Exactly, do we need social media in the first place?
I guess most people's family/friend circle do not exceed some dozens of persons. Having different messaging groups seems ideal, more targeted and more genuine interactions than shouting in the void in the hope of getting "likes"...
Great initiative!
Having a bootstrapped business I'm a bit sad that there is no option to skip the funding and valuation info.
It seems you can only exist in this world if you are burning someone else's money :)
While bootstrapping http://mockoon.com I'm freelancing to keep the lights on.
I'm good with building MVPs, challenge a crowded roadmap, cloud cost killing, email deliverability, desktop apps distribution, and tons of other things.
If you need help to ship fast and cut through the noise, let's talk!
Also, isn't that just 99% of OSS projects out there?
I maintained a project for the past 7+ years, and despite 1 million downloads, tens of thousands of monthly active users, it's still mostly me, maintaining and committing.
Yes, there is a bus factor, but it's a common and known problem in open-source. It would be better to try to improve the situation instead of just flagging all the projects. It's hard enough to find people ready to help and work on something outside their working hours on a regular basis...
I just watched the first Black Mirror episode (latest season). While I'm all for science and progress, I don't see a world where you don't pay a subscription for your brain to work.
I’ll second this. It seems that a lot of people assume it’s possible (or easy?) to make a living from open-source projects.
It’s probably due to a few famous projects being massively successful (think Vue.js), but I believe it’s directly tied to the project's size (audience), the maintainers' activities (conferences, etc.), and the type of audience. This last point is important—individuals are more likely to donate, while companies often need months of convincing, and it usually doesn't work, or they expect their logo everywhere with analytics (CTR, etc.) to justify it, which is basically advertising.
I have a sizeable seven-year-old open-source project (Mockoon) and, over its lifetime, I’ve received low four figures in donations, which is awesome, but far from enough to make a living from it.
Now, I’m creating a cloud version of the software, which has started generating revenue. It’s a lot of work, but leveraging the open-source success and sell something seems like a safer path.
>> It seems that a lot of people assume it’s possible (or easy?) to make a living from open-source projects
Eh? The only people who think you can make a living from Open Source (without working for a corporate) has never bothered to try. The number who have done it is a rounding error from zero. It's quite literally the hardest way to make money in software.
>> individuals are more likely to donate, while companies often need months of convincing, and it usually doesn't work, or they expect their logo everywhere
Companies cannot donate. People make donations, not companies. The only way to get a person at a company to send you money is by sending them an invoice for pretty much anything. Since you're giving the code away for free, advertising is pretty much all what you've got left to sell.
Repeat after me - Donations are not a business model. It's a hobby model.
Hosting can work at small scale. But I can host your product for less than you can. So if you're popular I can just host your software, and siphon off a chunk of your market.
Still working on https://mockoon.com, an open-source API mocking desktop tool, after 7 years.
My focus is now on the cloud version which is key to guarantee a future where the tool is still actively maintained and independent (read: free from high growth/high profits pressure).
Both my kids learned on a "draisienne" and they hoped on a regular bike like it was nothing the first day they got it.
Kids in the neighborhood who didn't learn on a draisienne, but instead got small wheels, really struggled with balance, and some are still scared to ride their bikes to this day (I'm talking 5-9 years old kids), while my kids are riding with no hands.
I don't know if it's enough to see a pattern, but I'm convinced :)
It's indeed interesting the number of people misspelling their email address, or having an inbox so full that it cannot receive emails anymore.
I never tried to add magix links, but I added Google Sign in to my SaaS several month ago, and since then, it accounts for more than 90% of new sign-ups (users are devs, so rather tech savvy and privacy aware). I'm now convinced that no other method is a priority (I still have email/password of course).
> but I added Google Sign in to my SaaS several month ago, and since then, it accounts for more than 90% of new sign-ups (users are devs, so rather tech savvy
I do it for services I don't care about. In my mind it is more privacy for me. Keeps you out of my real inbox and my password out of your system and I believe that I can - to some extend - remove myself without having to go through whatever crap account deletion process that services has tried to cobble together.
Worst offenders let me login with google and then immediately asks for name and phone number or email and asks me to verify it.
This shouldn't be a factor because your password should be a random series of characters that are unique to that site.
> I believe that I can - to some extend - remove myself without having to go through whatever crap account deletion process that services has tried to cobble together.
To an absolute minimal extent: you can make it so Google won't tell them whatever it was they already told them again. But you can't make them delete the data that they already lifted from your Google account.
For keeping surfaces out of your inbox, that's what email aliases are really good for. Register with an alias and then block that alias if they abuse it.
Wouldn't privacy aware users prefer passkeys or passwords, instead of any kind of SSO?
In general, I do understand that use of SSO is due to convenience. Especially since in many cases websites provide less friction when signing up via SSO instead of using username+password.
I have my HN username at a venerable webmail service. I check it about once a year, tops. My name isn't unimaginably rare, but neither is it "Smith".
I am shocked, shocked, by the number of different K. Strauser people who have typed that email address into some random website or another. I've gotten bank notifications, loan documents, Facebook signup info, meeting minutes from some random volunteer work, and all kinds of other things. When I can figure out from context who the intended recipient is, I try to let them know so they can fix it. On one occasion, the person sent me back a swear-laden diatribe for "hacking their email". Sigh.
I think this has made me a better engineer, though. When someone says something in a meeting like "...as long as they type their email correctly", I can jump in and address that myth head-on. No, people will not type it correctly. If it's a minor pain in the neck for me, with an uncommon name, I can only imagine the traffic that the world's John Smith's get.
Same issue. I've had university professors put my email address in their sylabus instead of ____.edu, and been carpet bombed by assignments, excuses, and pleading diatribes.
I'm listed as the email address for _many_ utility bills, doctors offices, and more political campaigns than I can count.
Comical how many people mess up their own email address.
I just don't get it. A legitimate typo I can see, sure, but so many of the things I get looks like someone said "email address? I guess I can just pick one!"
Just a very small detail, but want to point out the distinction between these two comments. "Revicon" is demonstrating 10x thinking, it's not about being better at rewriting a linked list algorithm or some leetcode challenge.
Player 1 gets the same support request over and over, does nothing about it, ("hey, that's what the user entered, they should be more careful!"), complains about it online, and who knows how many hours are wasted in the back and forth with the customers.
Player 2 simply makes the necessary change on the backend, the users don't even realize they made a typo, totally seamless flow.
Hat tip to you. Hope you screenshot these two comments and bring this up in every interview to exemplify the contrast between "technically correct" and high-efficiency problem solving.
A tasteful post and distinction well highlighted. Humorously, Yvo Schaap is no stranger to 10x thinking. For one thing, Yvo publishes diagrams on SaaS/dev topics that always seem consistently way ahead of their time in terms of their organization and completeness.
A couple of years ago I think I saw a frontend library that warned the user / auto-fixed those typos, but I can't remember its name, and all I can find now are SaaS offers for that kind of service.
Which I'm not entirely enthusiastic about as it leaks all user emails to some random service.
