skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There's no middle ground between "here's your free font" and "pay me/us a lot of money".

This is a general problem in many businesses. Back in the early days of blogging, Joel Spolsky wrote an entire article about how there was basically no software that cost more than $1,000 and less than $75,000. This was more than a decade ago, the numbers today would be different because we care about LTV not sticker price, but the gap would still exist.[1]

Of course, heuristics like this are not strictly true, but the general shape of his argument is still correct: There are three kinds of monetization models for software: Free, cheap, and dear:

1. Free as in beer. Open source, etc.

2. Cheap. $10 – $1,000, sold to a very large number of people at a low price without a salesforce.

3. Dear. LTV of $75,000 – $1,000,000, sold to a handful of rich big companies using a team of slick salespeople that do six months of intense PowerPoint just to get one goddamn sale. The Oracle model.

Net result is that some products are sold to people to scratch their own itch, and some products are sold to businesses that can justify the ROI of spending a large amount of money, and between the two it is hard to find reasonable options.

We see this in all the products that start at a low price and solve a simple problem, like DropBox and 1Password. Then they pivot to "The Enterprise" and you are now talking subscriptions, seat licenses, and all sorts of fancy enterprise features to justify the price.

I used to see this in hotels when I travelled on business. When my clients were paying, they put me up in fairly luxurious hotels that charged me $3 for a room service coffee. When I was paying, I stayed in Motel6-type places that had free coffee in the room or at the end of the hall. I think everyone eventually offered free coffee in the room, but the last time i traveled there was a similar dynamic with WiFi: The naive would expect the cheapest accommodation to try to rent you internet access, but it was the other way around. "You have an expense account? Ha! Pay for WiFi!"

Same dynamic: If you are selling to business, you have to have the sales force, customer success organization, and features business want to buy (like back-end integration with business expense and planning systems). That all costs you money, which you recoup by charging an arm and a leg.

TL;DR: The moment you start selling to business, you are on a path to charging huge money for something that when sold to individuals, ought to be affordable.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-... "Camels and Rubber Duckies"
It took me a while to get over the fear of destroying/using up nice things. Like enjoying a nice bottle of liquor, or using up a very nice notebook. Eventually I came across the idea that things are meant to be used, and now I'm much more relaxed about damaging/using up the things I own.

I read once a stellar idea to help get over the fear of starting to draw in a notebook (or an art project, or a new software project) is to just start scribbling and drawing. Intentionally starting with a mess makes it much easier to break the cycle of "This thing I'm doing isn't good enough yet for this".

One notebook brand my wife found, that I love very much, is minimalism art. I like the small, softcovers. They aren't too soft, and hold their shape really well. The paper quality is high.

I also just tried out the new "sidekick notepad" from Cortex. Very expensive (overpriced), but I was happy to support their work.

https://www.minimalismart.com/cn-soft-cover
And thank you for your bootlicking.

I wonder if the irony of creating new accounts just to comment on the uselessness of anonymity is lost on you or not…
Someone realized the emperor has no clothes. Its only a matter of time that rest of the crowd realizes that emperors court doesn't have clothes either.
It would be nice if at a minimum we could demand a social network that caters to making meaningful connection points with friends/family/strangers rather than ad serving algos. I know... the people have spoken and they want free stuff and are willing to sell their data/soul for it. I just wish it wasn't so! If a company built a product that was primarily designed to make me love it and find it valuable enough to pay for it I would be all in. But if the rest of my friends/family aren't in... then its pretty meaningless. I'll just have to keep relying on more manual methods of social media like texting, calls etc.
I am in a rural area and the street legal side-by-sides are fully supported. Most of them can do 65 MPH. People use them to go to into town all the time. I also see the mini Japanese trucks. The non-street-legal side-by-sides get pulled over and the driver gets cited but AFAIK they don't get impounded. I think that's a fair balance. The street-legal side-by-sides are much easier to find now and what I like about them is the lack of all the computer/telemetry junk. They just work and they are super handy around the homestead.

I've seen E-trikes during the summer but they would not be usable half the year winter here is almost half of the year. E-Trikes don't carry as much cargo or groceries as a side-by-side, though they are a lot more affordable.
People the world over have determined they're fine with this kind of surveillance as long as it's the "other side's" protesters that are being surveilled. We saw it here in Canada during the Trucker's protest. The ship has sailed.
The context is "International Startups" so I'm assuming that means Non-US startups.
This is much lower pressure than those others. It's not that it's practical to make a useful device, but it is much more practical to do in a lab where researchers can analyze the structure and hopefully design new ones. So it might be a very useful stepping stone.
A US federal court held that typeface designs cannot be copyrighted in Eltra Corp. v. Ringer in 1978. Federal regulations made this explicit in 37 CFR 202.1(e) in 1992. The government's explanation here [1] makes it explicit that typefaces are not subject to copyright protection, while fonts can be copyrighted as computer software.

[1] https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/history/mls/ML-393.pdf
Yes, it’s usually a management issue, because unless that hero person is given a team or put in a team lead type position, it’s frequently impossible to “train others“, especially other devs who are uninterested or have other tasks to do.
Account created 17 minutes ago? Can you hook me up with an astroturfing job feckmore?
I’d argue preventing a total financial collapse in 2020 is more important than SVB and some startups failing.
if only it had control of its currency! The way out of this previously was to devaluate currency so that the face amounts of pension stay the same but purchasing power decreases (in other words, it decreases the value of pension in a much less visible way, and done over many years is like a slow boil).
If you do not understand an ecosystem, then you will believe the things you are saying. Nearly everything you claim is simply not true, and demonstrates a lack of understanding more than anything.

You can indeed use notepad++ to write Kotlin. Nothing is stopping you.

Kotlin is not limited to mobile development either.
Silicon Valley's Burning Bank
"Do you think you could vectorize all the pages in a book and magically get around the copyright?"

...what?

The specific shapes and style of a font are not protected under copyright. It's only the software.

"A US federal court held that typeface designs cannot be copyrighted in Eltra Corp. v. Ringer in 1978. Federal regulations made this explicit in 37 CFR 202.1(e) in 1992. The government's explanation here [1] makes it explicit that typefaces are not subject to copyright protection, while fonts can be copyrighted as computer software."
[1] https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/history/mls/ML-393.pdf
Turn CSV –> Dashboards Quickly
Working on making quick dashboards/data visualizations in your browser. Would love to get feedback on the kinds of features that folks would find useful and what problems you run into with current offerings.
My mother often breaks computers, due to how and where she usually uses them (in the kitchen while cooking etc.)

I bought her a t420, which cost less than $100. All I did was swap in an SSD. But here’s the thing, I bought two t420s, and when one breaks I cannibalize the other for parts, or just swap the SSD into the old machine. I make sure to always have a spare machine, which is not hard because after you cannibalize one machine, and get a replacement, the parts on the cannibalized machine will often suffice for a while until you need to replace the same part again.

For her use cases, and to be honest 90% of people’s use cases, a t420 from 2011 has an excess of power. And the peace of mind knowing that spilling water on the keyboard will be a repair that takes 10 minutes (I could probably repair a t420 blindfolded at this point) and effectively only cost you $10-$20, is wonderful. I’ve been able to walk her through repairs over the phone.

I tend to use old various X220/X230 thinkpad as beaters. Used to be big on the X201, but somehow the X201 has been creeping up in price. Yeah, I use and like my big M1 MacBook for work. It’s nice for what I do at my job. But in my personal life I’m 100% happy with Arch Linux and i3wm on a stack of thinkpads. Having swappable batteries might be my favorite part, other than how well Linux runs.
He's making it sound like depositors are going to get 80% of their money back tomorrow. It's going to be a years-long legal battle while affected companies are going to potentially shutter due to an inability to meet obligations. Also, his number of 80-85 is based on the yield of the treasuries, but old treasuries like this are hard to move.
Yeah. You can bet that they wont use it to spy on everyone for everything and they will use it only for 'pedophiles'. Just like how the patriot act only targeted terrorists...

...

The naivete is mind boggling...
We only have an SVB account because of Stripe Atlas. Back then (2020) SVB was the only option, they hadn't added Mercury yet. I wonder if you still get SVB as an option today, or if Mercury is the default.

I got annoyed with SVB because the online banking feels from the 90s and they charged fees that I found excessive. Switched to Brex a while ago, and never looked back.

I was planning on closing our SVB account for a while, but didn't get around to yet. Now it seems like it might close itself. I wonder what the process will look like to get the $300 back we had on there.
Entropy. Take a colored pixel. It is connected to a four other pixels each could be one of say 256 colors but are more likely likely to be a shade similar to each other. So you have roughly 1000 options. But then take a given English word. How many possible words might come after the word "the"? The set of possible connections between words in a paragraph are larger than the set of possible pixel colors in a given image (a realworld image, not white noise/static/random pixels.)
Most of the usecallback or usememo you should try to remove. They are usually there to fix some other rendering issues (mostly performance).

But I also don’t understand, why react renders all child components if the parent renders. As long as their props stay the same, they should just stay as they are.
I like using
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/ As a good daily reading list.

https://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlinethoughts/how-it-st...

His work is good but everyone else writes crap on the site.

https://wolfstreet.com/
Can be a decent read

https://stocksandjocks.net/
Decent daily podcast
If you can be banned from the platform at any time just for having the audacity of using your credit card, maybe they should have a big yellow warning box when signing up with a credit card
We, in my last company saved our business customers US$2-3mn/year using AI products. And we made good money selling those products.

Those weren't products sold from techies to techies (the way Blockchain made some people money) either. And those products were end-user facing- it solved problems for them, too.

And I know a lot of people who are making money solving real problems for people outside of tech.

Equating AI and blockchain is a common HN commentariat fallacy.
They are easy to liquidate. But not at the face value. For that you need to wait until maturity.

Principle is simple. Why would you buy from someone a piece of paper saying someone else(even government) will pay you 1,5% a year. When you could directly buy from then similar paper paying 4%.
Bad boys, bad boys whatcha gonna do?
Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?
Unfortunately that's ended up with a netsplit between covenanted and free servers, some servers will even de-federate you for federating with the "wrong" servers. So the only way to access the whole fediverse is either have multiple accounts, or run your own server.
I was trained as a graphic designer. I have people in my circle who made fonts. I know how hard and time consuming it can be. And I wouldn't mind paying a fair price for them. It's the license the problem imo, not the price itself.
And if you are worried, don't upload to a some smaller provider either because some of them might have fun looking at the backups of the things that people find to to sensitive to upload to Google.
If that holds up in court, why aren't there free/open source/cheaper versions of typefaces that look just like some font but are named differently?
> My finger in the air haircut would thus be maybe 15-20% loss of deposits, if this simplified model has anything to do with reality. That's a lot but also means depositors get 80-85% of their money back.

Depositors have been getting 100% of their money back. [and will still do if they are quick (or has the bankruptcy been declared already?) - edited: too late!]

The loss - that is an amount measured in dollars, not an abstract percentage - is going to be supported by a smaller number of depositors.
> regulatory deposit requirements

I wonder if this is the problem.

> to a bank with regulatory deposit requirements and a longer term outlook?

Maybe with some generally accepted accounting principle, but not by any sensible business standard.

If that bond trades for $80, no one would buy it for $90. It’s worth $80. Similarly, if you already own it, it’s not magically worth more.

And if you are a bank with a long term outlook, you expect interest rates to hold near current levels, and you pay 4.5% APY to depositors, your long term outlook of paying 4.5% to deposits where that deposit money is locked up in a very safe bond earning 1.8% APY, you are losing a lot of money, very safely, in the long term. Almost exactly as much as you would lose by booking the loss right away and investing in something else.

Other than tax or regulatory arbitrage, complex accounting is no substitute for actual profits and losses :)
PicoRuby
You are right, as soon as I posted the comment I thought of binary search. Funny how people frequenting HN think alike, maybe we have to get out more often out of our bubble.
You ignored half my message.
I write on both sides, but I buy notebooks with better paper.
Based on recommendations from fellow leftists, I've read three of Haidt's books.

Although his Just So theories don't sound right to me, I'm neither smart or educated enough to argue against them. Fortunately, there are plenty of people smarter and wiser than me who do this yeoman's labor.

My favorite review comes from another professor:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2520208235

Just the first paragraph:

"This is a very narrow and small-minded book parading as a big thoughtful one. It says it is about the American Mind, but the data and the theory only support "the coddling" of a very narrow subset of the American mind: upper middle class college kids born after 1995 that got to college in 2013. As far as that group is concerned, this is really good advice. I totally agree with his three untruths--your feelings are not necessarily true, the world is not good and evil, and adversity does not make you weak. I also agree that children need lots of free play and that social media is bad for kids and they are over-protected. There is nothing to disagree with here (even though I sometimes chafe at "when we were kids..." arguments)"

Ouch.

Please read the whole review.

--

More generally, John Jost, a social psychologist like Haidt, critiques moral foundations.

My noob TLDR: Haidt's ignores "Justice". "Justice" beats "Authority", meaning "just following orders" is not a defense for failing to "do the right thing". Haidt also glosses over contemporary research which invalidates his thesis.

"John Jost on Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory" [2022]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA77JxiQDkA

And prior to that:

"Left and Right, Right and Wrong: The Politics of Morality" [2012]
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1222565

Full text:
https://themonkeycage.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Jost-bo...
Yes, copying or modifying the actual software.

You're free to transform the shape and style of a vectorized font as much as you want.
People will point to duration mismatch but Fed raised too fast without proper warnings.
using Instagram login is not decentralized, a text-based social network prototype doesn't sounds a lot of work, are they dusting off one project in past hackathon to make the news?

Meta do have some good cryptography work and talent in FB msg / Whatsapp, that may lead them to build a somewhat ATP/Bluesky competitor. With that said, they are really behind in this game.

My main concern is these new product from social OG will still be likely ad driven model, which made Facebook/Twitter what they are today.
These types of bonds are what caused the pound's dramatic fall a few months ago. There isn't a large market for these. If you need to sell a lot at once, you're in trouble. The treasury recently explored stepping in to provide liquidity for off-the-run bonds: https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/yellen-says-taking-steps-...
This is ridiculous. HTML rendering is robust enough to work without CSS. A missing font should just be defaulted to serif or sans and that's it.
I'm surprised at the amount of people who enjoy EDA. I find him very irritating. Most people at my small space company find him extremely irritating. He is not a rocket scientist. He parrots silly buzzwords like "biomimickry" like a fanboy, not an engineer. He suggests things to Elon for how to do rockets that are just pants-on-head dumb.

His blind fanboyism and arrogance irritate so many people who work in space. I'm very surprised HN loves this guy.
As far as I know it is a quirk of the US copyright system, so may not apply the same globally.

First reasonable one that came up in a quick search: https://www.crowdspring.com/blog/font-law-licensing/#:~:text...).
Physical excercise can give you many of those benefits too. A good strenuous workout or run will give you a high without any of the harms.
It requires 300GB of RAM apparently, not sure how you propose to make that work.
Sure, people try all kinds of ideas…. The “Uber of…”

I suppose I should have said “successful companies”
> of course shouldn't have said those words yesterday.

They were going to have to say something sooner-or-later. I think the biggest part is that before they could raise capital, they needed to be honest about their books or risk securities fraud charges.
My to-do list is a sticky note stuck backwards to another one (double-thick), with tasks written carefully and crossed out upon completion. The trick, for me, is to have them all X'd out before the note and text disintegrates in my pocket.

I sometimes carry-over tasks, but die a bit each time.
Isn't it how you save money by picking cheaper product instead of more expensive?
We save by buying hardware and renting DC space.
If we were using AWS we would not save.
It has changed a lot since then. 2015 was a huge overhaul of HIPAA and its enforcement.

Prior to that, it was just a polite suggestion.
Yeah. If you're a big company and your designers/brand team are going for a specific look in your trade dress it may be worth it to license font(s) or even commission a new design. But with so much quality free stuff out there, it's hard to see it making sense for an individual or small business absent very unique requirements.
It's not like they wanted to. Loads of money was coming in from funded companies but the demand for loans was low. So they had to put the money somewhere and banks (not just SVB) began putting record amounts into treasuries. At least they got something from them so they could pay interest on things and keep the lights on.

The government printed a ton of money and demand for loans crashed after the pandemic started. People even paid loans down. Many companies weren't borrowing much because of supply chain issues - why borrow if you can't use it? I'm not blaming the government - unemployment went through the roof for awhile and they had to protect people. But this is a side effect that no one really saw. That the treasuries would lose a lot of value because of super rapid interest rate increases while companies start eating away at their runway because no new investment is coming.

It all makes sense today but literally no one saw this coming a couple weeks ago.
There's a real issue with this where another large health company has a captive market, where small providers are being forced to take on the product to integrate with their larger partners, and their ToS has all these terrible loopholes for them to ignore national laws by pretending they have "consent."

Health is structured as a radical monopoly, and if you thought pharma were a bit cavalier about people, wait until you see health IT. It's the original platform. Their customers are doctors and hospitals - people are the product.
Was a bit in a hurry. Our former drummer is our studio engineer. We record everything ourselves and mix at home. We have a good but basic setup that creates a good result. Happy to talk more about it.
I've nice to hear that. This is also how I approach building software. My goal after at the end of a V1 is that if anyone looked at the code, they would wonder where it all is, shouldn't there be more code?

I try to make the features, structure, everything as simple as possible. As you do this you'll see things that should be probably be abstracted, things you'll want to do as soon as this next part is in.

Don't do it yet, wait for that actual feature to be written, then you refactor, make a system, etc.. Don't do it prematurely. You want to wait because the longer you wait, the chance the features parameters or use case will be different, or it won't even exist. Half the requirements they think they need at the start will be side thoughts by the end.
Contrasting perspective from John Carmack [1] who drops into a debugger all the time to explore state, understand program behavior, debug things, etc.

Looks like there is no universal golden path. Differing environments make different approaches effective.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzr7hRXcwkw
I think Windows is making some sort of restore point, whereas Linux just goes ahead and if something goes wrong, you have to spend a weekend fixing it by hand?