vhiremath4

i owe so much to fabrice, the ffmpeg community, and the upstream encoders and decoders and their respective communities. this post was a good reminder to donate.

Is there a link to another forum thread (or something similar) talking about the practical issues with operating proof of stake? Would love to learn!

Ahhhh missed the "/s" at the end of the comment I was reply to. :facepalm:

> The amount of data stored is monotonically increasing for every full node in the network

Right-O. Also the archived nodes seemed to be ~6TB in size a year ago. Today I learned!

https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/91156

I think the OP means less about perf and more about dollar cost since you have to either be able to trust the uptime of a storage node (and likely pay more) or make more copies (and therefore pay more) in order to be guaranteed your data isn't lost when a node goes down.

The performance of splitting up files and storing them on multiple nodes tends to be very good since you're not as bottlenecked to one node feeding out all of the bytes (think about bitorrent and how fast it is to download a well-seeded file). That said, network egress might become a problem if the node you're seeding content from lives within AWS or another cloud provider. I don't think this egress price penalty exists in any major ISPs that I know of.

This is what I'm thinking too. By default, you'll always want to store more copies of the file since you can't trust the uptime of the nodes in the same way you can trust the uptime of an EC2 instance or node backing S3. I think SLAs on trust of an individual node in the network are needed for storage to work.

Compute, on the other hand, seems to have a really bright future with web3 as long as the workload/task is parallelizable (for instance transcoding a video which has been broken up into many HLS segments). This is at least based on how I work it out in my head, but I'd love to have someone school me who might know more!

Congrats Zach to you + Ryan! I was just talking to my co-founder (Shahed Khan) yesterday and you came up in conversation as someone he really admires. :)

Best of luck in this new chapter for your company, your team, your loved ones, and your life.

How have you been iterating on your ideas? Generally, this is what I tell other entrepreneurs. It's startling how few actually take a framework like this to heart (doesn't have to be exactly this):

1. Build a hypothesis about how the world works

2. Build things to test the hypothesis

3. Figure out the world doesn't work that way

4. Alter hypothesis

5. Show progress as you repeat 1-4

I also want to call out that spending 18 months to build a landing page and your web app is an extremely long iteration cycle. I don't have all the context about your life, but that seems to be an area where you can get much tighter based off this post at least.

Agreed on the uncanny valley. That said, it seems like some research coming out about AI-generated movement looks promising.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t33jvL7ftd4

I love this. The more raw and honest we are with our narratives. The less polished we try to be. The more intimately understandable things are on a primal level. The much higher our likelihood of connecting a real life opportunity to economic outcome.

I've been a part of so many investor pitches and presentations (both receiving and pitching), and one major trend I constantly see is entrepreneurs who have the right itch or instinct into a problem space but they haven't fully thought through why people should care. When they give reasons for why people should care, it's often removed from reality and overly idealistic. A lot of people get bitter for getting turned down on this "last mile" of reasoning that investors demand, but _everything_ is in this last mile. This is how you orient your team to think about problems. This is how you become customer obsessed. This is how you market why you exist.

This piece resonates a _lot_ with me. There are a few rooms that are utilitarian in nature though (shoot your shot dating rooms for instance), and some where the people being seen are definite experts and it's interesting. Agreed that people with status have generally been leaving though.

This is off-topic, but I feel this more for live reloading/watching of rebuilding a node/webpack app vs. databases. For databases locally, I'm doing so little write usually that it's not a big deal. For coding and recompiling/hot reloading it's a big deal, and the perf is a pain. I really love working with Docker, so I hope they make the Mac experience more friendly soon.

Totally agree. After several years of experimenting with large quantities of psychedelics (heroic doses, 5-MeO DMT, etc.), they have always helped me realize I should just appreciate reality more.

I'm just always blown away that Google transcodes into as many formats as they do upfront. I wonder if they do a mix of just in time transcoding on top of queue-based.

Ah this makes total sense. Thanks for the additional info!

What about ads + paid plans with no ads? I feel like that’s a great middle ground for everyone who would delete the app if it had ads. Am I missing something with that thought process?

Thank you so much for recording with us Jeff!

> Loom is not trying to be a collaboration tool at all

ngould I'd love to understand this point of view. What are the pain points of the experience being disjointed between Loom and Slack for your team right now?

Hello everyone co-founder and CTO at Loom. There are lots of conversations around owning the end-to-end communication loop with Loom (and other async video products). Our team went over a ton of use cases we use Loom for that are pretty relevant to this thread in a webinar I'm linking to below.

https://www.loom.com/share/fe062f809754416b9d583266b47b9303

We will continue building out our platform, but we are instead focusing on features that generate a ton of value and are very hard to do (transcription for every paid user, instant trimming/editing, etc.). If there are other suggestions/gripes/comments about Loom, I'd love to hear about them! If you don't have a Hacker News account but do have a Twitter account, my DMs are open(https://twitter.com/vhmth).

Other than that, I want to say hats off to the PingPong team and other teams getting into this space!

btw my comment/question here is genuine - I want to know so I know I'm not potentially missing something critical and being a jerk

Does AWS not pay their support staff and engineers salaries?

We spend 100s of 1000’s of dollars a month on AWS. Our rep tried getting me to upgrade to paid support, and I said there was no way I was going to do that. I’m already paying AWS millions a year and will be giving them more and more business as Loom continues to skyrocket in usage. No way I’m paying for support at that scale. It’s a bogus model to charge your customers more when they’re continuing to accelerate in growth and pay you more money. I expect to get more support and attention over time automatically because I’m simply paying much more and my need for support hasn’t proportionally gone up in the least.

That was it. Other than that one conversation, my experience with AWS has been _absolutely stellar_ every step of the way. We’ve struck deals with them for several products and have felt like they were fair for both parties. Instead of continuing to focus on getting me to pay for support, they focused on areas where we’d want to rely on other AWS products and have come back with some amazing suggestions. I am extremely impressed with the teams I’ve worked with at AWS - it seems like they really understand the customer, and that incentivizes me to stay and use even more managed services when the unit economics work out for us.

For GCP I’ve had reps reach out. I tell them there’s no way we’ll go multi-cloud because it doesn’t make sense for our business goals and detracts from them. They respond as if they never even heard what I said. I get that you have to be persistent as a sales person, but the response wasn’t even talking about how _part_ of our infra would be worth hosting with them. There’s no conversation - it’s just what GCP wants me to do for them.

>How does he do Figma CTO-ing and at the same time building esbuild? That’s mad hours.

My guess is an alignment between purpose, fun, and skillset. I would say (not for the sake of bragging but for qualifying the legitimacy of my position) - I probably pull similar hours across CTO-ing, investing, and learning biochemistry. Then again, I'm commenting on HN and Evan isn't, so maybe not. :P

Evan Wallace (the author) is also the co-founder and CTO of Figma. Absolutely remarkable engineer. His co-founder Dylan is an investor in our company, and I can’t seem to get in touch with Evan at all because he’s always super heads down on something meaningful (such as esbuild). Mad respect for him.

So we don’t do location-based pay at our company, but we do factor in PEO costs in order to ensure folks are full time employees for legal reasons. So, if you’re a senior software engineer in Nigeria (for example), your salary would be exactly what we’d pay a senior software engineer in SF, NY, etc. but we’d lower the pay by ~40% (for example) if that’s how much the PEO firm charged us to operate within that country.

I hate that we have to do this, and I’m really looking for PEOs that charge less but they all seem to take a significant amount of capital so we’re starting to consider spinning up entities in order to scale more efficiently and take on lower operational costs. However, then we get back to having to hire within that country’s entity to get that benefit (Ireland for example).

Anyone know of cheaper PEOs or better ways? I want my team getting paid as much as possible because, at the end of the day, it’s the same cost to our business anyway.

Off-topic but notice you’re a Loom user from the demo video you created. Just wanted to say thank you for recording with us! (co-founder)

For the first time ever, yes! We read all applications:

https://jobs.lever.co/useloom/27c2ffa6-6938-4844-9835-6711f7...

Off-topic but notice you’re a Loom user from the demo video you created. Just wanted to say thank you for recording with us! (co-founder)

When I started on Clubhouse I was hooked the first night. I had never talked to so many black people in my entire life (I’m an Asian Indian American for context). I felt like I got exposed to more black American culture in 6 hours on Clubhouse than in my entire life. I also felt extremely drained. It was a lot of consumption.

I fell off for a little while as I realized my feed getting pretty echo chamber like. Then I started seeing extremely interesting conversations pop up such as the main PM on Google’s Alpha Fold answering questions live about the technology. Most recently the mayors of SF, Austin, Miami, and Seattle were on talking about the massive swell movement of tech between these ecosystems. They were taking questions from a live audience.

There is something magical going on here. My two cents.

The primary reason a company usually goes public is to offer a path to liquidity (cash) to its shareholders (mostly employees and investors) via selling shares on an open market. There are other reasons, but this is typically the primary one. As mentioned in another reply, GitLab already has investors and a board.

This is a fair assessment.