm not interested in commercial sport at all. I never google games or scores or players. When I use Flipboard, it always, always inserts sport news into my feed no matter how hard I try to suppress, block, or mute sport topics in my feed. I start suspecting that it's some kind of sponsored promotion that obliges Flipboard to inject sport news into the feed.

>If you've got an automated vetting process with a 99.999% success rate, but are dealing with billions of accounts, that's still tens of thousands of false positives.

Doesn't matter. If you're dealing with billions of accounts then you're earning billions of dollars. Just hire more people. Scale must never be an excuse for poor customer service.

You're correct, 25 days ago.

A free plan is OK as long as you understand that it's just a way of doing marketing. As with any marketing effort, you should keep the costs under control.

As with any marketing, it's easy to get it wrong. "Don't offer a free plan" is a good advice if there is a problem understanding the balance between revenue generation and expenses or there is a better way of doing marketing, but it's hardly a universal recommendation.

Free plans usually a good idea for a starting business when you look for approval from your target audience and stabilize the product. As companies grow, confirm product/market fit, polish the product, and discover more efficient ways of doing marketing, it's perfectly OK to discontinue the free plan.

Are you still interested in visual programming? If yes, I would appreciate having a chat (I develop a visual programming tool).

This supports the prediction [1] posted on HN 2 months ago.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25766736

Articles like that is why I keep reading HN. Excellent write-up.

After reading "Principles" by Ray Dalio [1], I think the winner was pronounced a bit too soon.

[1] https://www.principles.com/the-changing-world-order/

Can't think of any vertical FOSS. Can you?

What viable SaaS strategy can you have if Amazon can come at any moment and do the same?

>Caused by eating too much and probably minimal to no physical activity.

Eating too much is probably true. Healthy natural food though doesn't make you want to eat often or too much. People eat too much because they eat highly processed food with lots of sugar, salt, and artificial flavoring. Unfortunately, eating good food in North America is not possible without making a special effort. Learning how to cook is part of this effort.

>Why does EVERYTHING have sugar in it?

I suspect that added sugar increases sales.

That's why I believe the right payment model for paid apps/services is being able to sponsor another user.

>security is as much about discipline as the actual security you implement

Totally agree on that. The author's main ranting about Yubikey is that it requires developing new habits, but that's exactly the point.

>they're not promoting their value to sites in a way that implementation is a no-brainer.

That's a good point. Although, poor adoption of hardware tokens even by banks (e.g. no bank in Canada supports Yubikey) is surely not because it's hard to implement. It's a "chicken-or-egg" problem. Organizations don't support hardware tokens because few people use them, and few people use tokens because many organizations don't support them anyway. Yubikey and other hardware token vendors could've done a better job promoting and simplifying using hardware tokens.

It is a problem anyway, I agree. It's incorrect to attribute the problem specifically to Yubikeys.

They author makes a few good points, but I find the author's critique of Yubikey weak:

>Cost. The average YubiKey is £50...

If that's too expensive for ensuring your internet security, then either you underestimate the risks, or undervalue your information. If a Yubikey cost 10 times more it would still be a bargain.

>Usability. Buy a device, register it, install the app, configure it, find the setting in the website, enable it, hope your machine has the right sort of USB ports, press the button at the right time.

Pressing the button at the right tight was a joke, right? Although, I admit it may be challenging for people with disabilities. Websites making it hard to find 2FA settings is not a Yubikey's problem, it's a website problem. Setting up a Yubikey is rather straight forward too. The main issue is the inability to clone a Yubikey programmatically, but that's the price of security.

>Convenience. My YubiKey is on my keyring. My keys are in my coat...

That's can't be serious too. I won't even elaborate on this.

>Risk. YubiKeys have no password lock of their own. At least my crumby Android has a fingerprint lock to prevent people getting my 2FA tokens. But if you’ve stolen my laptop and the YubiKey is plugged in, then you’ve got the keys to my kingdom.

That's actually the only valid point I somewhat agree with. Again, this is largely mitigated by developing the right habits. You don't leave your car keys hanging in your car's lock after leaving the car in a parking lot, right? Then why do it with Yubikey? If developing a new minor habit represents a problem, then either you underestimate the risks, or undervalue your information.

An additional password/fingerprint protection would be nice though. I agree on that.

>Support. WebAuthn is a great standard – but only a few sites support it...

Again, this is not a Yubikey's problem. It's a website problem.

>Is there anything in particular that makes you believe that it'll eventually happen?

Humans have demonstrated the ability to eventually improve social systems to make them account for the needs and demands of the majority of stakeholders. In the offline world it has evolved into what is known as democracy. It started several centuries ago and eventually evolved into modern governments as we know it - publicly elected management boards.

Recently, there was an excellent article [1] on HN. It rightfully compared the current state of internet to the feudal times and warlords common in the offline world many centuries ago. From that point through a long and painful process we've come to elected governments as the most sustainable form of governing a large number of humans. All other forms of government turned out to be unsustainable (no matter how attractive they were to certain individuals or organizations) and inevitably led to all kinds of social catastrophes.

I believe, the same will eventually happen to the internet, our new brave world we used to love, but now seem to become increasingly disenchanted with.

[1] https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-...

One corporation must not have so much power over billions of citizens of many countries. A power like that must only come from a transparent non-profit organization with a publicly elected management board.

We will get to that point sooner or later. But the road there will be long and painful.