HN user

e98cuenc

599 karma

Collaborator on LoQUo, acquired by eBay. founder of Panoramio, acquired by Google. Cofounder of Freepik, Flaticon and resultados-futbol.com. CEO of Freepik Company.

Posts3
Comments113
View on HN

Everybody loves to hate BendingSpoon, but there is a lesson here. They consistently rewrite the code of their acquisitions with a tiny team, fire everybody and are able to maintain and improve the product. They basically skip everything but engineers, and they are kept at a minimum. Feedback from users is the products they take over 1) become more expensive, 2) they ship features waaaay faster.

It looks like next generation private equity, and my guess is more houses will start copying them.

These stats don't account for the much more common case of people that start renting a house and stop paying the rent indefinitely because technically it doesn't fit the definition of "okupas." I've seen estimates of that number being as high as 1% of the people renting, making it ~30K extra people living on a house they don't own and are not paying for.

I don't see how they can continue the service, even with huge localisation effort. The capital sin is to be a US company. That subjects them to US law, including CLOUD act, which the UE considers to be incompatible with privacy guarantees.

Even if cloud providers use local datacenters they are still in "violation". If the US makes a data request using CLOUD act, they will have to comply, no matter where these servers are sitting.

Ironically, the UE intelligence services are happy to take the anti-terrorist information that the US is extracting with the CLOUD act and sharing with them.

Hi krono, can you provide an example of a search where you want something different?

My guess is that this issue was already there with previous generations of the search engine, as we already tried to serve what’s most useful to most users. On this work we have not tried to get personalized results, except on a country level. On future work we want to give customized results to each user, and I’m very interested in understanding if there is some signals that we can pick up to give you a better experience.

Justin’s first startup was Kiko calendar. Google launched Calendar and it died, they auctioned it and got 250K. Then started Justin.tv, and it led to Twitch and Socialcam.

It takes time to build a billion dollar company, it’s unfair to compare his current ongoing initiatives to Twitch.

We use it in Freepik, Flaticon and Slidesgo. It has a good performance and I find the source code easy to read / understand. It lacks some features from Elasticsearch, like CJK tokenizers, but we were able to work around that.

Very stable, fast, and easy to connect to mysql.

The data in memory in that server is not encrypted. Amazon owning the server can log in it and read whatever part of the memory they want. I don't see how encrypting data at rest helps you in this scenario.

If GDPR makes all the cloud services provided by American companies illegal, what alternatives European companies have? Services like OVH and Hetzner are great as a low cost but they don't provide the same services at all.

How about Netsuite (Oracle), Netsuite, etc.?

My guess is that ~100% of European companies use some kind of US service and there are no realistic alternatives, are they going to rule all companies are doing something illegal?

Excellent question… we don’t have a separate subscription for StorySet, but you can download all these illustrations in Freepik.com without attributing if you subscribe to Freepik.

It’s an oversight that we don’t allow explicitly in the terms of use of the Freepik subscription to use content downloaded from StorySet without attribution. Let me try to fix that tomorrow.

Sorry the system is not straightforward, StorySet is a side project and we didn’t think of monetizing it.

Super glad you like it!

Thank you! My partner Alejandro Sánchez is actually who got the idea of Flaticon, and Fernando Fernández did most of the initial implementation. When we hired Fernando he was flipping burgers at BurgerKing :)

The difference is that nginx really works. I had Panoramio, a photo website featured in Google Earth / Maps, using Apache. It started to fail down under load, and I quickly switched to lighttpd. It was faster but crashing, getting OOM, etc. I fixed a memory leak and a few more bugs, but it still crashed every now and then and I looked for alternatives.

This was 2006 and nginx was the only realistic alternative on the market. It worked beautifully since day 1. It saved my startup. Next year we got acquired by Google.

I only got 1 crash with nginx and it was partially my fault, I had an "expires 30y" on some images, and a morning on feb 2008 I came to the office and the whole site was down. After a very quick gdb session under panic I realized it was trying to get a weekday name on an array with a negative index. Nginx was adding 30 years to the current date and that was over 2038 and it overflowed. Igor fixed that issue in hours, and he graciously explained that I could have used "expires max"

Nginx has powered all my startups since then (Freepik, Flaticon, Slidesgo, Besoccer).

This guy has added more real value to the economy than most unicorns. A true hero.

I don't think this was the right thing to do for end users. The largest perceived element on the page is still the map on the right, and it takes as much time to load as before the change.

They are just gaming the metrics changing what the LCP measures with no added value to the users.

you definitely have to add the relevant VAT, depending on your customer country, declare it in MOSS where it will be sent to every individual country.

You also have to check if your customer is any other of the countries / states that collect VAT (India, Indonesia, many US states and oh so many random countries) and make a proper declaration in each country. It's almost impossible to do it right if you don't go with a partner to handle it all.

Thank you for the feedback. Some people want to use the premium icons (as they are more exclusive), and they obviously help to keep the lights on, but I disagree with your point on us "tricking you to click it". They are clearly labelled, and if you're not interested at all in them you can filter them out. We will remember your preference and will not show them again.

There is a download limit on the icons you can download per day, with an exception to the limit if you're downloading a full pack. A platform that creates its own icons has different trade-offs than a platform that collect icons available for free, and that's another one of these trade-offs. We could remove the limit on CC icons, though.

I'm sorry that you have a sub-par experience with Flaticon, and glad that you extract some value from it.

The fact that our database is "so big" is because we paid artists to create these icons, and at the end of the day this money has to come from our customers, but I take note of your comments as we clearly have room to improve.

Thank you!

We (Flaticon) tried that years ago. Very quickly got a letter from their lawyer pointing out that a) that was a violation of their ToS (right) and b) they have a sui generis database copyright that applies to whatever we got (doubtful, that applies in Europe to "big" parts of a collection).

We deleted everything we got from them. We got a second letter when we reached independently to some authors with CC icons, got their explicit approval and got their icons from their site. The same icons were also available on the noun, and I guess they thought we had downloaded them there. This time we answered back and never heard from them again.

They seemed pretty protective to me, and I would not recommend touching their site if you want to get a CC collection of icons without troubles.

Btw, Iconduck looks dope :) congrats!

A subtle disadvantage of the Pro Rata model is that content creators in the platform can trivially exploit it.

If a content creator subscribes to Spotify as a user and streams non-stop his own music, he will receive from Spotify more than the cost of the subscription.

Repeat that a few times, and download here and there tracks from other random artists to cover your tracks, and the schema may work.

In Madrid many people were turned away from hospitals. I know personally people that could not get into the hospital with a double pneumonia and were told to call an ambulance if their oxygen levels dropped. Ambulances took 4-6 hours to respond, instead of minutes. In regular times a double pneumonia 100% lands you at the hospital.

Not a direct acquaintance, but a friend of my sister was two days siting in the hall of the Gregorio Marañon until they could transfer him to IFEMA. Almost no supply of food during these two days, and he was lucky to have a seat, many people lying on the floor.

They found many bodies of people dead by COVID-19 at home. They found some bodies on the streets.

I don't get how can you pretend that many hospitals / regions were "overload".

A few days ago spanish media reported that one of the latest outbreak in Lleida affected a residence. They tested all inmates in the residence with PCR, and found 8 positives. 5 of these 8 had COVID-19 a few months ago with the first wave (I guess march / april).

The usual poll is drafted in a way that almost everyone answers yes (usually by pro independence newspapers). Something like: "would you approve the vote on a referendum agreed with Spain?"

Otherwise, it's pretty obvious people voting for Cs and PP will never answer "Yes" and that's already way more than 20%