matrix

The answer is: he didn't understand the business. There tens if not hundreds of competitors, and yet the tour operators still taking bookings over the phone. That tells you a lot.

The market is ruthlessly efficient. If something has a low barrier to entry, like his idea, then it's absolutely 100% guaranteed that someone else has tried it. Would-be founders need to do a brutally honest assessment of why they are going to succeed where others have failed.

Not mentioned in the article: the market which this person was trying to enter is saturated with competition. These tour operators are bombarded with pitches for these things every day, and of course every one of them wants a cut of their hard earned revenue. It's a bad deal for a small business owner. They take all the risk, invest all the capital, while some SV firm comes along and kindly offers to scoop all the cream (margin) off the top.

So, this business failed due to a combination of lack of knowledge of the market and were not addressing a truly burning need for customers.

Hats off to the engineers who pulled this off.

This is not the first time someone has gotten PG running in a browser though. Here's another approach:

https://github.com/oguimbal/pg-mem

For those that can’t access the article, here’s the key sentences:

“In recent weeks, however, more data has become available, and it suggests that the true picture is less alarming. Yes, Delta has increased the chances of getting Covid for almost everyone. But if you’re vaccinated, a Covid infection is still uncommon, and those high viral loads are not as worrisome as they initially sounded.

How small are the chances of the average vaccinated American contracting Covid? Probably about one in 5,000 per day, and even lower for people who take precautions or live in a highly vaccinated community.”

Amazon's co-mingling of inventory facilitated large-scale theft by enabling stolen goods to be sold along-side legitimately sourced items. One has to wonder: at what point does Amazon's reluctance to improve supply-chain integrity venture into the territory of aiding and abetting crime?

Has anyone found similar good-quality mathematics videos for young (elementary school age) kids?

This feature is a big plus for parents. It's hard to appreciate how hard it is to protect kids online if you don't have kids yourself. I get that those without kids will find it intrusive, but it sounds like these feature are opt-in.

I consider iOS to be the best platform for kids today. That said, Apple: if you're listening: please tighten up parental controls around time limits and re-loading apps!

For anyone interested in these - their consumer chargers are here:

https://www.myinnergie.com/us

Unfortunately, their "buy now" button links to Amazon; I don't trust Amazon not to sell me a counterfeit that will burn my house down.

There's another really difficult challenge for hearing-impaired people not mentioned here: it's mentally exhausting to follow online meetings, even with captions. Hearing impaired people have to very intently while also trying to make sense of lagging/imperfect captions, and that's a high cognitive load to sustain for long periods.

Accented English is particularly challenging, because otter.ai (used in Zoom) has very poor accuracy with the most common accents we encounter in software engineering.

This is also the case in US. Contract formation requires that the signing party has an opportunity to read the contract. If the contract is subject to litigation and the signing party can show they did not have an opportunity to read it, the contract will be thrown out. It is especially frowned upon to misrepresent the contract ("Don't worry, it's just some routine boilerplate") and not provide a copy before the person signs it.

I think the author might not realize the substantial difference between working in a tech company (the HN audience) and in supporting roles in non-tech businesses. I have worked in both worlds, and it really just comes down to choosing the right tools for the job. In tech you're supposed to be on the cutting edge. That's part of what makes it fun and rewarding.

However, if anybody feels lesser for working in non-tech they're probably thinking the wrong way about the value they're creating. It can be immensely rewarding to build something unsexy and relatively simple that moves the needle by millions or even billions of dollars.

The heavy-handed updates forcing frequent reboots are the deal-breaker for me. It seriously pisses me off to come back to my machine only discover that all those editor windows I had open gone, the IDE close, and all the open browser tabs lost, etc. Why are frequent full reboots even necessary in this day and age?!

As a counterpoint, I found "Accelerate" to be just ok. It is essentially a rehash of all the popular software and methodology best practices blog posts and articles we've all read in the last 15 years. This is disappointing because I expect a book to dig deeper and present new information. The main value is in the surveys measuring the improvements that organizations experienced from these practices.

In my experience it's the loss (or masking) of high frequencies that are the most problematic for understanding speech. The most important sounds in speech are consonants, which are higher frequency sounds. Combine this with foreign accents, and more often than not conference calls quickly degenerate into an unintelligible babble (for me, at least).

This is good news for Groovy developers since the Groovy project seems to have run into significant roadblocks with migrating to Java 9+. I'd recommend most other developers on the JVM rip that bandaid off now and get onto Java 11 though, because migrating is not going to get any cheaper or easier.

Looking at this, I can't seem to find any examples of Wiremock being used to test async callbacks, which is one of the more challenging things to get right. Can anyone point to some documentation or code samples showing how to do this in Wiremock?

It's called: a distributed monolith

Why would a small business want to be part of some marketplace that just reduces their margins, commoditizes their business and and forces them into a race to the bottom?

Marketplaces are often a terrible deal for small businesses and small business owners know it, so there has to be some incredibly compelling benefit to being part of it for them to want to do it.

The main point they author is making is:

"the prevalence of a single, monocultural aesthetic that seemingly almost every startup and tech company and would-be industry disruptor out there has adopted, it’s worth wondering if there’s some other voice—or even a different modulation of this same voice—that could be appropriate."

This, of course, extends far beyond illustration (the topic of the article - the examples provided are striking). I would love to see more variety - especially for styling UI components because I think we can do so much better than Material Design/Metro or Bootstrap.

While the article provides a basic definition of various types of pricing tactics/strategies, it doesn't address important questions such as which pricing strategies work best for which types of markets and products, and what kind of marketing/sales is required to support the choosen strategy.

The best book I'm aware of on the topic is Nagle, but it's getting dated and is focused on older B2B business models. If anyone had recommendations for a more recent book on the topic, I'd love to hear it.

Thank you for doing that. I sincerely hope this fight isn't over yet; hopefully your comment gets its rightful fair hearing.

The video is unavailable. Is there somewhere else we can see it, or better yet a transcript?

I'll subscribe to the NYT again when they stop requiring you to phone them to unsubscribe.

I was a previous subscriber, and when I wanted to unsubscribe, I discovered there was no way to do it online. This is, of course, an intentional move to make it hard to unsubscribe.

My advice to the NYT: learn from Netflix.

Thanks for this. It's a far more informative read than the original article.

Looks nice and clean. What use cases make this a better choice than Ktor? This is an important question to answer because Ktor seems a bit more complete, has more contributors, and is backed by IntelliJ.

One big point in Javalin's favor: it does have more documentation than Ktor, which is currently missing some rather important parts (e.g. having no documentation for authentication and authorization is kinda unforgivable).

Intriguing approach. Anyone know if there's a write-up somewhere from somebody that's tried it? It's always helpful to learn from the gotchas others have run into.

Small kids are a lot more work than many people realize. Ditto building a business. Trying to do both at once without being financially independent first is not a choice anyone should make if they can help it.

That blog is the perfect example of how to create content that provides compelling value for your target market, and establishes credibility for your product. Great stuff!

Have you tried publishing a column in newspapers and the like that farmers typically read? I bet it would be popular and a powerful source of leads.

Agreed. Kotlin + Dropwizard is an interesting approach. How well do Kotlin and Jersey play together in your experience?

Excellent and very informative post. I'd love to see the things SureSwift needed for due diligence and their hand-over list - it would be a good checklist of things you need to have squared away to ensure a smooth transaction.