The author touches upon Heroku in the sense that they say they've used it, but I think it is still, to date, the best PaaS out there, and makes some (if not many) of the author's arguments void.
There's been so many apps on Heroku that I can deploy with just `git push heroku master`, and I've worked on team where we've scaled on heroku on the db and app side with very little devops work, if any.
What the author is completely right on, however, is Fly.io -- it's unfortunately a platform that has _just enough PaaS_ to seem easy, but ends up being frustratingly difficult and comes with a lot of hard edges, even for simple apps.
Provisioning a postgres db on Fly.io is a great example - just use `fly postgres create` and go through the steps! Uh oh, the provisioned db template is defaulting to `SQL_ASCII`, I need `UTF8` encoding, what's the best way to do that? Good luck -- the Fly.io docs don't talk about that at all, and if you aren't a high enough "tier" of plan you get 0 customer support, just a community forum, with people asking questions and many times getting no responses.
I think it would probably help to take the PDF up front, do a combination of checking the DPI and page count to get an estimated word count (as OCRing to get an exact word count might be costly on your end), and then return back a “price preview” at which point the customer just pays the price to get their podcast.
Like others have mentioned, I’d be scared to accidentally upload a 100 page PDF only for it to cost me $100 without me really knowing up front.
I'm going to post something vulnerable, but I hope people take my comment in the right light, as in general I love YC and what it has done for the startup community.
I've been building startups for a long time, and have applied to YC several times, mainly with the same idea (although I've always listed 4-5 other ideas I'm interested in as well). I have always gotten rejected, and while that was disappointing, I 100% understood that getting into YC was the exception rather than the rule, as YC had a smaller acceptance percentage than Harvard.
After a few batches of these rejections, I decided to take a break from applying and instead build up my startup experience more by working at growth-stage startups, and just in general started focusing on my career as well.
Fast forward a few years, and about a year ago YC reaches out to me (via automated email) saying they had identified me as being in the top X% on the Cofounder matching platform, and encouraged me to apply to their next batch cycle.
I was reluctant to do so -- I hadn't been thinking too deeply about any new startup ideas in the past few months (so I'd most likely have to apply with a previous startup I had built), but after encouragement from friends and family I decided to take a chance anyways and apply once again.
I went all out on the application -- I reached out to some YC friends and mentors to get their recommendations, and had them help me edit and perfect my application as well. I even traveled for a month to San Francisco, just so I could absorb more of the ecosystem, network with as many entrepreneurs as possible, and help give back to the community if I could.
I submitted my application, waited for the fateful "interview email" day, and when that day came -- I got the standard "...we're sorry, we're not going to move forward with your application".
I'll admit -- getting that email stung. I know looking back there were a lot of things I could have done better (e.g. not applying with the same idea as previous applications, among other things), and just like when I applied years ago, I knew that the chances of getting to the interview stage were slim to none.
But yet somehow, that rejection hurt more than any of the others.
I've come to discount any form of flattery in intro emails. E.g. when a FAANG recruiter emails me "wow, we were impressed by your public project!", I used to believe it.
Now I know it's just a synonym for "join the back of the line of 17,639,838 applicants."
I love a lot of what YC has done but their application process is fundamentally broken and has been for years. It appears to just be a just a factory and numbers game now, all clinging to previous successes from when PG and Jessica used to run things.
I struggle with how I'm supposed to grok this advice, as it feels like a tautology.
E.g. with his chess example, I can't see how blundering isn't just a result of a lack of the things he mentions -- practicing technique, drilling puzzles, etc. How can we as amateurs know _not_ to make blunders without knowing _why_ it was a blunder, which usually involves being properly skilled to identify the blunder ahead of time in some fashion?
The main caveats I can think of are ego/recklessness/apathy/emotion, which revolve around not caring about making a blunder, along with distraction/hastiness, which revolve around not having the appropriate mental energy to not make a blunder.
Some of the best advice I've ever heard comes from the following observation:
Blundering is often a result of trying to overplay a small advantage.
If you are playing thoughtfully, with an eye on the whole game, you are smart enough not to blunder. It's when you get excited about pursuing an opportunity that you overlook mistakes.
Play your advantages and play them hard. But don't lose sight of the big picture. Or alternatively, when you see an opportunity, look for the danger.
The insight has served me extremely well in competitive and security contexts, and I think it accounts for a lot of blunders in product design as well.
> Play your advantages and play them hard. But don't lose sight of the big picture.
Almost nothing is more dangerous to my winning chances than exiting the opening with a small material or positional advantage. Opponent is now incentivized to attack ferociously, and I'm left struggling to figure out the safest way to convert without playing too passively but also not over-pushing.
I agree. I like the way Arnold Kling expresses a similar idea [1]: "One of my beliefs about competition is that the business world is very forgiving of mistakes... On October 11, 1999, our business, along with the Scottsdale relocation business, was sold to homestore.com for $85 million. My share was quite dilute by this point...But a couple of percent of $85 million is still real money, particularly considering the sequence of mistakes, miscalculations, misjudgments, and erroneous forecasts that led to it."
Kling and coworkers had an important insight about what the internet was going to do to home-buying. This made up, in part, for such obvious blunders as failing to buy MapQuest.
Most blunders (at least 1500 ELO and below) are often board observation blunders, where your board vision lets you down. Either you're too tunnel visioned on your own attack or you just expose yourself to simple tactics. When I first started playing online, I would routinely blunder my queen roughly 10% of the time. Luckily I've improved and only do it 9% of the time...
His point on the significant motion-blur / image quality issues that exists with pass-through is my biggest complaint with the device hardware-wise.
I got the prescription lens inserts that Apple had suggested, and when I first put on the device I thought that either my eye doctor had gotten my prescription wrong, or something was defective with my device.
The blur is distracting -- and looking further away makes it more obvious, as the objects in the background move around a lot more when turning your head vs items really close to your eyes.
He also says you can read your screens through passthrough, but I've found that not really to be the case, at least for devices like the iPhone or Apple watch.
I've had to take my Vision Pro off many times not only to read a phone notification, but also for anything that requires Face-ID (which doesn't work well when the Vision Pro is covering your face, which feels like an Apple ecosystem fail).
I'm still enjoying it, and I bought it knowing it was a V1 product, but it also shows how far have to go, even with a ton of engineering put into a product.
This actually helps me a little bit. I've also seen people say they can read screens, and that's not my experience. I also have the lens inserts, and I suspect that part of the problem is how they implement the prescription. I'm not knowledgeable enough about lenses to say this with confidence (please correct me!), but I wonder if this is because Apple prioritizes a farther away focal point for the inserts, so you literally can't focus on anything close up.
I've noticed that I can almost read things if I hold my phone a little farther away, but I wouldn't call it usable by any stretch. I've considered getting contacts for the first time just to test all of this, but I'm extremely turned off by the upkeep of them (to say nothing of the idea of touching my eyeball to put them in).
> I wonder if this is because Apple prioritizes a farther away focal point for the inserts, so you literally can't focus on anything close up
VR is interesting all because all manufactures (that I know of) have a fixed focal distance for the screens. This is why you need inserts in the first place, even though the lenses are right in front of your eyes. For example, on the valve index this is set to ~6ft, so if you can see up to 6ft perfectly, you do not need inserts.
Moving your phone around doesn't change this number, its a relationship between the lenses and the screens
Stupid question: Are you wearing it in an environment with good lighting? Passthrough camera performance suffers a lot in low light, and the blur increases with the longer exposure.
I can read screens "fine" while wearing it (fine as in, I can read them, I wouldn't want to do it for an extended amount of time).
Counter anecdote: I didn't find the blur distracting at all, and was able to read my iphone 13 mini perfectly fine. I beleive your experience of course, though.
> but also for anything that requires Face-ID (which doesn't work well when the Vision Pro is covering your face, which feels like an Apple ecosystem fail).
At some point don't we need to accept the laws of physics and biology? That is, The VisionPro covers a significant part of your face, much more than a pair of glasses. Face-ID already has the challenge of needing to recognize you in tons of different conditions (lighting, pale/tan skin color, wildly different hairstyles, facial hair, etc.), while for security reasons nearly never letting someone else impersonate you. Is it really possible to get that level of forgiveness with accuracy if Face-ID only gets to consider the bottom half of your face?
I think the complaint is that the vision pro can’t authenticate the wearer to the iphone. Just like using your apple watch to unlock a mac, the vision pro will probably eventually be able to set up a trusted relationship between the user and their phone, and fix this issue. That’s what I understood from “ecosystem fail”
Outside of the fact that a platform will always selfishly want to prioritize its own content and keep users on its platform, I feel there is a growing sentiment from web users as well that most content-based websites are just _bad_, and platforms are adapting to this behavior.
Over the past few years, how many times have you:
- Searched Google for something like "Best Coffee Maker" / "STORE coupon codes" / "Best cocktail recipie" and the article was just an SEO'd affiliate link blogspam?
- Searched Twitter for something innocuous only for the top links to be some sort of crypto or OnlyFans garbage?
- Clicked into a website just for 1-3 visual modals to popup to "Disable your Adblock" / "Sign up for our mailing list" / "Login to view the rest of the post" (And we thought popups were dead once popup blockers became a thing)
This article is even an example -- I scroll down just to be interrupted by a call to action modal requesting my email and making me find the "continue reading" button just to read the content.
Platforms provide content consistency -- once users understand the platform, they can know how to consume content on it.
It's perhaps the death of the open web, but I kind of get it.
> This article is even an example -- I scroll down just to be interrupted by a call to action modal requesting my email and making me find the "continue reading" button just to read the content.
That substack popup drove me insane until I had enough and just turned js off for them. Very pleasant now
I think TipTap is really cool (and congrats on the launch!), but I hope you won't begrudge me a worry:
I see from your home page and pricing page (https://tiptap.dev/pricing) that you've switched from wording that says "You are free to do whatever you want, TipTap is licensed under MIT" (with support for premium paid plugins), to TipTap being free* (no Credit Card required), and no mention of the MIT license.
This makes me extremely worried that you are eventually going to go the TinyMCE / Froala / CKEditor route, which has made me very hesitant to now use these editors.
I completely understand that WYSIWYG editors are extremely hard to maintain, but on the flipside I now am worried about all the projects I've added / started to add TipTap to. Can you help assuage this worry? Will the core plugin remain free and MIT licensed forever, and not reliant on some sort of usage model outside of premium plugins?
I’ve been thinking similarly[0] about the community ownership/moderation problem[1] and have come to a similar conclusion that I think the next “reddit” will need to move away from moderators and fiefdoms if it wishes to succeed. When the moderation team is great the community flourishes, but too often communities are not well run, and badly led communities eventually crush a platform’s success.
In general the idea of "just use filters" fails. Number one, messages cost money for someone somewhere. Allowing everything and just filtering out bullshit leads to untold amounts of bullshit you have to filter. Hence the point of moderators in the first place...
This feeds into point two. Most people don't want to play moderator and create huge lists of filters in order to not deal with shit. They will gladly farm that off to someone else even if there are considerable potential negative side effects, and if it gets too bad they will pack up and move to a new community with less negative effects.
> Most people don't want to play moderator and create huge lists of filters in order to not deal with shit.
Sure — but think of Ad block filters. Filter lists eventually get developed (eg Easylist), and if the maintainers ever do something radical, users can easily remove one filter list and substitute another.
It’s much harder for users in communities with moderators to do the same — if I get banned from /r/detroit and I live there, what’s my alternative?
To play devil's advocate, I feel like most social platforms ban or limit most aspects of self-promotion or solicitation to other social platforms (whether out of self-interest or otherwise). Even Twitter for a brief while did this with Mastodon links back at the end of 2022.
I think most users of course don't like this as it feels like censorship, but on the flipside if I built a community and felt like users were joining my site just to try to solicit my community members to jump to a competitor, I'd probably not be too happy with that.
You say "even Twitter" as if that company is a paragon of ethics and even-handedness. If a place has to coerce people to stay in it, that's an awfully damning move. Well run communities don't need to do that because people actually want to use them over the competition.
To be clear I agree with you -- a large platform trying to coerce its users to stay is indeed a bad move. I'm also not trying to put Twitter on a pedestal here, mainly just trying to indicate that this isn't necessarily an "only Reddit" thing, but something other social platforms often do.
I could believe, however, that it could be hard to distinguish angry users that are protesting and telling people to move to another site because the platform / community is poorly run (as is the case with the current Reddit protest), vs potential "bad actors" that are hoping to capitalize and steal users to their own site even if communities were run perfectly.
In the former case it's justified, in the latter case even if it doesn't draw users away it is probably still, at best, spam.
I agree, without being able to read the linked the article, I assume this was a subreddit specific thing that happened. If that's the case, it's probably a good thing. I'm in a few subs where people constantly post links to alternatives and it floods the feed with useless posts. I understand that the lemmy situation is somewhat different as reddit is being a pain right now, but in general it's a dick move to go into a community and start spamming links to a different one.
The user linked to the comment in the thread (https://old.reddit.com/r/newsokunomoral/comments/148y47z/red...). It would appear as [removed] if it was removed by mods, a mod bot such as AutoModerator, the spam filter, or it was posted by a shadow-banned user. [Removed by Reddit] means that it was removed by Reddit's Anti-Evil Operations. I'm a mod elsewhere and the text matches other comments that AEO has removed on my sub.
It looks like the AEO removed it although I think as a normal user you actually can't distinguish if it was actually removed or the user just used that text. Great job at development, as usual, by Reddit.
But the modlog on new reddit should have a reason why it was removed and the actual text before removal. So the mods on that subreddit could verify that claim.
There's been so many apps on Heroku that I can deploy with just `git push heroku master`, and I've worked on team where we've scaled on heroku on the db and app side with very little devops work, if any.
What the author is completely right on, however, is Fly.io -- it's unfortunately a platform that has _just enough PaaS_ to seem easy, but ends up being frustratingly difficult and comes with a lot of hard edges, even for simple apps.
Provisioning a postgres db on Fly.io is a great example - just use `fly postgres create` and go through the steps! Uh oh, the provisioned db template is defaulting to `SQL_ASCII`, I need `UTF8` encoding, what's the best way to do that? Good luck -- the Fly.io docs don't talk about that at all, and if you aren't a high enough "tier" of plan you get 0 customer support, just a community forum, with people asking questions and many times getting no responses.