guptaneil

This is just shifting your eggs from one basket into another. Yes, the current basket is on fire but we should assume any basket can be lit on fire just as easily.

I’d love to see somebody nail the UX of distributed compute in your home that you own. A box I can buy that is similar UX to managing a SaaS account after plugging it into my router, with automatic management, updates, encrypted backup across cloud providers, and an App Store for services I can install on this appliance that gives self-hosted apps a means to monetize. Then scale that foundation up to business needs and really profit.

These ideas have existed before but IMO nobody nailed the UX and most people didn’t believe we’d light our own basket on fire for fun back then, so the market wasn’t there.

It’s best to lean into that. Even though it looks pretty, I (and I assume you) don’t need to be as organized because the organization wouldn’t help us surface the knowledge later anyway because we wouldn’t follow all the tags and links around systematically. Different systems work for different brains. For me, I’ve found just taking flat chronological notes with a good search engine is best, and there’s no point fighting that.

The fight for net neutrality may not have been as public anymore, but it kept going over the last 5 years. Plenty of court cases challenging the FCC's ruling have been ongoing and California even passed their own net neutrality law. Congress attempted to pass a bill that would enshrine net neutrality as well, though of course the Republic majority never allowed it to get to a vote.

All this is to say despite net neutrality technically not being federally required between 2018 - 2024, it wasn't feasibly for ISP's to roll out metered plans that would go unchallenged. I suspect most were stuck in a "wait and see" stage, and likely expected this eventual rollback anyway given the landscape is still so rapidly changing.

So the protests and constant pushing back against NN did have a positive impact on our eventual outcome, even if it's not obvious or a direct line from reddit blackouts. Like most things, the truth is complex.

To save you a click: webXR is not enabled yet in VisionOS Safari

> Is it just that v7 includes a timestamp for better sorting?

Correct. The sortable nature of UUIDv7 improves database performance and index locality by helping the index be more efficient since rows are inserted in a predictable order instead of scattered randomly.

This is something I am very curious about too. I’m kind of hopeful the fatigue and limitations imposed by Vision Pro will make my overall computer usage more intentional, similar to how wearing an Apple Watch and tossing my phone in my backpack made my overall phone usage when I’m outside more intentional. The Apple Watch is a pain to use for anything productive, and I appreciate that.

The biggest question will be if it’s too much of a pain that I don’t want to use it at all.

> Does it live up to the stratospheric hype? Not so much.

Oh sorry, that's from CNET's review of the first iPhone in 2007: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/original-iphone-review/

It's way too early to tell if this product line will succeed in the long term. Will the first gen Vision Pro be a runaway success? Of course not! Will later generations look as obvious as the iPhone does now? I sure hope so!

For comparison, Apple sold 1.4 million iPhones in 2007. Supposedly Apple is expecting to sell around 500k Vision Pro units this year. Given the 3x price difference (in 2024 dollars), that effectively means the first gen Vision Pro is expected to bring the same revenue as the first gen iPhone.

We all have rosy retrospection about how great and obvious the first iPhone or first iPod was, but honestly nobody had any idea if Apple's crazy bet would pay off. We all agreed it was magical tech, but it was expensive, had tons of limitations, and nobody really needed it. Sound familiar?

All I know is betting against Apple has rarely paid off. They do have failures too though and this is clearly technologically more ambitious than any other launch, so who knows! And honestly that's what makes this launch most exciting.

It's been so long since I've had child-like wonder about some new technology that I'm just glad Apple took a chance on launching such a crazy device, even if I don't know what to do with it... yet.

If anyone is interested in having this type of real-time usage data for their own own home, I highly recommend IoTaWatt: https://iotawatt.com

It's a completely local energy monitor that you can install into your home's circuit breaker panel, and then view dashboards or read data via an API from a local web server running on-device. You choose how many sensors you want, but you can monitor your whole home as well as individual circuits.

For example, I track and trigger automations when my various appliances (laundry, dishwasher, microwave, etc) start/stop. It's very cool. Just be warned that it does require some research, basic understanding of electricity, and comfort working with high voltage mains connections if you plan to DIY it but I found it approachable and easy to setup.

What it looks like: https://i.ibb.co/qBVmBD1/IMG-1595.jpg

This whole debate seems asinine to me. Erik must know he's in the wrong here. The idea that we can force any company to allow third party clients to their service by regulation is an obviously bad idea. Just because Beeper (probably) isn't doing something shady with user data doesn't mean Apple must be required to trust them.

What if I make a 3rd party client that actively records my users' iMessages and sells them to Facebook? Should Apple be required to support my app too? If not, are they expected to audit and vouch for every third party client? If yes, how is Apple supposed to make any claims about the security of iMessage if I have no control over the client my recipient might be using?

The whole interoperable API argument comes from the same place as "encryption where the good guys have keys," yet somehow demands for interoperability seem to be much more popular on HN. The E2E in E2E encryption stands for end-to-end, which inherently requires trusting both ends. Otherwise you might as well not have encryption.

Note that whether or not companies should be required to support third party clients is a different debate than whether or not Apple should be required to support Android, even if the end result happens to be similar in this case. I think most people defending Beeper are interested in the latter and are willing to burn down encryption to get it via the former. As a user, sure I'd love for my Android friends to use iMessage too. But this is not the way.

(To be clear, I don't think we should regulate that Apple has to support Android either. If I develop a new OS, would every company be required to build a client for their service for my new OS too? But at least I understand the merits of that debate.)

Apple is showing that an iPhone Pro can be used by _professionals_ to replace their existing camera. It’s not trying to replace an entire studio (yet). That would be like expecting a new centrifuge machine to replace an entire lab of equipment. Nobody expects an average user to compete with professionals, even if they were given a $20k RED camera.

Really love that you’re trying a unique business model! I suspect you’ll struggle to gain traction on anything that requires a credit card to interact with, even if the price is only $1, due to the very high barrier to entry for most of the world but I hope this works!

One idea I’d love to see somebody implement: weight content that a user spent longer typing + editing higher as a proxy for thoughtfulness. Unfortunately this specific client-side metric can realistically only work on a native-only service with device attestation and no API, so that the metric can be trusted, but would be cool to think about other solutions to surfacing higher quality content (like TikTok did), as well as solving the inevitable authenticity problem as more and more online content will be astroturfed by LLM’s.

We all have different pools of energy that we pull from each day that motivate us to get things done. According to the Kolbe Index, the 4 pools are follow through (FT), fact finder (FF), quick start (QS), and implementer (Im). Everybody has different starting values in each pool. People with high follow through like to work through a list or project until it’s complete. High fact finders are motivated by learning new things. High quick starts are very creative and constantly looking for something new. High implementers like to build and create things. Nobody is high on everything. From what you described, you sound like a high quick start and low follow through (and probably higher fact finder and lower implementer but I don’t have a lot to go off here). As others have noted, the high QS + low FT combination is perfectly correlated with having ADHD (but this is not a diagnosis tool!)

You can find your actual Kolbe by taking the Kolbe-A index at Kolbe.com (No connection, just think it’s an amazing tool, does cost $55 and their website is truly terrible)

The bigger take-away though is there’s nothing wrong with any Kolbe combination. They all have different strengths and weaknesses. For example, you would be very good in a startup environment where things are rapidly changing day to day and where others would get stressed out. But you might need someone else with more follow through to see your ideas to completion, or maybe you need to find ways to keep your fact finder satisfied as you finish a project by not planning everything out at the beginning. The best founding teams usually have complementary Kolbe’s so they fill each other’s missing energies.

Once you know your Kolbe and understand how each dimension is impacting you, you can start hacking your life to take advantage of your Kolbe instead of fighting against it. This is particularly hard for low follow-throughs (including me!) because most of society is optimized for high follow throughs, leaving us feeling like something is wrong with us when there isn’t.

I could talk about this all day, feel free to hit me up if you have more questions. I’ve been thinking about writing more detailed tools to help explain these concepts since Kolbe does a terrible job on their own.

This one is excellent on MacOS: https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/macwhisper

There are already a lot of protocols for microblogging (RSS, ActivityPub, JSON Feed, etc), we don’t need yet another.

I’ve lately been a fan of hosting my own Beluga feed (https://beluga.social) since it’s much more lightweight than a full mastodon instance, and I still rely on RSS feeds.

But let’s be honest, very few people actually want fragmentation and ownership even if it’s better for the long-term health of the Internet. They prefer discoverability, reach, and usability, which will always be better on a centralized platform. It’s like asking people to eat boiled broccoli when there’s a pile of donuts next to it.

Can we make broccoli donuts? Mastodon is doing pretty well these days, but given that email went from a fully federated and open ecosystem to mostly centralized over the last 2 decades, I’m not super optimistic.

Can’t read the whole paper but from the abstract, this sounds like an obvious case of correlation != causation. It’s possible whatever caused those regions to have access to western TV also helped foster businesses later, such as easy access to west German hubs or train lines or similar. In fact, their claim that the effects last through generations further weakens their argument since other East German regions would’ve gotten the same TV after the 90’s and should have caught up by now. Instead it sounds like something else is helping the original regions maintain their dominance.

It's true that every service has to deal with the same policy and lockout problems, but that doesn't lead to the conclusion that the risk is the same. I pay for FastMail because

1. if something goes wrong, I can reach a human without needing to write a viral blog post first. Other services pay for a customer service department.

2. I trust FastMail more to not shut down their product because they got bored. Sure Gmail will probably not go away, but I'm honestly not as confident about Google Workspaces or whatever it's called now for individuals.

3. I'm tired of acting like using products from an ad company is a good idea. People happily use an email service, browser, OS, and more from the modern DoubleClick without a second thought.

This is PG saying something... he linked to a chatGPT generated response and said he didn't like the response so he wrote his own.

I don’t have any unique insights into TikTok nor do I use the app, but TikTok has several product advantages over those other platforms:

1. They only have a queue of videos. That means there is one video playing and they know exactly what the next N videos are going to be, so they can start buffering them early

2. The video plays are high intent. If you launch TikTok, you are 100% going to watch videos. This is not true for Reddit or Twitter, making it harder for them to preemptively buffer content or over-optimize their architecture just for video playback.

3. As you noted, the videos are lower quality and shorter than YouTube or Netflix videos. They also are exclusively optimized for mobile, so don’t need to worry about streaming videos larger than a phone screen.

4. Most videos in your feed might be a similar style. This one is a stretch but I wouldn’t be shocked if TikTok uses some ML to extrapolate highly compressed videos early in the buffer.

5. Depending on who you believe, ByteDance might have financial backing and motivations that make it easier to throw more money at this problem than its American competitors.

Yes, in the form of higher housing costs.

They are self-contained

We use Guilded at Guilded. Corporate use is not our intended use case and I wouldn’t recommend Guilded for enterprise concerns, but as a startup, I can’t imagine not having this tool. All of our chat, docs, calendars, tasks, meetings, etc are in one place and easily cross-referenceable. More importantly, we have groups which are like mini-servers inside your server. Your whole company can be in one server, while each team can have their own space with their own channels and permissions.

https://www.guilded.gg

(I am of course biased since I work on this product, but these are my own opinions)

If you’re looking to self-host and are comfortable using AWS, I wrote a quick guide on the best way to self-host videos with the same performance as YouTube: https://neil.gg/2020/07/20/diy-video-streaming/

I’ve used the same technique to host various videos over the years with zero issues, but the s3 charges can add up if you’re not careful since you’re storing multiple copies of the same video to enable adaptive streams.

Guilded (YC S17) | Full Time | Full-stack software engineer | $150,000+ | REMOTE (U.S. or Canada only) | https://www.guilded.gg

We're looking for senior full-stack software engineers to connect the world's online gaming communities. You'll join a quickly-growing, engineering-led team, where you'll be using modern processes and tools to build features that teams need and love (our users often say Guilded makes Discord feel like Skype).

We're a fully-remote and asynchronous team. We know that many engineers are the happiest and do their best work when they're empowered to build on their own schedule. If that sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you.

We enjoy working and gaming together, have IRL meetups in really fun locations, get a daily Tovala subscription, and have very interesting challenges ahead in all areas from building new features to scaling our infrastructure to meet demand. I can honestly say Guilded is the closest I've gotten to my ideal company culture. Be sure to read our company handbook at https://www.guilded.gg/jobs for our philosophy on teams.

Learn more and apply at https://www.guilded.gg/jobs

Feel free to email me questions about the company at neil - at - guilded.gg but please apply at the link above for the fastest response time.

Guilded (YC S17) | Full Time | Full-stack software engineer | $150,000+ | REMOTE (U.S. or Canada only) | https://www.guilded.gg

We're looking for senior full-stack software engineers to connect the world's online gaming communities. You'll join a quickly-growing, engineering-led team, where you'll be using modern processes and tools to build features that teams need and love (our users often say Guilded makes Discord feel like Skype).

We're a fully-remote and asynchronous team. We know that many engineers are the happiest and do their best work when they're empowered to build on their own schedule. If that sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you.

We enjoy working and gaming together, have IRL meetups in really fun locations, get a daily Tovala subscription, and have very interesting challenges ahead in all areas from building new features to scaling our infrastructure to meet demand. I can honestly say Guilded is the closest I've gotten to my ideal company culture. Be sure to read our company handbook at https://www.guilded.gg/jobs for our philosophy on teams.

Learn more and apply at https://www.guilded.gg/jobs

Feel free to email me questions about the company at neil - at - guilded.gg but please apply at the link above for the fastest response time.

This is a fun[1] list that highlights how much is going on in Chicago despite how little attention it gets from the broader tech community. It’s the third largest US city, insanely good cost of living compared to Bay Area or NYC, a central hub with easy flights to anywhere, etc but it still isn’t talked about like NYC, Miami, Austin, etc.

[1] however take the numbers and descriptions with a large grain of salt. I’m not sure how they are sourcing their database but there are at least a few very incorrect investment amounts and company descriptions and those are just from the companies I personally know.