krn

> Russia has plenty of military power, it is just that Russia may not be able to handle its own military power.

For instance, like loosing more than 70% of all its tanks since the beginning of invasion[1]?

> The idea that Ukraine can resist the fully mobilized Russian Federation - military and industry is plain silly.

The idea that amateurs with zero military training could achieve more than 235,000 killed or wounded professional Russian soldiers achieved in the last 7 months sounds pretty unbelievable to me.

[1] https://www.minusrus.com/en

> But if you think "the job" of the entrepreneur is simply to have a good exit, well the world would be gravely impoverished if entrepreneurs in general shared your view.

The job of an entrepreneur is to calculate everything and to make the right decision in every situation.

There could be many reasons behind the decision to sell to Adobe for $20B:

– Maybe reaching the $20B market cap after an IPO would have taken a very long time for Figma on its own;

– Maybe were was an extremely high risk of Adobe acquiring another competitor or building a competitive product in-house;

– Maybe the investors wanted the have an exit now, 10 years after the company's creation;

– Maybe the founders had other ideas they wanted to work after their vesting with Adobe expires.

> The fact that many of the acquiring companies in these stores are still largely controlled by their founders is telling.

For some companies the right exit is IPO, for others – acquisitions. But if they took any money from investors, they must have an exit.

> Personally I don't think it IS just a matter of time before nukes are used. Putin is not a nice guy, but he isn't a comic book villain.

Whenever somebody said that "Putin is not that crazy to do X" – he eventually did exactly that.

Hear it from the Russian soldiers themselves:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/28/world/europe/...

The thing is, he might have no other choice: he is a strongman, and for any strongman loosing a war would mean the end of being in power.

> Plus this is a ground war, so any nuke ruins the land they're fighting over and kills as many of their own troops (who aren't exactly equipped for basic fighting, let alone fallout)

If you know the history of the Soviet Union, you know that they don't care about the lives of their own people, at all.

How many Soviet soldiers died in WWII? About 10M.

How many Russians soldiers died in the past 7 months alone? Between 50-80K.

> Russia has enough nukes (almost 6000, and the ability to deliver them) to annihilate any other country, and put the whole planet into nuclear winter. That makes them a super power, even if they cannot win a ground war with Ukraine. For reference, India only has 160

Many analysts point out, that all the Russian nukes are from the 1960s-1980s, and given the state of all their military equipment during the invasion there is an extremely high likelihood of complete failure to deliver any threat at all.

> You’ve essentially swapped just over 1 year of Adobe revenue for a quick exit instead of building the system that delivers $15B+ yearly by dethroning them.

The question for Figma was, if they would ever reach $20B+ market cap after an IPO, and how long it would take them to do so.

The decision to sell to Adobe was surely based on many calculations. Just like Whatsapp's decision to sell to Facebook for $19B.

> Claiming this is a good move is the same as claiming selling the iPhone or Android to Nokia for short term profit would have been a good business move.

Android Inc. was a company sold to Google in 2005 for short term profit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#His...

Where would Android be now without the backing of Google? Where would iPhone be now without the backing of Apple?

> Lots of people shared the same sentiment you just did about Instagram selling to FB. Look at them now, if IG had continued alone the idea to sell to FB would be a joke at this point.

There are multiple accounts of how many resources, human capital, and know-how Facebook put into Instagram to scale it. The same can be said about YouTube in the hands of Google.

You would probably say, that selling Vine to Twitter was a great decision, because it got eventually shut down as being worthless. But look at where Bytedance is with TikTok now.

> Russia didn’t gain military power to invade Ukraine from UN, it is in UN because it already possessed the military power.

Russia has no real military power, as the last 7 months have shown us. It was not even a founding member of the UN Security Council – the Soviet Union, a real world superpower, was.

> Now, you can say that UN failed to prevent the invasion and do its job, but expelling Russia means you’re left with no forum for dialogs and negotiations.

That's exactly my point: the UN failed to prevent the invasion, because the invading country had a veto right in all of its decisions.

Any dialogs or negotiations with Russia are an illusion of naive Western powers who don't understand how Russia really works: it doesn't care about or respect any international agreements it signs.

Source: I was born in the Soviet Union.

It's just a question of time when tactical nuclear weapons will be used in Ukraine, if Ukraine continues with the successful offensive[1].

Also, Russia is not even a world superpower: neither economically, nor militarily. It could easily be replaced by India as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2022/09/27/russia-putin...

> Could have asked if they think selling to Adobe has limited the potential of what Figma could accomplish. Could have asked about how users who supported them as a solution against Adobe might feel betrayed.

Well, it's a business, not a non-profit.

In business everything is for sale at any moment in time, if the price is high enough. Especially, when there are multiple shareholders with different goals.

As an entrepreneur he simply did his job: he built an extremely valuable company and took the best deal he could probably get for it.

Maybe a few years later he won't even be with Adobe anymore. Just like the founders of Instagram and Whatsapp are no longer with Meta.

Clickhouse is a data warehouse, not a timeseries database. Timeseries databases are designed with different bottlenecks in the mind:

https://questdb.io/blog/2020/11/26/why-timeseries-data/

If integration with PostgreSQL is not a requirement, I would suggest looking at QuestDB[1] for the best performing open-source timeseries database currently on the market.

[1] https://questdb.io/blog/2021/07/05/comparing-questdb-timesca...

> Facebook has admitted to suppressing speech in Thailand and the US.

> Twitter and reddit openly do it during election season to sway votes and opinions globally.

Could you provide any reputable sources that claim that such things were done under the direct request from the US agencies? Or is this your personal interpretation?

> No, we're just non-US people not seeing the difference between US agencies forcing FB/Google etc to hand over our data, or China forcing TikTok.

As a non-US person, I think you didn't get the point: the US agencies can only ask for data, but the Chinese agencies can push whatever software changes they want.

In other words, if China attacks Taiwan, there is nothing from stopping them of changing TikTok algorithm to deprioritize all the user content critizing its actions.

It could even make it look like the entire TikTok is supporting China just by promoting "the right" user content.

He also did a cameo in Faraway, So Close! (1993)[1] by Wim Wenders:

> Mikhail Gorbachev only appears because his secretary was familiar with the movies of Wim Wenders and was a great admirer. She talked Gorbachev into giving up a couple of hours to do the cameo as he was on a trip to Germany anyway.

[1] https://imdb.com/title/tt0107209/mediaviewer/rm1602489600

> Many generalizations really don't work for such a vast and diverse region.

I think the right solution here is to divide the region into Central Europe, The Balkan Region, and The Western CIS and Caucasus:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Map-of-Eastern-Europ...

> Are you migrating away from Heroku? If so, which cloud provider are you using (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc)? What's your stack and what service are you migrating to (ECS, Elastic Beanstalk, etc)?

I see only two real Heroku competitors: Render and Fly.io.

It seems that Render is currently better at developer experience, and Fly.io – at geographical availability.

OVH has datacenters in four continents:

https://us.ovhcloud.com/about/company/data-centers

Longevity is not about medicine – it's about lifestyle:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6125071/

Related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29429558

I have two completely different takes on this.

On one hand, if a business generating almost $500M in revenue per year[1] is doing something illegal, it shouldn't be allowed to operate. Simple as that. If it is allowed to operate, then it should have access to the same payment methods as any other business.

On another hand, if I belonged to a group of people who believe that such companies shouldn't exist[2] and had no way of getting them banned completely, that's exactly what I would try to do: force their biggest business partners to cut ties with them.

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

[2] https://exoduscry.com/

How does this compare with https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn ?

That's why any new open-source project designed to be run in different environments should prefer Go over Ruby:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31686536

They would have never been able to raise three consecutive rounds with increasing valuations without demonstrating to VCs the growth they typically demand.

When you are building a SaaS product that only runs on your servers, you can use whatever you want.

But when you are building an OSS product, there are a couple of more things to consider: those who will run it, and those who will contribute to it.

For instance, I love the idea of Nextcloud, but I would neither run it, nor contribute to it as long, as it is written in PHP.

Currently, there are 161 comments on Hacker News with the words "Nextcloud" and "slow" in them:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

The same applies to Gitlab, which is written in Ruby and runs on Ruby on Rails under the hood.

Currently, there are 1,656 comments on Hacker News with the words "Gitlab" and "slow" in them:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Had they made the right technological choices from beginning, there would be no need for articles such as "Why We’re Sticking with Ruby on Rails at GitLab" in 2022:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31684529

With the CEO of the Gitlab admitting in the comments:

> Performance is indeed worse. We're moving the 20% of the app consuming 80% of the compute to Go.

The Retool's founder explained this in the linked comment:

> TBH, fundraising is kind of like charades: it's a way to signal you are doing well, without telling people your private company metrics. I wish we never needed to fundraise, and could just focus on building great products and working with customers instead. :)

> But I’m interested to know from others the extent to which code base & framework decisions of the tool impacted adoption decision.

I tend to judge the technical foundations of an open-source project by the programming language it is primarily written in.

From my experience, the highest quality implementations these days come either in Rust, Go, Clojure, Python, or TypeScript.

For older and well-established projects, it's usually C, C++, and Java.

I think what's important here, is not only the performance and the design of the programming language, but the entire ecosystem around it.

I am much more likely to rely on an open-source code that itself relies on high quality battle-tested dependencies.

> More interested on how you secured the investment.

Here seems to be the answer: create an open-source alternative to a B2B SaaS product with $xxxM valuation, and then demonstrate a huge traction on Github in a very short period of time.

The investors will get in touch with you themselves.

> I'm currently pitching for seed for a profitable algorithmic trading company. Cold contacted nearly 60 investors, heard back from 7. Secured one client but no seed yet.

Would an algorithmic trading company be considered as a software company or as a hedge fund?

To put it into a little context: ToolJet seems to be the leading open-source alternative to Retool, which has recently raised money at $3.2B valuation[1].

Moreover, according to the founder, Retool hasn't even needed any VC money for a couple of years now[2]:

> We actually didn't need the money (we're cashflow-positive). In fact, we haven't touched the money from our Series B (in 2020) nor our Series C (in 2021).

So, ToolJet obviously must look like an attractive investment to any early stage VC in this software category.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32264454

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32264969

Yes, these are two different meanings of "stable".

In Clojure, "stable" means that your code remains working after the upgrades of its dependencies.

In Python, "stable" means that the dependencies themselves remain upgraded.

I am not suggesting that one thing is better than the other. What I meant, is that one thing is more attractive than the other for an average developer.

Currently, there are very few Clojure libraries from a decade ago that are still being actively maintained today.

What I meant, is frameworks like Django, Flask, and PyTorch. Also, libraries like Pandas, SciPy, and NumPy. That's what Clojure is missing the most for an average software engineer: simple and easy choices, that can remain relevant for decades.

> When revisiting old projects I have seen countless of Clojure dependencies having died in the meantime. I have replaced utility libraries with more recent utility libraries sometimes several times. Very annoying.

Yes, the "best in class" libraries change every few years in Clojure's universe, but they always bring huge improvements that require completely new APIs.

For instance:

https://github.com/plumatic/schema -> https://github.com/metosin/malli

https://github.com/juxt/bidi -> https://github.com/metosin/reitit

https://github.com/bhauman/lein-figwheel -> https://github.com/thheller/shadow-cljs

https://github.com/stuartsierra/component -> https://github.com/weavejester/integrant

https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen -> https://github.com/practicalli/clojure-deps-edn

> So overall Clojure is in a strange situation. For picking it up on-the-job its not the responsible choice probably for most situations I work in. For my private tinkering the JVM dependency feels just a little too heavyweight. I don't see that Clojure will hit an inflection point of adoption in any way in the future that would make it a viable candidate for me to use at work.

I think about programming languages as tools for different bottlenecks.

– Computational: Rust

– Networking: Go

– Business logic: Clojure / Python

And for many people Python has everything that Clojure is missing: a very low barrier to enter, and a very stable and well-documented ecosystem of frameworks and libraries.

> For my company, neither egress nor storage cost are the big issue. It’s the API call (PUT) cost.

> We are write heavy. Reads are probably 1% but need to be instant for a good UI and API experience.

It sounds like the recently released OVH High Performance Object Storage[1] might be a good fit.

It has better performance than S3[2], completely free API calls, and $0.015 / GB egress.

[1] https://corporate.ovhcloud.com/en/newsroom/news/high-perform...

[2] https://blog.ovhcloud.com/what-is-the-real-performance-of-th...

> I dream of a SQLite-like embeddable database engine based on Datomic’s data model and queryable with Datalog.

You can have this today by running XTDB[1] on top of SQLite via JDBC.

> Written in something like C, Rust, or Zig.

And then compiling your application into native executables with GraalVM Native Image[2].

[1] https://xtdb.com/

[2] https://www.graalvm.org/native-image/