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Thanks. Appreciate your support, and very glad it brings you value.

I'd rather not involve Microsoft but I recognize there are other options. It is additional work/complexity I'll probably have to take on.

To clarify the math. Netlify bills $50 for each 100GB over the Pro plan limit of 1TB. Which is the barrel I'm looking down just this month before others get the same idea. So yes, I'm squeezed on both side unless I put the work in to rehost.

Please believe me that it is not a step I want to take.

I created and maintain ProtonDB, a popular Linux gaming resource. I don't do ads, just pay the bills from some Patreon donations.

It's a statically generated React site I deploy on Netlify. About ten days ago I started incurring 30GB of data per day from user agents indicating they're using Prerender. At this pace almost all of that will push me past the 1TB allotted for my plan, so I'm looking at an extra ~$500USD a month for the extra bandwdith boosters.

I'm gonna try the robots.txt options, but I'm doubtful this will be effective in the long run. Many other options aren't available if I want to continue using a SaaS like Netlify.

My initial thoughts are to either move to Cloudflare Pages/Workers where bandwidth is unlimited, or make an edge function that parses the user agent and hope it's effective enough. That'd be about $60 in edge function invocations.

I've got so many better things to do than play whack-a-mole on user agents and, when failing, pay this scraping ransom.

Can I just say fuck all y'all AI harvesters? This is a popular free service that helps get people off of their Microsoft dependency and live their lives on a libre operating system. You wanna leech on that? Fine, download the data dumps I already offer on an ODbL license instead of making me wonder why I fucking bother.

ProtonDB started with a lunchtime reddit post and a public Google Sheets link I seeded with three of my own tests. Came back from work with a thousand rows in it. In a few weeks I built a frontend around it. The 30k row data migration was brutal but in hindsight was absolutely worth it. AMA.

Not who you responded to, but I thought you described your case elegantly neutral to the God question. I suspected you were coming from that perspective, but your argument stood on its own.

Now that said, if we did find alien life, how would your feelings about God change?

Tried your beta out and enjoyed it for a while but then got hit with the auth wall after ~10 messages. Kind of irrational but I felt insulted that even after I did so my conversation was nowhere in chat history.

People get attached to bots quick I guess! I recommend: 1) communicate to the provisional user how many moore messages they get before having to login and 2) persisting those pre-auth chat histories.

I'd be curious to hear of your experience. Let me know how to reach you?

Interesting I had no idea. This was also the first crewed mission following the Apollo 1 failure. There's some explanation of what they disagreed on here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_7#Conflict_and_splashdo...

The commander resisted the start of the first live TV broadcast in space for safety reasons. The mission had both technical and public relations goals, and it's fascinating to see these in understandable conflict.

Fascinating he would choose to retire at 39, in a position of what sounds of great influence in the space program. Anyone know the context around this? Was it mandated?

That great innovation is at the root of the market's disregard for negative externalities such as climate change. I'm not in support of jailing shareholders, but say a tax on the dividends of shareholders who front the capital for companies that impose a burden on civilization doesn't sound outrageous to me. Especially since fining the company directly doesn't necessarily discourage bad behavior at the tiers of power that have the ability to take a different path.

Aside from the well written article itself, it's remarkable the thought and time put into the commentary that follows. This reminds me how much the quality of commentary has reduced on most places that use them. As well as how much effort I put in to contribute. Valuable discussion used to be scattered across various blogs and HN is in some ways the last vestiges of it.

A powerful engagement and influence was left by MySpace, but it's not put up in protective glass for ticketed visitors to take snapshots of. I appreciate the nuance of its impact on the world, but... we've moved on.

You're proposing then that Google is in a disappointment loop. I think that's much more true for the technologically versed than the broader public. If they shut down Gmail/Maps/YouTube/Chromecast that'd breach the layman dyke, but I can't see them doing that.

Google I feel's is this age's General Electric. They already borrowed all the wrong ideas from Jack Welch. Most people, if they dug a bit, just want Google to keep what it's already built running and not charge for it. It's just not a place you expect radically good innovation to come from anymore. So, like your Whirlpool dishwasher, you expect it to do its thing, never rave about it to anyone, and moan about it when it breaks.

Irony bells are ringing with the New Yorker magazine chasing its own TikTok dreams, autoplaying an utterly unrelated video halfway down the article.

That's an odd comparison. Unlike Stadia, if the Pixel phone division shuts down you still have a working phone.

Forums will be forums and the trolls get the spotlight. Pixel phones, particularly the cheaper 'a' models, are very popular and good value. What significant things are much better on non-Google Android phones?

Absolutely agree. XBox Cloud gaming took the "Netflix for games" strategy and with inferior quality was able to decently establish itself.

How to fund the development of a risky but long-term valuable new platform? Whomever was calling the shots on that question failed spectacularly and in a way that technology companies usually don't. You're already losing hundreds of millions making the tech, why not spend a few more loss-leading the user growth?

But standards can be low or high. Can one firmly stand on unfirm ground?

Neither the post you respond to nor anyone I've spoken with make claim that assault rifles represent a significant portion of gun deaths. That politicians gravitate to 'banning assault rifles' is lazy governance. Much tighter regulation of all guns would be making a difference.

Why is there a belief that the provider of content should also be the source of quality recommendations? I also see this disappointment with for example Steam and gaming. Or Spotify and music.

But the days of walking into department stores and purchasing things based on a service rep's recommendations are behind us. We understand stores are incentivized to sell you the item most profitable to them. The Internet has a vast amount of places to inform your decisions independent of parties acting against your interests.

Netflix is a gigantic warehouse of a lifetime of content. Some bad, some good. If you select something poorly, perhaps you're better served honing a better selection criteria.

This is really good thank you. Worthy of a follow-up submission on HN of its own since we're pretty deep into comments here.

Note that this study is specifically focused on North Carolina. I'm curious if similar research has been done in the Western US. California in particular is very popular for GA. Here's the top 10: https://generalaviationnews.com/2020/02/03/top-10-busiest-ge...

edit: Another link: Santa Clara, CA recently banned sale of leaded fuel https://grist.org/transportation/california-county-bans-toxi...

Sorry i misstated, it was the article at the second link from post i responded to. first image of that post, under where it says 'Get Chrome - Download Chrome Today' there is a green text that shows www.google.com. I thought that was enforced by the search engine and not able to be manipulated.

At the risk of insinuating too much, there is a concerning incentive for Bing to provide corrupt links to Chrome.

I wonder if this extensive testing could be funded by a tax on leaded fuel. Seems like this would benefit everyone.

In the second link above, a Bing ad is presented to download Chrome while describing a domain of "www.google.com" but when clicked takes the user to googleonline2018.com ... maybe my expectations are out of date, but how is that possible? The otherwise excellent article doesn't explain.

edit: was the second, not first link. this one: https://blog.infostruction.com/2018/10/26/adware-empire-iron...

I'm no expert, but I'll express a wish: that modern supply constraints mean Lycoming O-360 engines may be noncompetitive to an engine design conceived today. Perhaps these old engines are suppressing the investment into an invention that turns a 250 person market into a 25,000 one?

Thanks for this context. I'm not a pilot but I can absolutely relate to the joy such a machine could give.

I'd like to ask one thing further: Do you think the existence of these older cheaper planes is holding back the development of upstart companies aiming for a price point that's closer to the Cessna 172 than the SR22? If leaded fuel engines were banned by the FAA today, would that create an opportunity for new entries, maybe with EV/hybrid engines? Or are there fundamentally different manufacturing economics to safely put something like that up in the air at that price point today?

Unity has learned all the wrong lessons. Their success was largely from the verdant asset store and the asset developers who augmented a creaky platform with wonderful and useful tools to shorten development time. They never figured out how to maintain sane compatibility for these tools version to version, nor a way to sustain and compensate these authors. Which brings us to today: a shady acquisition to sneak malware tech into games while they continue to neglect the community that made them who they are.

I feel like there's room to innovate on monetizing gaming hobby projects without ads. And that Kickstarter and Early Access have polluted the well by asking for a one-time payment for an unknown final quality.

I'd be more inclined for something more of Patreon subscription model, with a game loop that had a very overt 'Hey if you enjoyed this latest update, consider becoming a supporter. If I get xxx supporters this month I'll keep making more cool stuff' with a clear connection to what would come. Regular monthly updates so long as monthly supporters exceeded a certain number.

Right? It disparages not putting profits first in the act of creation, but doesn't explain how its offering solves this problem. Instead it describes how to improve feedback loops. It leaves as an exercise to the reader how user acquisition leads to money. Filthy.