1,583 karma · joined August 17, 2009
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> Signal's funding is only a recent event, and one could ask how long that would last too, since Signal doesn't even have a paid service.
Recency doesn't make a difference for users considering joining it now (only for why they may not have joined previously). $50M should be plenty to run a service for, say, 10 years, assuming they don't hire a huge number of employees.
As Wikimedia has demonstrated, a paid service isn't required to survive long-term. Certainly, users (and maybe companies) would be willing to donate to a non-profit foundation, whereas doing so to a for-profit company like Wire seems implausible.
Especially in the context of the OP article, the source of the funding of the app and service is pertty important, as it informs the motives, and for-profit motives generally seem to have been, historically, not in the best interests of the users.
Part of the appeal of Signal is that it's supported by a well-endowed non-profit.
Is the desktop client a "first class" one? Can I use it exclusively, including for initial signup?
A sibling comment implies the answer is "no", but it's ambiguous, since "linking" could just mean the SMS validation, which, IIUC, need not actually match the phone number on the device [1].
[1] presumably a tablet would work and does not necessarily even have an associated phone number, but that's still not a desktop.
If that's still the case, it's understandably a hard sell for users who prefer a laptop/desktop-based interface.
It's also unclear how well something like Signal would replicate the social network aspects of FB/IG. Are group chat facilities good enough?
That's a situation fairly far removed from a VC refusing to invest because the company isn't imitating a FAANG's architecture.
How often is this borne of ignorance, though?
> in the past there were a lot of story's about companies that needed to rebuild there system
More specifically, are investors merely remembering the struggles of the dot-com boom, when transistor density was one thousandth that of today?
Internet usage (number of users and number of services each one uses) has grown, too, but I haven't seen statistics that suggest this would be more than 100x of 20 years ago.
> Although it makes sense to ignore scaling at the beginning you need to design your application in a way that you can easily transition to something that can scale.
This presents a false dichotomy. One doesn't have to ignore scaling at the beginning to make the decision to trade initial time-to-market for eventual "horizontal" scalability (usually what is meant by "can scale" [1]), but that may be what happens in practice.
[1] even though one can buy a remarkably large single server 3-6x price premiums over mid-range single servers, as well as use other, more traditional techniques, before "needing" to rebuild the entire system.
I'd argue that blades are already bordering on being outside of "commodity", at least in this context reliability, since a single chassis replaces some number of actually-commodity standalone boxes with both shared PoFs and highly-customized designs (especially high density that results in thermal unreliability if not outright failure).
[1] Although some blade systems did offer things like integrated shared switches, they failed to make them cheap enough, so, in practice, it didn't happen. Personally, I suspect there was never enough advantage to putting ethernet or even InfiniBand on a backplane instead of cables, not at blade chassis scale of a dozen nodes.
Probably no even if it's 50x that at 1TB/year, unless it's in very small chunks and/or requires an outsized amount of (possibly realtime) processing.
Current commodity servers will scale up to 12TiB of main memory, and if you're willing to use previous generation CPUs, those servers can twice the RAM (24TiB). Under half a megabuck without storage.
Nor the underlying infrastructure, such as, for example, physical server hardware that's a fraction of the cost of cloud.
It's been more than a few years since I've looked, but any love didn't, then, translate to a diversity of products, transparency in pricing (e.g. ease of obtaining quotes), and/or significantly lower premiums (or discounts for periods of double coverage).
For many people, I think you have this backwards. That is, they seek an increased income in order to support increased spending, such as for raising children.
Regardless, the kind of savings discipline you propose seems like it would apply to a minority of those near the start of their careers.
For it to be useful long-term, you'll need to find a policy with both guaranteed renewal and guaranteed coverage increase as your income rises, before any chronic conditions appear (or are diagnosed) or things like car accidents occur and become pre-existing conditions.
There are other details that make shopping for a policy tedious/tricky, such as differences in "own occupation" coverage, post-disability inflation protection not being standard, and the fact that you probably want to choose a company that'll be solvent 40 years later (since there's no pre-existing condition exclusion-exception portability like for health insurance, AFAIK).
Meanwhile, while you're employed, those payments, which can be $50-$100/mo post-tax, may be a total waste, since your employer is likely paying for group disability coverage, and no (reasonably-priced) policy will double-pay. Usually, anything you get from Social Security (or any state-mandated) disability will also reduce the benefit. That is, the total from all sources will be capped by the most generous policy at somewhere around 60% of pre-disability income.
The market seems to be geared toward self-employed professionals, such as dentists, rather than the typical tech worker.
All that said, here's my advice: If your employer offers you a "tax option" or "imputed income" on the disability insurance premium, choose it (and if they don't offer it, ask for it). Paying the extra few dollars per paycheck in tax will mean that 60%-of-pre-disability-income won't be subject to income tax and would actually be close to a total income replacement.
>> I realize that some participants may consider it a part of a hobby
My point is that, since it can be a chore [1], not a hobby, time is a relevant part of any discussion of cost, and omitting or dismissing it is inappropriate.
[1] or the strawman of a career, I guess
...or reduce performance on otherwise perfectly good hardware, possibly due to the those changes or the "20 features nobody wants".
I'm a computer professional, and even I have this anti-update attitude for exactly that reason. At least I have the competence to mitigate the security risks through other means, but I can't well recommend anyone else do the same. To quote Tom Lehrer, this makes me feel "like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis".
If that's true, then I'd hope the analysis to mention something like "and an hour or two" in addition to mentioning the dollar cost savings for 1000 rounds.
> there three different types of equipment you can use in reloading.
Presumably their up-front purchase cost is significantly different. The OC's link didn't mention that, so I'd assume the cheapest option.
> Typically you can do ~50 cartridges an hour.
This cheapest option means that, according to that site, the savings range from $7.68-$66.50/hr (not counting equipment purchase?). That strikes me as a significant, if not very big, factor, if someone considers this a chore, rather than part of the hobby, since that range of hourly rates is at least the same OOM as what people would value their time at.
> easily put out 750-1000 per hour
As little as 1 hour per 1k is, I agree, insignificant, even for someone placing a high dollar value on their chore-avoided leisure time. How much more does that equipment cost?
Do those time figures include extra time to recover the brass, and any other differences (positive and negative) in handling pre- and post-production? It's easy to focus on only the most time-consuming part of the process, but everything adds up, and, for beginners or other low-volume participants, it can inflate the per-unit time cost.
There at least a third option, which is neither: a chore.
> You're not getting rich.
This is just a matter of degree. The point of the OC was that reloading was motivated by cost rather than ideology.
My point is that, even if an activity saves (or makes) cash, if it's a chore, at least some people will be willing to spend the cash to avoid it. Depending on how much an individual values, in dollars, chore-avoided-time that could have been spent on leisure instead, the activity may not save any money at all.
I realize that some participants may consider it a part of a hobby, in which case the dollar value of the time may be negative if not zero, I can't imagine this would be everyone (especially of the subset who load their own due to cost).
Someone might even value that "lost" leisure time higher than their hourly work earnings.
I'm talking about the mainframe (or other high-end server) situation.
Granted, you were specifically referring to "mid-range Compaq/HP servers", so perhaps I didn't understand what mid-range meant.
If they're just a branded/enterprise version of commodity servers, I'm missing how those are representative of hardware HA of the kind that the OC finds almost always terrible.
If they're non-commodity, then I'm curious what their price tags are and if "far more than one box" equates to at least several hundred (else there's still a decent enough chance of not getting bitten by even a 1% failure rate).
Pinpointing the source isn't necessary, though, only knowing that the leak occurred and the approximate number of people "in on it". Even limiting this to leaks to the media for information shared at company meetings (so the number of people is equal to the number of employees) could provide interesting data, assuming a large enough sample size (and that leaks are numerous enough).
This could be a form of the law-of-large-numbers at work. If each customer only has a single box, and the failure rate is .1%, then 999 customers will never have a failure to remember, compared to the 1 who will.
What does it look like if each customer has 1000 boxes?
In the context of a "large-scale service", my guess is that there's a chicken-and-egg problem, where an operators of such a service has to decide they want it to be production-ready enough to throw money and/or engineering resources at the project, which can attract yet more contributors.
However, even a thousandth of their scale is enough to demonstrate that decentralized scale is possible at the level where there can be economies (or diseconomies).
Google's scale was already huge even when they had merely "more than 10,000 servers" in the years prior to their IPO.
Only Netscape is a for-profit company, and it took 3 years of the Web existing to be founded.
I wouldn't know, other than assuming that the subject of the article is the model for the indoor farm.
> I agree that indoor farming will likely seem more profitable even though lighting costs money.
That does answer my question, and it essentially answers (at least part of) why VCs would find it interesting.
> 1. economies of scale.
IIUC, the subject of the article is attempting to tackle a niche (of their own creation?) of urban farming, which is, presumably, at smaller scale.
Even this isn't quite true, since it's not fungible, except in the narrow use-case of creating heat[1].
> Whether the energy is carried by glucose/ATP or electric current is just an implementation detail.
This implementation detail means that converting between these forms incurs a tremendous cost (in lost energy) and, perhaps more importantly, is nowhere near instantaneous.
[1] Even the slightly broader use case of heating (e.g. increasing the temperature of a home) can be done with a heat pump, and those don't tend to run off of fungible energy.
If labor costs, for any comparably-sized farm, dwarf artificial light [1] costs, then it would be a form of "penny wise, pound foolish" to opt for free light if it means incurring the labor cost. This is true, even if each is the biggest single cost in each scenario.
[1] Even that needn't be 100% artificial, since windows and skylights exist, though, again, my ignorance as an outsider may preclude me from realizing something that might be obvious to an insider, like this option not moving the needle on cost.