It currently has 99 Democratic sponsors and 31 Republican sponsors (note: there are more Republicans than Democrats in the House). It will probably not make it out of committee. 2 of the 4 Democrats on the committee have sponsored it; 0 of the 8 Republicans have.
Passkeys are here to improve your login security! All you have to do is give complete control over your ability to log in to a service to one of three American big tech companies. Yay!
> What’s wrong with cmd tab and just switching between apps?
Open 3 terminal windows. Try to switch back & forth between just two of them with a keyboard shortcut (without mentally tracking whether or not to press Shift). You can't.
Open a browser and two terminal windows. Try to switch between one terminal (your editor) and the browser window (your reference docs), without also bringing the other terminal above the browser window, covering up your docs. You can't.
> Is this going to be some Kind of major epiphany?!
If you don't use several windows per app, probably not. But, I do, and macOS's window manager is awful for it.
> Open 3 terminal windows. Try to switch back & forth between just two of them with a keyboard shortcut
cmd+` gets me there, no problem at all
> Open a browser and two terminal windows. Try to switch terminal and the browser window, without also bringing the other terminal above the browser window
you got a point there. alt+tab is gonna surface both terminal windows above the browser.
Yeah, I do. People & brands having a link to an X account is a huge red flag. It's a public statement that you support child pornography and the end of democracy in the US. That's going to tarnish a brand pretty majorly.
Twitter has become a lot better since people who say truly insane things like this have left. What on earth does Twitter have to do with child pornography? What kind of misinformation have you been reading?
I feel like a crazy person for having to write this, but: if you are starting a business (yes, non-profits are businesses), then you need to have a business plan. If you launch a business and you have not done the work to have a business plan, then in 99.999% of situations, your business will fail. A business plan includes market & competitive research, a revenue plan based on that research that includes realistic pricing models and costs, a marketing plan, and several options for when things don't turn out like you planned. This isn't even Business 101, this is like Remedial Intro to Business. If you don't have this worked out before you launch, you have already failed.
The corollary for this is as a user, you should determine whether or not the business you are planning to depend on has a business model before you choose to depend on them. If there is no apparent income stream, then the business will close at some point and you may as well skip all the heartburn and choose not to use that business for anything you care about. BlueSky, I'm looking at you right now.
Keeping the servers online for 90 days is a very good thing.
This final donation run doesn't change the timeline unless it gets a big amount of money, in which case is it supposed to be bad for them to change plans?
> I feel like a crazy person for having to write this, but: if you are starting a business (yes, non-profits are businesses), then you need to have a business plan.
Not in tech you don't. The business plan these days is try and get as much investment money as you can to redistribute to your friends, have a few parties, hand out some Macbooks and try to get acquired by Google before your runway runs out.
> try to get acquired by Google before your runway runs out.
And on the user side, treat this outcome (company whose product you use being acquired by Google) the same as the company announcing it will go out of business within the next year, because Google will almost certainly shut the service down.
Exactly. The explicit plan for many/most tech startups is to raise VC money and get an exit before everything falls apart.
My last job was one of these. Everyone except the CEO and one designer quit. The money was drying up, CEO spent all his time chasing flashy big name customers who didn't want anything to do with us while ignoring customers begging to buy our product.
I'd wager most still successful businesses weren't started with much of a plan, especially if they offer services instead of products. I started mine by paying less than a hundred bucks to incorporate on a whim, and was successful for many years. The only reason I shuttered it is because it led me to programming and I went off in that direction instead. There are many such examples everywhere you look, so it's not just anecdotal. I'd say that all one needs is determination and a vision.
I suspect you did actually have a business plan, even if it was informal & just in your head. Something like "based on my experience in this line of work, I can charge about $X for Y service, if I get Z sales at that price, it's a viable business, otherwise I'll try to do ABC instead." It's light on details, but that's still a business plan, you had a plan to bring income in. That's fine.
Not having a business plan looks like "we'll release a free thing, have no way to generate income, lose money for a few years, and then beg for a million dollars." That's not a business plan. That's a waste of your time & your users' time.
> have you started a successful business?
Not yet, but I am actually working on it! Having a meeting with a local business tomorrow to discuss potential market pricing options so I have some idea of how much money I can expect to make. Business plan!
> "we'll release a free thing, have no way to generate income, lose money for a few years, and then beg for a million dollars." That's not a business plan. That's a waste of your time & your users' time.
This is literally the foundation story of numerous billion-dollar businesses. In fact OpenAI managed to beg their way into a trillion dollars after losing money offering no kind of product for many years. It sounds like it's just a business plan that you don't like very much.
Off the top of my head, I believe Twitter, Youtube, Discord, Reddit, Imgur each had no monetization at all for the first 3~5 years of their existence. Or more recently there was uv, that write-it-in-Rust Python package manager that had no avenue for monetization but received millions in investment funding a team working on it full-time until successfully getting bought out by OpenAI.
> I believe Twitter, Youtube, Discord, Reddit, Imgur each had no monetization at all for the first 3~5 years of their existence
yes, their business plans was always to engage a lot of users losing VC money until you are a platform with enough moat to add monetization. It was the plan all along
It is the plan for plenty of startups: when it works you become a tech giant, otherwise you fail and no one knows you
Those are actually all pretty good examples of what I'm talking about, yeah. Investment money is not income, it is debt. It has to be paid back some time, or else your business will close. So the users who came to depend on the business will get boned when the business either closes or drastically changes as they find a business model.
OpenAI, for example, is not profitable as far as I know. I think the users they have now will be in for a rude awakening once they have to come up with a business model in order to pay back their investors. Startups that don't have a business model and get bought also regularly get shut down shortly later, leaving users stranded, look at Nest or Keybase for example off the top of my head.
For my master thesis I did a lot of digging into the research on success factors for startups. And at least based on what I found back then, you're right. The correlation is weak between any factor like this and success. Generally positive though, so it does make sense to try doing some planning. But it's definitely not a requirement.
In general, observable factors doesn't strongly correlate with success. Probably both because there are so many to choose from and because the real world is complex and typically doesn't align well with any predefined plan.
This kind of analysis sounds far more interesting than a lot of the "just do what I did!" startup writing that's out there. Do you have any recommendations for further reading from this perspective?
I’m not speaking from the startup world, but the sheer amount of small businesses that don’t do any level of revenue forecasting, financial modeling, or even formal budgeting and still make a comfortable sum (~$10m assets over the course of 10 years) based on instinct is pretty staggering. Personally it seems more stressful but that’s the leeway experience gets you.
It took Uber, like, 14 years to become profitable. That doesn't mean Uber is necessarily a success, though. They could still disappear.
There's a lot of corpse businesses around. The walking dead, just operating with zero profit and no realistic plan to be profitable. Their investors are usually just stupid or they think they can eventually squeeze the market so severely they can't go out of business.
Privacy enthusiasts tend to align with anarchists - people who intrinsically distrust institutions. Maybe this also correlates with qualities like blind optimism, or disbelief in institutions like capitalism?
> Privacy enthusiasts tend to align with anarchists - people who intrinsically distrust institutions
That's not a reasonable definition. The distrust in the institution is actually a side effect of questioning the authority for authority sake. Anarchists aren't a bunch of individualists that want to burn down whatever we've got in terms of mechanisms in the society regardless if they are necessary. It's just the manifestation of the dialectical opposite of the expression of power and authority.
And privacy enthusiasts just know very well that power shifts and what once was a necessary mechanism can be abused by an elected authoritarian leader.
When I was in college, we were required to take a business class (Business 101) that mandated a finished business plan as part of the project.
It had to be long, in-depth, and include everything you mentioned.
I was incredibly surprised when I entered the tech and startup workforce that these were generally absent.
I had misunderstood the class and instructor and thought that you couldn't even start a business without one.
Then, when I started raising money for my own venture, I thought for sure a complete business plan was a prerequisite.
Nope. A few graphs, preferably hockey-shaped, and a good story were all that was necessary.
My venture failed, of course. But if I were to do it again, I would do myself the favor of having a complete plan. It would definitely save a lot of headaches and guessing in the moment.
There is some great irony that you can have a flashy app with good user growth, and get a chunk of cash from a vc firm. But if you want to get a loan from a Bank to open a restaurant you best have a business plan.
Not every organization can or should be a business, this is dead wrong. Organizations including non-profits and social ventures need sustainability plans rather than business plans. These are largely similar but the values are different.
Some of the slippery slopes include the wanton privatization and outsourcing of government especially for things that create perverse incentives like for-profit prisons, education, and healthcare, and so-called private-public "partnerships" that usually turn out to be predatory "gotcha capitalism" monopolies that charge people for things that were previously free and paid for with taxes as commonwealth services.
OTOH, another pathology can happen in all sorts of money collecting organizations by putting profits/fees before mission, such as by making worse products or services to sell more of them, seeking maximum fines or fees unreasonably without offering value or a public service, or charging unreasonable fees for things that cost almost or nothing.
Here is an example of one of their core growth plan items from the strategy above:
"Social Media Campaigns, Organic and Paid
Driving key messages around digital hygiene, decentralisation, and security on social media platforms to raise awareness."
The whole pdf is basically a collection of the remedial "go-to" SaaS growth blog posts everyone thinking about startups read: make content, build a community, turn your community into advocates, write about things people care about etc etc.
Given I've done this stuff for some 20+ years now, here is what is missing and frankly what most folks miss/don't want to admit:
This document basically has no ICP, who is the ideal customer? What is their persona? Who specifically are they, like, super specifically! You can't start with "oh anyone who wants anon-privacy first msg'ing!" That would have been like me at digitalocean saying "oh it's for anyone who needs a VM" - you can't execute a series of steps with that, you can't boil the ocean so to speak, we had to work through communities one at a time, we did: rails, node, php, devops/config management, in that order, split up over quarters and years, maybe it looked like we just...did developers, but we didn't, we slowly worked our way through all the developer communities slightly tailoring towards them while keeping things general enough.
The biggest problem here tho is the classic vitamin vs. aspirin problem. They're selling "better privacy" and "decentralization" - these are vitamins for the vast majority of people - they're things people say they care about in surveys but don't actually switch apps for. The 85% of adults who "want to do more to protect their privacy" aren't switching off WhatsApp. Are they the most secure messenger, or are they a token ecosystem with staking? Those attract fundamentally different people with different motivations...so just bolting them together creates confusion.
Folks need to stop thinking "we're going to do marketing" = "we're going to build a business" marketing, go to market, growth.. these are tiny components of overall business strategy. </rant>
Slack (originally an MMO), Nintendo (card games), Nokia (rubber shoes) and Netflix (DVDs over snail mail) would disagree.
"We'll gather a bunch of talented people together, figure out what this industry needs and then do that, let's hope we can do that before the money runs out" can be a viable business plan. There's no guarantee it's going to work, there's never a guarantee a plan is going to work, but it can work sometimes.
Plans are useless, but planning is essential. IIRC Nintendo had been operating for decades before they shifted to videogames. And Glitch (the MMO that gave birth to Slack) was also very much a product with a plan. Plan failed, or execution failed, or the industry shifted, or something else, or all or the above. But for sure it was not just "a bunch of talented people."
Nintendo was founded in 1889 and basically predates electricity in the home. I think they did a very successful job pivoting to new forms of entertainment as they arose over the years. Not a planning failure in any sense.
> Cloudflare pushing PQ by default is probably the single most impactful thing that can happen for adotpion. Most developers will never voluntarily migrate their TLS config. Making it the default at the CDN layer means millions of sites get upgraded without anyone making a decision
> cloudflare making pq the default is the only way we get real adoption. most devs are never going to mess with their tls settings unless they absolutely have to. having it happen at the cdn level is the perfect silent upgrade for millions of sites without the owners needing to do anything
> Incredible that we are regressing back to webrings and hand-curated lists like this
One of these hand-curated blog aggregator websites pops up on HN about every month. They're cool and good on the author for trying to solve the problem, but it seems like the wrong approach to me. They're too disorganized, a random collection of mostly tech- and politics-related writing from random people with zero way to vet the quality of the writing. They also require the creator/owner to care about the project for the long-term, which is unlikely. I never revisit the aggregators.
I wonder if webrings are a better fix here. The low-tech version could be to put a static-URL page on my blog that links to other blogs I like, with a short description. Then people who find my blog interesting might also enjoy the blogs that I enjoy. That could be powerful if it caught on widely.
Maybe a clever person could come up with some kind of higher-tech version that could present a more interesting & consistent interface to users, encourage blogs to link back to each other, and also solve the dead-link problem.
I think we're going to reinvent Google's "circles" mechanism from G+. We all (well, the terminally online, at least) are going to be part of several more or less overlapping villages, and the people in those villages are going to trust each other to not be bad faith actors. Everything else... everything that tries to scale... everything public... wasteland.
Something something Dunbar's number, Tragedy of the commons.
Interesting. Each time I think about how we could reboot the (social) web I have this on mind. I don't want exposure to everything, so kind of whitelisting the contacts/peoples/blogs is the first thought.
I guess it could work to carve your own cozy echo chamber that once in a while lets something new in.
The conflict I cannot penetrate is that some things (could) need a larger exposure surface. I.e. OS projects, maintainers that will naturally generate a large following. There are also individuals that want to maximize exposure, mostly for the sake of it. The latter could be neglected but the former not. That leaves an natural backdoor to turn any networking into the same cesspools we have right now.
I am not sure, maybe we have to subdue to the fact that a massive focus on a single thing will turn out into something bad. Considering the importance of Linus Torvalds to the software world, it can even work. He isn't really digitally socialized in a "modern" sense and he still is networked enough to manage an high impact project. Sure he is networked via the linux ecosystem, but that walls him away from direct interactions with the general public.
It seems like many people have the same or similar ideas. I was thinking of using a tool similar to bookmark-managers as the foundation of a new web. Where you subscribe to RSS-feeds of specific (or clusters of) people to specific topics as the "follow" primitive and you publish your own feed(s), which bookmark-managers btw. already allow. The missing pieces are commenting on the feeds of friends and a layer of federated ML for ranking, which the user controls by simple sliders that set the mark for dimensions like retrieval-vs-discovery, hightrust-vs-highnovelty, recency-vs-trendingimpetus and so on.
The few niche social media websites I have seen able to prevent rapid deterioration in quality without dying in active user count typically have a high barrier of entry. Reminds me evilzone one of the few decent hacking websites on the clearnet that actually had a decent community. They had some challenge you had to complete I can't even remember what it was, but it prevented new users from joining unless they could solve it. Was very simple iirc but it stopped large amount of the skids/hf peeps.
I like the idea of tree curation. People view the branch of their interest. Anyone can submit anything to any point but are unlikely to be noticed if they submit closer to the trunk. Curated lists submit their lists to curators closer to the trunk.
The furthest branches have the least volume (need filters to stop bulk submission to all levels, but still allow some multi submission). It allows curators to contribute in a small field. They then submit their preferred items to the next level up. If that curator likes it they send it further. A leaf level curator can bypass any curator above but with the same risk of being ignored if the higher level node receives too much volume.
You could even run fully AI branches where their picks would only make all the way up by convincing a human curator somewhere above them of the quality. If they don't do a good job they would just be ignored. People can listen to them direct if they are so inclined
Instead of having that one god-author who has to keep maintaining everything, I think a better option may be to have the whole comprehensively community-maintained. Which opens up the question: How do you open source structured data and maintenance?
> The low-tech version could be to put a static-URL page on my blog that links to other blogs I like, with a short description. Then people who find my blog interesting might also enjoy the blogs that I enjoy. That could be powerful if it caught on widely.
That has both caught on, is well-supported by WordPress and lots of other tools since forever, and is notable enough that there's a glossary entry for it on Wikipedia:
> I wonder if webrings are a better fix here. The low-tech version could be to put a static-URL page on my blog that links to other blogs I like, with a short description. Then people who find my blog interesting might also enjoy the blogs that I enjoy. That could be powerful if it caught on widely.
I have been doing this by linking my linkhut profile with either my profile picture (I used to) or just mentioning it in comments like I am doing right now
https://ln.ht/~imafh , Although not really entirely to blogs, I have this place to recommend cool musicians,projects,links that I have found and I write a short note in all of them as to why I really liked the link. But with tags you can especially have a #blog #webring and use linkhut with notes feature
What do you think about linkhut, I had submitted it to hackernews as a submission after finding it but there wasn't really much traction to it, I am not going to lie when I say this when this feature really resonated with me so much.
I hope more people come to know about linkhut, I hope I am doing my part in making people know about it :)
I have submitted it again after reading your comment. I definitely feel like certain discussions can happen on linkhut side which will be both interesting to read/write on.
The quality concern is real but I think it assumes writers are optimising for reach in a broad sense. I started writing about backend engineering a few weeks ago and what I actually want is to find the right hundred people, not a million random ones. Substack surfaces AI takes. HN surfaces whatever's trending. There's no feed for 'engineer who's been running Postgres in production for a decade and has things to say about it.' The problem isn't that I want to go viral, it's that even targeted discovery doesn't exist.
I think a web ring combined with some kind of web of trust style system would be nice. Ideally they could be both centralized where an initial creator holds the keys to what's allowed and decentralized where it just sort of exists. I haven't quite been able to sketch out a reasonable way to keep sites persistent and consistent except DNS records, though. DNS of course making it hard or impossible for smaller and less tech-savvy creators while also having it's own issues regardless.
I'm a big web ring person though so I might be biased and trying to use a hammer in place of a screwdriver.
Thanks to a post here a week or two ago, I started looking at Gemini and the Smolnet in general. It looks really appealing to me. No layout. Just the data and accompanying meta semantics (this is a list item, this is a quote, etc.). There's even a Geocities-like hosting service that is completely free and without ads, and it provides a Gemtext -> HTML conversion for people accessing via HTTP instead of gemini:
Reading aggergated news is somewhat of an art. I add and remove feeds and do keyword filterin then i scan over the 5000 newest headines and find 1 to 4 things that are really great finds (to me).
Maybe if you do that for 1000 days some automation can find a pattern in it? I doubt it. Filtering out garbage hundreds of items at a time is definetly doable.
> people who find my blog interesting might also enjoy the blogs that I enjoy. That could be powerful if it caught on widely.
Imho this is better at the blog post level of granularity. Sometimes I will like someone's writing style, much more often I will be interested in topical recommended reading.
Aggregate the aggregators, then add a search box and ranking algorithm. You’ll have something like early-internet search, because these blogs are reminiscent of the early internet, and higher signal-noise (even if you think it’s still low, at least there’s less obvious marketing).
Couldn't you technically crawl all these blogs for their "blog's I'm reading" and create a social graph? You could start vetting based on how often other blogs link to that one, sort of like an impact factor in research.
I don't like counting the number of subscribers, that ends up surfacing things like major news websites, or the hacker news feed. But I've found the graph to be useful in finding recommendations.
I feel like every new iteration of ways to find good content online: webrings, blogrolls, user upvoting/downvoting, giving everyone their own microblog to share interesting links, ML to learn your own preferences by your behavior - they all worked really well at first, but then eroded significantly once people figured out how to game them.
The economic incentive is overwhelming to corrupt these signals, either directly (link sharing schemes, upvote rings, bots to like your content) or indirectly (shaping your content itself to have the shape of what will be promoted, regardless of its quality).
What you almost want is to use any of these ideas and hope for it to catch on widely enough in your small niche to be useful, but not so much that it comes an optimization target.
Smolnet might be the answer. There really isn't a feasible mechanism for monetizing it. At worst, you could have some text ad embedded. No images. Minimal semantic markup (links, lists, quotes, code, generic text) in the case of gemini/gemtext.
I think the simple reason why small web / webring sites don't work is that if you're in the mood of "let's pull the handle on the internet slot machine and see what it surprises me with today", then social media does a better job. Without fail, it gives you something to be outraged about or impressed with.
And if you're looking for something specific - "I want to learn category theory" - then you don't visit a small web site because the content you're looking for is probably not on any woefully short, hand-curated list of URLs. So you do a normal web search (or ask your chatbot).
Another problem with web rings is that if you're hopping sites at random, you more often than not end up someplace weird in 3-5 hops. I guess it's the internet version of six degrees of separation: you're always at most six clicks away from neo-Nazis or SEO spammers.
It's a good question, and I think worth trying to answer. I think the key thing is that discovery is derived from a curated index rather than social link posting and voting, and the darwinian race to the bottom/popularity/campaigning that drives link aggregators is replaced by a more deliberate human curation with all of its good and bad. You find new things, you feel a slower pace, but maybe get bored more frequently too.
> Can anybody understand what happens and maybe explain it a little?
I spent a lot of time squashing bugs like this.
Windows has one window manager. Linux has dozens. Windows apps are written to make assumptions about how the Windows window manager works. Things like windowing event message sequences, side-effects on values returned by other APIs, the exact sequence of fullscreen status side-effects such as window size and mouse cursor capture and window chrome presence. That's valid because those always work the same way on Windows. But Linux window managers all do all of those things differently, and trying to get all dozens of window managers to behave exactly the same way as Windows's does is near impossible.
Another possibility is it's just how the game works, even on Windows. It was pretty common to get windowing bugs reported, test them on Windows, and see the exact same behavior as we had on Linux.
It currently has 99 Democratic sponsors and 31 Republican sponsors (note: there are more Republicans than Democrats in the House). It will probably not make it out of committee. 2 of the 4 Democrats on the committee have sponsored it; 0 of the 8 Republicans have.
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