jenius

I work at Clerk - same opinion here. Rolling your own auth is a trap. It's super easy when you are just getting started with your product and I cannot count how many times I have seen developers boast about how they rolled their own auth and now they aren't "locked in" to a vendor and are saving tons of money etc.

But the truth is, if you scale up as a company, it will end up costing you more in engineering salaries to re-create and maintain all the auth features you will need to support like @mooreds mentioned above than just using an auth library/vendor in the first place. And if you don't scale up, you are unlikely to push outside of the cheap or free tiers of any auth vendor you do go with, so it's a wash. Every reputable auth vendor has a pretty generous free tier.

It feels scary to go this direction because what happens if you blow up and then it becomes ultra expensive and now you're "locked in". All the time I see developers put hundreds of thousands, or millions of MAU into an auth vendor's pricing calc then gawk over the projected monthly bill and decide to roll their own. But the reality is that this doesn't happen. By the time you have that many MAU, you're typically paying out many multiples of that in engineer salaries alone, and paying an auth vendor a fraction of a single engineer's salary to handle your auth is substantially better value than hiring a team to build and maintain your own from scratch.

We have churned our fair share of large company customers over the years, as has every other auth vendor. They have all been because they needed feature we didn't have, not because the price was too high.

Back up now fwiw

Clerk employee here - it's certainly the case that a lot of our users are JS ecosystem users, which is why those SDKs have received extra attention. That being said, I do want to note that we have greatly expanded the number of SDKs that we offer over the past year or so. I'm not sure which framework you were using when you tried it out, but we may have better support for it now! You can see all our supported SDKs if you scroll down in the docs: https://clerk.com/docs

We have a new major version of the chrome extension sdk with a docs overhaul on the verge of release over here at Clerk if that’s useful!

Head of support at Clerk here, can confirm this is accurate. We're right at the finish line with a project that will give you a secure export of your full user data through the dashboard without needing to email support as well.

We are very committed internally to making sure that folks using Clerk are doing so because they want to be, not because we have made it difficult to leave.

We do now support this, as of late august! https://clerk.com/changelog/2024-08-20-custom-oauth-provider...

Vercel is fairly clear about where it runs your code - depending on the type of page/deployment its going to be either S3, Lambda, or a cloudflare edge worker. There is a ton of logic behind how deployments work but the general benefit of using a service like Vercel is basically exactly as described above -- you push your code and it just works and you don't worry about it.

This is an attractive prospect for a lot of folks who want to spend their time making their apps better and not building/monitoring infrastructure. However, there are some folks who really like to build and maintain their own infra and in that case a service like Vercel might not be the best fit.

Vercel has edge function support as well that will work with any framework, docs are here: https://vercel.com/docs/build-output-api/v3#vercel-primitive...

We have been using datocms heavily at my company for a variety of projects, and have been beyond impressed by how robust and well-thought-out the platform is, and how responsive the staff are to bugs and feature requests. I spend a LOT of time evaluating headless CMS' as part of my job, and Dato is a standout option - one that I recommend as a top choice to anyone who asks, and as an inspiration when I speak with reps from other companies building headless cms'. To be clear I am not employed by or have any partnership with dato at all, just a big fan of their work : )

You can't make a comment like this with absolutely zero explanation other than that it was 'your impression'. I understand the whole refuting bullshit is a lot of work thing, but it's equally as irresponsible, if not more, to make a comment like this with no evidence for a claim. At least give us something!

So just a question and this probably is stupid. But what to investors expect to gain from an investment into a nonprofit? Are the expecting to get their money back somehow? Are they expecting to get more than the money they invested back, and if so where would that come from? Or is it basically equivalent to a large charitable donation they are making, where none of their investments will ever come back to them in monetary form?

I have spent a long time thinking about and looking for ways that people use to rationalize their own spending and not giving to those who are in need, and this is one of the most common reasons cited. While all my research and experience has led me to the same conclusion, that it's a bullshit psychological defense, when it comes down to it I lack enough hard scientific evidence that this is the case to really solidly prove it.

The article you posted is great, thank you for sharing. It's clean, well-written, and backed by an experiment, which is fantastic. Do you have any more material like this? On the other hand, does anyone who disagrees have any material to the contrary?

Just jumping in here to back you up jpmoral. In fact, I said in my original comment that I am not trying to tell anyone how to spend money and its these peoples' own lives and they can do what they want, right in the last paragraph. So I hope nobody was offended here.

On the other hand, the first reply above actually answers the question. Notice that, while cloaked as a rebuttal to my initial comment, it was actually a string of defenses as to how the author rationalizes spending money for himself, others, or both, which was precisely what I asked for. Let's take a look at the points made:

- I earned this money so I can spend it how I want

- I should not hold back on spending money because it's my personal freedom

- Do you give away 100% of your money? If not, you are no better than me so who are you to suggest this?

- We have tried to solve worldwide poverty problems and failed many times, so it won't make a difference if I donate

- The money I spend on luxurious things is helping society as it creates jobs and trickles down the supply chain, so anything I spend is actually good for the world

- It's none of your business how I spend my money

Pretty decent answer actually, when it comes down to it. The answer is simply that people come up with a relatively consistent number of ways that they can rationalize themselves spending excessively, and from these rationalizations build their psychological defense. In fact, many of the points in his answer are exactly the same as the ones from the quora threads linked in my edit above.

Now, my next question is whether any of these defenses are valid. My preliminary research indicates that a resounding "no" is the answer, however, I'm going to continue researching and do a separate writeup on this topic, as it's fairly extensive. If anyone from here is interested at all let me know on twitter or something (@jescalan) and I'll link you when it's done. This thread is fairly buried by now though so I assume not.

Read the beginning of the article, was mildly interested. Kept reading about how he arbitrarily decided to book a helicopter ride and buy an expensive motorcycle through a texting service just to test it out, and was no longer sure if it was honestly a troll or not. Came here to see the comments, apparently was not a troll. Wow.

So the question I have here is, was he aware of how outrageously douchey this article comes off with the examples being off the cuff entirely over-the-top money blowing that he apparently regularly indulges in, or are rich people so in their own world that they don't even realize how normal people live and that writing something like this comes off as absurd to most people?

And another question that comes to mind too. He tried to make a startup that solved a similar problem a while ago, and mentioned this in the article. Are rich people seeking further conveniences for their already rather convenient lives entirely blind to the range of problems middle or lower class people deal with? Do they not care about these types of people and their problems because it simply not relevant to them?

I know this sounds very accusing of rich people, and while I am always personally a little shocked to see money squandered carelessly while so much suffering happens in the world, I honestly do not have anything against these people at all. Everyone has their own path in life and can and should make their own choices as they see fit. I am just honestly curious how it is rationalized, and the thought process surrounding it for people like this.

Edit: Did some googling and turned up these two quora answers:

- http://www.quora.com/Do-rich-people-feel-bad-or-guilty-when-...

- http://www.quora.com/How-do-rich-people-feel-about-the-fact-...

The answers given are essentially "they make excuses for themselves and set up situations that rationalize it, such as 'I deserve this' and 'I could never make enough of a difference', etc." I don't quite feel satisfied with this. I would like to hear an answer from a legitimately very rich person still just out of curiosity!

Do you honestly think most adults follow what the senate is doing? On top of that, do you think most adults follow what the senate is doing to the extent that they know the names of individual senators, and whether one is more or less distinguished than another?

This would be like me saying that due to X's long and distinguished career in tennis, most americans should know who they are. The problem is that most americans don't follow tennis at all, especially not to the extent that they are familiar with particular players, unless they are superstars that always have their name all over the news (I can think of two for which this might be the case). And senators seem to have their name in the prominent news less frequently than tennis stars, honestly.

Honestly, I'd be significantly more likely to know Snowden's name than the vice president. I feel like he made a major impact on society that will be written about in history books for years to come. If you don't follow politics closely, the vice president is simply not relevant. The only way you'd know their name is by remembering it from the last presidential campaign, where the his and the president's names were everywhere, or if a vice president happened to do something extraordinary, which if I'm not mistaken is not super common.

I hear people citing this specific stat all the time as a proof about how stupid or uninformed americans are, and every time I hear it it bothers me. Knowing the vice president's name is something that is neither useful nor relevant to most americans, and therefore not knowing it makes sense entirely. I honestly don't see how that makes them uninformed at all.

I feel like this is a perfect reason why this is a bad investment. Anyone who is still subscribed to AOL dialup is honestly probably a senior citizen or technology-illiterate. AOL is not even marketing their dialup service anymore. These people over time will slowly decline until those 2 million eventually hit zero. In fact, you can clearly see the nearly exponential downward trend right on the article you linked. This makes it a nice amount of basically free money for AOL currently, but an absolutely terrible investment for the future.

Woah, really impressive that he was able to guess the company. That seems super crazy to me. I guess I'd better check out SmugMug if it's that above and beyond!

This is absurd. Are you serious? The way you express your opinions is enormously important. It could easily be the difference between getting a raise and getting fired. Expressing your opinions in a way makes sense to other people and they take well to is the farthest thing from silly ever, it's like a #1 essential skill for life. On top of that, phrasing informs the message, and in this case I was not just complaining about the phrasing, I was also complaining about the outrageous statement being made.

For example, saying "React is the best way to build all apps no matter what" vs. saying "Compared to building native UIs with objective C, react-native made for a much smoother experience for me because of X Y and Z" are not only phrased differently, they are communicating different things. The first one is an absurd overarching dogma declaring every other app-building technology to be inferior to react with no backing whatsoever, and the second one is a useful and specific analysis of react in one situation compared to an alternative.

I can't figure out if you're trolling or not, honestly.

Look up the definition of the word "opinion" on google or a dictionary. Then look up the word "dogma". Then re-read my comment. Fair? It's not the opinion I'm objected to, it's the way of stating it.

Maybe I didn't get this across in my original comment, but my primary job is open source software. So I spend ~40h/week working on public projects that are not all my own. I spend tons of time contributing to other peoples' projects, and I authored and maintain a significant number of libraries that are used by other developers.

What I was saying is that it does work. I can use dependencies with no problems no matter what they expose by coercing to promises internally, and have had no complaints about my libraries' APIs use of promises.

"This is solid engineering. And it completely reinforces the fact that React.js is the right way to build apps."

This just comes off as really weird to me. Why would any sane developer make a statement like this? It sounds preachy and brainwash-y and weird. If there's anything we learn as developers it's that there never is and never will be a single "right way" to do everything. Reading stuff like this makes me doubt the entire article.

There's a difference between writing objectively about something that's interesting that you enjoyed, and trying to lay down a dogma. TBH, the more of this article I read, the more my view of it's goals swayed towards the latter.

So I've been writing javascript full time for a couple years at this point, client, server, and open source, and what I have adopted is coercing everything into promises, which I suppose would be the author's way of saying making everything red.

If you have something that is not async mixed in with something that's async, you can still add it to the promise chain and it will resolve right away. If you have a library that uses callbacks or some other thing, you can just wrap it such that it now uses promises. And then of course you can always look for alternate libraries that use promises from the start and skip step as well.

I've found that using promises for everything works super well. There is no confusion or doubt at all. Everything has the potential to branch into async at any time with no consequences and without complicating the flow. And an additional benefit is that rather than checking for errors after any operation you do, you choose where to check for errors. When a promise rejects, it skips everything else in the chain until it gets to a catch. So rather than running 4 async operations and doing an "if error do this" after each operation kind of deal, you can catch the error in once place and handle it once. Promises surpress the error in the promise chain until you choose to handle it, which is dangerous if you don't understand how promises work, but really useful once you do.

There are really solid promise-based libraries for all common operations in node right now. When.js for general promises, composition, and coercion, rest.js for network requests, bookshelf and knex for database connection and orm stuff, etc. If you are a js developer, give them a shot!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to claim that this is better than any other language-level construct by any means, but if you are working in javascript, where you have to deal with javascript's limitations as a language, from experience I can say that working in an all-promises environment makes things quite pleasant.

While I agree that facebook is frequently used for events, I'd actually argue that it's horrible for events, there's just no other option.

For any given event, about 2/3 of the people will never respond to the invite, of the people who did respond it's a complete tossup who will show up, the stupid "maybe" answer which is essentially the same as not responding at all because it means "almost definitely not, but I technically could show up since I marked maybe". People often invite all their friends which includes everyone they have ever met, people that don't even live in the area or that they are close with anymore. Facebook gives you no intelligence whatsoever on the events, like "here are people you always invite" or "here are people you always invite but who never respond" etc, which would be easy to show and very helpful. There is no way to update people coming to the event on changes or anything other than posting on the event's wall, which most people will not be notified of unless they check facebook all the time, etc. etc. I could go on for so long about how shitty facebook events are, and it truly makes me sad, because really the purpose of these events is just to meet up with and have fun with friends, but the process is so frustrating I feel like it actually prevents this from happening in a lot of cases.

On that note, I am also very passively plotting out working on a better version, so if anyone is reading this and is also frustrated by facebook's crap events feel free to get in touch, hah.

The free tiers for both are quite extensive actually, so we easily fit in, even with a very large amount of content.

Keep in mind that a desire "to improve world" is a synonym for a "lust for power." The first is a positive way of putting it, the second is a pejorative, but it is the same thing.

This is simply not true. Many people see something that is wrong in the world and genuinely want to make it better. I'm not talking about companies like Uber that see how rich people just can't get private car quite conveniently enough and want to make that better, I'm talking about people that see real important problems and injustices and try to improve them, like Watsi for example.

I'm sure that there are some people who just want to grab power and influence and call it "trying to improve the world", but there are also people who genuinely want to make the world a better place with no concern for money or power and work tirelessly every day to do so. While sadly these people are usually not well known, they are the real heroes.

I know it's very early, but just curious if anyone is working on a node binding for this, or if one exists already? Would love to try it out in our stack, but it would require a javascript interface.

Just out of curiosity, what do people typically slam google for? I feel like I have a lot of trust in their services -- a hell of a lot more than facebook, and somewhere around on par with apple. Sure, they collect a bunch of your data, but it's for the purpose of them being able to serve more relevant ads to you if I'm not mistaken, since that's where most of their money is made, and their ads are fairly clean and not questionable as far as I've seen.

Overall, they have really solid products that have been incredibly useful to me, and you can see how they are working hard on so many important things: surpassing apple on the mobile design front with material design, cranking out bleeding edge and experimental innovations like self-driving cars and glass, and even working on a lot of projects that help to bring technology to those who don't have it, like project loon, the lower cost and open source android stuff, etc -- and these projects have actually been making a really big difference in third world countries (with no strings attached unlike facebook's total bullshit "charity" initiatives).

I'm not a google fanboy by any means. I more or less just use gmail and calendar, and just got an android phone after having an iphone 4 for like four years just to try it out. Just pointing out things I have passively observed about how they run. I would really love to hear the other side of the story though to perhaps balance my perspective a bit more!

Came here just to see about RAW support -- I think that's the only thing stopping this from being a legit competitor to lightroom, which says a lot so nice work guys! One other thing I would miss as well is the ability to auto-correct distortion through the lens profile. This is super quick and easy in lightroom and it auto-detects your lens from the image metadata. This typically reduces the vignette, so the ability to add that back in is nice as well.

On a totally separate note, I feel like you guys are positioned in a spot to solve the photographer storage problem as well, which is detailed remarkably well here: http://paulstamatiou.com/storage-for-photographers/ -- a service like this is something that I know I would pay for and I'm sure it's the same for a number of others.

Twitter doesn't give a fuck about developers now that they have sufficiently used them to build their platform and brand.

I really hate that this is the standard model for building startups these days. Make a free service, grow your userbase using investment money and by encouraging developers to build on your platform, then once users and developers are dependent on the platform, start littering it with ads, selling users' data, and shutting down all your API and all the developers' work. We've seen this happen over and over. Will it ever stop? One thing is for sure, developers will wizen up to this if it continues and stop building on top of platforms, which just sucks for everyone.